A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:07:51 · Damien Lewke
[00:07:51] S0: Yeah, no, it's a great question. Huntress is an amazing company. I was fortunate to spend a little bit of time working at ForgePoint, which invested in Huntress. So really big respect for the ForgePoint team and Huntress. Yeah, I think there are three key examples I can give you. The first is, if you think about existing systems. Especially if you are running in a customer's environment, you have to balance like, do I detect all the things or do I detect what I'm good at? Because if I detect all the things, I promise you, because no two enterprise environments are the same. You're going to lead to a bunch of false positives. So every vendor has to run this very fine Pareto front of finding the optimal space. Which again, if I'm starting to cut stuff at some point, I'm going to miss things. So the real example here is, we'll focus on something topical like OpenClaw. So when OpenClaw first deployed, came out, right? Really exciting, cool productivity piece, nightmare for security teams. What we were able to do that no other system could was, we'd actually built some really comprehensive machine learning models around command line investigation and in GenSec systems, as it just so would happen, run command lines. So out of the box, as soon as OpenClaw hit the market, we were able to start detecting what OpenClaw was doing. More importantly, because we could also understand the intent of these command lines. We could actually see when the OpenClaw agent wasn't doing things like it should, like catching an OpenClaw agent touching a production DB. Which it should not have had access to, and being able to trace back, how and why it was able to create the accounts to access that. So that's a great example, right? The second piece really is focusing on what we call the telemetry, right? The raw data itself. So most security vendors, right? Back to that Pareto front, generate detections, they'll generate alerts but because they can't catch everything, there's this whole swath of data that is undiscovered, right? That doesn't really remain touched and our whole process is to constantly look at that data and go, what might be amiss, and use data inputs like context from the customer organization, right? They can upload a threat model or intelligence, right? What are bad actors doing with existing tools that are running on this system?
00:10:00 · Damien Lewke, Pablo Srugo
And then finally, we've got a brilliant group of folks that do research and test, and build these agents. So we have these three new axes that surface things that otherwise might have gone missed and to that end, you know, over our company's lifecycle. We've run over three hundred million agentic investigations, and we've surfaced over four thousand active incidents that had otherwise gone missing. [00:10:23] S2: Is this like, and I'm always trying to simplify as much as possible. I understand the other point, which is if you flag everything, you're creating so much noise now. You're just lost in this all, you can't do it. So is this bringing AI to find the signal in that what normally is discarded as probably not relevant by more. Let's say, heuristic driven deterministic system, you're using agentic AI to say, let's look at that, you know, double, triple check it, and now pull out the signal out of it without all the noise that normally would come along. Is that a good frame of thinking about it? [00:10:23] S0: Pablo, that is the perfect way of thinking about it. [00:10:23] S2: Boom, there you go, there you go. [00:10:58] S0: It was amazing. [00:10:58] S2: That's it, that's why I'm here. [00:11:00] S0: Amazing. [00:11:01] S2: Oh, man. All right, cool. Well, I think at least I get it now. That's the good thing. That's, you know, one person gets it now. But so that's, I guess, the core idea. Maybe walk me through even just how you make the decision. This is what, 2024 at this point? Like mid-24? [00:11:14] S0: Yeah.
00:11:14 · Damien Lewke, Pablo Srugo
[00:11:14] S0: Yeah. [00:11:15] S2: How do you make the decision, which is always the key moment of, do you just kind of cold turkey it? Okay, I'm going all in, screw it, or you kind of phase it in. How do you play that out going from employee to founder? [00:11:25] S0: Yeah, great question. So ultimately I can only speak from my experience, but I definitely ascribe to the cold turkey school of thought. So, you know, my decision point basically is I got really quiet with myself and asked myself, if I made $0 and all I could do was tackle this problem. Would I do it, right? If I could accept that I would get no monetary benefit, but I could focus on this problem full time. Would I do it? And the answer was yes, that's when I made the jump. The best advice I can give to a prospective founder is be obsessed with the problem and not inherently your solution. Because your solution will evolve and change over time. If you're calling all the shots a couple of years in, you might want to ask yourself why that's the case. But for me, it was the obsession with the problem and just going, you know what, I got to do this. And thankfully, I made the jump and I'm very grateful that I did. It is a moment of uncertainty. It can be a bit scary when you got forty bucks in your bank account. You're like, oh, gosh, I hope this works. But it has been by far the most rewarding experience.
00:12:27 · Pablo Srugo, Damien Lewke
[00:12:27] S2: But I would argue for somebody in your position who's doing something in their industry. Worst case scenario, a year later, it doesn't work. You're probably extremely hireable. You've got that kind of the downside protection. Which is different than if you go, and this is the good thing about going into your industry. When you decide like, oh, screw it, I'm gonna start a marketplace for whatever, right? And then you try to come back. It's a little tougher. [00:12:47] S0: It certainly is. I will say this for what it's worth as a hiring manager. I actually am always excited to meet founder curious people or former founders. We have a former founder on staff here. You are also extremely hireable if you try something and it doesn't necessarily work out. Because the problem solving and skill sets that you build and learn, honestly, you know, there's that expression, right? We learn far more from failure than we do from success. To me, that says a lot about your character. So it's definitely something that I totally get but yes, you're right.
00:12:47 · Damien Lewke, Pablo Srugo
[00:12:47] S0: It certainly is. I will say this for what it's worth as a hiring manager. I actually am always excited to meet founder curious people or former founders. We have a former founder on staff here. You are also extremely hireable if you try something and it doesn't necessarily work out. Because the problem solving and skill sets that you build and learn, honestly, you know, there's that expression, right? We learn far more from failure than we do from success. To me, that says a lot about your character. So it's definitely something that I totally get but yes, you're right. [00:13:15] S2: I mean, I tend to agree. It always depends on the employer. You know, the bigger company or a small, but for a startup. I can tell you for our companies, the first ten, twenty hires, if they could be all founders, I'd probably be for it, right? We just try, and it's just because the level of management a founder needs, frankly, is zero and so somebody gone out for a year or two years, and done something on their own. It's like, okay, I know I can be like, this is the thing you're doing, and they're just going to go run off and do, which is amazing. [00:13:36] S0: Yeah, a hundred percent, right? And early days, you have to have that kind of flexibility, right? You're wearing a million different hats. There's no structure. Having somebody who can just take something and run with it is invaluable to a startup. [00:13:47] S2: So, we're going through the story. So you've decided that you're going to leave. Are you alone? Do you have a co founder at the outset? What's the setup?
00:13:47 · Pablo Srugo, Damien Lewke
[00:13:47] S2: So, we're going through the story. So you've decided that you're going to leave. Are you alone? Do you have a co founder at the outset? What's the setup? [00:13:47] S0: First time solo founder. So it was just me. [00:13:47] S2: Oh buddy, going on hard mode, I like that. [00:13:58] S0: Yeah, I have conviction, I had conviction and you know, at the time it was the right choice. And I backed that up. [00:13:58] S2: And you're technical, so you could build the stuff and try to sell it? You could do both those things? [00:13:58] S0: Yes, so again, fortunate in that regard where being technical I have the ability to kind of sit across both. But one of the core functions as we built this company is I've continuously hired myself out of a job, right? Hired myself out of the marketing leader role and we've got an amazing head of engineering, product, sales, customer success. That's been my constant focus, right? It's ultimately to bring people who are more skilled and more accomplished in each of these roles to develop that. But yeah, in the beginning, I sat across everything. Which was interesting.