SaaStr Podcast #205: Guy Podjarny, Founder & CEO / Snyk Shares The Secret To Building A Truly Successful Freemium Product
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This post is by Harry Stebbings from SaaStr
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Welcome to Episode 205! Guy Podjarny is the Founder & CEO @ Snyk, the developer-first solution that automates finding and fixing vulnerabilities in your dependencies. To date, Guy has raised over $32m in VC funding from Snyk from some of the great of venture including Accel, GV, our friends at Boldstart and Canaan Partners, just to name a few. As for Guy, prior to Snyk, he was the CTO of Akamai’s Web Performance Business following their acquisition of his startup, Blaze.io. Before founding Blaze, Guy built Web Application Security products, including the first Web App Firewall (AppShield), Dynamic Application Security Testing tool (AppScan) and Static Application Security Testing tool (AppScan Dev Edition). Fun fact on Guy, he is the holder of 18 patents related to security and performance.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
- How Guy made his way into the world of SaaS and came to found one the hottest open source companies of our day in the form of Snyk.
How does Guy navigate between the difficult balance of going wide on market and shallow on product or narrow in market and deep in product? What is the decision-making process? What does Guy advise founders on feature prioritization in the early days? Does Guy agree if you are not embarrassed by V1, you have shipped too late? How does support provide a feedback loop on what to build next?
Why does Guy believe that, “successful freemium requires giving away your secret sauce”? How can one give away enough secret sauce in freemium without giving away too much people don’t buy? How does freemium fundamentally alter your relationship to revenue? Where does Guy see many going wrong when pursuing the freemium model?
How does Guy think about the problem of agency with developers using the product but having to sell to CIOs? What 2 things can be done to make this sell easier? What does Guy believe is the right framework to think about pricing through? Why is transparency in enterprise pricing not always optimal?
What does Guy believe is required to have strong and seamless communication across functions and locations? How has Guy seen this change over time and with increased locations? Where does Guy see many going wrong when trying to scale team across location?
Guy’s 60 Second SaaStr:
- How does Guy know when is the right time to hire your first sales person?
How did Guy learn to let go and trust his team?
What does Guy know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning?
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Jason Lemkin
Harry Stebbings
SaaStr
Guy Podjarny
Transcript
Harry Stebbings: This is the official SaaStr podcast with me, Harry Stebbings at H Stebbings 1996 with two Bs on Instagram. It would be great to see there and if you haven’t checked out our most downloaded episode of 2018 with Stripe CEO Claire Hughes Johnson, you can do so on last week’s episode, it really is a must. But to the show today and what I just love about doing this show is its ability to build friendships and just non transactional relationships with some really special people in our industry. That’s the case today as I’m thrilled to welcome a friend in the form of Guy Podjarny, founder and CEO at Snyk, the developer first solution that automates finding and fixing vulnerabilities in your dependencies. To date, Guy’s raised over $32,000,000 in VC funding with Snyk from some of the greatest in venture including Accel, GV, our dear friends at Boldstart and Canaan Partners just to name a few.
Also, Guy, prior to Snyk, he was the CTO of Akamai’s Web Performance business following their acquisition of his startup blaze.io. Before founding Blaze, Guy built web application security products including the first web app firewall, App Shield, dynamic application security testing tool App Scan, and static application security testing tool App Scan Dev Edition. Fun fact on Guy, he’s the holder of 18 patents related to security and performance and I do also want to say huge thank you to some dear friends of the show in the form of Eliot and Ed at Boldstart for the fantastic intro and questions for Guy today, I really do so appreciate that. But now, I’m very excited to hand over to a friend and phenomenal founder, Guy Podjarny, Founder and CEO at Snyk.
Guy, It’s absolutely fantastic to have you on the show. Very big hand for the wonderful Eliot at Boldstart for the intro. But thank you so much for joining me today, Guy.
Guy Podjarny: No, thanks a lot for having me. It’s great to be here.
Harry Stebbings: But not at all. I’m very excited, but I want to kick off with a little on you. Tell me, Guy, how did you make your way into what we both know to be the wonderful world of SaaS and really come to found one of the most exciting companies in open source today, being Snyk?
Guy Podjarny: My start up experience kind of goes back to some of the first application security company. A company called Sanctum that got acquired by Watchfire, they got acquired by IBM. My first dabble in SaaS was really what we call the MSPs that have managed service profiling map. It was basically our kind of managed offering for a security enterprise, which was sort about application security testing tool at the time. It was exploratory. We’re still selling primarily software, but it was clearly the better way to do it and it was more for the company became very clear that that is the means through which we want to sell. It’s an ongoing relationship with the customer and it just helps us make them more successful. But it was still nascent in Watchfire days. Then after IBM and when I left IBM and I founded a work performance company called Blaze, SaaS was very much a straight up there.
It was almost a CDN compliment that made websites faster, so running it as an operated service, right? Running something that we operate and the customer just consumes was very, very natural and the CDN space was there. For me, it almost becomes yours now to sort of think about a non SaaS offering as part of the offering. Blaze was acquired by Akamai. I was CTO at Akamai for a bunch of years. Once again, being very, very used to a recurring and operated sort of hosted software and then left about three and a half years ago, a little bit more now to found Snyk, which is, once again, SaaS service dealing with helping companies use open source code and stay secure.
Harry Stebbings: Well, I mean time flies when you’re having fun. I do have to ask, though … Given the previous successful founding of companies that kind of across the years, is there anything that you particularly took away from them in terms of learning and maybe changed your operating mindset for how you started and think about running Snyk today?
Guy Podjarny
United States
