1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ken Elefant, Partner and Co-Founder at Sorenson Ventures 2021 (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: On your point on needing smart engineers to do things, it has always been my observation that there are only a finite number of those people. We need abstractions and we need ways to enable and equip people who are not these really smart engineers.

This is one of the reasons why I find PaaS to be an interesting trend. It enables a large body of developers to develop stuff and things on top of stacks that they don’t necessarily need to build. You don’t need to be that savvy to be able to build a product and build a solution to problems. 

Ken Elefant: I also think that the smartest enterprises know that they should focus on what they are good at. They should not try to do site reliability better than Google or Facebook. 

Sramana Mitra: Going forward, what are you looking for? What is your thesis? What is your post-COVID investment thesis?

Ken Elefant: I first got into the business in 1999. I saw a big upturn and then saw the downturn in 2007 and 2008. I have been surprised at how long-lasting this upturn has been.

Our philosophy is that we are going to continue to invest in entrepreneurs that are coming up with new and unique ideas in security and enterprise software. We want to back those entrepreneurs that are solving unsolved problems.

I will give you an example. We have been active recently and to answer your question about COVID, my philosophy is to keep finding those top-tier entrepreneurs to back and help them without worrying about the cycles out there. If you are backing high-quality entrepreneurs building long-term sustainable companies, then you will do great over time.

One of the big problems that have been out there for 15 years has been ransomware. Enterprises are getting breached and they are going to continue to get breached. We recently invested in the seed round of a company called Airgap.io.

I have not seen anything this unique about ransomware. The founders are out of Juniper, so they understand the network very well. The name of their company is very apt because what they do is create an Airgap around individual devices. The issue that I have heard over and over again from security officers is that they know they are going to get breached but the issue happens at that point.

Airgap has created these devices in their segmentation so when an enterprise gets breached, you just flip the Airgap anti-ransomware kill switch and that ransomware is confined and cannot move from device to device.

For example, in a particular LAN, maybe that would stop my computer from printing to my local printer. That is okay. These devices shouldn’t be necessarily talking to other devices directly so why should my personal computer that is inside the network talk to an IP-enabled video camera? That video camera is connected to another LAN. That is how ransomware gets spread. I thought that it was very unique. 

Sramana Mitra: What is the background of the entrepreneurs?

Ken Elefant: They came from Juniper. They had phenomenal domain experience associated with the network. For seed-stage deals, we are all about backing first-time entrepreneurs. About half of our investments are with first-time entrepreneurs. What we look for is this extreme domain experience to solve a problem that nobody else in the world could solve as well as they can. 

This segment is part 4 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ken Elefant, Partner and Co-Founder at Sorenson Ventures 2021
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