Bootstrapping a High Growth Cyber Security Venture with a Paycheck: Christian Geyer, CEO of ACTFORE (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the subsidiary doing that warranted spinning it out into its own company?

Christian Geyer: So, I’ll get to what we do, but I think it’s good to set the stage of where we were with the pandemic. I joined Active Nav in March 2020, five days before the actual announcement of the pandemic and the shutdowns. I went on a global tour to tour all the offices the EMEA and APAC regions. Within my first week, my first directive was to shut down all offices and send everyone home worldwide. That was my first global directive as a COO for this new software company, five days into my tenure.

As most businesses faced during that time, due to the retraction of the market and the tightening of belts, companies were less likely to purchase. When you looked at how people were spending, they were spending it on the requirements of a business, not the luxuries. Unfortunately, proactive data governance is considered a luxury. People have a tendency to ignore the problem, and the problem can be sensitive data in their environment. They ignore it until it becomes too much of a problem.

What we faced pretty rapidly at the tail end of 2020 and 2021 was declining revenues, losses, and an erosion of cash or working capital. There wasn’t enough funding to run the business. Like everyone else out there, you saw massive layoffs and reductions in force. You saw organizations going to furloughs where employees were basically told to go home and they couldn’t come back to work until the business rebounded.

Well, we did everything that’s out there in every playbook. Now, we tried to pivot into new markets. We retracted or pulled back from hiring. We laid employees off. We went to part-time, we furloughed employees. We did everything to keep the business afloat. But eventually working capital runs out, especially in the pandemic.

So, we had to look at how else can we generate funds. The easiest solution for me was instead of trying to sell up proactive service where it’s a luxury, we move into a reactive service where it’s a requirement. That’s what spurred the idea of ACTFORE.

Sramana Mitra: So, what is ACTFORE?

Christian Geyer: We’re an incident response company that responds to cyber breaches. When we think about a hacker getting into a client’s environment, they break into or get past your firewall in various ways. The most common is a phishing attempt where an employee receives an email. They click on a link, and that link ends up taking them somewhere where malware gets deployed onto their computer, or a port gets opened, and then that hacker is now able to get into the company’s environment.

Well, what happens when a hacker gets into a client’s environment or a company? They then look for information or data that they can leverage. So, they end up stealing and moving data out of the client’s environment or the company’s environment and moving it past their firewall into their hands.

Well, a regulatory requirement is whenever data is stolen, you must notify those that are impacted. So, some of your listeners out there could, and you yourself have probably received a letter in the mail one day saying your social security number, date of birth, maybe your medical history has been stolen. Well, that’s all a regulatory requirement, and that’s what we do.

We actually go through all the data that a threat actor or a hacker has stolen, and basically find out how the jewels were impacted, what did that hacker get that pertains exactly to you, and then facilitate that for legal counsel so that they can then send out those letters and notify you because there’s a regulatory requirement.

So that’s why we started ACTFORE. Instead of selling something that’s a luxury good, like a data governance software solution, we moved into and created a solution that addressed a legal requirement in the market.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Bootstrapping a High Growth Cyber Security Venture with a Paycheck: Christian Geyer, CEO of ACTFORE
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