00:08:29 · Varun Badhwar, Siddhartha Ahluwalia
And the importance of investing in the right team upfront. I think we made the mistake early on in the first couple of companies where it was like, well, we don't have a lot of funding. Let's figure out how do we cut corners. And I just realized eventually, even like your equity, right? As a founder, you don't want to give up too much equity. Um, but you can only build a successful company if you share the wealth and you find the best talent and kind of unconstrain yourself to do that. [00:08:58] S1: So, so let's compare your journey now in Redlock, right? How much did you raise in the first few rounds and how big did your team get before you got acquired?
00:08:58 · Siddhartha Ahluwalia, Varun Badhwar
[00:08:58] S1: So, so let's compare your journey now in Redlock, right? How much did you raise in the first few rounds and how big did your team get before you got acquired? [00:09:07] S0: So with Redlock, we had raised a 2.5 million seed and about an $8 million Series A. So we were very capital efficient as a company. We'd raised under $12 million in funding. The company was about 85 people, split half and half between India, uh, Bangalore, and US. And um, you know, we were closing in on the first 10 million of ARR, a short amount of time actually, from inception to that point. And the exit was uh, you know, close to $250 million exit for the company, which was an incredible return for all our investors. It was life-changing for every employee because, again, I believe in investing in people, you know, a lot of times people say, well, in India, when you're hiring employees, they care more about cash, less about equity. And I would always educate people like, look, salaries pay the bills, but life-changing moments come from equity. And I think it's really interesting, even when I look back now, many years from now, I'll get a text message from somebody saying, Look, I bought the second vacation house. This is all thanks to you know the redlock run I had, or you know, I've got this nice new car, couldn't have it done without redlock. So I think it's very fulfilling knowing that it was not just a wealth creation event for investors and founders, but for every individual that worked in this company.
00:09:07 · Varun Badhwar, Siddhartha Ahluwalia
[00:09:07] S0: So with Redlock, we had raised a 2.5 million seed and about an $8 million Series A. So we were very capital efficient as a company. We'd raised under $12 million in funding. The company was about 85 people, split half and half between India, uh, Bangalore, and US. And um, you know, we were closing in on the first 10 million of ARR, a short amount of time actually, from inception to that point. And the exit was uh, you know, close to $250 million exit for the company, which was an incredible return for all our investors. It was life-changing for every employee because, again, I believe in investing in people, you know, a lot of times people say, well, in India, when you're hiring employees, they care more about cash, less about equity. And I would always educate people like, look, salaries pay the bills, but life-changing moments come from equity. And I think it's really interesting, even when I look back now, many years from now, I'll get a text message from somebody saying, Look, I bought the second vacation house. This is all thanks to you know the redlock run I had, or you know, I've got this nice new car, couldn't have it done without redlock. So I think it's very fulfilling knowing that it was not just a wealth creation event for investors and founders, but for every individual that worked in this company. [00:10:26] S1: And uh you ultimately created Prisma Cloud, which became uh one of the core infrastructures of Palo Alto. [00:10:35] S0: Yeah. [00:10:36] S1: Right. So how was that so strategic to Palo Alto? Did you realize that at that point in time?
00:10:43 · Varun Badhwar
[00:10:43] S0: I I don't know if anybody could have realized how strategic it could have been. It was certainly strategic, and I'll tell you a small story around this. Um Nikesh had just come in, Nikesh Arora had just come in as the CEO of Palo Alto Networks. Um it was the first acquisition he was making. Remember at the time, people were wondering why this non-cybersecurity person is a Googler coming in and taking over the realm of a cybersecurity company. Palo Alto was known for firewalls and network security. And the craziest part that most people don't remember is a couple of months before Nikesh joined, Palo Alto Networks had made one of its biggest ever acquisitions of a direct competitor of Redlock, a company called Evident.io. And the interesting thing is after that acquisition, you know, Endor, I'm sorry, Redlock was really deep into um winning even more accounts. Like we got even more momentum after the acquisition while Evident was busy getting acquired, and you know, they were limited to AWS, Endor, uh, sorry, I keep saying Endor, Redlock was much more gravitated around multi-cloud. And you know, the architecture was fundamentally different. And so we were scaling and we were beating Evident and Palo Alto Networks on a lot of deals. And so when Nikesh came around and the team said, Hey, you should come meet Nikesh, I just said, like, you're my biggest competitor, you know, I'm not going to waste my time. And long story short, Nikesh and I met had a meeting in the minds. He said, Look, I'm making a bet in this, you have to make a bet in me. He created very big goals that I thought were fundamentally unachievable. But kudos to him because the only way it was possible to scale this thing up is to not tuck Redlock as part of the network security business. But he allowed us to create an entirely new business unit that had never been done before. We used to call it a speed boat. So if you think about the big network security business as a mega yacht sailing in the middle of the ocean, cloud security was a new business. You needed a speedboat to be scrappy, move fast, and catch up to the core business.
00:12:49 · Varun Badhwar, Siddhartha Ahluwalia
And so Nikesh was incredible at funding me and my team and giving me the opportunity to not just scale that team of 80 people up to eventually close to a thousand people in three years, but in that midst, we acquired nine other companies to fold them into the Red Lock architecture and really create this monster platform, which was for cloud security. And to a great degree, I'll take a little bit of credit for Wiz's success because we showed such a great acceleration of revenue and path that Wiz eventually and the founders there were building something else, pivoted to cloud security, got funding on the backs of Palo Alto Network's Prisma Cloud Success. And obviously, kudos to them. They've built uh you know a 32 billion outcome for themselves and the teams there. Did you angel invest in Wiz? No, I couldn't. I mean, it was a direct competitor to us. [00:13:40] S1: Got it. But but they started, I think, just at the time that you were leaving Palo Alto to start Endor? [00:13:48] S0: They started about 18 months before that. They started right when COVID started, like at the beginning of 2020 is when they pivoted to cloud security. They started a little bit before in 2019. Uh, but yeah, 2020, and then I was still at Palo Alto Networks for another 18 months. [00:14:02] S1: Yeah, probably, you know, if you hadn't known it's inside of 2020, that it was so strategic, you could have asked for a billion dollars.
00:14:10 · Varun Badhwar
[00:14:10] S0: People tell me that all the time. They're like, hey, you sold Redlock too cheap. And I like my my theory is I never look back and have regrets. I think it was an amazing outcome even till this point. Uh for those of uh the people that held on to the Palo Alto network stock, that stock is you know 15 times higher than what it was. So, you know, if you take that bet that that was a multi-billion dollar acquisition now. But but no, look, life is a matter of learnings. I think startups, the the people almost think about the initiation and the incubation of a startup as the hardest part. And I think in the moment it feels that way because it is really hard. But I think startup building gets harder. And um across the board, right? When you're raising, you're raising on a dream, you're raising on an idea. If you're a repeat founder like myself, we don't have to prove anything. Money comes easy. Fortunately, if you're a young founder, you still have to prove conviction in the business, but you're not showing for revenue and scale. You're selling the TAM and you're selling the product architecture insights. And you can raise the, you know, whatever valuation these days we see crazy valuations. There's a bunch of cybersecurity companies starting out with $100 million seed funding now with near zero revenue. And that's fine. But what do you do when you have to scale revenue? Now you could be the smartest founder with product instincts, but if you don't understand how to build go-to-market for scale, that's another hard problem to crack. And engineering can be scientific. Sales marketing is art and science, so it kind of starts getting more and more complicated. And then initially you have one building block of engineering, then you had engineering and marketing and sales, and all of these building blocks have to connect. And then people start asking you about go to market and efficiency and eventually CAC and LTV. And so growing and scaling a healthy, sustainable business, I think over time gets harder.