Claim OwnershipSecure Ventures with Kyle McNulty
Subscribed: 9Played: 242
Subscribe
© Kyle McNulty
Description
Kyle McNulty interviews cutting-edge founders in the cyber security space to understand their plights, glories, and revolutionary products.
New episodes are published every other Tuesday.
If you are interested in sharing your story, please contact me at kyle@secureventures.io
Following the podcast really helps! Follow it on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/75106414
Twitter: https://twitter.com/VentureWithKyle
New episodes are published every other Tuesday.
If you are interested in sharing your story, please contact me at kyle@secureventures.io
Following the podcast really helps! Follow it on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/75106414
Twitter: https://twitter.com/VentureWithKyle
131 Episodes
Reverse
Mariano founded Onapsis back in 2009 to address the challenges securing a growing new class of technology: ERP systems. After working at CYBSEC for 5 years doing offensive security research, he discovered just how vulnerable SAP applications could be. Onapsis is sneakily a juggernaut, having raised a $55 million Series D in 2020. And while they started focused on SAP, they have since expanded into related tools such as Oracle. They have certainly established themselves as core to securing an often overlooked component of IT infrastructure. In the conversation we discuss the founding story, why SAP couldn't do this themselves, and how he has thought about growth opportunities over the last 16 years.Website
Vrajesh is co-founder and CEO at Operant AI. Operant AI is a holistic AI security platform, helping organizations discover, detect, and defend AI deployments. Operant raised a $10 million dollar Series A last fall from Felicis and SineWave, and the company continues to expand its offerings within AI security. Before Operant, Vrajesh worked at Apple, Qualcomm, Arm, and Scaled Inference, rounding out an exceptionally technical background with several quality technology companies. In the episode we discuss his career transition from extremely technical, kernel-level engineering to management, how he thinks about timing a market, and how the vision for Operant's product was cemented from day one rather than bolted together over time.Website
With me in this episode is Rishi Bhargava, co-founder of Descope. Rishi has a standout background having founded Demisto in 2015 and then selling to Palo Alto Networks in 2019 for over $500 million dollars. Before Demisto, he was a VP at McAfee and Intel. Rishi is extremely knowledgable about go-to-market in the cyber domain, and we dove into his lessons learned over his career and how he has applied those to Descope for customer identity.Website
Brian Pontarelli is co-founder and CTO of FusionAuth. FusionAuth helps companies easily roll authentication workflows for their public facing applications. For example, FusionAuth is an alternative to writing custom code for user creation and multi-factor authentication login for a new web application. FusionAuth is entirely bootstrapped, and the company has successfully become a legitimate enterprise option for customer identity. Before FusionAuth, Brian started CleanSpeak, one of the original companies for profanity filters in chat interfaces. Brian is still the CEO of both businesses, and he tells the story of how the two tie together in our conversation.Website
Kamal is co-founder and CTO at Andromeda, which is building an identity management solution to help companies better understand their identity footprint and manage excessive permissions across disparate platforms. Kamal uses the term "digital incarnation" which resonated with me given the number of accounts a single human may have across different platforms. Kamal worked as an engineer and engineering leader for two decades across Oracle, Ebay, and Paypal before starting Andromeda in 2023. In the episode, we start by discussing his experience working as an offshore developer in India and how that influences his own perspective on leveraging offshore teams today. We also cover the cultural differences at eBay and Paypal, how that influenced his security mindset, the origin story of Andromeda, and the future of identity.
This episode was recorded live at the Dreamit Cyber Founders Summit during RSA. Huge thanks to the Dreamit team for including me during their inaugural event!David Cass is the CISO at GSR, which is a cryptocurrency market maker. For the finance uninitiated, that basically means they buy and sell cryptocurrencies in large volumes to then buy and sell to other parties. As a result, David's role entails a lot more than the average CISO. As he will mention, it is his job to secure GSR's corporate IT like any CISO, but he also has to sign off that the cryptocurrencies they are trading are secure enough to hold a financial position without undue risk to the company. David therefore has one of the most advanced perspectives on the cybersecurity controls for cryptocurrencies. In the conversation we discussed his views on the productization of web3 security, cryptocurrency regulation, and the successes behind his CISO community CISOs connect.GSRDreamit
Rehan is CEO and founder of Securiti AI, which is providing a data command center to help organizations secure and enable their data for AI use cases. Rehan as an incredible track record which we discuss in more detail on the episode. He sold his first company for $180 million, and his second company for $280 million. Securiti AI has already raised $180 million to date from top tier investors, and they are geared up for an even bigger number. I was incredibly impressed with his track record identifying landmark technology trends and then building differentiated businesses with tailwinds from those trends. In the episode we walk through how each of these experiences built on one another, the rationale for each business, and how Securiti AI is positioned at the intersection of three of the most pivotal technology growth areas: data, AI, and cybersecurity.
Raj is CEO and co-founder of Blueflag, which helps ensure developers only have the access permissions needed for their roles, reducing risk of excess exposure. Raj started his career as an engineer and then in marketing at Adobe and VMware before taking on a COO role at Cloudknox, which they later sold to Microsoft. Raj took his lessons from working with identity at Cloudknox and applied them to designing Blueflag while paying attention to the nuanced differences for the development lifecycle. In the episode we discuss his core tenets of successful marketing in cybersecurity, the promise and challenges of cloud infrastructure entitlements management, the value of his time as an entrepreneur in residence, and how he has constantly reevaluated strategy at Blueflag informed by his previous experience.Website
Luke is Chief Product Officer and co-founder at Semgrep. Semgrep performs static application security testing, a form of code analysis, and has grown to become one of the mainstay application security tools on the market over the last eight years. Luke started Semgrep after three years at Palantir as a software engineer and product manager, and this episode really helped drive home the supportive community amongst former Palantir employees. In the discussion we cover his early entrepreneurial efforts such as modifying Xboxes, the 17 different product variations they tried before the current form of Semgrep, and how he thinks about the innovator's dilemma as a growth-stage company in a vertical being disrupted by AI.Website
Recorded live at Blu Ventures’ Cyber Venture Forum! I got the chance to speak with Rick Howard, previously Chief Security Officer at Palo Alto Networks from 2013 to 2019. Rick has a wealth of cybersecurity industry experience, and he wrote a book called Cybersecurity First Principles and maintains the cybersecurity book hall of fame, called the Cybersecurity Canon. In this episode we discussed his perspective on the fundamental themes of cybersecurity with a lens to how entrepreneurs and investors can leverage these ideas.Cybersecurity Canon WebsiteCybersecurity First Principles on AmazonSponsored by VulnCheck!
This episode is a recording of a live interview held on stage at Blu Ventures' Cyber Venture Forum in February. A huge shoutout and thank you to the Blu Ventures team for putting together an awesome event. Bricklayer is building an AI-based agent to assist with security operations workflows. Before Bricklayer, Adam founded ThreatConnect which he led for over a decade. In the conversation we discuss his learnings from his experience at ThreatConnect, acquiring vs. building a new capability, and how he thinks about competition in the AI SOC space.Website: bricklayer.aiSponsor: VulnCheck
Amir is co-founder and CEO at Vorlon Security, which provides visibility and monitoring for SaaS app connections within an enterprise. For example, Vorlon can detect what other applications are connected to your Salesforce instance along with what data is flowing between each relationship. This helps security teams detect data exfiltration, data leakage, improper configuration, and more. Before Vorlon, Amir worked his way from a software developer into progressively more customer-facing roles, most recently as a Director at Palo Alto Networks. We kick off the episode talking about his early motivation to become a founder and how he led a decade of his career in pursuit of preparing himself for that role. Now, the team is continuing to focus on product and growth after raising $15 million last year from Accel and Shield Capital.WebsiteSponsor: VulnCheck
Josh Kamdjou is CEO and Founder of Sublime Security. Josh started Sublime after realizing just how easy it was for him to break into companies with phishing emails. He wanted to build a solution that better addressed the tailored environment of each organization such as historical data. Now the company has raised over $80 million from leading VCs such as IVP, Index Ventures, and Decibel. Before Sublime, Josh worked as a DoD hacker for 9 years.In the episode we discuss his emphasis on leveraging the attacker perspective, the fundamental difficulties of email security, his conviction in product-led growth, and more.Website: https://sublime.security/Sponsor: VulnCheck
Jon is co-founder and CEO of Halcyon, which is building an endpoint solution fully focused on anti-ransomware. Halcyon recently raised at a $1B valuation in 2024. Jon started his career in cybersecurity consulting for a decade before joining Cylance in 2014 as Chief Research Officer. After his stint at Cylance, in 2017 Jon founded Boldend, which was building offensive cyber capabilities to be used by the US intelligence community for information gathering and electronic warfare. Boldend was acquired by Sixgen three years after Jon stepped down as CEO to start Halcyon given the critical impact of ransomware on US companies.
Tushar was the CEO of Attivo Networks for a decade before selling to SentinelOne for $600 million dollars in 2022. Attivo Networks built deception technology which would trick attackers into attacking fake infrastructure. A common form of deception is a honeypot, which is an intentionally vulnerable server so defenders can gather information about attackers such as their IP address or attack techniques. Attivo provided comprehensive deception solutions and served five of the Fortune 10. In the episode we talk about Tushar's learnings from a decade at Cisco, the unique origin story of Attivo and its founders, and the sale process to SentinelOne.
Pete is CEO and co-founder of Realm Security, which is building a security data fabric to help companies manage their disparate log sources for monitoring tools. For companies spending millions of dollars every year on contracts with Splunk, Realm is the light at the end of the tunnel that can help them move to a cheaper SIEM tool.
Pete started his career at Rapid7 after dropping out of college, and he worked his way through a variety of cybersecurity sales leadership roles since, including companies acquired by CarbonBlack and Cisco.
In the episode we talk about his emphasis on moving roles for new learning opportunities, his obsession with customer problems rather than potential solutions, and how Realm's message is unique in a cyber ecosystem where vendors are always asking for CISOs to grow their budget.
Website
Sponsor: VulnCheck
In the spirit of the end of the year, I decided to put together some highlights from a handful of episodes over the course of 2024. This episode will feature a select few snippets from five different episodes over the course of the year including Chris from RADICL and LogRhythm, Gil from Orca, Chris from Veracode, Andy from BreachRx, and Kabir from Leen. There will be a mix of stories of unique crossroads, general entrepreneurial advice, and cybersecurity-specific challenges.
Thank you to all the listeners this year!
Sponsor: Vulncheck
Odysseas is co-founder and CEO of Phylax, a web3 security company building a security layer for blockchain-based protocols. Before Phylax, Odysseas worked at Nomad, a crypto exchange which suffered a $190M breach in August 2022. In the episode, we talk about his unique background as a developer relations manager, the approach law enforcement takes to recover funds in the wake of a crypto breach, the different attack surfaces for the web3 ecosystem, and more. If you are not a blockchain expert, do not worry, me neither. There are still plenty of interesting high level conversation points throughout!
Maksym is CEO and founder of Mantis Analytics, providing holistic security awareness to organizations through a social media monitoring platform. The tool combs media channels to identify risks to a customer's business and escalates alerts accordingly. I thought this would be an interesting opportunity to look at the broader security world to understand some parallels with pure cybersecurity. Maksym worked in business intelligence and product management for two decades before the Ukraine war inspired him to start something that would make a difference. In the episode we talk about the war events leading to the creation of Mantis, the pivot from a focus on solely disinformation, the problems with keyword searches with the growth of generative AI, and more.
Website
Sponsor: VulnCheck
Ben is founder and CEO of watchTowr, building an external attack surface management tool (EASM) that performs automated penetration testing and red teaming activities. Before founding watchTowr in 2021, Ben worked as a security consultant for a decade focused largely on penetration testing. And as Ben describes in the episode, what started as a combination of cobbled together scripts from his previous experience has since grown into a comprehensive automation platform.
Website: https://watchtowr.com/
Sponsor: VulnCheck
Comments
Download from Google Play
Download from App Store
United States