Bootstrapping a High Growth Cyber Security Venture with a Paycheck: Christian Geyer, CEO of ACTFORE (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Wow. So, by this time you have spun out into a separate entity?

Christian Geyer: Not yet.

Sramana Mitra: Not yet. So, this $18.3 million is happening within, as a subdivision of the original company. Okay, and you’re probably making a lot more money than the original company, right?

Bootstrapping a High Growth Cyber Security Venture with a Paycheck: Christian Geyer, CEO of ACTFORE (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How much did get paid by this customer that gave you the first use case?

Christian Geyer: I believe it was $300,000.

Sramana Mitra: And this $300,000 came into the original company?

Bootstrapping a High Growth Cyber Security Venture with a Paycheck: Christian Geyer, CEO of ACTFORE (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Were you aware of this regulatory requirement in your original business?

Christian Geyer: Yes. I was part of a cybersecurity incident response company back in 2016 at the Crypsis group I had talked about. We sold it for $260 million to Palo Alto Networks, a cyber security company.

Bootstrapping a High Growth Cyber Security Venture with a Paycheck: Christian Geyer, CEO of ACTFORE (Part 1)

Christian convinced the Board of his employer to let him incubate a Cyber Security startup idea as a division of the company with an express intent of spinning it off.

Now, the company has been spun out, doing almost $20M in bootstrapped annual revenue, and may soon find a lucrative Exit. This is a phenomenal story for entrepreneurs considering the Bootstrapping with a Paycheck route.

Building a Venture Scale AI Developer Tool Company: Moderne CEO Jonathan Schneider (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Can you elaborate on how you’re working with the open source community and is that a source of leads?

Building a Venture Scale AI Developer Tool Company: Moderne CEO Jonathan Schneider (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I have a question that comes to my mind. Enterprises have very diverse applications and frameworks. Are there particular frameworks that you specialize in, do better in, or have more training in? Or you can basically walk into any enterprise, do this training right there, and basically build from there?

Building a Venture Scale AI Developer Tool Company: Moderne CEO Jonathan Schneider (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: So now, tell me more about the product and especially where is AI in this story?

Jonathan Schneider: We think of Moderne as large-scale automated code change. That could be for application modernization, security vulnerability repair, or code quality.

Building a Venture Scale AI Developer Tool Company: Moderne CEO Jonathan Schneider (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: So now what about the go-to-market strategy? What were you settling into? You were talking to customers all this while. What was emerging as the go-to-market strategy?