July 10, 2024 • 65 mins
Join us on the DiscoPosse Podcast as we welcome back Shira Shamban, CEO and co-founder of Solvo. Shira shares the journey of Solvo's evolution, the challenges of pivoting a tech startup, and the importance of maintaining a positive company culture. Dive into the intricacies of selling security solutions to developers and the lessons learned along the way.
Discover how Solvo has adapted to market needs, from enhancing UI for security teams to implementing compliance monitoring and auto-remediation features. Shira's candid insights on leadership, strategic thinking, and personal well-being offer valuable takeaways for entrepreneurs and tech enthusiasts alike.
Don't miss this engaging conversation that balances the technical with the human aspects of running a successful startup.
This podcast is made possible thanks to GTM Delta
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hi everyone, I'm Shira, I'm the CEO and co-founder of Solvo,
and you're listening to the Disco Posse Podcast.
Music.
(00:21):
You're listening to the Disco Posse Podcast.
Perfect. And a return, friends.
This is so great, Shira, to see you because we've had a lot of time that I didn't
realize how much time has passed since you were on the podcast last time.
(00:42):
And that was a new introduction.
It's even funny thinking of, like, I forget how we all meet sometimes times
because there's just been, you know,
the podcast began with a lot of ideas of, you know, sort of finding my network
and then my second layer network.
And then I began getting inbound from people with like PR agencies that were
(01:06):
helping to raise and amplify some of their brands.
And I think that may have actually been what originally triggered us was probably
through a friend might've been Amber or Georgiana.
Or it was Georgiana yeah yeah and you
know we've got such an amazing crowd of
folks that we share as as friends and colleagues and
(01:28):
and you really stood out to me
as having such a fantastic approach to the humanness with which you build your
team and your company and your platform and then seeing you I've seen what looks
like fantastic success and definitely you know really really,
really great moves that are going on with Salvo since then.
(01:49):
So anyways, I could talk all about you for 75 minutes and be happy because I
continue to be impressed every day with what you and the team are doing.
Well, thank you so much. And I'm so happy to be back here.
And I'm grateful for this opportunity to be able to do a part two and talk about
what has changed and what happened.
(02:10):
I think that every entrepreneur is going through some kind of roller coaster.
It's a cliche, But it's really true.
This is why it's a cliche and it might be, for some people, it might be useful
and helpful to hear about the
different turns and loops that we need to experience as part of this ride.
(02:33):
So I'm happy for this opportunity to share with the audience what we've been doing so far.
Yeah. So let's, for the folks that are brand new, I'll of course tell them they
should go back and listen to the first episode where we talked.
But let's give a recap, Shira, on your story, your background, and the Solvo story.
And then we get to play, you know, what's changed, you know,
(02:57):
and especially we talked about the idea of selling security to developers.
Selling anything to developers is a very distinct challenge.
But then introducing security, there's so much we could learn about that you've
seen play out in real life.
So I'm looking forward to those lessons. But let's start with the beginning of your story.
(03:19):
Sure. So as a really quick recap for those of you who caught up with the previous episode.
So I started Solvo four years ago with my co-founder, David.
Both of us worked for another cloud security company that got acquired by a larger corporate.
And that was our cue to go ahead and start our own business.
(03:45):
Initially, we did not think about doing a cloud security company because we
thought, and this is back in 2019, early 2020, cloud security is not a problem anymore.
I mean, you have plenty of very good products out there. Let's find the next big problem.
But since we went and talked to different smart people and asked them,
(04:07):
what do they recognize as the next problem? And all of them said, no, no, you got it wrong.
Cloud security is only getting started as a problem.
We realized there is still a lot of room for us to innovate.
And we had this idea of
helping the people who are involved with cloud security to quickly and ideally
(04:33):
automatically remediate some of the most popular and commonly done mistakes
takes when configuring cloud infrastructure.
And again, back when we started, we thought that we have matured enough as organizations
(04:53):
that are building cloud applications that we can actually talk directly to the developers.
Because nowadays, developers and engineering organizations and security organizations
are no longer separated silos.
We have CICD processes, we have automation processes, and we have a lot of security
(05:19):
processes that are being done together.
Security is now part of the design process.
Security, of course, is a part of the code review. So we have security integrated
in many parts of the development lifecycle.
So we just assumed that it will be a great idea to put cloud security as part
(05:43):
of the CICD lifecycle and preferably earlier in the process.
So we will kind of skip over the security organization,
talk directly to developers and tell them, hey, while you're writing this awesome
application, how about if you deliver it with a secure infrastructure? structure.
(06:04):
So that was our idea.
What we do is detect misconfigurations that could come from identity,
infrastructure misconfiguration, network exposure,
these kind of things, and suggest a fix that comes in a CLI command,
(06:26):
Terraform, or other infrastructure as code templates,
or JSON files to make it as easy as possible for the developer to just click
the command and enforce the fix that Solvo has to offer.
So we thought, everyone is going to adopt it. Who wouldn't want to deliver a much better product?
(06:50):
It's a no-brainer. Of course.
But... We forget that humans don't have brains.
Or they don't think with them. We don't have brains, but most people are just
so busy delivering their tasks or closing the tickets.
(07:11):
And if security was not a very specific task as part of what they're doing,
even though it's really romantic to think this way, they're not going to do security.
And it was an important lesson,
It was a lesson that took us time. And in a startup life, time is money. Right.
(07:39):
That I know very, very well. Yeah, yeah.
So that was an important lesson. But you always need to look at the bright side.
And the bright side about it is that we built a product that was very,
very, very easy to implement.
Because to begin with we
(08:00):
knew that developers are going to hate an onboarding
process that is not super light and
friendly and automated so so we built the product to support their their very
high standards and needs and that still serves us very well today because today
(08:23):
day when I have a meeting with the security team,
because now we stop talking first with developers and we don't expect them to be our champions.
We go and talk to the security organization and we can talk about that as well.
But now when I do a demo meeting and I tell them, listen, the onboarding process
probably takes five minutes if you're drinking coffee while doing it. Do you want to do it now?
(08:47):
Usually if we were able to impress them during the demo, they will do it immediately.
And it's very satisfying to see results coming up so quickly.
Yeah. Well, then the interesting thing about that is I use it strange analogy,
but this is the vacuum salesman methodology that when I was a young lad and
(09:10):
I grew up is that like, I can't sell you a vacuum from a distance.
They're like, no, I will come to your house. We'll clean one of your rooms and
like so there's the salesperson in their sock feet vacuuming your house for you.
And by doing that you're you've actually invested in the experience more than
(09:33):
you would have prior to and so you're you're actually experientially involved
in it which is different than conceptually involved if you say yeah conceptually
this is great but then we got to get a ticket we
to implement we got to do whatever it's friction and any
amount of friction can delay that so the fact that they can now see it and i
would even tell people in my i was teach i teach people how to do technology
(09:56):
demos and i say don't say this is our environment you know this is our platform
this is our ui you say okay let's here's your application environment.
Like put in the context of your your this is your cloud your thing and yes and they really do invest,
in wanting to see it in their context because
(10:17):
that's a context that they will think of when
that meeting stops because when that meeting stops your language your nuance
our market created phrases that we've generated they're great for gartner but
they're not great for that person that's going to as you say have different
priorities when they leave that meeting and And unless security was a priority for that next fix,
(10:39):
it may not make it into their thought cycle even after lunch,
which is sad. This is true.
And you probably have a lot more to say about this.
But one of the important things I learned, you know, I was not,
I was never a salesperson.
I never, selling was never my day job.
(11:00):
And all of a sudden as a ceo i
had to be the company's first salesperson and initially i thought well you know
the product speaks for itself you see how amazing it is you see the potential
right i mean it's a no-brainer and over time i learned that even though i think that.
(11:22):
Most people don't think it it's like a baby you think that yours is amazing,
the most beautiful baby in the world
and not everyone thinks
that they might not say they they might say oh what a beautiful baby and yeah
they're just waiting for the meeting to be over so i i had to learn how to sell
(11:46):
and how to run a selling meeting and how to make people feel,
that they want a next meeting.
They're curious about the next meeting.
They're curious to see their environment in the Solver platform.
And these were all very important lessons. And while learning these lessons,
(12:10):
naturally, I had to take some meetings and then not succeed in them.
And naturally, if I had the opportunity to re-engage with these organizations,
I'm sure that today the meeting would have went a little differently.
Yeah, there's, that's a very interesting thing. Like, and even look,
I've honestly struggled with this myself.
(12:32):
Like I never, I even use it in my tagline of life.
Every time I would be, you know, when I started that my previous company,
I came as a tech evangelist.
One of the advantages of having me in a customer call is that I can literally
come in and say, hey, I'm not in sales.
I used to be on the other side of the desk with you. I understand your experience.
(12:54):
And this is what makes me excited about what we can do based on the problem that I see you have.
And then they see your investment in that love of the problem.
And then it's fantastic. But because I had the credibility of lived experience,
that was sort of my carryover. But I was, so I would say, I don't sell things.
I don't even stand next to people while they sell things. I'm just here to show
(13:17):
you what I'm excited about and how I've used it.
And then hopefully you can find value in that.
Of course, in the back of my mind, knowing 100%, I'm in sales,
like everybody is in sales. The only difference is I'm not quota carrying.
And I even was so self-determinant that I said,
I would, I can never take a job where where I would rely on commissions because
(13:38):
I don't believe that I have the skillset or the, the flow of thinking to be
a really good account executive level salesperson.
I can excite somebody about technology, but then once that meeting's done,
I'm like, who's next? Yeah.
I need, there's no me thinking like, okay, one hour later, I'll send the followup.
(13:59):
And then two days later, I'll have a second followup. And then remember where
their kids go to school. Like I remember these things just cause conversationally,
I love hearing about people and I get excited about that.
So I was using some of the same techniques, but not in the true way of thinking
it as a program, as a flow of work.
And then all of a sudden, yeah, I have to do it. Like I have no choice,
(14:22):
but you have to go as a founder seller.
And then at that point, you know, because your message has to then translate
to the rest of your sales team.
And it has to be consistent with as the CEO, especially like you have.
But it's a very humbling experience. It is. It is wild.
And yeah, I've always had a massive respect for people in sales.
(14:47):
Because of how well they have to manage a relationship.
And we've all seen salespeople do things that it's like, hey,
yeah, they're moving a deal across the line, but not necessarily invested in
the long-term outcome of that deal.
But real true good relationship sellers, I've always just been a huge admiration
(15:09):
of how well they know how to keep people attuned,
revisit the clients, check on other things. So I've, anyway, so many techniques.
One, I think we need about 10 podcasts on just so we can share lessons for founders.
I think that selling is a skill like many other skills, like being a surgeon, okay?
(15:31):
Once you do the same surgery over and over and over and over again,
you can do it very, very easily in a shorter period of time,
get very, very, very good results.
So being a good salesperson is also, you know, after you've looked at other
people do it and then did it yourself and then messed it up a few times,
(15:52):
but at some point it's, it becomes like a second nature. Yeah.
But like everything else, you need to do it repeatedly and also hopefully have
some good mentors to help you with that.
Absolutely. Yeah. And I think I remember from Grey's Anatomy,
of all places I learned this, was the idea of they use it in medical practice,
(16:16):
but in universities for everything, is see, say, do, teach.
And it's like, so you watch somebody do something and then you describe how
it occurred. heard, so they can say, okay, based on how you're describing it, I agree.
It's almost like sort of a Socratic therapeutic sort of discussion.
And then do, so you actually perform the function, and then you have to teach
(16:39):
it back to the next person.
And by then having to teach it, you think very differently about how you approached it.
And as you said, having a mentor as well is incredible because you can continue to have check-ins.
And I've been lucky, I've got a great friend jr he has
a company called shift group actually and they they do sales training
(16:59):
for for athletes for like high performance athletes and he turns them into amazing
technology sales professionals and and he's been a great friend i've worked
with him in the past and is very helpful because even my partner she tells me
all the time she's like you're surrounded by nerds so.
But it's very easy to get excited about that she says but then you get you get
(17:21):
worried about sales She says, you need to surround yourself with salespeople.
And I was like, huh, I never thought about that.
So I did make a point of spending more time in kind of a mentor and in groups
that just being surrounded by it and hearing the language, you really do adapt very, very well.
Yeah. And if you were able to build this kind of relationship with them where
(17:45):
they actually share with you how they run a meeting.
Right. What kind of questions they ask.
Whenever I joined a meeting with, when I'm not the buyer, but I joined professional
salesperson, I always try to listen to the questions they ask and when they ask them.
(18:08):
One of the questions I never thought of, but I learned to ask after a demo meeting,
was what surprised you the most about our products?
Because then that person has to stop and think.
And usually they will not say a negative thing about your product.
(18:28):
So this kind of draws them into saying something good about your product.
And then we can finish up the meeting with a very positive thought and feeling.
And feelings are such a crucial part of the sales process.
Yeah. People always ask me and said, how do you learn how to deal with technology?
(18:51):
And I said, what's the book you recommend the most for understanding technology?
And I say DSM-5, like being able to understand how humans work.
So I literally use behavioral psychology and Hahnemann and Tversky,
like thinking fast and slow and learning the heuristics of behavior.
And this is a lot of it. And also a great friend of mine, a great mentor as
(19:13):
well, I worked with in the past, he would ask, especially when there's a,
there's always a competitive product, right?
And so someone would bring up something and he's like, there's the easiest way
to do this is you're not there to shut down a competitor. You're there to find out about a competitor.
And so he would ask the simplest question says, what do you love about their product?
(19:35):
And of course they come up with like the easiest thing in the world.
They're like, oh, I think this is amazing.
I really like this. It's integrated with what I do because it's closer to the
UI that I spend a lot of time with.
It's like, okay, that makes sense. And then you say nothing.
And you pause and you why and there's silence and they said one thing that i
wish it did have though is that and almost invariably because they feel a reciprocal
(19:58):
like boundary like they've,
they've talked up somebody else in front of you and they immediately then naturally
start to say like they want to even the the playing field it's a human behavior
thing it's very interesting and so almost always they would highlight something
that they're missing from it and then at that point you You can say, okay, that's great.
(20:19):
And you've never been adversarial in competitive discussion.
You just let them do the pitch.
Yeah, and that's what it is. So sometimes it's nice when someone says,
you know, like what my other favorite I've learned is what would you consider
success as a result of us showing you our platform?
We go through this meeting, what would you mark as a success at the end of this
(20:43):
meeting? And again, always knowing that you're working towards this thing where
they say, we want to see how it works, how it works with X.
And they likely will share a lot more with you.
Versus you saying, you know, what infrastructure to run? How many clouds do
you run? How many people do you have? How much do you spend on this?
And they're like, These are very dry question. Exactly.
(21:06):
So and like you said, it's I've learned by I haven't, as I'm always like messing
around with cars, I've got a friend's a card magician.
And so I got I said, like, when you do little things that look amazing to people,
is because I've done it about 15,000 times.
And that's what But sales is just the idea that the simplest thing in the world
that looks smooth and natural to me, if I did that three years ago, it wouldn't.
(21:31):
But now I literally can't not do it smoothly.
I have no choice. My muscle memory is built so deeply into me that I can't not do it.
And that's like exposing yourself to a peer group that has that muscle memory.
It's sometimes hard for them to teach, speech but if
you can at least as you say shira like listen
(21:53):
to what they ask find out when it is and
you watch the patterns occur and all
of a sudden you're like oh okay i'm gonna try that yes exactly and sometimes
it works now here's the the the pivot i guess is what we would say is and a
pivot of your ideal customer profile is one of the most challenging things to experience
(22:17):
and also to humbly admit you have to go through because quite often people say,
well, then that, that audience was stupid because they didn't get it.
But it's more like, oh no, no, no, no.
They don't necessarily have the capability to do what we expect them to do to
make our platform successful.
(22:38):
And it's very hard for us to back away from that and see it in that light.
Naturally, you know, it's a conclusion that took us a little time to get to.
But once we realized it, we also started thinking or asking ourselves questions.
What does it mean about the product that we built? Does that mean we need to
(23:01):
throw it all away and start over again?
Or let's ask it differently. What do the security teams need that we can deliver to them?
And can we use the technology that we built to deliver that?
So once we realized that these questions need some answers, we went back to the drawing board.
(23:27):
And started thinking about it. And luckily enough, the technology that we built
was still useful for the security teams, security managers.
They still want to get things done.
So the approach of auto-remediation of different security issues was still right.
(23:50):
But these people are not the ones who would use the CLI to fix issues.
Now they need something else so
even though the core of detection and a
remediation code is still there and
they still want to use it now we need to wrap
it in a very very very pretty ui
(24:12):
so then we started thinking okay
what kind of information do we need
to present what would be the best way to
present it and we it's
really tough because in your dreams you want
like amazing dashboards and bi
capabilities and it's it's
(24:34):
going to have such a smooth experience and you dream about all of these things
and all the products you never had but these things take a lot of time so the
back end exists right because they were It was very challenging problems.
So the back end is there and it's working. And now we need to make the front
(24:58):
end reflect all the amazing things we have on the back end.
And we had to prioritize where to start.
We realized that we are addressing like mid-level management,
not necessarily the CISO and the CIO, but the people who need to report to them,
(25:19):
but also to work with the engineers.
So while reporting and dashboards are important, you still need to make sure
that you're well integrated with actionable insights.
So this is something we never stopped, you know, preaching. It has to be actionable.
(25:41):
So what if I show you a trend of something?
What can you do with it? Is it helpful?
Is it going to be helpful next time you meet with your CISO or next time you
meet with a DevSecOps engineer?
So being useful and handy for the security engineers was very important.
(26:05):
Us and and that kind of
led us towards building not
a different kind of product but definitely a different way of reflecting what
we know so building different graphs where
you can see the components of the infrastructure and the identity and the network
(26:25):
components but also adding a layer which is going to show you the application
behavior because very often the security teams It's not that they don't know
what the application does,
but they don't know, why did this container approach the PII bucket?
Hmm, I don't know. Now you have the visibility to see who approached it.
(26:48):
Did they need to do that? What action did they run?
So now you can answer different questions by yourself, but also come a little
smarter to the meeting with the engineers.
And instead of having a conversation where you from the security are asking
them questions and they're very angry that you are undermining their authority,
(27:12):
you can actually have an intelligent conversation because you look at that graph
together, you scratch your heads together, and then you also have a suggested remediation.
So instead of blaming each other and trying to make the other person take responsibility
and fix the issue, just say, hey, hey, here is the CLI command.
(27:34):
Let's run it and fix the issue.
So we were actually able to reduce friction between different teams.
Absolutely, yeah. And when you do that, you also reduce the time it takes you
to remediate issues because you don't have the fear of going to the other team
(27:54):
and talking to them because they might kick you out of the room.
Yeah, it's less blame-oriented and much more results and secure-oriented.
We all have this common goal, but there's no...
It's very hard to go to a developer and say, you did something wrong,
and it doesn't meet with our practice requirements.
(28:16):
And it creates this adversarial lane between people, which is tough.
And so, yeah, I love your approach.
Thank you. So visibility was one component.
And then we added another capability of compliance monitoring.
Touring so now the the
(28:40):
the first user might not be an
infrastructure security engineer this might be a grc practitioner or engineer
but the person who needs to actually do the remediation is still from the engineering
team because maybe based on on the framework you need to be compliant for Or
you need to encrypt some resources.
(29:03):
The GRC engineer can't do it themselves. They need someone else to do it for them.
I have to say that initially, I did not really believe in this feature.
I thought that it's a really small niche.
And there are other very big and successful companies that are doing compliance
for different mediums like the
(29:26):
cloud and on-prem and endpoint and everything. So why should we do this?
But this is one of our best-selling features.
People love it when they can come, check the boxes, and just wait.
And you will tell me how well my infrastructure is configured.
(29:46):
And if I did something wrong, you will also tell me how to fix it.
So now it's really easy to
to enjoy the fruit of of your
work without you know having to talk to
other people or having them blame you for something or you
know just doing it before the audit because who has the time and the bandwidth
(30:09):
to do it guilty as charged i'm fairly sure i've been i've been peeling through
infrastructure about an hour before my auditor was arriving I still got PTSD from it.
So you know everyone has to do it we don't like doing it it feels like an obligation because it is,
(30:33):
And I was so surprised and happy to see the results that, you know,
the core product that we built was so flexible that today it's not only used
for compliance purposes,
but it is used for different monitoring and detection capabilities.
So that enabled us to go beyond just compliance monitoring and actually offer
(31:01):
the CDR capability, the detection and response capability. Wow. Yeah.
I mean, we're monitoring the environment anyway.
We just used to call it compliance, but we can also detect security issues.
In the cloud, even though compliance and security are different practices,
(31:22):
very often compliance finding or issue could drive a security issue.
So if you were supposed to encrypt and didn't encrypt and somebody was able
to read the data out of your database and you have a security issue right now.
(31:44):
And we're able to see the big picture, find where you have a problem and suggest
how to remediate and eliminate it in a very easy way.
So we can close the loop for both security and compliance engineers using this
approach of let's observe the environment, let's observe the application behavior,
(32:06):
find the misconfigurations as we understand them from best practices,
but also as we understand them from the behavior of the application itself.
So this kind of brings together different worlds, the application,
the infrastructure, the compliance, the security, but they all meet in the cloud.
(32:26):
Well, the interesting thing too is that security and compliance are like diet
and exercise in that they work best together and can be individually right,
but not correct for each other.
So you can be compliant and not secure. And you can be secure and not compliant.
Like it's rare, that it seems like sort of edge case to do so.
(32:47):
But it's very easy to be highly secure, but not compliant.
Like you look at PCI DSS, you look at SOC two and ISO 27,001.
And all these different ones.
There's interesting regulatory bits that are buried in there that are not necessarily
security, as you you would call it, but yet they are as a pairing of security and compliance.
(33:14):
And the idea that you can move beyond just observability to actionability is
the fundamental game changer to me.
Like I, I, I never like, I hate the word game changer.
I don't even know why I say it, but like that's, that is the differentiator
because just telling you you've got a problem, it's like, Hey yeah,
you're out on the CVE good luck.
(33:35):
Like that's that's not valid. Yeah, let me know how it goes.
But now you can actually bring them an actionable framework.
That's that's also just the fact that I got to say the low lift of getting your
platform stood up is fantastic.
Because anything that usually is involved in development life cycle invariably
(33:57):
means it has to take over the pipeline.
And that's probably one of the reasons why so many platforms lose,
the ability to get adoption is because you
have to move it to a different place and
the moment it feels unnatural then it
(34:17):
will move away from stuff i even like just
getting people to move from mysql to postgres i to
this day i know people that it's like why do you use
mysql for no other reason than i've just i know
the commands well i'm used to it and
so we are creatures of habit and
(34:37):
when you build bespoke cicd pipelines which is what 90 of them are because there's
no out of the box it just works you know cicd framework for you to be able to
jump in there without saying hey yeah i know you need to move away from this.
You need to move to our custom SVN or some crazy thing that it's just,
(35:00):
it's a bridge too far for most people.
So it's a, so kudos that the reason why you've been able to adapt so well to
market conditions is because you built the company and the platform on a foundation
that was flexible, built from the right first principles.
So then we changed the artifacts that it deals with maybe, including the ICP,
(35:22):
but the foundation, its core was sound.
And also like most people, when they get to the pivot or a pivot, it's really difficult.
So it feels like, I know we look, it's going to seem very concise to go in hindsight
bias and say like, you did really, really well.
I know it's been a struggle and will continue to be one for a while,
(35:46):
but you've earned your opportunity to stay in the market so strong because of
the way you built it from the beginning.
Also, you know, as an entrepreneur, very often you fall in love with your product.
And it's really hard to just admit that something is not working.
It's much easier to think, you know, that CISO I was talking to,
(36:10):
he doesn't understand anything.
Thing that developer he's you know he doesn't know what school they're probably
mainframe people that they just don't know what's new you blame them because your product is great.
And and it might be great but it doesn't matter if the buyers don't want to
buy it doesn't matter what you're trying to sell to them this could be a money
(36:33):
machine but if they don't want to buy it
doesn't matter you build the product for people
who will buy the product so if
the market is telling you we're not interested in buying this you know you can
say that the first person doesn't know a thing and the second one and the third
one but at some point you need to start listening to what they're telling you
(36:57):
and not just dismiss them yeah it's not it's not easy
because you are in love with your product and
your team did a tremendous job so
now going back and telling them listen guys we were wrong it's not easy you
don't have to frame it this way but this is the essence of what you're saying
(37:21):
our thesis was not right and we need to make changes changes,
if you're mature enough and your team is mature enough,
they will not be disappointed.
They will know that their leadership is trustworthy and is able and capable of making,
hard decisions, hopefully when it's not too late and there is still time to
(37:48):
adapt and change and fix this.
One of the things that I think people are always curious about is how do you think strategically.
About this change while you have likely had found success in market?
So then you have to actually tell existing customers and existing early development
(38:14):
partners that, hey, we're switching things up a bit.
You know, we're going to where we see, we know where the problem is.
The problem moved us a little over here.
How do you carry the people that did love the story and love the platform because,
(38:35):
you know, you loved the problem?
How do you bring them through and not have a confidence shake for those folks?
So I think it really depends on how far the old product is from the new product.
For us, as I said before, the core technology remained the same.
So if people really wanted to stick with the old version of what we did,
(38:58):
they could have sticked with it.
They were very excited about having UI and having additional capabilities.
It wasn't instead, it was an addition. But I think that sometimes companies,
when they pivot, they do it like big time.
They pivot from crypto to security or from a web, a 3.0 to, I don't know, LLM security.
(39:23):
So I think that it really depends on how big the pivot is.
I also think that usually at this point, you have like a couple of design partners
and And they know that they are design partners and the design might change.
So it's a part of the game.
(39:45):
And as long as you communicate it in a good way, I think it should be fine.
This will not mess up your relationship with them. This is the truth.
Communication definitely is what's needed because as soon as it,
when things happen in the dark and then it's a surprise,
(40:05):
especially when, you know, as you go on further on to like people begin to adopt
for a particular thing that was unique and specific.
And then the last thing you want to have is where you sort of shake that,
that feature out or, or, or hide it behind something else.
And then that being said, that particular champion may not have been the champion
(40:25):
for what is next for the, the company.
And, and, and there actually, there are times where we outgrow our first customers.
It's an interesting experience where, you know, at some point you say,
huh, you know, that thing that we were really good at is actually not the real
full value of the platform.
(40:47):
And it's an interesting, humbling process to go through as well of like what
did work well, but also what is not necessarily scalable for the overall company.
Yep, that's true. True. And you just need to be brave to make those decisions
and to be candid with yourself.
This is true. Now, you've also founded a company in what could be the most tumultuous
(41:13):
years in existence since the 20s or the 70s.
Well, we've been through a lot of ways of interesting thing.
And, you know, just there's so much going on.
How did you weather all of that, Shira? Because it's not just business and technology,
(41:34):
but you're surviving world events. Yes.
I don't know if this is normal or not. I mean, I have a very short, you know, perspective.
I have not been an entrepreneur for such a long time. I have not been in the
security market for such a long time.
(41:56):
So I don't have 20, 30 years perspective about the market.
So I don't know if objectively these are the hardest years in modern history,
or is this just the regular entrepreneurial experience?
But no doubt the last four years were full of black swans all over the place. For me.
(42:24):
I couldn't imagine this.
I'm not sure everyone experiences such big events, so many of them in the life of one startup.
But, you know, once you start, it is what it is.
And you have no other choice but keep on swimming.
(42:46):
You have no other choice.
And once you realize that and you accept that, and it's easier to to handle
it i mean i have some days when i'm like oh my god i can't believe,
i need to face this right now but i never let myself drown i know i have to
(43:10):
keep on swimming so everyone needs to find what is the thing that gives them
the power to keep on swimming I mean,
it could be talking to a therapist or to a friend or to a mentor or to someone
you trust and gives you the energy,
not people who drain you and say, yeah, you know what?
(43:32):
It's a really shitty situation. It's terrible.
This is not energizing anyone. You need to talk to someone who will tell you,
yeah, it's bad, but here are a couple of things you can do about it.
Or you know what? I believe in you and I think you can do this.
Or, you know what, I can introduce you to someone who can probably help out.
(43:56):
So especially as an entrepreneur, you need to surround yourself with people
who give you that kind of energy and not people who drain you.
Because if you do, you're going to drown.
And then also find the things that are not work and that will give you this kind of energy.
(44:16):
And I think kind of related to something you said before, at least for me,
what kept my sanity this whole time is making sure I have a sports routine.
It happened. I will not say it did not happen.
That in like really depressing or upsetting times, I stopped the routine like I didn't do sports.
(44:42):
But I knew that once I just make myself get back to the routine, I will feel better.
I knew that this is what I had to do. Even if I don't want to do it right now,
I will be grateful for myself for doing it.
And again, you need to, to grab the last, you know, drops of energy in your
(45:09):
body and just go and do it. once you do and once you're able to stick to that routine.
Another day and a couple of days and a week, two weeks, you will,
you will start feeling better and you will start feeling like you have control
of your life and of the situation.
We can't control everything that happens to us, but we can control our feelings
(45:35):
and we can control how we're going to react.
So the sooner you realize that, you know, I can't tell what other Other people
are going to tell me or what they're going to do that has to do with me.
But I can decide, you know, what meetings am I going to take today or what projects
am I going to do this week?
(45:56):
And I focus on the ones that will promote me and my company and my objectives.
And this is where I put my focus.
Then this is when you will start seeing results. Yeah.
It's really interesting because there's never no work to be done.
(46:16):
That's the thing I've learned.
When I was working in a startup, there was always work to do,
but there was also a relative logical end to the day.
As a founder there is
only the ends that i choose to assign it
is in itself imposed i could
(46:39):
think and work day and night there's no
lack of stuff to be done but there
is you know it begins to have
diminishing returns at the length but then
some days i i'll be on a coding tear
or on something and i'll do a real long run and i'll end up like working till
(46:59):
like two in the morning and i'll feel energized but then to your to your point
i i stopped going to the gym because like i have too much stuff to do and like
four or five six seven days and all of a sudden i realized like,
i don't feel good you know and and i know this stuff needs to get done but i'm
(47:19):
not doing it well And I could just, I could feel myself not performing as I expect.
And so I said, okay, no, stop, put on the shoes, head to the gym.
And even though I'm just like kind of dragging my way, as soon as you start,
you're like, okay, I remember why I'm here.
And then you, no one ever finishes a workout and says, I wish I didn't do that. Yes.
(47:43):
That's the one thing I've always found. This is the adrenaline in your blood.
You feel very happy you did it.
It's a tough thing for folks. Now, this is the interesting thing too,
because we're also not alone in our founding journey.
You're a co-founder, you have a management team, you've got a staff,
(48:04):
you've got a lot of, you've got investors, a board.
There are many people that have to follow through this change with you.
They're your cheerleaders, but they're also in a weird way as the CEO.
Sounds, people always forget this, that they're your boss.
Because at some point, when we look at large corporations, the board eventually
(48:26):
will have the power to sometimes manage through who sits in the CEO role.
Not that you're going to get, you know, taken out of that opportunity,
but there is a weird hierarchy that develops.
But the board, especially this early on is meant to help to give guidance and
and advisory to you and provide growth help to get you to this next phase and through these ones.
(48:49):
So how do you manage, not just yourself, but when you look at your peer group,
can you spot like, hey, David, you sound different in meetings lately, everything okay.
Like it's sometimes hard for us to even pause and ask others,
you know, what they need help with.
I think that, again, it has to do with communication and it has to do with the
(49:14):
kind of relationship you have with people.
And it's a matter of constant, you know, nurturing.
It will not happen by itself.
It's a relationship like any other relationship. Sometimes in a relationship,
it's really hard to come and say, is everything okay?
(49:35):
Because yesterday during that meeting, you sounded a little...
Sometimes you just tell yourself, oh, I won't mention it. I don't feel comfortable bringing this up.
But if you don't do this, you will feel bad.
And there might actually be something in there that needs cleaning up.
(49:57):
So you need to find the strength to not go around it, but to actually tackle
it directly and bring it up in a polite way, of course.
And talk about it and talk about those areas that you might be afraid to talk
(50:19):
about just because this is something that will, in the long run,
build the relationship and build the trust.
And it's also, I think that for me, I think that all of us don't love difficult conversation.
Who does, right? Yeah. sociopaths
(50:42):
i know it really is it's a it's a natural it's
just it's born into us we don't want to deal with difficulty unless absolutely
necessary and even then we really don't want to deal with it we just do yeah
so i i there are still you know being conversations i procrastinate for as long as I can,
(51:05):
but I know that once I will find the strength to do it, I will feel better and
the other person will feel better that we talked about it.
So I will not say that I don't postpone and procrastinate.
I do, but I also tell myself, okay, this is something I have to do today. I have to do this today.
(51:31):
You have to, because sometimes it has context for something you're working on
or something that needs to get done.
So you have to talk about it. And I think that when talking about the board,
it's a little different because it's a different kind of relationship and different kind of system.
So the first part is definitely more related to co-founders and colleagues and friends.
(51:56):
But when talking about the board you
know at the end of the day they want the
company to succeed for sure right sometimes they
have a good advice sometimes they don't so
it's not that straightforward i
think this is something you need to navigate in a different way one of the the
(52:19):
things that I learned in the last few years is trying to think what is the interest
of the other person? What do they want?
What would make them feel successful or happy or accomplished or whatever?
And by understanding what they want, I can better navigate the situation and the
(52:42):
conversation when i understand their interests i
have a wider picture i understand
where they're coming from and once i
understand that i can i can manage
the conversation a little differently empathy is
a wonderful thing you know we overuse the the phrase
sometimes because people it became like a thing of like especially in development
(53:06):
you know ecosystems a couple years ago i seem to remember that empathy suddenly
became the number one word that I would see on all these people talking about
developer advocacy and what it was for.
And it unfortunately became like a catchphrase of what it is,
but it really is at its core, not about me like manipulating.
(53:31):
Like I said, the tough parts, I studied behavioral psychology and
management of experience and attention
and then everyone people always ask
me the first thing they ask me is like oh are you psychoanalyzing me now i'm
like well i will because he just asked me that but no
no like i i just naturally i want
to know what matters to you so that i can guide i can help you with that like
(53:53):
that's we we love feeling that connection because as you say the board it's
not magical They're not experts with perfect answers that will get you through.
We're not wizards. Right.
And it's just that they're a, a hero group that has been given a particular
(54:13):
responsibility and has a particular set of skills, usually in experiences that they,
And connections and many things like it's a very, the understanding of what
a board structure is, is very difficult for people to get early on.
And then you see it play over time.
Lord knows, after we saw Sam Altman and open AI is exciting weekend of craziness.
So you're like, Oh, God, a lot of people are like, so wait a second.
(54:38):
So I think he like, got fired, then he got hired by Microsoft along with half
of open AI, then they didn't. And then they weren't.
And yeah, I'm like, well, there was actually a, Sam was on the Lex Fridman podcast
earlier this week and really, really great unpacking of that experience.
(55:01):
And the one thing that he said, he learned very quickly that even the people
that were, you know, choosing to oust him, he understood the reason why they were doing it.
And it's very difficult to have that pragmatic view. And it's very difficult as a CEO.
You know, you have to make decisions about your peers as well.
(55:22):
You have to make hiring decisions and staffing decisions in general,
including retention and when people are not in the right role or it's not the
right time to be in that right role.
I mean, you have to put emotions aside.
So based on what you said, so Sam was probably able to put his emotions aside.
Side because knowing about this
(55:45):
coup or you know what was
just about to happen so these people really don't want me around they don't
like me and then you sticking around as the ceo and needing to work with them
must be so tough so you need to put your emotions aside if if you want to do well on your job.
(56:08):
And yeah, definitely, we need to make some decisions. We had to make some decisions
about employees that personally, I really liked.
But for whatever reason, we couldn't continue to be colleagues.
And that's always very painful.
It is, it is. Yeah. And, you know, even your time, and you know, as we wind up here,
(56:33):
Shira, I know the value of your time, a CEO's time a founder's time and and
i'm always amazed when i get to share your time because i know number one how
important it is to your company and also just what you genuinely give back to
me and to people i've had so many great comments from our discussion last time and it really,
it stands out because we have to have both you know the technical like what's
(56:58):
the problem that we need to solve but how do we do it the how we do it is like
it's like all those meme jokes you're like number one, you know, find products,
you know, find markets, dot, dot, dot profit, like, but no one tells you what
the dot, dot, dot part is. And.
For me, you know, my dream is that no matter what, when I look back,
(57:23):
I will know that the path that I took reflects the person that I am.
Because sometimes you can look at people and say, oh, they are so aggressive
or they run over other people.
And I knew what kind of company I wanted to build and I knew what kind of person I wanted to be.
(57:45):
And I might not be 100% successful at it, but I know that when I need to make
a decision, I always think about what kind of person do I want to be?
I want to be the person who makes this turn or the other turn.
And I try to make sure I stick with my principles of being a good human being.
(58:08):
I think that often entrepreneurs are crazy geniuses. and it has a price on their interpersonal skills.
Yeah. So I try to think about that a lot.
I think that very successful people that we know are sometimes not the best humans we know.
(58:31):
And I try to not lose one while trying to be the other.
Yeah, that's why they often say you never want to meet your heroes particularly
sports heroes are challenging because it's like part of what made you know i
i'm a cyclist right so i i sort of grew up at the landstrom strong era,
(58:53):
you know even knowing what potentially was actually happening that allowed him
to do this you i put it and said well it's equalizing the field because everybody
else is doing the thing but in the end having actually met him and having met
him twice once where i was like whoo yeah now And now I get why everyone hates you.
And then also then meeting again later and seeing humility, having said in,
(59:18):
ah, but not quite enough.
So he is, has had a brush with humility, but also is still, has to be,
there's a, there's a thing that's inside him that what some even say was broken.
Like he just, he has to compete.
It mean men, women, people everywhere are, are born with this thing.
(59:38):
That's why they're incredible at what they do.
But unfortunately, that often just means the sacrifice of other things,
including any level of empathy for other humans, where you're like,
you're my counterpart in a competition.
They have to treat it that way. And they have to be super pragmatic about it.
But sometimes they also, at the end, like they, you know, they get out of the
(01:00:00):
boxing ring and they hug each other and, and they have a press conference and
everybody's fine. Sometimes they ride home together, you know, who knows?
It's an interesting thing, but you are, you are a good human, Shira.
I can, you are an inspiration to me and to many others.
And, you know, there's no better way to describe what a founder should be than,
(01:00:22):
you know, you've described it. The tough part we always have is the people that
should write the books don't have the time to.
And I do hope that we all capture some of these lessons from what you shared with us today.
And so what's next? What's next for Salvo? I know we've got,
we sort of went down a fun path.
And thank you for always also being super great in my crazy meandering thoughts
(01:00:46):
that we walk through these together.
What's exciting? 2024 is going to be a wild year. We're still,
I call this the actual start because Q1 is just kind of like,
you know, no one's actually selling yet.
We are now in peak season. It's beginning.
So, you know, last year when OpenAI came to our lives, everyone was talking,
(01:01:08):
everyone still is talking about AI and products for AI security and so on and so forth.
But I think that the reason why we talk about AI so much is not because it's,
I mean, it is a hype, but at the end, if we ask ourselves, what did we really want to make out of this?
(01:01:30):
Naturally, you want to achieve or to do certain things faster,
preferably even automatically.
So, for us, what's next for 2024 is to try and leverage this kind of technology
into the strategy we already have.
I think that, you know, when we started the company, we didn't think about a Gartner category.
(01:01:54):
By the way, at the time, you didn't have a CSP. I don't think one existed. Yeah.
DSPM, SSPM. So, today, we have so many categories for cloud security.
But if I try to drill down and actually understand what kind of problem are you solving, then,
users still feel a lot of pain around their remediation. In the CSPM or CIM
(01:02:18):
or SSPM or ITDR or whatever, they still feel a lot of pain around remediation.
So I think that this year will be the year where we're really able to leverage
AI into auto-remediation and trust building with the user.
Today, when you go and write on ChatGPT, like whatever, write me a blog about
(01:02:42):
this, write me an abstract about that.
You don't just copy and paste it. You take it, you read it, you make some adjustments
and some tweaks, but it saves you a lot of time.
And my vision is for,
cybersecurity in general, not just Solvo, to be that source of relief for you
(01:03:04):
and for our users, to just know that when the time comes, and eventually it
will come because somebody is going to mess up.
You will just have the confidence that you can handle it because you have someone
or something to be there and give you an advice.
And then maybe you can reiterate, maybe you can make some changes,
(01:03:26):
but the baseline is there.
Well, it's going to be a big year and a well-earned one because of what you
and the team are doing. So thank you for doing all you do.
It's always a pleasure and for folks definitely
go check it out salvo.cloud is easy to find and you've got your fantastic follow
(01:03:47):
on linkedin as well i love all the energy that comes out of the company this
is true culture bound and culture strong company from the outside like it's very obvious to me that
you're building something that you cannot create it.
It occurs, but you've given it the opportunity to succeed and grow in a way.
(01:04:13):
So I'm very proud of you for what you've done. And you and David and the whole
team are always something to watch.
So I look forward to one day when we're all retired from this and we can write
these books we've long said we would.
We'll use ChatGPT to write them. There you go. That's it. That's it.
That's it. So, Shira, for folks that do want to connect with you,
what's the best way that they can do that?
(01:04:35):
LinkedIn, Twitter. I'm available on both platforms.
Perfect. Well, thank you very much. Always a pleasure. And definitely, folks, check out.
Solvo is both a company and a platform technology to watch.
I'm excited by what's ahead.
Thank you so much for having me and looking forward to next time.
Yes. Again, again, I'm looking forward to 2024 review and let's see how it all worked. Okay.
(01:05:02):
Music.
Hi everyone, I'm Shira, I'm the CEO and co-founder of Solvo,
and you're listening to the Disco Posse Podcast.
Music.
(00:21):
You're listening to the Disco Posse Podcast.
Perfect. And a return, friends.
This is so great, Shira, to see you because we've had a lot of time that I didn't
realize how much time has passed since you were on the podcast last time.
(00:42):
And that was a new introduction.
It's even funny thinking of, like, I forget how we all meet sometimes times
because there's just been, you know,
the podcast began with a lot of ideas of, you know, sort of finding my network
and then my second layer network.
And then I began getting inbound from people with like PR agencies that were
(01:06):
helping to raise and amplify some of their brands.
And I think that may have actually been what originally triggered us was probably
through a friend might've been Amber or Georgiana.
Or it was Georgiana yeah yeah and you
know we've got such an amazing crowd of
folks that we share as as friends and colleagues and
(01:28):
and you really stood out to me
as having such a fantastic approach to the humanness with which you build your
team and your company and your platform and then seeing you I've seen what looks
like fantastic success and definitely you know really really,
really great moves that are going on with Salvo since then.
(01:49):
So anyways, I could talk all about you for 75 minutes and be happy because I
continue to be impressed every day with what you and the team are doing.
Well, thank you so much. And I'm so happy to be back here.
And I'm grateful for this opportunity to be able to do a part two and talk about
what has changed and what happened.
(02:10):
I think that every entrepreneur is going through some kind of roller coaster.
It's a cliche, But it's really true.
This is why it's a cliche and it might be, for some people, it might be useful
and helpful to hear about the
different turns and loops that we need to experience as part of this ride.
(02:33):
So I'm happy for this opportunity to share with the audience what we've been doing so far.
Yeah. So let's, for the folks that are brand new, I'll of course tell them they
should go back and listen to the first episode where we talked.
But let's give a recap, Shira, on your story, your background, and the Solvo story.
And then we get to play, you know, what's changed, you know,
(02:57):
and especially we talked about the idea of selling security to developers.
Selling anything to developers is a very distinct challenge.
But then introducing security, there's so much we could learn about that you've
seen play out in real life.
So I'm looking forward to those lessons. But let's start with the beginning of your story.
(03:19):
Sure. So as a really quick recap for those of you who caught up with the previous episode.
So I started Solvo four years ago with my co-founder, David.
Both of us worked for another cloud security company that got acquired by a larger corporate.
And that was our cue to go ahead and start our own business.
(03:45):
Initially, we did not think about doing a cloud security company because we
thought, and this is back in 2019, early 2020, cloud security is not a problem anymore.
I mean, you have plenty of very good products out there. Let's find the next big problem.
But since we went and talked to different smart people and asked them,
(04:07):
what do they recognize as the next problem? And all of them said, no, no, you got it wrong.
Cloud security is only getting started as a problem.
We realized there is still a lot of room for us to innovate.
And we had this idea of
helping the people who are involved with cloud security to quickly and ideally
(04:33):
automatically remediate some of the most popular and commonly done mistakes
takes when configuring cloud infrastructure.
And again, back when we started, we thought that we have matured enough as organizations
(04:53):
that are building cloud applications that we can actually talk directly to the developers.
Because nowadays, developers and engineering organizations and security organizations
are no longer separated silos.
We have CICD processes, we have automation processes, and we have a lot of security
(05:19):
processes that are being done together.
Security is now part of the design process.
Security, of course, is a part of the code review. So we have security integrated
in many parts of the development lifecycle.
So we just assumed that it will be a great idea to put cloud security as part
(05:43):
of the CICD lifecycle and preferably earlier in the process.
So we will kind of skip over the security organization,
talk directly to developers and tell them, hey, while you're writing this awesome
application, how about if you deliver it with a secure infrastructure? structure.
(06:04):
So that was our idea.
What we do is detect misconfigurations that could come from identity,
infrastructure misconfiguration, network exposure,
these kind of things, and suggest a fix that comes in a CLI command,
(06:26):
Terraform, or other infrastructure as code templates,
or JSON files to make it as easy as possible for the developer to just click
the command and enforce the fix that Solvo has to offer.
So we thought, everyone is going to adopt it. Who wouldn't want to deliver a much better product?
(06:50):
It's a no-brainer. Of course.
But... We forget that humans don't have brains.
Or they don't think with them. We don't have brains, but most people are just
so busy delivering their tasks or closing the tickets.
(07:11):
And if security was not a very specific task as part of what they're doing,
even though it's really romantic to think this way, they're not going to do security.
And it was an important lesson,
It was a lesson that took us time. And in a startup life, time is money. Right.
(07:39):
That I know very, very well. Yeah, yeah.
So that was an important lesson. But you always need to look at the bright side.
And the bright side about it is that we built a product that was very,
very, very easy to implement.
Because to begin with we
(08:00):
knew that developers are going to hate an onboarding
process that is not super light and
friendly and automated so so we built the product to support their their very
high standards and needs and that still serves us very well today because today
(08:23):
day when I have a meeting with the security team,
because now we stop talking first with developers and we don't expect them to be our champions.
We go and talk to the security organization and we can talk about that as well.
But now when I do a demo meeting and I tell them, listen, the onboarding process
probably takes five minutes if you're drinking coffee while doing it. Do you want to do it now?
(08:47):
Usually if we were able to impress them during the demo, they will do it immediately.
And it's very satisfying to see results coming up so quickly.
Yeah. Well, then the interesting thing about that is I use it strange analogy,
but this is the vacuum salesman methodology that when I was a young lad and
(09:10):
I grew up is that like, I can't sell you a vacuum from a distance.
They're like, no, I will come to your house. We'll clean one of your rooms and
like so there's the salesperson in their sock feet vacuuming your house for you.
And by doing that you're you've actually invested in the experience more than
(09:33):
you would have prior to and so you're you're actually experientially involved
in it which is different than conceptually involved if you say yeah conceptually
this is great but then we got to get a ticket we
to implement we got to do whatever it's friction and any
amount of friction can delay that so the fact that they can now see it and i
would even tell people in my i was teach i teach people how to do technology
(09:56):
demos and i say don't say this is our environment you know this is our platform
this is our ui you say okay let's here's your application environment.
Like put in the context of your your this is your cloud your thing and yes and they really do invest,
in wanting to see it in their context because
(10:17):
that's a context that they will think of when
that meeting stops because when that meeting stops your language your nuance
our market created phrases that we've generated they're great for gartner but
they're not great for that person that's going to as you say have different
priorities when they leave that meeting and And unless security was a priority for that next fix,
(10:39):
it may not make it into their thought cycle even after lunch,
which is sad. This is true.
And you probably have a lot more to say about this.
But one of the important things I learned, you know, I was not,
I was never a salesperson.
I never, selling was never my day job.
(11:00):
And all of a sudden as a ceo i
had to be the company's first salesperson and initially i thought well you know
the product speaks for itself you see how amazing it is you see the potential
right i mean it's a no-brainer and over time i learned that even though i think that.
(11:22):
Most people don't think it it's like a baby you think that yours is amazing,
the most beautiful baby in the world
and not everyone thinks
that they might not say they they might say oh what a beautiful baby and yeah
they're just waiting for the meeting to be over so i i had to learn how to sell
(11:46):
and how to run a selling meeting and how to make people feel,
that they want a next meeting.
They're curious about the next meeting.
They're curious to see their environment in the Solver platform.
And these were all very important lessons. And while learning these lessons,
(12:10):
naturally, I had to take some meetings and then not succeed in them.
And naturally, if I had the opportunity to re-engage with these organizations,
I'm sure that today the meeting would have went a little differently.
Yeah, there's, that's a very interesting thing. Like, and even look,
I've honestly struggled with this myself.
(12:32):
Like I never, I even use it in my tagline of life.
Every time I would be, you know, when I started that my previous company,
I came as a tech evangelist.
One of the advantages of having me in a customer call is that I can literally
come in and say, hey, I'm not in sales.
I used to be on the other side of the desk with you. I understand your experience.
(12:54):
And this is what makes me excited about what we can do based on the problem that I see you have.
And then they see your investment in that love of the problem.
And then it's fantastic. But because I had the credibility of lived experience,
that was sort of my carryover. But I was, so I would say, I don't sell things.
I don't even stand next to people while they sell things. I'm just here to show
(13:17):
you what I'm excited about and how I've used it.
And then hopefully you can find value in that.
Of course, in the back of my mind, knowing 100%, I'm in sales,
like everybody is in sales. The only difference is I'm not quota carrying.
And I even was so self-determinant that I said,
I would, I can never take a job where where I would rely on commissions because
(13:38):
I don't believe that I have the skillset or the, the flow of thinking to be
a really good account executive level salesperson.
I can excite somebody about technology, but then once that meeting's done,
I'm like, who's next? Yeah.
I need, there's no me thinking like, okay, one hour later, I'll send the followup.
(13:59):
And then two days later, I'll have a second followup. And then remember where
their kids go to school. Like I remember these things just cause conversationally,
I love hearing about people and I get excited about that.
So I was using some of the same techniques, but not in the true way of thinking
it as a program, as a flow of work.
And then all of a sudden, yeah, I have to do it. Like I have no choice,
(14:22):
but you have to go as a founder seller.
And then at that point, you know, because your message has to then translate
to the rest of your sales team.
And it has to be consistent with as the CEO, especially like you have.
But it's a very humbling experience. It is. It is wild.
And yeah, I've always had a massive respect for people in sales.
(14:47):
Because of how well they have to manage a relationship.
And we've all seen salespeople do things that it's like, hey,
yeah, they're moving a deal across the line, but not necessarily invested in
the long-term outcome of that deal.
But real true good relationship sellers, I've always just been a huge admiration
(15:09):
of how well they know how to keep people attuned,
revisit the clients, check on other things. So I've, anyway, so many techniques.
One, I think we need about 10 podcasts on just so we can share lessons for founders.
I think that selling is a skill like many other skills, like being a surgeon, okay?
(15:31):
Once you do the same surgery over and over and over and over again,
you can do it very, very easily in a shorter period of time,
get very, very, very good results.
So being a good salesperson is also, you know, after you've looked at other
people do it and then did it yourself and then messed it up a few times,
(15:52):
but at some point it's, it becomes like a second nature. Yeah.
But like everything else, you need to do it repeatedly and also hopefully have
some good mentors to help you with that.
Absolutely. Yeah. And I think I remember from Grey's Anatomy,
of all places I learned this, was the idea of they use it in medical practice,
(16:16):
but in universities for everything, is see, say, do, teach.
And it's like, so you watch somebody do something and then you describe how
it occurred. heard, so they can say, okay, based on how you're describing it, I agree.
It's almost like sort of a Socratic therapeutic sort of discussion.
And then do, so you actually perform the function, and then you have to teach
(16:39):
it back to the next person.
And by then having to teach it, you think very differently about how you approached it.
And as you said, having a mentor as well is incredible because you can continue to have check-ins.
And I've been lucky, I've got a great friend jr he has
a company called shift group actually and they they do sales training
(16:59):
for for athletes for like high performance athletes and he turns them into amazing
technology sales professionals and and he's been a great friend i've worked
with him in the past and is very helpful because even my partner she tells me
all the time she's like you're surrounded by nerds so.
But it's very easy to get excited about that she says but then you get you get
(17:21):
worried about sales She says, you need to surround yourself with salespeople.
And I was like, huh, I never thought about that.
So I did make a point of spending more time in kind of a mentor and in groups
that just being surrounded by it and hearing the language, you really do adapt very, very well.
Yeah. And if you were able to build this kind of relationship with them where
(17:45):
they actually share with you how they run a meeting.
Right. What kind of questions they ask.
Whenever I joined a meeting with, when I'm not the buyer, but I joined professional
salesperson, I always try to listen to the questions they ask and when they ask them.
(18:08):
One of the questions I never thought of, but I learned to ask after a demo meeting,
was what surprised you the most about our products?
Because then that person has to stop and think.
And usually they will not say a negative thing about your product.
(18:28):
So this kind of draws them into saying something good about your product.
And then we can finish up the meeting with a very positive thought and feeling.
And feelings are such a crucial part of the sales process.
Yeah. People always ask me and said, how do you learn how to deal with technology?
(18:51):
And I said, what's the book you recommend the most for understanding technology?
And I say DSM-5, like being able to understand how humans work.
So I literally use behavioral psychology and Hahnemann and Tversky,
like thinking fast and slow and learning the heuristics of behavior.
And this is a lot of it. And also a great friend of mine, a great mentor as
(19:13):
well, I worked with in the past, he would ask, especially when there's a,
there's always a competitive product, right?
And so someone would bring up something and he's like, there's the easiest way
to do this is you're not there to shut down a competitor. You're there to find out about a competitor.
And so he would ask the simplest question says, what do you love about their product?
(19:35):
And of course they come up with like the easiest thing in the world.
They're like, oh, I think this is amazing.
I really like this. It's integrated with what I do because it's closer to the
UI that I spend a lot of time with.
It's like, okay, that makes sense. And then you say nothing.
And you pause and you why and there's silence and they said one thing that i
wish it did have though is that and almost invariably because they feel a reciprocal
(19:58):
like boundary like they've,
they've talked up somebody else in front of you and they immediately then naturally
start to say like they want to even the the playing field it's a human behavior
thing it's very interesting and so almost always they would highlight something
that they're missing from it and then at that point you You can say, okay, that's great.
(20:19):
And you've never been adversarial in competitive discussion.
You just let them do the pitch.
Yeah, and that's what it is. So sometimes it's nice when someone says,
you know, like what my other favorite I've learned is what would you consider
success as a result of us showing you our platform?
We go through this meeting, what would you mark as a success at the end of this
(20:43):
meeting? And again, always knowing that you're working towards this thing where
they say, we want to see how it works, how it works with X.
And they likely will share a lot more with you.
Versus you saying, you know, what infrastructure to run? How many clouds do
you run? How many people do you have? How much do you spend on this?
And they're like, These are very dry question. Exactly.
(21:06):
So and like you said, it's I've learned by I haven't, as I'm always like messing
around with cars, I've got a friend's a card magician.
And so I got I said, like, when you do little things that look amazing to people,
is because I've done it about 15,000 times.
And that's what But sales is just the idea that the simplest thing in the world
that looks smooth and natural to me, if I did that three years ago, it wouldn't.
(21:31):
But now I literally can't not do it smoothly.
I have no choice. My muscle memory is built so deeply into me that I can't not do it.
And that's like exposing yourself to a peer group that has that muscle memory.
It's sometimes hard for them to teach, speech but if
you can at least as you say shira like listen
(21:53):
to what they ask find out when it is and
you watch the patterns occur and all
of a sudden you're like oh okay i'm gonna try that yes exactly and sometimes
it works now here's the the the pivot i guess is what we would say is and a
pivot of your ideal customer profile is one of the most challenging things to experience
(22:17):
and also to humbly admit you have to go through because quite often people say,
well, then that, that audience was stupid because they didn't get it.
But it's more like, oh no, no, no, no.
They don't necessarily have the capability to do what we expect them to do to
make our platform successful.
(22:38):
And it's very hard for us to back away from that and see it in that light.
Naturally, you know, it's a conclusion that took us a little time to get to.
But once we realized it, we also started thinking or asking ourselves questions.
What does it mean about the product that we built? Does that mean we need to
(23:01):
throw it all away and start over again?
Or let's ask it differently. What do the security teams need that we can deliver to them?
And can we use the technology that we built to deliver that?
So once we realized that these questions need some answers, we went back to the drawing board.
(23:27):
And started thinking about it. And luckily enough, the technology that we built
was still useful for the security teams, security managers.
They still want to get things done.
So the approach of auto-remediation of different security issues was still right.
(23:50):
But these people are not the ones who would use the CLI to fix issues.
Now they need something else so
even though the core of detection and a
remediation code is still there and
they still want to use it now we need to wrap
it in a very very very pretty ui
(24:12):
so then we started thinking okay
what kind of information do we need
to present what would be the best way to
present it and we it's
really tough because in your dreams you want
like amazing dashboards and bi
capabilities and it's it's
(24:34):
going to have such a smooth experience and you dream about all of these things
and all the products you never had but these things take a lot of time so the
back end exists right because they were It was very challenging problems.
So the back end is there and it's working. And now we need to make the front
(24:58):
end reflect all the amazing things we have on the back end.
And we had to prioritize where to start.
We realized that we are addressing like mid-level management,
not necessarily the CISO and the CIO, but the people who need to report to them,
(25:19):
but also to work with the engineers.
So while reporting and dashboards are important, you still need to make sure
that you're well integrated with actionable insights.
So this is something we never stopped, you know, preaching. It has to be actionable.
(25:41):
So what if I show you a trend of something?
What can you do with it? Is it helpful?
Is it going to be helpful next time you meet with your CISO or next time you
meet with a DevSecOps engineer?
So being useful and handy for the security engineers was very important.
(26:05):
Us and and that kind of
led us towards building not
a different kind of product but definitely a different way of reflecting what
we know so building different graphs where
you can see the components of the infrastructure and the identity and the network
(26:25):
components but also adding a layer which is going to show you the application
behavior because very often the security teams It's not that they don't know
what the application does,
but they don't know, why did this container approach the PII bucket?
Hmm, I don't know. Now you have the visibility to see who approached it.
(26:48):
Did they need to do that? What action did they run?
So now you can answer different questions by yourself, but also come a little
smarter to the meeting with the engineers.
And instead of having a conversation where you from the security are asking
them questions and they're very angry that you are undermining their authority,
(27:12):
you can actually have an intelligent conversation because you look at that graph
together, you scratch your heads together, and then you also have a suggested remediation.
So instead of blaming each other and trying to make the other person take responsibility
and fix the issue, just say, hey, hey, here is the CLI command.
(27:34):
Let's run it and fix the issue.
So we were actually able to reduce friction between different teams.
Absolutely, yeah. And when you do that, you also reduce the time it takes you
to remediate issues because you don't have the fear of going to the other team
(27:54):
and talking to them because they might kick you out of the room.
Yeah, it's less blame-oriented and much more results and secure-oriented.
We all have this common goal, but there's no...
It's very hard to go to a developer and say, you did something wrong,
and it doesn't meet with our practice requirements.
(28:16):
And it creates this adversarial lane between people, which is tough.
And so, yeah, I love your approach.
Thank you. So visibility was one component.
And then we added another capability of compliance monitoring.
Touring so now the the
(28:40):
the first user might not be an
infrastructure security engineer this might be a grc practitioner or engineer
but the person who needs to actually do the remediation is still from the engineering
team because maybe based on on the framework you need to be compliant for Or
you need to encrypt some resources.
(29:03):
The GRC engineer can't do it themselves. They need someone else to do it for them.
I have to say that initially, I did not really believe in this feature.
I thought that it's a really small niche.
And there are other very big and successful companies that are doing compliance
for different mediums like the
(29:26):
cloud and on-prem and endpoint and everything. So why should we do this?
But this is one of our best-selling features.
People love it when they can come, check the boxes, and just wait.
And you will tell me how well my infrastructure is configured.
(29:46):
And if I did something wrong, you will also tell me how to fix it.
So now it's really easy to
to enjoy the fruit of of your
work without you know having to talk to
other people or having them blame you for something or you
know just doing it before the audit because who has the time and the bandwidth
(30:09):
to do it guilty as charged i'm fairly sure i've been i've been peeling through
infrastructure about an hour before my auditor was arriving I still got PTSD from it.
So you know everyone has to do it we don't like doing it it feels like an obligation because it is,
(30:33):
And I was so surprised and happy to see the results that, you know,
the core product that we built was so flexible that today it's not only used
for compliance purposes,
but it is used for different monitoring and detection capabilities.
So that enabled us to go beyond just compliance monitoring and actually offer
(31:01):
the CDR capability, the detection and response capability. Wow. Yeah.
I mean, we're monitoring the environment anyway.
We just used to call it compliance, but we can also detect security issues.
In the cloud, even though compliance and security are different practices,
(31:22):
very often compliance finding or issue could drive a security issue.
So if you were supposed to encrypt and didn't encrypt and somebody was able
to read the data out of your database and you have a security issue right now.
(31:44):
And we're able to see the big picture, find where you have a problem and suggest
how to remediate and eliminate it in a very easy way.
So we can close the loop for both security and compliance engineers using this
approach of let's observe the environment, let's observe the application behavior,
(32:06):
find the misconfigurations as we understand them from best practices,
but also as we understand them from the behavior of the application itself.
So this kind of brings together different worlds, the application,
the infrastructure, the compliance, the security, but they all meet in the cloud.
(32:26):
Well, the interesting thing too is that security and compliance are like diet
and exercise in that they work best together and can be individually right,
but not correct for each other.
So you can be compliant and not secure. And you can be secure and not compliant.
Like it's rare, that it seems like sort of edge case to do so.
(32:47):
But it's very easy to be highly secure, but not compliant.
Like you look at PCI DSS, you look at SOC two and ISO 27,001.
And all these different ones.
There's interesting regulatory bits that are buried in there that are not necessarily
security, as you you would call it, but yet they are as a pairing of security and compliance.
(33:14):
And the idea that you can move beyond just observability to actionability is
the fundamental game changer to me.
Like I, I, I never like, I hate the word game changer.
I don't even know why I say it, but like that's, that is the differentiator
because just telling you you've got a problem, it's like, Hey yeah,
you're out on the CVE good luck.
(33:35):
Like that's that's not valid. Yeah, let me know how it goes.
But now you can actually bring them an actionable framework.
That's that's also just the fact that I got to say the low lift of getting your
platform stood up is fantastic.
Because anything that usually is involved in development life cycle invariably
(33:57):
means it has to take over the pipeline.
And that's probably one of the reasons why so many platforms lose,
the ability to get adoption is because you
have to move it to a different place and
the moment it feels unnatural then it
(34:17):
will move away from stuff i even like just
getting people to move from mysql to postgres i to
this day i know people that it's like why do you use
mysql for no other reason than i've just i know
the commands well i'm used to it and
so we are creatures of habit and
(34:37):
when you build bespoke cicd pipelines which is what 90 of them are because there's
no out of the box it just works you know cicd framework for you to be able to
jump in there without saying hey yeah i know you need to move away from this.
You need to move to our custom SVN or some crazy thing that it's just,
(35:00):
it's a bridge too far for most people.
So it's a, so kudos that the reason why you've been able to adapt so well to
market conditions is because you built the company and the platform on a foundation
that was flexible, built from the right first principles.
So then we changed the artifacts that it deals with maybe, including the ICP,
(35:22):
but the foundation, its core was sound.
And also like most people, when they get to the pivot or a pivot, it's really difficult.
So it feels like, I know we look, it's going to seem very concise to go in hindsight
bias and say like, you did really, really well.
I know it's been a struggle and will continue to be one for a while,
(35:46):
but you've earned your opportunity to stay in the market so strong because of
the way you built it from the beginning.
Also, you know, as an entrepreneur, very often you fall in love with your product.
And it's really hard to just admit that something is not working.
It's much easier to think, you know, that CISO I was talking to,
(36:10):
he doesn't understand anything.
Thing that developer he's you know he doesn't know what school they're probably
mainframe people that they just don't know what's new you blame them because your product is great.
And and it might be great but it doesn't matter if the buyers don't want to
buy it doesn't matter what you're trying to sell to them this could be a money
(36:33):
machine but if they don't want to buy it
doesn't matter you build the product for people
who will buy the product so if
the market is telling you we're not interested in buying this you know you can
say that the first person doesn't know a thing and the second one and the third
one but at some point you need to start listening to what they're telling you
(36:57):
and not just dismiss them yeah it's not it's not easy
because you are in love with your product and
your team did a tremendous job so
now going back and telling them listen guys we were wrong it's not easy you
don't have to frame it this way but this is the essence of what you're saying
(37:21):
our thesis was not right and we need to make changes changes,
if you're mature enough and your team is mature enough,
they will not be disappointed.
They will know that their leadership is trustworthy and is able and capable of making,
hard decisions, hopefully when it's not too late and there is still time to
(37:48):
adapt and change and fix this.
One of the things that I think people are always curious about is how do you think strategically.
About this change while you have likely had found success in market?
So then you have to actually tell existing customers and existing early development
(38:14):
partners that, hey, we're switching things up a bit.
You know, we're going to where we see, we know where the problem is.
The problem moved us a little over here.
How do you carry the people that did love the story and love the platform because,
(38:35):
you know, you loved the problem?
How do you bring them through and not have a confidence shake for those folks?
So I think it really depends on how far the old product is from the new product.
For us, as I said before, the core technology remained the same.
So if people really wanted to stick with the old version of what we did,
(38:58):
they could have sticked with it.
They were very excited about having UI and having additional capabilities.
It wasn't instead, it was an addition. But I think that sometimes companies,
when they pivot, they do it like big time.
They pivot from crypto to security or from a web, a 3.0 to, I don't know, LLM security.
(39:23):
So I think that it really depends on how big the pivot is.
I also think that usually at this point, you have like a couple of design partners
and And they know that they are design partners and the design might change.
So it's a part of the game.
(39:45):
And as long as you communicate it in a good way, I think it should be fine.
This will not mess up your relationship with them. This is the truth.
Communication definitely is what's needed because as soon as it,
when things happen in the dark and then it's a surprise,
(40:05):
especially when, you know, as you go on further on to like people begin to adopt
for a particular thing that was unique and specific.
And then the last thing you want to have is where you sort of shake that,
that feature out or, or, or hide it behind something else.
And then that being said, that particular champion may not have been the champion
(40:25):
for what is next for the, the company.
And, and, and there actually, there are times where we outgrow our first customers.
It's an interesting experience where, you know, at some point you say,
huh, you know, that thing that we were really good at is actually not the real
full value of the platform.
(40:47):
And it's an interesting, humbling process to go through as well of like what
did work well, but also what is not necessarily scalable for the overall company.
Yep, that's true. True. And you just need to be brave to make those decisions
and to be candid with yourself.
This is true. Now, you've also founded a company in what could be the most tumultuous
(41:13):
years in existence since the 20s or the 70s.
Well, we've been through a lot of ways of interesting thing.
And, you know, just there's so much going on.
How did you weather all of that, Shira? Because it's not just business and technology,
(41:34):
but you're surviving world events. Yes.
I don't know if this is normal or not. I mean, I have a very short, you know, perspective.
I have not been an entrepreneur for such a long time. I have not been in the
security market for such a long time.
(41:56):
So I don't have 20, 30 years perspective about the market.
So I don't know if objectively these are the hardest years in modern history,
or is this just the regular entrepreneurial experience?
But no doubt the last four years were full of black swans all over the place. For me.
(42:24):
I couldn't imagine this.
I'm not sure everyone experiences such big events, so many of them in the life of one startup.
But, you know, once you start, it is what it is.
And you have no other choice but keep on swimming.
(42:46):
You have no other choice.
And once you realize that and you accept that, and it's easier to to handle
it i mean i have some days when i'm like oh my god i can't believe,
i need to face this right now but i never let myself drown i know i have to
(43:10):
keep on swimming so everyone needs to find what is the thing that gives them
the power to keep on swimming I mean,
it could be talking to a therapist or to a friend or to a mentor or to someone
you trust and gives you the energy,
not people who drain you and say, yeah, you know what?
(43:32):
It's a really shitty situation. It's terrible.
This is not energizing anyone. You need to talk to someone who will tell you,
yeah, it's bad, but here are a couple of things you can do about it.
Or you know what? I believe in you and I think you can do this.
Or, you know what, I can introduce you to someone who can probably help out.
(43:56):
So especially as an entrepreneur, you need to surround yourself with people
who give you that kind of energy and not people who drain you.
Because if you do, you're going to drown.
And then also find the things that are not work and that will give you this kind of energy.
(44:16):
And I think kind of related to something you said before, at least for me,
what kept my sanity this whole time is making sure I have a sports routine.
It happened. I will not say it did not happen.
That in like really depressing or upsetting times, I stopped the routine like I didn't do sports.
(44:42):
But I knew that once I just make myself get back to the routine, I will feel better.
I knew that this is what I had to do. Even if I don't want to do it right now,
I will be grateful for myself for doing it.
And again, you need to, to grab the last, you know, drops of energy in your
(45:09):
body and just go and do it. once you do and once you're able to stick to that routine.
Another day and a couple of days and a week, two weeks, you will,
you will start feeling better and you will start feeling like you have control
of your life and of the situation.
We can't control everything that happens to us, but we can control our feelings
(45:35):
and we can control how we're going to react.
So the sooner you realize that, you know, I can't tell what other Other people
are going to tell me or what they're going to do that has to do with me.
But I can decide, you know, what meetings am I going to take today or what projects
am I going to do this week?
(45:56):
And I focus on the ones that will promote me and my company and my objectives.
And this is where I put my focus.
Then this is when you will start seeing results. Yeah.
It's really interesting because there's never no work to be done.
(46:16):
That's the thing I've learned.
When I was working in a startup, there was always work to do,
but there was also a relative logical end to the day.
As a founder there is
only the ends that i choose to assign it
is in itself imposed i could
(46:39):
think and work day and night there's no
lack of stuff to be done but there
is you know it begins to have
diminishing returns at the length but then
some days i i'll be on a coding tear
or on something and i'll do a real long run and i'll end up like working till
(46:59):
like two in the morning and i'll feel energized but then to your to your point
i i stopped going to the gym because like i have too much stuff to do and like
four or five six seven days and all of a sudden i realized like,
i don't feel good you know and and i know this stuff needs to get done but i'm
(47:19):
not doing it well And I could just, I could feel myself not performing as I expect.
And so I said, okay, no, stop, put on the shoes, head to the gym.
And even though I'm just like kind of dragging my way, as soon as you start,
you're like, okay, I remember why I'm here.
And then you, no one ever finishes a workout and says, I wish I didn't do that. Yes.
(47:43):
That's the one thing I've always found. This is the adrenaline in your blood.
You feel very happy you did it.
It's a tough thing for folks. Now, this is the interesting thing too,
because we're also not alone in our founding journey.
You're a co-founder, you have a management team, you've got a staff,
(48:04):
you've got a lot of, you've got investors, a board.
There are many people that have to follow through this change with you.
They're your cheerleaders, but they're also in a weird way as the CEO.
Sounds, people always forget this, that they're your boss.
Because at some point, when we look at large corporations, the board eventually
(48:26):
will have the power to sometimes manage through who sits in the CEO role.
Not that you're going to get, you know, taken out of that opportunity,
but there is a weird hierarchy that develops.
But the board, especially this early on is meant to help to give guidance and
and advisory to you and provide growth help to get you to this next phase and through these ones.
(48:49):
So how do you manage, not just yourself, but when you look at your peer group,
can you spot like, hey, David, you sound different in meetings lately, everything okay.
Like it's sometimes hard for us to even pause and ask others,
you know, what they need help with.
I think that, again, it has to do with communication and it has to do with the
(49:14):
kind of relationship you have with people.
And it's a matter of constant, you know, nurturing.
It will not happen by itself.
It's a relationship like any other relationship. Sometimes in a relationship,
it's really hard to come and say, is everything okay?
(49:35):
Because yesterday during that meeting, you sounded a little...
Sometimes you just tell yourself, oh, I won't mention it. I don't feel comfortable bringing this up.
But if you don't do this, you will feel bad.
And there might actually be something in there that needs cleaning up.
(49:57):
So you need to find the strength to not go around it, but to actually tackle
it directly and bring it up in a polite way, of course.
And talk about it and talk about those areas that you might be afraid to talk
(50:19):
about just because this is something that will, in the long run,
build the relationship and build the trust.
And it's also, I think that for me, I think that all of us don't love difficult conversation.
Who does, right? Yeah. sociopaths
(50:42):
i know it really is it's a it's a natural it's
just it's born into us we don't want to deal with difficulty unless absolutely
necessary and even then we really don't want to deal with it we just do yeah
so i i there are still you know being conversations i procrastinate for as long as I can,
(51:05):
but I know that once I will find the strength to do it, I will feel better and
the other person will feel better that we talked about it.
So I will not say that I don't postpone and procrastinate.
I do, but I also tell myself, okay, this is something I have to do today. I have to do this today.
(51:31):
You have to, because sometimes it has context for something you're working on
or something that needs to get done.
So you have to talk about it. And I think that when talking about the board,
it's a little different because it's a different kind of relationship and different kind of system.
So the first part is definitely more related to co-founders and colleagues and friends.
(51:56):
But when talking about the board you
know at the end of the day they want the
company to succeed for sure right sometimes they
have a good advice sometimes they don't so
it's not that straightforward i
think this is something you need to navigate in a different way one of the the
(52:19):
things that I learned in the last few years is trying to think what is the interest
of the other person? What do they want?
What would make them feel successful or happy or accomplished or whatever?
And by understanding what they want, I can better navigate the situation and the
(52:42):
conversation when i understand their interests i
have a wider picture i understand
where they're coming from and once i
understand that i can i can manage
the conversation a little differently empathy is
a wonderful thing you know we overuse the the phrase
sometimes because people it became like a thing of like especially in development
(53:06):
you know ecosystems a couple years ago i seem to remember that empathy suddenly
became the number one word that I would see on all these people talking about
developer advocacy and what it was for.
And it unfortunately became like a catchphrase of what it is,
but it really is at its core, not about me like manipulating.
(53:31):
Like I said, the tough parts, I studied behavioral psychology and
management of experience and attention
and then everyone people always ask
me the first thing they ask me is like oh are you psychoanalyzing me now i'm
like well i will because he just asked me that but no
no like i i just naturally i want
to know what matters to you so that i can guide i can help you with that like
(53:53):
that's we we love feeling that connection because as you say the board it's
not magical They're not experts with perfect answers that will get you through.
We're not wizards. Right.
And it's just that they're a, a hero group that has been given a particular
(54:13):
responsibility and has a particular set of skills, usually in experiences that they,
And connections and many things like it's a very, the understanding of what
a board structure is, is very difficult for people to get early on.
And then you see it play over time.
Lord knows, after we saw Sam Altman and open AI is exciting weekend of craziness.
So you're like, Oh, God, a lot of people are like, so wait a second.
(54:38):
So I think he like, got fired, then he got hired by Microsoft along with half
of open AI, then they didn't. And then they weren't.
And yeah, I'm like, well, there was actually a, Sam was on the Lex Fridman podcast
earlier this week and really, really great unpacking of that experience.
(55:01):
And the one thing that he said, he learned very quickly that even the people
that were, you know, choosing to oust him, he understood the reason why they were doing it.
And it's very difficult to have that pragmatic view. And it's very difficult as a CEO.
You know, you have to make decisions about your peers as well.
(55:22):
You have to make hiring decisions and staffing decisions in general,
including retention and when people are not in the right role or it's not the
right time to be in that right role.
I mean, you have to put emotions aside.
So based on what you said, so Sam was probably able to put his emotions aside.
Side because knowing about this
(55:45):
coup or you know what was
just about to happen so these people really don't want me around they don't
like me and then you sticking around as the ceo and needing to work with them
must be so tough so you need to put your emotions aside if if you want to do well on your job.
(56:08):
And yeah, definitely, we need to make some decisions. We had to make some decisions
about employees that personally, I really liked.
But for whatever reason, we couldn't continue to be colleagues.
And that's always very painful.
It is, it is. Yeah. And, you know, even your time, and you know, as we wind up here,
(56:33):
Shira, I know the value of your time, a CEO's time a founder's time and and
i'm always amazed when i get to share your time because i know number one how
important it is to your company and also just what you genuinely give back to
me and to people i've had so many great comments from our discussion last time and it really,
it stands out because we have to have both you know the technical like what's
(56:58):
the problem that we need to solve but how do we do it the how we do it is like
it's like all those meme jokes you're like number one, you know, find products,
you know, find markets, dot, dot, dot profit, like, but no one tells you what
the dot, dot, dot part is. And.
For me, you know, my dream is that no matter what, when I look back,
(57:23):
I will know that the path that I took reflects the person that I am.
Because sometimes you can look at people and say, oh, they are so aggressive
or they run over other people.
And I knew what kind of company I wanted to build and I knew what kind of person I wanted to be.
(57:45):
And I might not be 100% successful at it, but I know that when I need to make
a decision, I always think about what kind of person do I want to be?
I want to be the person who makes this turn or the other turn.
And I try to make sure I stick with my principles of being a good human being.
(58:08):
I think that often entrepreneurs are crazy geniuses. and it has a price on their interpersonal skills.
Yeah. So I try to think about that a lot.
I think that very successful people that we know are sometimes not the best humans we know.
(58:31):
And I try to not lose one while trying to be the other.
Yeah, that's why they often say you never want to meet your heroes particularly
sports heroes are challenging because it's like part of what made you know i
i'm a cyclist right so i i sort of grew up at the landstrom strong era,
(58:53):
you know even knowing what potentially was actually happening that allowed him
to do this you i put it and said well it's equalizing the field because everybody
else is doing the thing but in the end having actually met him and having met
him twice once where i was like whoo yeah now And now I get why everyone hates you.
And then also then meeting again later and seeing humility, having said in,
(59:18):
ah, but not quite enough.
So he is, has had a brush with humility, but also is still, has to be,
there's a, there's a thing that's inside him that what some even say was broken.
Like he just, he has to compete.
It mean men, women, people everywhere are, are born with this thing.
(59:38):
That's why they're incredible at what they do.
But unfortunately, that often just means the sacrifice of other things,
including any level of empathy for other humans, where you're like,
you're my counterpart in a competition.
They have to treat it that way. And they have to be super pragmatic about it.
But sometimes they also, at the end, like they, you know, they get out of the
(01:00:00):
boxing ring and they hug each other and, and they have a press conference and
everybody's fine. Sometimes they ride home together, you know, who knows?
It's an interesting thing, but you are, you are a good human, Shira.
I can, you are an inspiration to me and to many others.
And, you know, there's no better way to describe what a founder should be than,
(01:00:22):
you know, you've described it. The tough part we always have is the people that
should write the books don't have the time to.
And I do hope that we all capture some of these lessons from what you shared with us today.
And so what's next? What's next for Salvo? I know we've got,
we sort of went down a fun path.
And thank you for always also being super great in my crazy meandering thoughts
(01:00:46):
that we walk through these together.
What's exciting? 2024 is going to be a wild year. We're still,
I call this the actual start because Q1 is just kind of like,
you know, no one's actually selling yet.
We are now in peak season. It's beginning.
So, you know, last year when OpenAI came to our lives, everyone was talking,
(01:01:08):
everyone still is talking about AI and products for AI security and so on and so forth.
But I think that the reason why we talk about AI so much is not because it's,
I mean, it is a hype, but at the end, if we ask ourselves, what did we really want to make out of this?
(01:01:30):
Naturally, you want to achieve or to do certain things faster,
preferably even automatically.
So, for us, what's next for 2024 is to try and leverage this kind of technology
into the strategy we already have.
I think that, you know, when we started the company, we didn't think about a Gartner category.
(01:01:54):
By the way, at the time, you didn't have a CSP. I don't think one existed. Yeah.
DSPM, SSPM. So, today, we have so many categories for cloud security.
But if I try to drill down and actually understand what kind of problem are you solving, then,
users still feel a lot of pain around their remediation. In the CSPM or CIM
(01:02:18):
or SSPM or ITDR or whatever, they still feel a lot of pain around remediation.
So I think that this year will be the year where we're really able to leverage
AI into auto-remediation and trust building with the user.
Today, when you go and write on ChatGPT, like whatever, write me a blog about
(01:02:42):
this, write me an abstract about that.
You don't just copy and paste it. You take it, you read it, you make some adjustments
and some tweaks, but it saves you a lot of time.
And my vision is for,
cybersecurity in general, not just Solvo, to be that source of relief for you
(01:03:04):
and for our users, to just know that when the time comes, and eventually it
will come because somebody is going to mess up.
You will just have the confidence that you can handle it because you have someone
or something to be there and give you an advice.
And then maybe you can reiterate, maybe you can make some changes,
(01:03:26):
but the baseline is there.
Well, it's going to be a big year and a well-earned one because of what you
and the team are doing. So thank you for doing all you do.
It's always a pleasure and for folks definitely
go check it out salvo.cloud is easy to find and you've got your fantastic follow
(01:03:47):
on linkedin as well i love all the energy that comes out of the company this
is true culture bound and culture strong company from the outside like it's very obvious to me that
you're building something that you cannot create it.
It occurs, but you've given it the opportunity to succeed and grow in a way.
(01:04:13):
So I'm very proud of you for what you've done. And you and David and the whole
team are always something to watch.
So I look forward to one day when we're all retired from this and we can write
these books we've long said we would.
We'll use ChatGPT to write them. There you go. That's it. That's it.
That's it. So, Shira, for folks that do want to connect with you,
what's the best way that they can do that?
(01:04:35):
LinkedIn, Twitter. I'm available on both platforms.
Perfect. Well, thank you very much. Always a pleasure. And definitely, folks, check out.
Solvo is both a company and a platform technology to watch.
I'm excited by what's ahead.
Thank you so much for having me and looking forward to next time.
Yes. Again, again, I'm looking forward to 2024 review and let's see how it all worked. Okay.
(01:05:02):
Music.
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