Rubrik goes public, as the stock closed up nearly 16% in the cybersecurity company’s first day of trading

An IPO is a lot like a wedding.

Hear me out: The opening bell ceremony is called a ceremony because it really is one. There are pictures, there’s family (both biological and chosen), and there’s lots of folks getting from one spot to another in a venue—”herding kittens” as my mom would say.

But the primary way in which an IPO is like a wedding is this: It’s a big, dressed-up day that took a lot of time, relationship-building, and ups-and-downs to get there. And it’s also the first day of the rest of your life.

This all occurs to me Thursday morning as I stand on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, looking up at the bell-ringing balcony: Bipul Sinha, Rubrik CEO and cofounder, stood blue-suited and pink-tied, symbolically opening the public markets, surrounded by cheering employees, investors, and his family.

Rubrik, a data-focused cybersecurity company, went public yesterday, with the stock initially popping by about 20% and closing up nearly 16%. What happens now is much like what happens after a wedding: you get up tomorrow and while you have new formalities, the basics remain the same.

“I'll wake up [tomorrow morning] and call my customers, talk to my team, as we figure out: How do we build a better product?” Sinha told me before the stock started trading. “At the end of the day, business exists to create value for customers, because that’s who pays for our paycheck.”

There is, of course, a lot about this that’s not like a wedding. After all, a wedding is a money-spending endeavor and this is, aside from the fees going to the underwriters and lawyers, a money-making endeavor. But an even bigger difference is that lots of people get married, while very few founders make it to this exact IPO moment that I was able to watch Sinha live out. Though a dream for many founders (and investors), this moment is rare.

Lightspeed Venture Partners partner and cofounder Ravi Mhatre and Greylock partner Asheem Chandna both said that the statistic they’ve heard is that less than 1% of founders ever get here.

“It has to be somewhere between 0.1% and 0.01%, the odds of getting here,” said Chandna, who was last at the NYSE for Palo Alto Networks’ IPO 12 years ago, as a founding investor of the company.

Then, you layer in Sinha's personal story—he grew up in a small, poor town in India, and wasn’t a good student in the traditional sense. He didn’t get into state colleges, but got into IIT after preparing for the exam for more than a year. Decades later, tucked away in a surprisingly presidential-looking stock exchange room, I asked Sinha about how the distance-traveled in his own life affects how he thinks about the future.

“I've stopped thinking about what tomorrow is going to be,” he told me. “All of this wasn’t supposed to happen. It’s all gravy, It’s all house money.”

Rubrik’s story is ultimately both American and Indian, then. And, as IVP general partner Somesh Dash notes, an incredible example of the American Dream. “Somebody who comes to this country as an immigrant with nothing, and builds a business that could be an institution—where, as [Sinha] said at breakfast this morning, retirees in Maine and Oklahoma are going to be buying the stock.”

It’s also worth noting that Rubrik took a chance by making its Wall Street debut during this tricky IPO market.

“When you are the first company stepping into the waters, after a sort of multi-year hiatus, it definitely requires the courage of your convictions,” said Lightspeed’s Mhatre. “I'm really hopeful that enthusiasm around Rubrik will translate into more receptivity with public market investors.”

Sinha seems less focused on the question of what Rubrik’s IPO might mean for the broader marketplace, saying that he’s not worrying about “externalities…because you can’t control those things. What you can control is your input.”

Because, in the end, an IPO is like a wedding, especially in this key truth: The next day’s just the first day of the rest of your life, a new chapter in a story that will, with any luck, unfold for decades.

Elsewhere…My colleague Sharon Goldman just featured OpenAI rival Cohere and interviewed the company’s CEO, Aidan Gomez. “We’re still sort of the underdog,” he told Goldman. “We have to prove ourselves…I think in the past couple of months we’ve really done that.” Read the whole story here.

See you Monday,

Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com