Building an IPO-Ready Identity Software Company from Colorado: Andre Durand, CEO of Ping Identity (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: With that General Catalyst money, you said 2006 was when you had the server?

Andre Durand: 2005 was when it came out. We used the General Catalyst money, in essence, to build the first commercial product. The first one probably took us about 18 months.

Sramana Mitra: When did American Express hit?

Andre Durand: They actually licensed our toolkit—the open source precursor to the commercial server. We had some customers that were licensing our toolkit capabilities. We weren’t licensing the software at that time. We were really just licensing our professional services to implement the software.

Sramana Mitra: What’s the next major milestone from here on? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Manoj Leelanivas, CEO of Cyphort (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Lift yourself to the 30,000 foot industry perspective level. If you were to start a company in cyber security today, what open problem would you focus on?

Manoj Leelanivas: I would start with data. The issue right now is basically that there is too much data. People are struggling to find information from data. There is too much data out there and you don’t know what to process and what is meaningful for you. If I were to look at it with a blank slate, I would look at something that is in the boundaries of multiple industries.

Sramana Mitra: I’m asking you a question purely from a cyber security point of view. We have a huge Big Data coverage. Tell me specifically what is an open problem in cyber security that is worth following today. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Manoj Leelanivas, CEO of Cyphort (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: There is a window before your system is able to figure things out when something may have gotten into the enterprise, but then you would know that something has gotten into the enterprise and do something about it. Is that correct?

Manoj Leelanivas: Yes. The beauty of it is that it doesn’t matter what the exploit is. You need to find out what the implication is. If somebody downloaded something by accidentally clicking on the site, it doesn’t necessarily mean that person is infected. If that person downloaded and opened the file, then that person probably is infected, but that doesn’t mean that something has happened in the enterprise. If now it’s propagating to a high-value target, it is not a millisecond thing.

We really are going out for these targeted attacks, which have a long dwell time. It takes almost a year for them to find the target. It took almost three months to actually become the real attack. These are the ones that are slow, sophisticated, and trying to go after your crowned jewels. They’re going after the intellectual property. That’s what we predict. If you’re a large bank, it could be the customer data or the financial data, which can have huge implications on the market. We focus on the ones that have dwell time, target you, and put you on the newspaper. That is what we focus on. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Manoj Leelanivas, CEO of Cyphort (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The example you gave about the propagated malware, does that mean that your system scans every ad that comes into the screen of any employee of your client enterprise?

Manoj Leelanivas: Yes, anything that is coming to an employee on any of the vectors. In this case, it’s going to a web page.

Sramana Mitra: It could be mobile as well.

Manoj Leelanivas: It could be a mobile as well. Let me just siphon off things into two different parts. One is say you’re on a Windows or a Mac machine and you’re doing web surfing or email, we can see that right there because it’s coming through the enterprise. If it’s the mobile device on WiFi, we see it through the enterprise too. For a mobile device that is completely encrypted that is not on the enterprise, we cannot see it. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Manoj Leelanivas, CEO of Cyphort (Part 1)

In the crowded world of Cyber Security, where is the true innovation? Manoj throws light on an esoteric area of undiscovered threats and how they are handled by Cyphort.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Cyphort.

Manoj Leelanivas: I’m the President and CEO of Cyphort. I started off my professional career at Cisco about 20 years ago. I was part of the team that started Juniper Networks. I was with Juniper for a long time. I had different roles at Juniper. I ran all of engineering and all the product management groups. Then I created a software business for Johnson, our CEO, which grew to be $150 million business. I ran sales for a year and a half. One fine morning, I said, “It’s time for me to create a new startup.” I’ve done the large company and I just wanted to do something different. That’s my journey to Cyphort. >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: RJ Metrics CEO Robert Moore (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Where are you right now in terms channel, or other strategic pieces that enable you to grow? How do you acquire customer? Is it a direct channel? Is it an online channel?

Robert Moore: We have two main channels through which we acquire customers. One of them is inbound marketing and one of them is outbound sales. On the inbound marketing side, we made a really big effort from day one to be a thought leader in the space of data analysis, business intelligence, and e-commerce. We published very frequently everything from blog posts to white papers, to industry benchmark reports. We hold webinars every couple of weeks. We’re very prolific on the content side when it comes to providing people operating businesses with advise on how to use their data to make smarter decisions.

That content ecosystem is a really helpful source of leads for us because people become aware of us and then they say, “What’s this RJMetrics?” They click through and raise their hands to try the product out. We have a free trial as part of our on-boarding process. Because there’s a very low amount of risk, we’re able to get a lot of people in on the free trial on a monthly basis. As long as we convert a good amount of them, it works well. >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: RJ Metrics CEO Robert Moore (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You said you’ve raised about $22 million. Let’s talk about other strategic moves during the past four years that you’ve been a venture-funded company.

Robert Moore: One thing that we did quite recently that I think was very strategic in nature was we decided to release a second product. For most SaaS companies, your brand is also the brand of your product. It’s all nice, clean, and simple. If you’re using Zendesk, you’re using Zendesk. There are some companies out there in the SaaS universe who end up releasing multiple products for various reasons. For us, we saw a trend happening in the market where we noticed that a lot of our customers had a desire for much more control over how their data was stored, where it was stored, and what tools  they use to analyze it in addition to RJMetrics. >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: RJ Metrics CEO Robert Moore (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What were your metrics when you were putting this round together? What kind of monthly revenue run rate did you have at that time?

Robert Moore: At that time, we were less than a million in revenue. That would translate to something to the order of a hundred customers, or just below a hundred. We were profitable when we raised that money.

Sramana Mitra: Awesome.

Robert Moore: We had to file a business tax return in 2011. We raised in 2012. When we started raising money, that’s when we made the deliberate decision that a lot of SaaS companies do, which is we know that we can put $1 out and we get $2 back in. It just takes a year to get those $2 back. If we want to make $2 million, then we have to put out $1 million today. That would mean that you burn cash in the short term. We made a deliberate strategic decision to make this be a growth business rather than a traditional net present value business. It started dipping into being a company that burns cash. We grew really rapidly. That’s when we started to achieve some real scale. >>>