Welcome to the new episode of the TNW Podcast, the show where we discuss the latest developments in the technology ecosystem and feature interviews with some of the most influential people in the industry.
In today’s episode, we’re happy to present an interview with Arvind Jain, founder and CEO of Glean, the enterprise AI company that connects to every system a business runs on and turns its knowledge into context for people and AI agents. Arvind explains why AI needs that context to work well, why 80 to 90% of it lives in people’s heads, and how Glean feeds it to tools like Claude.
We also get into how Glean protects employee privacy, why word of mouth is still its biggest growth channel, and Arvind’s advice for graduates worried about AI. His most surprising answer is about lock-in: Glean wants to be easy to replace, because the memory its AI builds should belong to the enterprise.
Feel free to email us with any questions, suggestions, and opinions at contact@thenextweb.com.
Chapters
00:00 Intro 01:51 How companies use Glean 06:46 Why not just use Claude? 10:27 Why Glean wants to be replaceable 13:13 How Glean protects employee privacy 15:28 How Glean got started 16:56 Word of mouth and rapid growth 18:25 What context really means 21:06 Rapid fire: scaling and fundraising 22:53 How Arvind spends his day as CEO 23:36 Career lessons and advice for graduates 25:34 Where the idea for Glean came from 26:08 Why big companies get slow 27:37 Where Glean saves people time 29:34 Is Glean Asana plus Claude?
