Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Qstream CEO Duncan Lennox (Part 1)

Qstream uses insights on how the human brain learns to power sales empowerment and training. It’s an interesting concept that could be applied to many other use cases, and it seems like a ripe arena for entrepreneurial experimentation.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to you as well as Qstream.

Duncan Lennox: I’m the co-founder and CEO of Qstream. Qstream is a spin-off from Harvard Medical School. We provide, what we call, a sales performance platform to help organizations manage and improve the capability of their sales force.

Sramana Mitra: Give us a bit more color on this value proposition. Double-click down on some of your customers and tell us how, specifically, are they using your product. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Craig Hinkley, CEO of WhiteHat Security (Part 5)

Craig Hinkley: You had asked about use cases. I would like to talk about two examples of software development lifecycle. What’s interesting is the dev ops trend—the bringing together of the operations and development teams. What we’re pushing for and striving to achieve is secure dev ops or sec dev ops. We want to embed secure software development into the sec ops environment. Because the more securely you develop software through the software development lifecycle, the more secure your software will be. Less vulnerabilities will show up in websites and web applications. Significant increase in productivity and cost savings can also be achieved by having a sec dev ops. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Craig Hinkley, CEO of WhiteHat Security (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I’m absolutely on the same page with you. For the small to medium business segment, it has to be as a cloud service offering. It’s hard for a player to go both enterprise and SME because the go-to-markets are so different. The DNA is so different. Everything is so different. It’s hard to do both for one company. A $50 million company has to be somewhat focused. That’s my question.

Craig Hinkley: Now I understand the question. From a market perspective and serving the market, the underlying technology capability to serve the SME versus the large enterprises is the same. Yes, your go-to-market may be different, but one of the benefits of being Security-as-a-Service is we can scale that offering.

The challenge that I’m faced with as the CEO is making sure that we serve the right markets with the correct go-to-market strategy. That’s why our go-to-market strategy is using both direct and indirect models. Indirect models are channels and partnerships that can scale to handle >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Craig Hinkley, CEO of WhiteHat Security (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Where do you position your product? What size or scale of websites or apps are you looking to protect?

Craig Hinkley: I think about it from the software development lifecycles perspective. You can think about developing your software to production where it’s now accessible to customers and partners. We have some customers who use us for what they determine as their critical websites. We have some customers who just want us to look at a very small set of websites to customers who have us, literally, looking at thousands of websites and applications. What we do is detect those vulnerabilities using our internal thread research center.

Sramana Mitra: There are millions of millions of websites out there and there are millions of e-commerce websites out there that actually have people’s credit card data. Many of these websites are very small. They’re not Target. They’re not these gigantic websites with major enterprise customers behind them and with major cyber security budgets behind them. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Craig Hinkley, CEO of WhiteHat Security (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You said you have 30,000 websites and apps that your solutions protect in the process of developing these websites and applications. When you look at the universe out there of millions and millions of websites and applications, what percentage of them are actually vulnerable?

Craig Hinkley: What we found is that pretty much 100% of customers will have a vulnerability at any time during a year that we’re providing service. The scary statistics is that every customer that we’ve looked at and provided service for as well as customers we’ve done research work with has a serious vulnerability open and available to be exploited.

The analogy would be, if you try to equate software security and how that shows up on the web as websites and applications, equivalent to protecting your home. We’ve all done it before. We’ve all left our home and either forgot to put the alarm on or left the back door unlocked by accident. In the time that vulnerability is exploitable, the bad folks find us. They take advantage of it. >>>

How to Manage A Successful Pivot: Bullhorn CEO Art Papas (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: The IPO window will be fine even if the market corrects itself. Most of the problem with the market right now is with the late-stage venture capital as it pertains to private businesses. I don’t think there’s a lot of problem with the public market.

Art Papas: I’d like to be a little larger when we go public. I’d like to be over $100 million, which we will be next year. I’d also like to be in a position where I feel like my team is ready. I hired a CFO from a public company in Boston called Constant Contact. I hired a COO from Parametric Technology Corporation. I hired a Head of Services recently from Salesforce.com, which is our largest competitor. The CFO has the most work to do to get ready for an IPO. I think it’s in our future.

Sramana Mitra: Why did your venture investors want to sell to private equity? When companies are growing well, venture companies tend to not want to sell to private equities. What was the motivation? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Craig Hinkley, CEO of WhiteHat Security (Part 1)

Cyber Security is becoming a bigger threat every day. Every website and app is exposed, vulnerable. This discussion explores the topic in depth, and offers pointers to open opportunities for entrepreneurship.

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

Craig Hinkley: I’m the CEO of WhiteHat Security. WhiteHat Security is a company that helps customers develop secure software. We’ve been around since 2002. We were the first company who really helped incubate and develop the web application security market. We’re a company of 300 plus employees. We’re headquartered out of Santa Clara with offices in Houston, Pittsburgh, and Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Sramana Mitra: How many customers do you have and what’s the revenue level of the company? >>>

How to Manage A Successful Pivot: Bullhorn CEO Art Papas (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In a nutshell, you basically pivoted to a vertical CRM strategy and then started building out more and more verticals and developing work flow in your product for those verticals. You went after mid-market companies in each of those verticals.

Art Papas: We did. We have a lot of tiny customers and then we also have a lot of mid-market customers. Being SaaS, you can service a one-person company. You can service the person who wants to be on their own or you could service a mid-market company. Being vertically-focused allowed us to go up-market. We landed our first Fortune 500 account back in 2005. We got traction because we had all this vertically-focused workflow. We were able to get traction with these very large players early on. That also has been a key to the success – being able to go all the way up and down. We applied that across multiple verticals as we grew. >>>