SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Worth $2.6b Today, What About 36 Months Ago?
27 Mar 2021
Chapter 1: What is the current state of the cybersecurity market?
So we have over 450 customers and rapidly growing every single year.
Okay. What's rapidly growing mean? Doubling in size. You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latke. Now, if you're hearing this, it means you're not currently on our subscriber feed. To subscribe, go to getlatke.com. When you subscribe, you won't hear ads like this one. You'll get the full interviews. Right now, you're only hearing partial interviews.
And you'll get interviews three weeks earlier from founders, thinkers, and people I find interesting. Like Eric Wan, 18 months before he took Zoom public.
We got to grow faster. Minimum is 100% over the past several years.
Or bootstrap founders like Vivek of QuestionPro. When I started the company, it was not cool to raise. Or Looker CEO Frank Behan before Google acquired his company for $2.6 billion.
We want to see a real pervasive data culture, and then the rest flows behind that.
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My guest today is Alexander Yampolsky. He's a recognized expert in the security field, running his company, SecurityScorecard.io, which is the leader in security ratings used by hundreds of customers like GE, McDonald's, Pepsi, and many others.
Before founding the company, he was CIS, so at Gilt Group, and has held lead technologists and security roles at Goldman Sachs, Oracle, Cinchcast, and Microsoft. He's a published author and active speaker in the security and software development communities and has a PhD in cryptography from Yale University. University. All right, Alexander, are you ready to take us to the top?
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Chapter 2: How does SecurityScorecard measure a company's security posture?
Well, I would say roughly half of our company are in the product technology. We're an engineering-driven company. We believe our vision as a company is We want to create a new language for how companies talk about security. So we want chief risk officers, board members, CFOs, regulators, we want them to start using scorecards as part of an everyday dialogue.
We want people, just like people bake into contracts 99.9% uptime requirements, we want people to start baking into contracts minimum scorecard requirements. Mm-hmm. And that's the vision we're trying to create.
And so half of our company is dedicated to product and engineering because we believe that ultimately, I mean, if you have crappy technology and really good sales and marketing team, that's only going to last you so long. If you have an amazing technology and crappy sales, marketing, and execution, then people are still going to value your technology.
Luckily, we have good technology and good sales market and execution, but we're dedicating quite a lot of people in our company towards product innovation.
How many months does it take you to get back your CAC on a customer?
Customers pay us upfront. So, you know, and given the retention rate that we have, you know, we see in very good economics metrics. I don't want to disclose it, but, you know, we see in very good efficiency.
Okay, but in terms of payback period, I mean, it sounds like you're south of six months if they're paying you all up front.
It depends. We're under a year.
Okay, that's fair enough. Under a year. And just to be clear, if you're under a year and average ACV is 80 grand, it means you're willing to spend up to 80 grand to acquire one of these customers. Where are you spending that typically?
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Chapter 3: What is the business model and pricing strategy of SecurityScorecard?
If you think back to kind of like an interest in business analogy, if you think back to Henry Ford, Henry Ford's innovation was not the fact that he came up with a low-cost automobile or that he pioneered a very efficient assembly line. Henry Ford's innovation was the fact that he envisioned the society where many regular people will be automobile drivers. People didn't drive automobiles.
Only rich people could afford automobiles. And so Henry Ford envisioned when many people all over the world will be drivers. And so we're envisioning a similar world where CFOs, chief risk officers, general counsels. I use in our scorecards to measure and quantify risk. And this world doesn't exist today, but we're marching towards that vision. And that's really our goal.
That's what we're focused on.
All right, very good. I like the vision. Let's wrap up here with the famous five, Alexander. Number one, what's your favorite business book?
Sure. So one of my favorite business books is... Behind the Cloud by Mark Benioff about how he created Salesforce. It's a very good book where he talks about the history of Salesforce, many of the tricks that he used to build it. And that's one of my favorites.
Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying right now?
Sure. Well, I'm a big fan of Elon Musk. I think that he's a very inspirational guy. He's a very smart guy. I met him a couple of years ago at a Sequoia Capital offsite, and I learned a lot of interesting things just from a casual conversation with him. When I asked him, how does he know that what he's working on during the day is really making a difference?
He said to me, at the end of each day, he reverse engineers his day and says, how did I spend my time? Which meetings did I attend? Who did I speak to? Were there things I could have delegated? Were there things that I shouldn't have been doing? And that was very good advice. So yeah, Elon Musk is one of my favorites.
Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building a business?
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