Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Greg Enriquez, CEO of TrapX (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down on how you do what you do. Let’s say I’m an enterprise. How am I interfacing with your technology?

Greg Enriquez: If you are an enterprise and you’ve got a security team of two people or 200 people, you’re looking at a layered defense to protect your environment. You have to have a perimeter defense. You have to have end-point defense. At least, some form of anti-virus. Maybe, an IPS system. A good security defense will have multiple layers of tool to protect their environment and they’ll have diligent professionals following up on those alerts. Where we come into play is we build a gap. When the perimeter is breached and the security team is not aware of it, we will find it first because we operate inside the network by putting decoys and traps inside your network that attackers will touch if they breach your perimeter. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Greg Enriquez, CEO of TrapX (Part 1)

CISOs are flooded with Cyber Security Vendors trying to sell them solutions. What are they looking for?

This and other topics are kicked around in this insightful interview.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as TrapX.

Greg Enriquez: I’m the CEO of TrapX Security. TrapX is a security technology provider and services. We provide deception technology and assist enterprises in providing a duplicate of their real network. We provide a shadow network or deception technology in their environment so they can fool attackers and protect themselves from threats in the cyber environment. >>>

Concept Financing from Andreessen Horowitz: Andrew Rubin, CEO of Illumio (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Also, your sales cycle was already in full swing. If there are 100 customers engaged in the developing of the product, that means that as soon as the product is ready, a good percentage of those are ready to buy. If you have product–market fit, a good percentage of those are ready to buy.

Andrew Rubin: Even though we didn’t do it with the idea of pipeline in mind, it was obvious to us that some of the work that we were doing would eventually pay off after we launch the company. We ended up running in stealth mode until October 22nd of 2014. On that day, we publicly launched the company. Just to endorse what you said about not only building the feedback loop but also the customer engagement, on the day that we launched, we had referenceable customers on the record who were talking about us. One of them in particular is worth calling out. Morgan Stanley, who I’m sure you know by name, is obviously one of the very large global banks. >>>

Concept Financing from Andreessen Horowitz: Andrew Rubin, CEO of Illumio (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Venture capitalists and even seed investors do not fund concepts. We say this to our entrepreneurs in the program all the time. You have to get to a business. You have to get to some level of validation with your product before people are willing to write big checks.

Andrew Rubin: I think there’s a lot of truth in that. But I think we are among the few of the data points that does show that there are some exceptions to the rule. They are far and few between. What ended up happening with us was we had a lot of soak time. We spent a year. Although we hadn’t built the product and we didn’t have customers and revenues, we were in a position to be able to explain in an unbelievable level of detail, the depth of the problem, the specifics of why it existed, exactly what we wanted to build, the architecture of how we were going to build it, and exactly what it would do and how it would behave. I think three things came together for us in December 2012 when we pitched Andreessen Horowitz, which gave us a yes before we had a product. >>>

Concept Financing from Andreessen Horowitz: Andrew Rubin, CEO of Illumio (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What are the nuggets of what you were going to do differently and how you were going to do them differently?

Andrew Rubin: Very simply put, our industry has been dominated by hardware- and network-based solutions for over 20 years. It doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. It’s just that it was the singular approach. Our world, which is the infrastructure and the applications that our customers run their business on, has changed so dramatically that in a lot of ways it felt like security has been left behind. For us, the very first conclusion we made was we needed to build a security platform in software – not in hardware – and not reliant on the network or in other words, not following the same model and motion of everything else that our customers are already doing. >>>

Concept Financing from Andreessen Horowitz: Andrew Rubin, CEO of Illumio (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When you started to get this thing off the ground, anecdotally and structurally, what were the next steps?

Andrew Rubin: PJ and I probably first had to figure out whether or not we like each other enough to spend more time together. I know that sounds silly now in hindsight, but when you meet somebody for the first time, you literally consider tethering the most important investment of your life to somebody else. You want to make sure you like the person. >>>

Concept Financing from Andreessen Horowitz: Andrew Rubin, CEO of Illumio (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do in the Valley?

Andrew Rubin: In every sense of the word, people talk about luck, timing, and fate being not everything, but an important part of the story.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a very big thing.

Andrew Rubin: It’s an incredibly important part of the story in my case. While I was at Cymtec, I was coming out to California for conferences and to visit colleagues. On one of those trips before I moved out here, I was introduced to PJ Kirner who is the co-founder and CTO of Illumio. We were introduced by a mutual colleague who thought that we might enjoy talking about security and talking about views of the world that he believed we shared in common. PJ and I got together and had lunch. That started a conversation that, in a lot of ways, lasted a year and a half and led to the formation of Illumio. >>>

Concept Financing from Andreessen Horowitz: Andrew Rubin, CEO of Illumio (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year does this bring us up to?

Andrew Rubin: It was in 1998 that I graduated from university.

Sramana Mitra: How long did you work in the first job?

Andrew Rubin: I stayed in my first job for under five years.

Sramana Mitra: This brings us to about 2003 then?

Andrew Rubin: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What happens then? >>>