Bootstrapping Using Services from North Carolina: Ateb CEO Frank Sheppard (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let me see if I got this. You basically had a project within IBM that IBM didn’t want to pursue. You wanted to pursue it and, with IBM’s blessing, you spun it out as a separate company?

Frank Sheppard: Correct. IBM had no part in the founding of that company except to say yes. It was a very original project.

Sramana Mitra: You were doing that out of North Carolina?

Frank Sheppard: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: What happened to that project? You had a customer also that wanted you to build that solution for them, correct? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Qstream CEO Duncan Lennox (Part 1)

Qstream uses insights on how the human brain learns to power sales empowerment and training. It’s an interesting concept that could be applied to many other use cases, and it seems like a ripe arena for entrepreneurial experimentation.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to you as well as Qstream.

Duncan Lennox: I’m the co-founder and CEO of Qstream. Qstream is a spin-off from Harvard Medical School. We provide, what we call, a sales performance platform to help organizations manage and improve the capability of their sales force.

Sramana Mitra: Give us a bit more color on this value proposition. Double-click down on some of your customers and tell us how, specifically, are they using your product. >>>

Carnival in the Cloud: Okta makes Identity and Access Management Simpler

The growing adoption of the cloud by organizations is leading to the evolution of Identity Access Management-as-a-Service aka IDaaS. Gartner estimates the IDaaS market to account for nearly 25% of the overall Identity Access Management market, compared with a modest 4% share back in 2011. Gartner’s multiple reports peg the IDaaS market to be worth nearly $500 million in 2013 and expect it to grow to $1.24 billion by the year 2017. San Francisco-based Okta is a leading provider of IDaaS services and also the “sole leader in the IDaaS Magic Quadrant” as per Gartner.

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Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Craig Hinkley, CEO of WhiteHat Security (Part 5)

Craig Hinkley: You had asked about use cases. I would like to talk about two examples of software development lifecycle. What’s interesting is the dev ops trend—the bringing together of the operations and development teams. What we’re pushing for and striving to achieve is secure dev ops or sec dev ops. We want to embed secure software development into the sec ops environment. Because the more securely you develop software through the software development lifecycle, the more secure your software will be. Less vulnerabilities will show up in websites and web applications. Significant increase in productivity and cost savings can also be achieved by having a sec dev ops. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Craig Hinkley, CEO of WhiteHat Security (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I’m absolutely on the same page with you. For the small to medium business segment, it has to be as a cloud service offering. It’s hard for a player to go both enterprise and SME because the go-to-markets are so different. The DNA is so different. Everything is so different. It’s hard to do both for one company. A $50 million company has to be somewhat focused. That’s my question.

Craig Hinkley: Now I understand the question. From a market perspective and serving the market, the underlying technology capability to serve the SME versus the large enterprises is the same. Yes, your go-to-market may be different, but one of the benefits of being Security-as-a-Service is we can scale that offering.

The challenge that I’m faced with as the CEO is making sure that we serve the right markets with the correct go-to-market strategy. That’s why our go-to-market strategy is using both direct and indirect models. Indirect models are channels and partnerships that can scale to handle >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Craig Hinkley, CEO of WhiteHat Security (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Where do you position your product? What size or scale of websites or apps are you looking to protect?

Craig Hinkley: I think about it from the software development lifecycles perspective. You can think about developing your software to production where it’s now accessible to customers and partners. We have some customers who use us for what they determine as their critical websites. We have some customers who just want us to look at a very small set of websites to customers who have us, literally, looking at thousands of websites and applications. What we do is detect those vulnerabilities using our internal thread research center.

Sramana Mitra: There are millions of millions of websites out there and there are millions of e-commerce websites out there that actually have people’s credit card data. Many of these websites are very small. They’re not Target. They’re not these gigantic websites with major enterprise customers behind them and with major cyber security budgets behind them. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Craig Hinkley, CEO of WhiteHat Security (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You said you have 30,000 websites and apps that your solutions protect in the process of developing these websites and applications. When you look at the universe out there of millions and millions of websites and applications, what percentage of them are actually vulnerable?

Craig Hinkley: What we found is that pretty much 100% of customers will have a vulnerability at any time during a year that we’re providing service. The scary statistics is that every customer that we’ve looked at and provided service for as well as customers we’ve done research work with has a serious vulnerability open and available to be exploited.

The analogy would be, if you try to equate software security and how that shows up on the web as websites and applications, equivalent to protecting your home. We’ve all done it before. We’ve all left our home and either forgot to put the alarm on or left the back door unlocked by accident. In the time that vulnerability is exploitable, the bad folks find us. They take advantage of it. >>>

How to Manage A Successful Pivot: Bullhorn CEO Art Papas (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: The IPO window will be fine even if the market corrects itself. Most of the problem with the market right now is with the late-stage venture capital as it pertains to private businesses. I don’t think there’s a lot of problem with the public market.

Art Papas: I’d like to be a little larger when we go public. I’d like to be over $100 million, which we will be next year. I’d also like to be in a position where I feel like my team is ready. I hired a CFO from a public company in Boston called Constant Contact. I hired a COO from Parametric Technology Corporation. I hired a Head of Services recently from Salesforce.com, which is our largest competitor. The CFO has the most work to do to get ready for an IPO. I think it’s in our future.

Sramana Mitra: Why did your venture investors want to sell to private equity? When companies are growing well, venture companies tend to not want to sell to private equities. What was the motivation? >>>