Bootstrapping Using Services First, Raising Money Later: Rohyt Belani, CEO of PhishMe (Part 2)

Rohyt Belani: Here I am on a student visa with eight weeks to go till graduation, and I was starting to scramble for a job. Then, I just ran into a job. I ran into a gentleman, literally, in the hallways of Carnegie-Mellon. I was introduced via email to him. He was an Adjunct Professor. He was teaching a security course that I was not taking. I ran into him. I was naïve enough to not think of it as an interview. I literally showed up dressed in flip-flops, shorts, unshaven for three days, and looked completely sloppy. I met this gentleman who was the founder of a security company and an adjunct professor at Carnegie-Mellon. 45 minutes into the conversation with him, he actually offered me a job at his company.

Sramana Mitra: This was all happening in the Pittsburgh area, right?

Rohyt Belani: That’s right.

Sramana Mitra: That’s cool.

Rohyt Belani: It was the most bizarre thing. I was told everything about dressing well and showing up a certain way for interviews. I didn’t know this was an interview. The next thing I knew, I was offered a job at a security startup. I had no other option, so I took it, but it turned into something really amazing. It was a great ride. It was a company that was doing a lot of work on the front lines of security.

It was the company behind the Hacking Exposed series of books. I got to work with some of the authors there, and I had a great three years. They got acquired by McAfee in 2004. When we got acquired in 2004, I chose to leave because it didn’t seem like the right place for me to be, career-wise.

I actually went in and joined Kevin Mandia who had started Mandiant just four months ago. It was operating with its first five employees, literally out of a basement in Alexandria, Virginia without a window. He actually asked me to come and set up the New York City office for Mandiant, which later turned into a Unicorn. I worked there for just over two years. Things went well. I realized that when it came to security consulting, it was not a capital intensive business to start and it was something that I had figured out, having done it for about five and a half years.

I got together with a gentleman called Aaron Higbee who I had worked with. We started a security consulting company that focused on mobile security in early 2007. Just so you get a little bit of an idea of the timeline. The iPhone 1st generation was launched mid-2007. When we started this company, smartphones weren’t really a thing. When we told people we were running a company that focused on mobile security, they looked at us like we were crazy. We did that. That company was acquired as well.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services First, Raising Money Later: Rohyt Belani, CEO of PhishMe
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