Building a Mobile Security Company in Silicon Valley: Domingo Guerra, Co-Founder and President of Appthority (Part 2)

Domingo Guerra: During my MBA, I decided to focus on entrepreneurship. Santa Clara has a very flexible program and you get to pick a lot of the classes and core competencies that you want to focus on. I decided to shadow a lot of the professors there that had entrepreneurship experience. In the last semester of the program, I got to do a market research project for an entrepreneurship class where you basically write a business plan. That’s when I started evaluating the mobility space inside the enterprise. It was something I was passionate about.

We had all transitioned from the Blackberrys that were assigned to us to the iPhone. However, IT wouldn’t support it. Having a technical background, we figured out how to make it work on our own. It wasn’t necessarily the most secure way for the enterprise if they weren’t involved in that process. A good friend of mine, Kevin Watkins, was at McAfee. I started sharing ideas about mobility and explored starting a company. He was still pretty happy at McAfee, so he didn’t want to leave.

I utilized the time during my MBA to write the business plan and interview a lot of potential enterprise customers and get feedback on the market. I thought it was a good opportunity and tried to get Kevin to join me. He still didn’t want to leave McAfee until Intel acquired McAfee and cut a lot of his projects. We quit our jobs in mid-2011 and decided to start a company.

It wasn’t called Appthority at that time. We were focusing on Android anti-malware, because we saw that Android was going to get a big market share and malware was going to be a big problem. We turned out to be a little too early inside the enterprise context. When we started reaching out to prospects and folks we knew in the enterprise space, they said that they were concerned about Android. As a result, they didn’t allow Android in the corporation. It was all iPhones, and we didn’t have an iPhone product.

Sramana Mitra: What was the value proposition to the enterprise?

Domingo Guerra: We wanted to allow the enterprise to deploy Android and be able to look for malware on those devices, which is a product that exists today.

Sramana Mitra: Your’e saying that there was no Android at the enterprises at that time, so your value proposition was moot.

Domingo Guerra: Exactly. We had quit our jobs without any funding. We applied for a big DARPA grant. The Department of Defense had a big research grant for Android malware analysis. We thought we were going to win that grant. We quit our jobs so that we could develop the IP and apply for this grant. We didn’t win the grant. At that point, we decided to just bootstrap. My co-founders and I just started to build the company and technology ourselves for almost a year. It took 11 months before we were able to take financing.

Sramana Mitra: What were you going to do though? Your enterprise market validation was telling you that this is not what the market is looking for. How did pivot your value proposition? Where did you go from there?

Domingo Guerra: We started realizing that it wasn’t just an Android problem. The enterprise is more concerned about iOS. It wasn’t just a malware problem. The enterprise was worried about data leakage and other information that was being siphoned or collected off of these devices. Instead of just throwing away all of the project development we had done, we started adding more functionality to our analysis engine that could already automate the analysis of Android apps. We started working on automating the analysis of iOS apps. We started gathering feedback as to what type of data the enterprise wanted to protect or what kind of risks they were concerned about. We didn’t start from zero.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Building a Mobile Security Company in Silicon Valley: Domingo Guerra, Co-Founder and President of Appthority
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