From a Security VAR to a $10 Million ARR SaaS Product Business: Andrew Plato, CEO of Anitian (Part 1)

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We’re big fans of unfair advantage derived out of deep domain knowledge.

Read how Andrew played his.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Andrew Plato: I was born in Detroit, Michigan. I was raised in Arizona. I went to high school and college there. After college, I moved to Seattle because I wanted to get into the computer industry.

I played with computers all the while during college. I built a WAN and an automation tool. I created a system where we’d call up all these mainframes and download data, then put all the data together, and import them to a database. It took three or four people weeks to do it. I could do it in one night.

Sramana Mitra: What year was this?

Andrew Plato: This was in 1991.

Sramana Mitra: This is the days of Novell.

Andrew Plato: Yes, mainframes and dial-up connections. I’d actually call each of the mainframes and I had a script that would run and download. I would drop it into a text file, concatenate the text file, and then it would reformat it and import it into a database system.

They had five students doing this. I was one of the students. I was trying to figure out how to do my job faster. I started implementing it all. I had to do it in the middle of the night. We were doing it at three in the morning. It dramatically improved the efficiency.

My reward for that was that I was fired. I didn’t realize that I stepped on some toes. When you jump ahead with an amazing innovation, that really terrifies people. There were some other guys who were trying to do this. It pissed them off.

That taught me an important lesson about being an entrepreneur. You need to pay attention to what other people are doing around you. Sometimes grand innovations can be really terrifying to people. I learned that lesson again after I got out of college.

I went to work at Microsoft. I was a tech writer, which is an exciting job. My job was to document databases. One day, I copied and pasted a SQL query. I accidentally pasted it into the browser. I was working in one of the e-commerce websites in existence at that time. It retrieved all the data in the database.

What I had done is I had executed the world’s first SQL injection attack. It’s probably the most destructive attack that ever existed. It accounts for billions in losses. It’s the granddaddy of all attacks. All the big breaches that you’ve heard about started with a SQL injection attack.

Sramana Mitra: You did that accidentally?

Andrew Plato: Yes. I went to the developers of the website to show them this. When I showed it, they just completely dismissed me. That was the moment that crystallized in my head that I was onto something about security. Their reaction really perplexed me. It seems obvious to me there’s a problem here. From their perspective, they couldn’t comprehend what I was saying or doing. 

Sramana Mitra: It was too big.

Andrew Plato: They had no context for it. Nobody had ever done anything like this. As far as they’re concerned, it was stupid and meaningless. I did something so out there that it was just terrifying.

I left and decided to start a company. I wanted to get into security. The first few years was really just doing contract work for companies building security tech or implementing security. I did contracts in Oracle. I did contracts at Microsoft. 

This segment is part 1 in the series : From a Security VAR to a $10 Million ARR SaaS Product Business: Andrew Plato, CEO of Anitian
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