The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:02:55 · Harry Stebbings
Airwallis are more than just a banking alternative to HSBC or Citi. Airwallis brings you an intelligent financial operating system that powers how global businesses operate and grow, allowing you to manage and automate banking, treasury, payments, and spend. The most exciting part for me, they're heavily investing in agentic finance. If you're scaling globally, you need a banking and finance platform that's borderless, real time, and intelligent. Check out Airwallets today and see how they're helping thousands of businesses like Canva, McLaren, and deal scale at airwallix.com forward slash 20 v c. Terms and conditions apply. Your money is safeguarded, not FSCS protected. See airwallix.com for more details. While Airwallix helps your money move globally, Vanta helps your security keep up. What's one thing in business that's spreading as fast as AI? AI risk. Every new tool your team signs up for, every vendor that turns on AI features, every new integration, each one, I'm sorry to say, is an opportunity for something to go wrong, and most security programs weren't built for AI's pace of growth. Well, that's where Vanta comes in. Vanta is the number one agentic trust platform used by over 16,000 fast moving companies like Ramp, Cursor, Harvey, and more to ensure they're always audit ready. And now Vanta's helping companies like yours. Watch for the risks that show up between orders across your vendors, your AI tools, and your whole environment. How? Well, the Vanta agent works like a twenty four seven GRC engineer in the background, finding issues, drafting fixes, and cutting vendor agreements time by up to 50%. Whether you're a fast growing startup or a global enterprise, Vanta's here to help you automate your security and your compliance and earn and prove trust. My listeners get a special offer. Oh, yes. A special offer, $1,000 off Vanta at vanta.com/20vc. That's vanta.com/20vc for $1,000 off. You have now arrived at your destination. Brandon, it is so good to have you in the studio, dude. Thank you so much for joining me in person.
00:04:52 · Brendan Foody, Harry Stebbings
[00:04:52] S0: Super excited to be here. Thanks for having me, Harry. [00:04:55] S1: So I was thinking about how we're gonna structure this, and I was like, you know what? There's there's quite a lot of myths or rumors around McCaw. And given it's our second time, I thought I could kinda break the ice and just go straight for them. So myth number one that we're gonna tackle, but there was a hack or a leak or whatever. I don't know how you can... Terminology you call it, but a hack, And revenue's been flat. What's really happening with McCore? True or false? [00:05:20] S0: So there was an incident. All of the other parts are false, in that we obviously handled it very quickly. We were in touch with customers. We moved incredibly fast at engaging Mandiant and a bunch of other security consulting firms, and the company's been crushing it ever since. We've expanded our relationships with all of the Frontier Labs and added 300,000,000 in net new ARR in the last sixty days. [00:05:43] S1: 300,000,000 in sixty days? Fuck me. [00:05:46] S0: That's been pretty crazy, yeah. [00:05:47] S1: Keeping Where us were you when you found out about the hack and what did you do? Well, it was
00:05:47 · Harry Stebbings, Brendan Foody
[00:05:47] S1: Keeping Where us were you when you found out about the hack and what did you do? Well, it was [00:05:52] S0: a Saturday, so I was in the office and I was talking with our engineering team. And I think the initial thing is of course, how are we communicating this to customers and trying to be very proactive about understanding exactly what happened, what was accessed, etcetera. And then how do we communicate this to the experts and just containing it, moving quickly on the comms. And then from there, of course, making sure that we put in place all the right things so that it never happens again. [00:06:21] S1: There's a brilliant poet, Roger O. Kipling, who said, you have to keep your head when all about you are losing theirs. That is a time when everyone is losing theirs. Definitely. And by no means, wanna be patronizing when both young, you're younger than me. What do you do to stay calm when that is an oh shit moment?
00:06:21 · Harry Stebbings, Brendan Foody
[00:06:21] S1: There's a brilliant poet, Roger O. Kipling, who said, you have to keep your head when all about you are losing theirs. That is a time when everyone is losing theirs. Definitely. And by no means, wanna be patronizing when both young, you're younger than me. What do you do to stay calm when that is an oh shit moment? [00:06:37] S0: Well, it's interesting because I feel like throughout the lifetime of the business, I have been through a lot of very stressful moments. That was definitely stressful, but it definitely wasn't close to the most stressful one. Seriously. Yeah. I mean, there's been times when I'm freaking out about making sure we get something right with a customer or whatever it is, but part of it is that there was this broad perception on Twitter that was much more exaggerated than what actually happened within the business. And so having a thorough understanding of what actually happened and having really strong relationships with customers gave us a lot of confidence that we would get through it, be on the other side even stronger. And we used to have six values as a company, but we added a seventh value as security to make sure it's very ingrained in the culture. But I think that, yeah, just that confidence that we know what's going on and that there's sort of this echo chamber on X that we need to hedge against a little bit. Do you pay attention [00:07:37] S1: to it, and do founders need to pay attention to it? Definitely.
00:07:37 · Harry Stebbings, Brendan Foody
[00:07:37] S1: to it, and do founders need to pay attention to it? Definitely. [00:07:40] S0: I mean, I think founders need to pay attention to it. Like we had an all hands with a company where we just laid out, here's exactly what's happening, here's the trajectory of the business. And I think that was very helpful to the entire team. But it was definitely annoying that there were all of these people saying things that didn't actually happen and we couldn't quite speak out against them too explicitly. Otherwise, there's going to be the Twitter mob circling and all these recommendations from lawyers, etcetera. [00:08:07] S1: The hard thing is there are often a lot of people with economic incentives behind the scenes Totally. Who will absolutely trounce you and be very negative because they are aligned to a competitor or, you know, we're in a YC company that's been through a lot of shit in the last few days, and that competitor has a lot of people behind them through various different means. And the alignment is not obvious, but it really sounds out on Twitter. [00:08:30] S0: That is exactly what happened. And like, I can even think of one person that's very prominent who's invested in multiple competitors and just like made this tweet about how all [00:08:41] S1: of our data was getting accessed by China when it was totally untrue. You mentioned adding security as a seventh pillar there. We've seen so many hacks. It's almost become normalized, as awful as that sounds. Yeah. Are we about to enter a golden age of cyber given the new threats awakened by AI?
00:08:41 · Harry Stebbings, Brendan Foody
[00:08:41] S1: of our data was getting accessed by China when it was totally untrue. You mentioned adding security as a seventh pillar there. We've seen so many hacks. It's almost become normalized, as awful as that sounds. Yeah. Are we about to enter a golden age of cyber given the new threats awakened by AI? [00:08:59] S0: I think so. I mean, we're even seeing this on the customer side, where our customers obviously are very focused on how do we improve the model cyber defensive capabilities, so that we can have the best AI security engineer that is able to defend every enterprise from all of these attacks. Because in our incident, it was the attacker that used a swarm of coding agents to help get access to the system as is happening in a lot of these. And so I think there's going to be an enormous boom in AI security engineering tools and various forms of defense that are able to help protect companies against all of the increasing waves of cyber incidents that are just getting started. [00:09:41] S1: Can I just be very naive and dumb here? How do the swarms of coding agents make for such dangerous and malicious actors? How does