Concept Financing from Andreessen Horowitz: Andrew Rubin, CEO of Illumio (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What are the nuggets of what you were going to do differently and how you were going to do them differently?

Andrew Rubin: Very simply put, our industry has been dominated by hardware- and network-based solutions for over 20 years. It doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. It’s just that it was the singular approach. Our world, which is the infrastructure and the applications that our customers run their business on, has changed so dramatically that in a lot of ways it felt like security has been left behind. For us, the very first conclusion we made was we needed to build a security platform in software – not in hardware – and not reliant on the network or in other words, not following the same model and motion of everything else that our customers are already doing.

We needed to build something that allows them to protect themselves and understand their environment in a fundamentally different way than they can do with any of the solutions they have today. So building software is probably the most literal answer to your question. The bigger issue for us was buidling something that actually solves a set of problems that no existing solution could solve for them today.

Sramana Mitra: So what architecture did your solution take?

Andrew Rubin: In a very literal way, there was a problem that customers have been talking about very openly that the legacy or traditional solutions simply can’t address. That problem is that if you go back 10 years ago, people ran their own infrastructure, and the environment in which they ran that infrastructure was pretty homogeneous. If you think about the world today and if you think about the way that any enterprise runs their applications and stores their data, what you find is they use bare metal servers, virtual servers, and some organizations are even starting to move to something called containers. Those things that they run on, they don’t just put them in their own building like they did 10 years ago. They build private clouds and, in some cases, they even use public cloud infrastructure. These are infrastructures that they don’t even own and control.

This world went from being very homogeneous and running all in one place that a company owns and controls to suddenly being heterogeneous and running, not only in that place, but lots of other places like public cloud where you have no control. We can give you visibility and deliver security to any version of that story no matter how you choose to build and run your infrastructure, applications, and data. In other words, we wanted security to mirror or mimic their infrastructure choices rather than get in the way of that.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do to get the company off the ground? Did the two of you build the product and go to raise money? How did you play the next set of hands?

Andrew Rubin: One of the key takeaways for me, and it became one of my top three life lessons, is that persistence is actually very undervalued and doesn’t get enough credit. We spent the better part of a year working on the business plan and maturing the product architecture. For a good portion of that year during 2012, we were asking for money. We never got it despite the fact that we got a lot of venture capitalists who liked, conceptually, what we were doing. We had a number of them who actually thought we were on the right track, but we couldn’t seem to get a yes.

Sramana Mitra: That’s because you didn’t have a product or a business. You were selling a concept.

Andrew Rubin: That definitely is a part of it.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Concept Financing from Andreessen Horowitz: Andrew Rubin, CEO of Illumio
1 2 3 4 5 6 7