General Partner at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers, Mamoon Hamid, and CEO at Netskope, Sanjay Beri, talk about building your company for 100+ years. Sanjay discusses scaling your culture throughout your journey. He also shares his tips on hiring in the fight-for-talent job market.
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Transcript
Mamoon Hamid: Good afternoon everyone. So nice to see you all. I can’t actually see you all because the lights are shining in my eyes. I’m so happy to have here a friend and a colleague, Sanjay Beri. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Sanjay for over five years, maybe even six years now, and got a chance to invest and work with Sanjay right out of the gate when he started Netskope back in 2012.
Mamoon Hamid: A few months ago I went off his board, so now I get to see him after a few months and catch up on the business, but he won’t tell me because I’m no longer on his board what his numbers are. But maybe you guys can ask him questions, and maybe we’ll get it out of him.
Mamoon Hamid: Sanjay, a pleasure to have you here. Maybe for the benefit of the audience, it would be great for you to tell people, just in your own words what Netskope is and what it does.
Sanjay Beri: First, it’s a pleasure that I should be with Mamoon. He was my first board member, and by far my best. But Netskope basically, we sell to enterprises.
Mamoon Hamid: You get my wallet. My whole wallet.
Sanjay Beri: I don’t need it. Trust me. We sell to enterprises, Fortune 5000 companies and we focus on cybersecurity for their cloud applications. SaaS Infrastructure Service Pas. Working with organizations to let them leverage the cloud but do it securely. The biggest bottleneck nowadays to adoption of cloud in most enterprises is the Chief Security Officer. So we give him or her what they need to say yes to enabling the cloud. That’s what we do.
Mamoon Hamid: Cool. You left Juniper, where you were running a pretty substantial part of the organization and business and revenues in multiple hundreds of millions if not over a billion, and decided to leave a pretty great job at a fairly young age and leave and start Netskope. What was the motivation behind that?
Sanjay Beri: First thing is, everybody’s different in their life, what they want to do. For me, I love building. I love putting a stamp on the industry. I love working in a culture where there isn’t bureaucracy or politics. It’s open, it’s collaborative. All of those things led me to do what I love, which is Netskope. I had started a company previously, and I learned a lot from it, good and bad. I wanted to go build a legendary cybersecurity company. To do that, I had to do that and start off with a blank whiteboard. Build a culture I want, with the people I want, with the product I want, and then go to market that the market needed.
Sanjay Beri: That’s why I left. The only person I had to convince was my family. That was it. But I was dead set on doing it, and extremely happy we did it. The people that we’ve been able to bring on, I would think they would say the exact same thing.
Mamoon Hamid: If you could just talk about some of the early people you brought on and how you chose your co-founders, and then also, the first set of employees. Just to get some context, Netskope was started inside our office at Social Capital. It very quickly went from Sanjay to –
Sanjay Beri: We took his whole office up.
Mamoon Hamid: -to four Indian guys to 15 engineers, and there’s more diversity in that first 15 from the four Indian guys. Actually there was Leben too, right, so it was great. We also used to joke, “Hey Sanjay, you got to mix it up here a little bit.” Because it very quickly took over our whole office within four months. Can you talk about your co-founders, the four of you, to the 15 that you very quickly went to?
Sanjay Beri: One of the key things when you pick people in the beginning of your country, you’re actually finding people who actually build a product. You’re not looking for sales. You’re not looking for marketing. The first thing is you’re looking for great architects, engineers and so. The number one thing for everyone I hire is cultural fit. Cultural fit for us means you’re no ego, no bullshit, you’re an open collaborative person. That’s my number one filter.
Sanjay Beri: When I thought about who I would like as our co-founders, that was my number one thing. Obviously they’re going to be great at what they do, domain-wise. They’re going to be great architects, they’re going to be developed in cyberworld. But there’s a lot of people who are great at that. But there are very few people who are great, as many companies would call them distinguished engineers or architects, very few who are great and humble. I.e., when they draw on a whiteboard and … a lot of these folks will draw on a whiteboard, they’ll turn around to a group and they’ll say, “This is what we should do, why don’t you go do it.” I told them, when you turn around there’s a mirror, and the mirror is you and you got to go do it.
Sanjay Beri: It’s very hard to find that combination of person who has had that experience, understands how to build great enterprise product, yet is humble. That’s how I pick them. When you think about picking them, it’s very hard when you look for a co-founder if you don’t know them, if you haven’t had experience in the trenches with them. How do you know what they’re going to be like in the worst of times? I went to the three people that I knew fit that bill. They all came from varied backgrounds, varied places. But they also fit very well together. That’s how I found them.
Sanjay Beri: They’re here today. They’re still sort of the product leaders of our company. Over time they changed their roles. They’re not managers, not leaders. They’re individuals. But because of their cultural fit, as they grew, they were savvy enough to realize that, look, there needs to people who manage us and are above us, and so on. That’s how I picked them.
Mamoon Hamid: You mentioned that they’re actually still with the company, and they’re doing a variety of roles, and you’ve hired managers, V.P.s. How has that transition gone?
Sanjay Beri: When you look at folks who fit that cultural mode. Obviously the big thing is, when we started Netskope, our goal was build an iconic, independent cyber company. That’s very important, every word. You can build your company, and you can build it in your mind saying, “I’m going to go sell my company.” We were very clear. We’re going to build a company for the longterm, because this is our place to put a stamp on the industry. You shouldn’t start a company in that mode all the time. But for me that’s what I wanted to do. That’s what those people wanted to do.
Sanjay Beri: If you have that mindset that you want to build an iconic, longterm company, you’re going to do what’s right for the company. And what’s right for the company may mean, that maybe you were the head of engineering, now you’re no longer. Maybe you were the head of sales, and now you’re head of a region of sales. I think people who are self aware enough to realize that if their heart and their goal is to build and be part of an iconic company, they got to do what is right and what is necessary, and in many cases that means bringing on others who are right at a different scale and at a different part of the company’s journey.
Sanjay Beri: All of them are there, and they love what they’re doing. They’re still part of the heart and soul of the company.
Mamoon Hamid: Just as you’re talking about picking your co-founders and bringing on executives, you must also have a philosophy as it comes to picking your investors, the people that work alongside with you. I imagine a lot of the folks in the audience are either founders, they’re inside of start-ups, or they’re going to start a company, and they think about the people that they pick to work with to fund them. How do you go about doing that?
Sanjay Beri: One of the most important “hires” you make is your investor, your board member. Just like you would hire your hundredth, your four hundredth or our thousandth person, you want to obviously have the frame of what your culture, your company is. The number one thing for us when I chose our board member was, they had to be of that ilk. An open, collaborative, transparent person, but also they can’t be a pontificator. People who come in a room and say, “You know when I was doing X 20 years ago, I used to do it this way.” It’s the worst thing. It’s a different world, different time. You got to let your entrepreneurs be who they are and build their company.
Sanjay Beri: For us and for myself, it was cultural fit, but people who understood that their role at a board was to help the company. It wasn’t to pontificate and instruct and tell. People who understand that concept of building a company let the entrepreneurs and the founders have their space, yet provide wise advice as they build a company. That’s the type of people we picked. To be frank we met a lot of other folks were the other side, and I look back, and I don’t think our company would be where we were if we had made the wrong decision.
Sanjay Beri: We’ve kept our board very small. It’s very open. By the time we have a board meeting, everybody knows roughly what’s going on. We’re texting beforehand using Slack. All the rest. That’s sort of how we picked our board. It was one of the most important things we did.
Mamoon Hamid: Cool. Along the same lines, the title of this chat is The Road to Building a Hundred Year Company. Every company that’s been around for 100 years, not that many actually, but any durable country, has a set of specific things that it does, especially as it pertains to culture. I know that there’s a very specific Netskope culture. Can you just expound on that, talk more about that? What are some of the specific things that you do and you’ve been doing from the early days?
Sanjay Beri: If you look at our industry. We’re in the enterprise industry, we’re a sort of B2B company. We sell to the Fortune 5000 and so on. Many of the folks in our space, they were built 10 years ago, 20 years ago. Frankly, their cultures are very political and bureaucratic, and you have 20 people to make a decision, and so on. I tell you that story because when you think about competitive advantage, it’s not just about the product and this go to market that you put together, but it is about your culture. I’m a big believer that’s the number asset that we have and the number one thing that will eventually get us to where we want to be.
Sanjay Beri: What that means is, when I say there’s no BS or politics or bureaucracy, we mean it. We put it in every slide deck, we talk about in every hire we make. If we see it, and as you grow, we’re closing in on 500 people, and as you grow internationally, you’re going to see it sometimes, and you’ve got to stamp it out and be very deterministic and make sure your leaders do.
Sanjay Beri: We’re an open collaborative company. We are very open. Sometimes we share too much. In a good way.
Mamoon Hamid: Can I interject for a second? The only company where I’ve ever seen the board meeting slides are actually all hand slides and then you add a few more slides to the all hand slides. The company’s seen everything before the actual the board’s seen it. That’s how transparent we are.
Sanjay Beri: It is, yeah. Because the company should know how we’re doing in each area, just like the board would want to know. That’s sort of the culture, and I think when you build your company internationally. Open up Europe and APAC, all of these places, as you get further from maybe where your epicenter is, that communication can break down. If you don’t have the culture of being open and transparent and disseminating information and talking and anybody in the company can talk to anyone. You can Slack anybody. It works really well. I’ll get somebody who hired one month into the job, working in Australia, he or she is an SE, and they’ll Slack me and say, “hey did you know X?” That kind of openness, it actually espouses great information for which you can never otherwise know. I think the culture feeds itself and it makes it a much better company.
Mamoon Hamid: Specific things that you do, culture-wise?
Sanjay Beri: A couple things we do. First of all, it’s everything from how your office looks. Nobody has an office. Not allowed. No doors. I sit amidst everybody. One, we don’t have that, we won’t. Not going to have any offices, ever. Obviously there’s conference rooms and so on, where people can do what they need to do. From a board meeting perspective, any board member. People ask me, “Hey can I go talk to our board member?” I go, “You can talk to anybody you want. You can tell them anything you want.” It’s just a concept that, look, we’re not here to tell you who to talk to, how to talk to them. We feel comfortable and self aware enough, in good and the bad of the company, that you should be able to talk to anybody.
Sanjay Beri: Whether it’s physical layout, whether it’s how we use tools to communicate, whether it’s how we use our all hands as our board deck, whether it’s me make people aware when we make mistakes and we do the wrong thing. We’re like, “look we made a mistake, and this is why.” We don’t hide it, we don’t cheer lead all the time. We actually talk about losses, we talk about what we did wrong. Those are the things that truly mean openness. It’s not openness when it’s convenient or when it’s positive. It’s openness when it’s not too.
Mamoon Hamid: You’re down in Los Altos so you’ve got competition from Google and Facebook and all the other big public companies. when you’re recruiting, does that message come through?
Sanjay Beri: It does. If you look at … first of all, in what we do is obviously domain. We’re an enterprise company. It just happens that a lot of our targets for folks to employ, from an engineering perspective, are actually int he South Bay, so you end up, yes, those are the companies that often take thousands of people. Those companies are very large, they’re actually fairly bureaucratic. And they reorg every six to nine months. There’s a lot of people who don’t want that. They want to work at a place where they can put their legacy, they can see what they do, and they can see it impact the company and the industry. They want to be part of building something, maybe not expanding it once you’re 10, 20, 30, 40,000 people.
Sanjay Beri: When you think about competing for talent, yes, you’re not going to compete against in the old day … well, five years ago you weren’t going to compete against comp with some of the equity and so on. Now it’s actually a lot better when you look at some of those companies and what they can offer. You got to compete on a heart. What do they want to do? Do they want to be part of something that they can be from the ground up, that they can come every day and go, “I’m actually going to see what I do? I’m going to see it out there, and it’s not going to be filtered through 10 layers, and not going to get reorged every six months.”
Sanjay Beri: I think it’s just very different. Some people like that and some don’t.
Mamoon Hamid: Mist companies are no international. They have multiple offices. You have a pretty significance office now in India, where it’s not just outsourcing of … it is real engineers. How do you maintain the culture across … and it’s how many people is it?
Sanjay Beri: Over there? We’re about 500 people, and about 150 over there?
Mamoon Hamid: How did it translate over? What tools do you use to communicate? What do you …
Sanjay Beri: Common tools we use for communication. We try not to use as much email. We use things like Slack, project based, obviously from a development point of view, which is most of what that team is. Obviously we’re using things like and so on as tools for development. Wikis and beyond.
Sanjay Beri: It works well. I think the single different thing for us when we looked at … we only have two development offices. Los Altos and Bangalore was that we didn’t go there for cost. We went there because there were specific talent that we knew we could get in a specific domain in. Some of them actually used to be people I know. They were very senior people. We went there because of talent. I’m a big believer when you’re building your company, you don’t go somewhere for cost. You go somewhere where there’s specific talent you want. You can build a heart of that company, and you need to hire somebody to run. BDMD. One of the best folks to run that operation, ran it for me over at my previous companies as well. Without that person, we wouldn’t be able to get to where we are.
Sanjay Beri: Same thing in Europe. We built our London office, and we built it around a core set of people. Mostly sales and marketing. We’ve been growing that for our hub for Europe. I think it’s finding the right early people, finding people who truly believe in what you want, that espouse the culture. Then you actually empower them to go build that region and do it right.
Mamoon Hamid: A lot of companies these days adopt these bottoms up selling motions, so adoption happens, and then you go sell it once there’s use. You’re mostly the opposite, which is you’re a top down. Traditional large enterprise sale, Fortune 5000. Can you talk about how you went about building your sales and your go to market?
Sanjay Beri: You’re right. This is a model that is more applicable if you’re selling to the enterprise, and you’re selling to organizations that are more 1,000 to 5,000 employees and above. Not necessarily for below that. Our target was start high, get great brands in each vertical, and then move down. The first thing in everything we do is we say we’re building a longterm iconic company. We’re going to do things not for the next quarter, which by the way many our board members may ask you to do, and you have to say no, and you have to pick the right board members who understand what you’re doing and be aligned with it.
Sanjay Beri: For us we said, “Look, the first thing we’re going to do is we’re going throw all our business through a channel. We’re going to hire great salespeople who are hunters, channel friendly and high activity. They’re not the people who work at Cisco, any of those companies now. If they work there, they’re pretty much disqualified from being the type of people we want. Because they’re not going to be hunters, they’re going to be farmers. So, find hunters, channel friend, high activity. There are CEOs … we just have our sales kickoff going on right now. And we say, “Look, the best reps are CEOs of their region. They are people who share and collaborate, and they’re high activity and channel friend.” And channel friendly is very important because the people we compete against are like 10-20,000 people public companies. We need to make ourselves look bigger than we are.
Sanjay Beri: Hire those people. Build a channel. By building a channel you look 10 times bigger than you are. In the first year, you feed your channel. They don’t do anything. They basically take 10 or 15 points off every deal. But after the first year, they bring you business. Now, instead of having 150 or 200 sales people, you have 2,000 sales people. If you think longterm about that, and you do it right, that’s what you’ll end up with. If you think short term, you’re going to say, “I’m not giving up 10, 15, 20 points in my first, second year.” You won’t actually build a channel because they’ll feel you’re not channel friendly. That’s how we built our team.
Sanjay Beri: It is meat eating sales folks. Great at selling to the enterprise. They sell to the C level and the V.P. director level, and then we have systems engineers we pair with them to win the hearts and minds of the people who actually use the product and operate it. The biggest thing that I tell people in sales is, it isn’t about winning … the person who operates it. It is isn’t about winning the mid-level directorate or the C’s, it’s about winning them all. Because any part of that pyramid from the CIO or CSO down to the person who implements your product, any of them can side swipe you. There’s so much politics in enterprise sales. And anybody who’s done it knows. You can’t just have a product, you have to have a go to market engine that takes all parts of that pyramid and works them pretty hard.
Mamoon Hamid: You mentioned this to me earlier. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to share this, but you said you have 25% of the Fortune 100, and in four years of selling or so?
Sanjay Beri: Yeah, we just finished our fourth year.
Mamoon Hamid: It seems pretty daunting to be able to get just one Fortune 100 company. You have to build up to that. How did you build up to be able to sell to even the first Fortune 100 company. Just given how complex the sale is, how much is required out of you, ’cause I think for many of us, just getting one big sale that’s a seven figure deal would be a big accomplishment. And I’m sure success begets success after a certain point. But you have to get there before you have the right to the next thing.
Sanjay Beri: You do. Obviously everybody has a different competitive landscape, and ours is public, big companies worth $10-$20 billion. How do you beat them? The reality is, you got to have a better product. I know it sounds simple, but ultimately your goal when you’re starting is get an at-bat. More than have the goal is to get an at-bat. I want them to actually look at our product. If they look at our product, our product needs to be so much better that they’re going to go, “Wait a minute, I’m going to use these folks.”
Sanjay Beri: The first thing you have to do is really believe and invest in R&D. We invest an inordinate amount in R&D. I know some people like that.
Mamoon Hamid: That burn rate of his.
Sanjay Beri: You have to because if you’re targeting that set of customers, once you get an at-bat, you better be that much better that you’re going to win. And they’re going to see your product and go, “I really love these guys. I love these folks.” And then they’re going to ask you, “Well, wait a minute. Is this company going to be around?” I can make my bet, and it’s a bet. Some of them will bet their career on this thing. They’ll bet their career, and if it’s not going to go the right way, they’re going to get damaged in their career. Then they’re going to want stability. They’re going to look at your company and go, “Wait a minute. Who’s your investors? How much capital do you have?” We did our first round with Mamoon and we took $5.5 million. We got our first couple Fortune 100 through that.
Sanjay Beri: The reality is what we did at that point, when they said, “Wow, you only have $5.5 million and so on when you’re competing as these public companies,” is we one their hearts. We showed them, that look, this is our vision. In many cases you talk about the firm and the person that invests and their track record. That builds you up. You need to find those people who are in that point that they’re going to say, “You know what? Yes. I’m not just somebody who’s going to buy what is safe, what everybody else buys.” You get your first one or two. They become your evangelists. You use them to get to many others.
Sanjay Beri: It’s hard work. Enterprise sales Is nine to 12 months. It’s not go to a website and buy anything. It is get an at-bat, do a POC, go through procurement, grind that out with procurement people who beat you down and tell you you’re too small. You just have to go through all of that. You will go through it all, and if you have a good product, you’ll make it through. Once you make it through, you have references you can use everywhere.
Mamoon Hamid: I think one thing that might not be appreciated is that 2012 when we funded your company, there were probably one or two other competitors, and then a year later they’re probably seven or eight competitors. And at last count I think you may be the only stand alone company left. Everything else has been acquired for small amounts, some larger. Again, to go build this stand alone durable company that lasts many decades. There’s a massive consolidation that happened along the way, and you decided not to play and be acquired, which again speaks to your desire to keep the company stand alone. Can you just talk about the competitive nature of the industry and what happened over the last few years?
Sanjay Beri: Yes, so when you think about building your company, there’s no right or wrong answer. Getting acquired is perfectly fine for folks. It’s just, what do you want to do in your heart? In heart, we were very clear since the beginning that we want to build an independent, iconic security company. That’s our goal. We say it since the beginning. We say it now. Some people self select not to come because, “Wait, I don’t want to do that. I want to be here for two years and flip.” This is not the company for that. For us, we’re very clear that’s what we want to do. When everybody came calling, we said, “Thank you but no, we’re not interested. Not even interested in talking.”
Sanjay Beri: The last company in our space was acquired for close to $800 million. And we said, “look, we’re not even interested in talking.” For us, it’s also, what do you want to do? I have a good family. I have good friends. A nice house and all the rest. I’m not in it for that. I’m in it because I want to put a stamp on this industry, and so do the people who joined in the beginning. We want to be true to that and build our company. It’s obviously not easy, and it never will be. If that’s what you want to do, you’ve got to have conviction, and that conviction will pound you through everything else.
Sanjay Beri: I think it’s pretty well known in the industry that that’s who we are. One of the side effects of saying that publicly and believing and actually having it is, there’s a lot of people, partners, who actually like that. Who will say, “Wait a minute, I don’t want to partner with that big company. ‘Cause maybe they’re competitive. People actually gravitate to you as well. You can use it actually as an advantage. A lot of people think if you’re small and you’re competing against 20,000 and you’re 5-600 people. Maybe you’re at a disadvantage. But you’re not. You can actually turn it around in every way. From partnerships to field sales. I tell ever CIO or CSO I meet, “We’re agile. 500-600 people. We have a Fortune 100. 25% of them. We partner to you. We don’t need to sell to everybody. When we sell to you we’re going to partner with you. You’re not going to get that from those other companies. You’re just going to be another notch on their wall.
Sanjay Beri: Turning it around as you grow is very important.
Mamoon Hamid: You’ve used the words, “building an iconic security company” a few times now, and it’s also the title of this chat. Can you just double click into that. What does that really mean?
Sanjay Beri: If you look in the industry we’re going after. And everyone is going after different industries and different buyers. But for what we do, if you look at the cybersecurity market, obviously it’s a rare market that transforms itself every few years. There’s new transformational companies that come up maybe every five, 10 years. You can look at it from multiple lenses. You can look at it from, “What are those companies valued at?” We’re at between $10-20 billion. You can look at it from what’s the impact they have on the market? What’s their adoption? They’re adopted 50%, 60%, 70% of the Fortune 500. They’re average spend is this. They view them as a strategic vendor.
Sanjay Beri: Those are all things that we think about as iconic. But what we also think about is, when somebody hears our name, when a customer talks about us, when our people are working in our company, they actually think of the company as an amazing place that they want to come and work that’s still not bureaucratic, political or so on. Where it still has the notion of innovation, moving quickly, being very agile. I think it’s a mix of what iconic means to us is achieving a certain goal, which is what you’re worth, frankly, financially. Maintaining the cultural that we have, and then having our customers look at our brand as iconic. That’s what it means.
Mamoon Hamid: I’d ask you what your attrition rates are, but it’s probably not a fair question.
Sanjay Beri: You mean for customers?
Mamoon Hamid: No, for employees and customers.
Sanjay Beri: It’s funny, you mention that. In every region … one of the things I did at Juniper was I ran their overseas sites. It used to be that people, “15% attrition. That’s amazing.” I’d go, “What? 15% attrition is amazing?” But in certain geographies it actually is the norm. For us, you will always have attrition. But for us it’s been very low. Low single digits for us. We’re very happy about that.
Mamoon Hamid: That’s employee attrition.
Sanjay Beri: Yeah.
Mamoon Hamid: That’s really good.
Sanjay Beri: It is, yeah. Really happy about that. As you scale, I think you alluded to before, when I hired my first sales lead, one of the things I told the person, I said, “Hey, in two years you won’t be my head of sales.” And the person said, “Are you trying to close me, ’cause that’s not a good way to close me.” But it’s sort of reality. As you grow your company in every function, you’re going to have different people for different stages. The key is those people need to be either self aware enough when they join to realize that. Or, you will move on, right?
Mamoon Hamid: Yes. Maybe talk about something that’s not Netskope, and some of the things that you’re excited about just in general in the broad landscape of technology, that I know in your copious spare time you think a lot about it. What else excites you about what’s going on in the world?
Sanjay Beri: One of the amazing things that everybody talks about is this notion of there’s a ton of data in this world and everybody’s gathering data. If you’re an enterprise, it’s actually the opposite. You have too much data. You’re like, “I don’t even know what to do with this. I have all this data. I don’t people to do anything with it. I can’t process it. It’s a flood, and I don’t know what’s good and what’s bad and so on.” Having this amount of data while maybe useful for Facebook and Google, and maybe not useful for us, in that context, is definitely not useful in many cases for an enterprise because they don’t have … if you’re an enterprise, and I’m talking about enterprise what I see interesting, they don’t have the amount of people that those type of organizations have.
Sanjay Beri: What I find really interesting is people are making that amount of big data small data, consumable data. Taking that data and then in an automated way making it easily consumable for most of us, which are people who just can’t pore through it. Some of that is a mix of people who are using algorithms, some calling machine learning or AI, who are using those algorithms to actually contextualize and take that data and make it small data that’s actually actionable. That’s very, very interesting int he enterprise, because that’s the number one problem they have is not enough resources, there’s a massive hiring shortage. Every average company has so many open requisitions. And they can’t find people, and they never will find people. That technology that can automate and make that amount of data small data is very interesting. Not only in the enterprise world but in the consumer world.
Mamoon Hamid: I don’t know how much time we have, but I have a couple more questions. You’re a technology company, hardcore technology company. You have a few hundred engineers. They do all kinds of different things. Can you just touch on some of the coolest things that Netskope does as a technology company?
Sanjay Beri: One of the advantages that we espouse in our company is that we have the benefit of being born five years ago. And I know you might say, “Why is that a benefit?” With technology evolving, if you are born 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you wouldn’t have access to some of the technology and stacks that you do now. If you look at most organizations in engineering, and you built work cloud, our product is built in the cloud throughout the world. It’s also built on premise. They didn’t have access to back end technology that was high speed, no sequel, analytics that could process a large amount of data. They built it using your traditional Oracle or whatever data base, and then one day realized they were spending too much money and try to get rid of it.
Sanjay Beri: They wouldn’t build their product to abstract from hardware. They wouldn’t use things like containerization and kubernetes to make DevOps actually real. They still have that mode of development QA solution test release. This is our industry in the security network. They still have two to six month release cycles, sometimes a year. This notion of blending what the SAS world already knows, like in a box and a Slack and … all these folks built … you look at Facebook, even their enterprise product, they release every hour. That world with the worlds of networks and enterprise security, which is still stuck int he old model. Taking those concepts and those technologies and those stacks and applying it to an enterprise context security is actually pretty transformational because now you can actually be agile. You can make your developers be extracted from the nuances of your back end or your infrastructure and so on. And you can actually deliver a true cloud dev model.
Sanjay Beri: For us, that’s the tact we’ve taken. None of our competitors, which are dinosaurs. 10 years old, 20. They didn’t have the advantage of being born now to be able to do that. For us that’s a great competitive advantage.
Mamoon Hamid: Pick one cool technology that you guys built.
Sanjay Beri: That we use, you mean?
Mamoon Hamid: Use or actually built internally.
Sanjay Beri: One of the things that we actually built, when you think about us, we do gather a massive amount of data about everything that an enterprise is doing for the purpose of finding cybersecurity incidents. One of the great things that we’ve been able to do and build is machine learning algorithms to pinpoint data theft. Exfiltration of data. Whether you’re working for the company. Whether you’re external to the company. You all read in the press about the latest company losing all of your data. Ultimately a lot of what we do is protect that data. Our algorithms, to be able to detect, find people who are attempting to siphon off data, exfiltrate it, sell it, use it, take it to your competitor, is one of our great IPs.
Mamoon Hamid: Cool. I don’t think we have Q&A here. I think I’ve questioned you enough. I don’t see a timer here, so I’m just going to give you some time back. Is that okay? Yeah.
Sanjay Beri: Thanks Mamoon.
Mamoon Hamid: Thanks Sanjay.
Sanjay Beri: Thank you.
