Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Avanan CEO Gil Friedrich (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What are the unsolved problems in the phishing and data protection domain? Where would you recommend new entrepreneurs to start new companies?

Gil Friedrich: In our area, we see a gap that we try to solve. I can talk about the gap that we saw and then the other gaps that are still there. We came to Avanan from what we now call our first baby. It was a company called Forescout.

It was a great experience. It was successful, and we learned a lot. We started talking to customers in 2014 and they would say, “I love the technology, but we are moving to the cloud and this is where our focus is. Can you implement that technology in the cloud?”

That drew our attention to that area. At the time, the local vendors were approaching it in this way, saying, “Let’s take our existing technology and let’s see if we could implement that in the cloud environment.”

Very often, it led them to an inefficient architecture where they would try to proxy the traffic and change the user experience negatively. Our thought and our mission as we started was to do a cloud solution from the ground up. With the cloud, there is an option of creating this cloud-to-cloud architecture or ATI base connection between the service and the protection.

This is what we refer to as protecting from the inside. The customer would approve an app in Office 365 for the entire organization and we are up and running. That potential intrigued us. As we started doing this, we saw the advantages of the additional visibility that we have, adding a layer to what Microsoft or Google has.

All these capabilities don’t exist if you try to protect from the outside. This was the potential that we saw. It started with a change of behavior with the end-user. That’s a good rule of thumb if I was to think of a new idea – changing behavior together with the new technology that has the potential to create a disruption.

One thing that I didn’t think about enough if I was to start over again is to ask, “How am I going to sell this? How am I going to find customers? How am I unique and how clear is my differentiation to explain simply to customers?” I would give more thought to these things in the beginning to make sure that it’s not just about the technology but also about selling it. 

Sramana Mitra: That’s one of the things that we pay a lot of attention to in our program and that is how you position a product. How do you message that positioning such that people can clearly understand what problem you are solving and how unique you are? I think that issue is at the heart of success. 

Gil Friedrich: The differentiation tends to erode a little bit. We could say two or three years ago that we are the only company that brings AI to this problem. In general, there is still a lot of potential to bring machine learning to areas where it’s still not there and to optimize problems where AI is not yet used.

We were able to say that two or three years ago.  Now if I say AI, it’s corny because everyone else has AI. You need to double-click down and explain why your AI is different. 

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Avanan CEO Gil Friedrich
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