From broke to $28B: The Splunk Story

Join us for a fireside chat with Rob Das, Co-founder of Splunk, as part of Tech Founders SF 2026. Rob has described the Splunk journey very simply: the company started in 2002 from his house and his co-founder’s house, they were effectively broke for the first two years, Splunk later went public on NASDAQ in 2012, and Cisco acquired the company in 2024 for $28 billion. This session will go back to the beginning and focus on what happened between those points. We’ll talk about what the earliest days of Splunk really looked like, how the founders kept going before there was much external validation, how they knew the problem was worth pursuing, what early customers taught them, and what changed as Splunk moved from survival to real traction and then scale. The conversation will also explore the less polished parts of the founder journey: what nearly broke, what Rob got wrong, how his own role changed as the company grew, what going public changed, and which lessons from Splunk still matter for founders building enterprise technology today. This is not a keynote or a retrospective success story. It is a founder conversation about persistence, product, enterprise growth, scaling, and the decisions that compound over time. Hosted by SparkLabs as part of Tech Founders SF 2026, in partnership with CODE, MCIT and UC Berkeley.