00:30:50 · Siddhartha Ahluwalia, Varun Badhwar
[00:30:50] S1: Why is there a Darth Vader in your office? [00:30:54] S0: So um, if you haven't guessed it with Endoor Labs, the name Endor comes from um kind of inspiration from Star Wars. The the quick story on that is you know, 2021, when I was starting the company, LLMs didn't exist, so I couldn't go to an agent and say, help me find a domain name and a uh, you know, uh company name that can align. Two hours into this process of trying to find a domain name. I was just tired. We're watching Star Wars in the back. And I needed this done that day because I had a term sheet, and literally the VC needed a name to put on the term sheet. So uh my brother-in-law were and I were just joking around and he said, Well, let's try some Star Wars stuff. And so I have to give him credit. You know, Endor was the name that came from him, which is a forest moon. It actually plays very nicely with the David and Goliath kind of storyline at Endor, you know, where the underdogs in security helping secure the world. And we play a lot of Endor and Star Wars themes around here, and like the team really wanted Darth Vader around here. And we also have Ewoks and little Ewok squishies around, and we call our employees Ewoks. [00:32:00] S1: So you mentioned that today, for any founder, the market is obviously not in control. Their product roadmap is also not in control. So, what are the things that are really in control?
00:32:11 · Varun Badhwar
[00:32:11] S0: Um, I think the number one thing that is in control is the quality of talent you bring into the company, right? So that is non-negotiable because you may think you're building A, you might end up building B. Uh, you need the people that are first principles, system thinkers that will basically out-hustle the market. So that's one. The second thing you control is the culture you define in the company and some of the core things, like for us, customer obsession is critical. In times of uncertainty, how do I decide if I do A versus B versus C? We believe in our customers, we believe in understanding deeply their businesses, their pains, and understanding how to help them navigate it. Because if we can help them navigate their challenges, we will win because then by nature we'll build a good product. Uh, and the third thing I think fundamentally is I think entrepreneurship is not just always about solving the hardest unsolved problem. It's about solving a large problem in the most practical way with the best distribution and reach you can create. So oftentimes I talk to founders that I, you know, will come to me for advice saying, look, I've solved such a hard problem, but I can't get people's attention. I'm like, maybe you solved a really, really hard problem, but did you connect it to what the customers' needs are? The example I gave is if you're here in mainland USA and you're trying to build this amazing resort in a dream vacation place on an island, and you forget the transport problem, how are you gonna get people to come here to finally see your vision and realize your vision? Then you miss the mark. And so I always say you got to find a problem that is near-sighted for now, but there's a long path to build, and the arc is pretty uh significant. And then work with your customers to get them there to the dreamland. But don't be sitting there waiting for your customers, waiting where they are, because maybe you've missed the mark because you were just too far ahead.
00:34:09 · Siddhartha Ahluwalia
[00:34:09] S1: And and how are you thinking about distribution this time? And what have been some of the wins in distribution and GTM channels that you are built?
00:34:18 · Varun Badhwar, Siddhartha Ahluwalia
[00:34:18] S0: Look, this is this is always an interesting one, and I wouldn't say that I have solved it end-to end. I think we are continuing to iterate on it. Um I think to me, tactics have shifted. For example, so we first and foremost, we are an enterprise-led, sales-focused company. We're not product-led, we're not open source. But even in enterprise, right? 10 years ago, we would have big booths, large conferences, we would collect leads, we would follow up in leads, and we would close business. I think today that doesn't work. I think events are great to meet people you're already talking to, but not like the big funnel of people that you get leads for. I think a lot of how people want to buy today and be sold to is independent research. Like they, you have to be in the community, you have to have thoughtful content. Um, you have to be in the places where they're doing their research about the space, about your competitors, about you. Um, and you have to win them over without them having ever talked to you. Because I feel like 80% of the buyer's decision about who they're gonna go with for enterprise technology is made before they have the first sales call with you. So I look at that as a core part of opportunity or challenge and say, how do you build go-to-market messaging, brand, thoughtfulness, um, social proofs to make sure that people before they ever talk to you have already been won over by you, uh, even though you're not a PLG company. [00:35:49] S1: Can you give some examples like where customers found of you from which reports?
00:35:54 · Varun Badhwar
[00:35:54] S0: Yeah. I'll give you one concrete example. We, you know, there's lots of benchmarks about how functionally correct the code is. And we said, well, look, everybody's talking about, oh, the coding agents are so good because they can write functional code, but there's no benchmarks that exist to talk about how securely they are writing that code. So we said, what can we do? Carnegie Mellon and Columbia Universities were working on some research in their labs. We partnered with them, we took harnesses that were believable and benchmarks that they had built, not us. As a vendor, how are you gonna believe my benchmarks? We took that, we invested around that, and we created the entire infrastructure and investment plan where now, every time there's any new model released within 24 to 48 hours, we will test the security efficacy as well as functional efficacy, and we'll publish those results. It's called Agent Security League. What does it do? It just brings people, you know, there's conversation, people are sharing some of these benchmarks. Those benchmarks are created by this company called Endor Labs. Maybe people will want to know what Endor Labs does, how it can help. But like we do a lot of unique research. We've invested heavily on the research side of this company. We uh, if you look at our blogs, most of our blog posts are written by engineers, not by marketing people and salespeople. So we're very thoughtful about the depth and quality of the content we create. So those would be a couple of examples.
00:37:19 · Siddhartha Ahluwalia, Varun Badhwar
[00:37:19] S1: So, but you're still going to these conferences? [00:37:21] S0: Yes. But we're going from a perspective of not let's have the biggest booth and let's lead scan, but it's presence and like again, it's the halo effect, right? When somebody is ready to buy, they will come to us and want to talk to us because they have seen us at places, their friends talk about how great our product is, they have the best experience, we have solved really hard problems, they're seeing good quality research from us in the learning. So, you know, you never know when a buyer is ready to engage, but you want to be there at the time and you want to be the top name in their mind when they're ready to engage in a problem that you can solve. And so we create a lot more of that halo effect, the community, the content. As an example, last week was Black Hat, one of the largest cybersecurity conferences in Las Vegas. We didn't have a booth, but we had this incredible restaurant we had taken over inside the convention center that everybody had to pass through to get to the booth. We had brunches and lunches and talks and dinners, and people could walk in, spend five minutes, relax, sit down, have a coffee, follow along, move along. There's no sales pressure, there's nobody coming in, like, you know, forcing you to take certain actions to get in there. And and you know, our hope is it's a memorable thing people leave behind with. [00:38:39] S1: What are some of the things, you know, in RedLock uh that you were not doing that you learned on distribution at Palo?