The Founder Formula

This Founder has some surprising additional talents outside of founding a company that’s raised $20 million in VC funding to hunt for networked devices. After helping several start-up brands market their solutions, Chris Kirsch joined the founding team of runZero and is currently the company’s CEO. In addition to a fun round of “fact or fiction,” The Founder Formula co-hosts Todd Gallina and Sandy Salty talked with Chris about, the evolution of a winning name for a company, developing a...

Security teams sometimes need to tackle big transformations as they keep up with today’s threat landscape. This two-time Founder set out to make that transformation less intimidating. In this episode, our co-hosts Todd Gallina and Sandy Salty interview Guy Podjarny, the Founder and President of Snyk. The three of them discuss how Guy was able to overcome a catastrophic failure, the importance of winning over a user, and rethinking the way security teams defeat threats. Listen to this and all...

Identity and data are intrinsically linked. In fact, our guest in this episode tells us 10 years from now the only things that will mater in cloud computing and cybersecurity will be people and data. The rest is just details. In this episode, co-hosts Todd Gallina and Sandy Salty of Trace3 interview Mohit Tiwari Co-Founder & CEO at Symmetry Systems. Mohit tells us all about his transition from teaching in academia to becoming a tech founder, unpacks what a good culture fit really is, and...

This Founder challenges others looking to start a business to ask themselves - Why do you want to start a company? Ermetic Co-Founder Arick Goomanovsky is a two-time founder who appreciates the ever-evolving journey of founding a company. In this episode, co-hosts Todd Gallina and Sandy Salty sit down with Arick to discuss the inner workings of launching Ermetic, a cloud security startup which has raised a total of $97.3M in funding over 4 rounds. Listen in with this Founder and learn more a...

This entrepreneur knows that to build a successful company, the clients’ experiences, motivations, issues, and mindset comes first. Vikram Kapoor, Co-founder and CTO of Lacework, talks about the origins of his customer-centric mentality in his journey of building a Series D funded technology startup. Vikram tells co-hosts Sandy Salty and Todd Gallina about the most important factors in scaling Lacework - the shared principals and keeping a pulse on competition. Hear about the ins and outs of...

You need these two things to start a company: a really big idea and a plan for how to get there. Our guest today has an absolutely mammoth idea…Passwordless authentication. In this episode, we interview Rakesh Loonkar, President & Co-Founder at Transmit Security and four-time founder, about how his latest company achieved the largest series A in the history of cybersecurity with a big idea and a plan. Listen to this and all of The Founder Formula episodes through your favorite podcast pl...

Big tech companies have their pros and cons; but compared to the freedom found in startups, the choice was a no-brainer for Armon. In this episode, we interview Armon Dadgar, Co-founder and CTO at HashiCorp, about how his company gained success through a balanced relationship with the co-founder, seed money from trusted investors, and changing hats as the CTO to best fit the specific concerns of the quarter. Listen to this and all of The Founder Formula episodes through your favorite podcast...

Menlo was founded, in part, because five cybersecurity experts were fed up. Security products should stop bad things from happening — but they didn’t. Founding his second company on the premise of “Hey, we can do better” has taken this entrepreneur all the way to validation in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant within a decade. In this episode, we interview Amir Ben-Efraim, CEO at Menlo Security, about lessons learned from the acquisition of his first company and the wild success of his second one. L...

Celebrating a massive milestone - $225 million in Series F funding for Illumio - our guest today is startup guru and network security expert, Andrew Rubin. Illumio is at the bleeding edge of the cybersecurity maelstrom with their groundbreaking work in Zero Trust Segmentation. Andrew offers up his entertaining insights on cyber security, his history as a successful entrepreneur and fashion investor, and paying it forward by mentoring up-and-coming founders. Listen to this and all of The Foun...

For this Founder, getting out of the cubicle and teaching completely changed his life and his career. We’re talking to Mike Pfeiffer this week on The Founder Formula. He’s the CEO and Founder of CloudSkills.io, the most immersive cloud and devops learning community in the world. Mike realized as he was working in tech support and cloud architecture that his true calling is to teach, but on his own terms. Listen to this and all of The Founder Formula episodes through your favorite podcast pla...

Why would you launch a company when you’re already working at your dream job? If you’re Brian Wheeler, the answer is simple: you can stay a partner at your dream job, while also able to branch out and launch a new company. It was a win/win. In this episode of The Founder Formula, we talk to Brian, who is a partner at Bertram Capital, and the cofounder of Morpheus Data, a cloud application management platform company. Listen to this and all of The Founder Formula episodes through your favori...

How do you know when you’ve built a winning culture? More importantly, how do you know when you’ve succeeded in instilling your core values across the entire company? We’re talking this week to Ian Tien, CEO at Mattermost, an enterprise messaging workspace for teams to collaborate securely and effectively. His career has taken him through various areas of the entertainment industry including founding Spinpunch, an independent game studio. Listen to this and all of The Founder Formula episode...

If you’re not using video to communicate your message, odds are that you’re missing a huge array of potential investors, consumers, and users. And before you make excuses about your company not being exciting, or your product not sexy enough for video, take a listen to this episode of The Founder Formula. This week we're talking to Evan Macmillan, CEO and Co-Founder at Gridspace, an AI-driven, voice automation company. Evan has an incredibly rich background. He was born in Silicon Valley, an...

Last Episode we spoke with a man who has been called the Father of Video Games. Silicon Valley legend Nolan Bushnell. If you haven’t listened, make sure you go back and do so, because we talked all about his career up through his time at Atari, and ultimately the sale of Atari to Warner Media. In part 2 of our interview with Nolan, we’re covering the second half of his career. With someone as storied and experienced as Nolan is, he wasn’t content to just sell Atari and fade into the backgrou...

For the 25th episode of The Founder Formula, we thought we’d pull out all the stops, and invite one of the most famous founders in Silicon Valley history on the show for a two part extravaganza. If you spent any amount of time in the 1970’s & 1980’s playing Atari, you have our guest, Nolan Bushnell to thank. Nolan founded Atari, and brought video games to the home user, selling over 30 million units. As if changing the video game industry wasn’t enough, Nolan also went on to found Chuck ...