Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Gryphon CEO John Wu (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit about your company. Is it venture-funded?

John Wu: We’re a customer-funded company. We view our customers as our partners in this. We have done several successful equity crowdfunding rounds in the last few years. We raised over $11 million in past rounds. A lot of it came from our customers who believe in what we’re doing. When you talk about how you’re getting the word out, that’s one of the ways.

Sramana Mitra: Which equity crowdfunding platform did you work on?

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Gryphon CEO John Wu (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: But you would still have to sell the full product – hardware and software – if a carrier wants to work with you.

John Wu: It depends on the carrier. Some carriers have their hardware vendors picked out. They want to use their hardware vendors. We can port the software onto this hardware. Other carriers don’t mind just getting any solution. We could offer them the full solution.

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Gryphon CEO John Wu (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: The primary pain point around which you’re positioning your solution is this parent trying to protect children.

John Wu: Correct. That’s a very salient pain point that a lot of parents are facing today. Less so in terms of people concerned about their refrigerators getting hacked. Once you have our product, we let you know what we’re doing on the network to help you protect against hackers who are trying to hack into these devices as well.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. Where do you advertise or how do you find the customers that have this pain point?

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Gryphon CEO John Wu (Part 1)

Gryphon is a very interesting company in the B-to-C Cyber Security space. This interview discusses their go-to-market strategy and equity crowdfunding strategy in significant detail.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Gryphon.

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Stellar Cyber CoFounder and CTO Aimei Wei (Part 4)

Aimei Wei: We already know what we need to build. Whoever can execute and provide the value to protect the customer effectively still needs to execute. There are three ways. First is detection. Detect at the earliest stage of an attack. The next stage is how to automatically respond, disrupt, and stop the attack before it causes more damage.

Then the third way is to proactively build your security assessment exposure and continuously close the doors and open windows to make sure your environment is as safe as possible and leave a very small chance for the hacker to come in. To do this effectively across the continuously growing attack surface is a challenge.

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Stellar Cyber CoFounder and CTO Aimei Wei (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What is your strategy vis-a-vis the players like Qualys and Palo Alto Networks? Are there opportunities for partnerships? If they’re not your direct competitors, do they have anything in their portfolio that you compete with? That would then open you up to large enterprises.

Aimei Wei: We have integrations with Palo Alto’s firewall. We also have integrations with other Palo Alto products. When customers have those products, we are able to support them. We do have the integration. We do have integration with Qualys.

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Stellar Cyber CoFounder and CTO Aimei Wei (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Is it fair to say that your solution goes to market through the MSSPs?

Aimei Wei: That’s one type and accounts for 50% of our business. On the other hand, we do have enterprises that operate on their own, for example, higher education, government, or financial institutions.

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to discuss those two businesses separately. Let’s start with MSSP. What is happening in the MSSP world right now in terms of how you go to market with them? When you start an MSSP relationship, do they immediately offer you to all their customers?

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Stellar Cyber CoFounder and CTO Aimei Wei (Part 1)

Aimei talks about the Cyber Analytics space and how her company analyzes the entire attack surface. It’s a hard problem, and she explains the nuances of technical and go-to-market strategy.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with the context of Stellar Cyber. Tell us a bit about yourself as well as Stellar Cyber.