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The Unusual Strategy That Helps ArmorCode Grow 100% YOY | Nikhil Gupta · The Neon Show

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: And the developer said Armor 42.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: That was the biggest win for me because 5,000 developers in that company were using it, but they didn't know about Armor 4.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: 90% of the entrepreneurs are, I want to solve a problem which I'm going through as a pain.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: 10% on the other side.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Solve first principle.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: You discourage people from becoming entrepreneurs.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: Why is that?
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: So basically, you should do entrepreneurship for.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: Hi, this is Sadhat Aluwaliya, your host at Neon Show and managing partner at Neon Fund, a fund that has invested in the pre-seed stages of some of the best enterprise AI companies between US and India called like Atomic Work, Spot Draft, and CloudSet.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: Today I have with me Nikhil Gupta, founder of Armor Code.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: Nikhil, welcome on Neon Show.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for having me.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: You're a founder who has shown great persistence for a long period of time.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: And you waited for almost 20 years to become a founder.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: And you kept that company bootstrapped without raising a single dollar.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so one of the things was that I knew I was not investable back then.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't blame if you look at somebody's 42 and starting from you know QA to development to testing to marketing and telecom to data center to virtualization and doing a business development.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I was not investable.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: So as a result, I had no choice because I went and asked, I made my first VC pitch in 2000.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I got my first institutional check for armor code in 2020.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: I actually didn't put any of my own money because that was one of the things which I was very clear.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: But I was getting checks like$25,000 and things like that, smaller checks over there.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: And uh and but I took that risk to start a company in a crowded space which was perceived resolved, a problem was perceived resolved at the time, but with just as a customer.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: I was very clear, sir.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: Customer were obsessed, and that is one piece of advice for anybody here is if you're in enterprise space, you have to have to have to talk to customers and understand them very well.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: And the value that you were providing in your first startup was you were showing cloud security posture management.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: So in fact, now this word is very there.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: We actually coined that word back in 2017, cloud security posture management.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: And the whole idea was you're getting that kind of visibility, and then we are also helping them with the uh taking an action and things like that.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it was super easy, and um, so that was the fundamental.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: And how did the acquisition happen of your first company?
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: So uh it was very interesting that we had a very big win against the number one security company in Ken Rock.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so uh so we had a very big win against them.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: So after that win, we got into the radar and we were kind of looking for partnerships, and uh we are looking to do our series A because we were doing pretty good.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: So we started to get series by inbound offers and all.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: And around that time, what happened was there were two big acquisitions that happened in our space.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: So one was a company called Redlock, which was acquired by Palo Alto, and then the other company was Drome Line acquired by Checkpoint.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so when that happened, my experience was that if the market is consolidating and there was no moat, we are doing really good visibility, we are selling, but then at that point, what would have happened here is these large companies could have come and given it for free.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: So, and you have to think as an entrepreneur at any given time, especially in enterprise space, that what if your largest competitor, which is typically the market leader, is they give it for free, can you stand that?
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: And in Avid Secure, the answer was no.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: So that's when I decided because now the two top security companies did it, another four or five which came in because they all needed a solution.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: We had great customer low, great all of those things.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: So that was the time.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: And those acquisitions have offer came inbound, or yeah.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, offer.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: So again, great companies, it's always inbound, right?
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: Companies are built to build a business, right?
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: Not to be sold.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: That's another piece of advice I'll say.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of times people will think, oh, I can do make some quick money and I build something, and those were the lessons.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: So again, you know, you can say I failed for 26 years or at a lost cars and uh learned.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: One of the biggest learning was that if you're building a good fundamental business, then the good things happen, right?
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: But if you're thinking to build a company to sell, then you know, companies are not bald and you're not even building a good business.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: So that was uh very important advice is to build a good healthy business and let the outcome depend.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: But did you have a banker in between to negotiate the price or anything?
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: No, so again, see what happens here is that we we figured it out, right, in the sense and uh having done it so many times and things like that, so we didn't include any of those things.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: And what happens is whenever you have multiple offers, then you are in a negotiation position.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's again depends upon like you typically hire bankers when you want to sell the company.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: We were not selling the company, and and it it just so happened that these two things are.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: So you were almost 45, 46 year old when you sold your first company.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: So first first of all, you know, before we dive into the tech aspects of armor code and what you do, I would love to know your journey, right?
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: Where do you come from, right?
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh your journey growing up.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely, absolutely.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I was uh born and raised in Delhi.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I grew up in a business family, so I always wanted to be an entrepreneur.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: There was no word called entrepreneur, it is all business.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: And um so uh started with a humble background.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: After engineering, I was uh jobless.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: So I took my first job in a computer manufacturing company there, and I learned some hard lessons over there.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: I realized that uh, you know, technology and also I moved from there to Chennai.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: And from Chennai in 97, I came to the US.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: I was fortunate to work at Bell Labs with the father of Unix and some of those.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: How did you come to the US?
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I came, uh I was working in a company in Chennai, and over there basically they needed some hair for three-month project.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, and so when I came in here, then I realized that hey, uh it takes me 48 hours to go from uh Chennai to Delhi in the train, and here I can fly in the plane.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: In 44 hours, I can be here, and you know, uh again, there was a language barriers in Chennai and things like that.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: So for me, it's like this is a great idea.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: So I I'm an accidental immigrant to the US, I never had an aspiration to come to the US.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: And when I came here, then I started working in Dallas.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: From Dallas, I went to New Jersey, Bell Labs, where I was fortunate to work with the father of Unix and some of those guys, and it was a Fortune 25 company that always had an aspiration to be an entrepreneur.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: So and that time dot-com was happening, boom was happening 99, 2000.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: So I came to the valley thinking, hey, it's a mecca of all of those things, and less than I knew that within six months or nine months of coming in here, all that crash happened.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so, but but the good news was that uh everywhere I went, I built some great and lasting relationship and trust.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: So the father of Unix and all, they left Bell Labs to start a company in Bayern 2000, and I got an opportunity to become a founding engineer over there, and that company, because of their pedigree, uh, we raised 190 million dollars from 2000 to 2006, and when world was crashing and burning and everything else, and I was there a software engineer, then I changed the path, became a customer success engineer, sales engineer.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: Because in my mind, when I want to be an entrepreneur, I wanted to do touch all of these things through my hands.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: And in 2006, we had a uh half a billion dollar offer.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and uh you know, at that time, unfortunately, board decided not to take that offer.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: And in 2007, it was sold for ridiculously low price, and you know, for making some few seven-digit, I couldn't even make four-digit numbers.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: So those were some wake-up calls, but there were two things which I learned.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: Number one, that I'm still an entrepreneur, because after working, you know, 24 by 7 for seven dog years, I still wanted to do a company.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: And second thing was the culture, and uh, you know, those two things it really fast forward helped me in uh armor code today.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: And then I stuck around there because company was acquired, hung around there in like 2012 or so, and then as soon as you know, I got my green card and all joined Cisco.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Cisco I was running data center business over there, and I lost a big deal to an unknown company called AWS, and then what happened was uh and Cisco you know knew the cloud and everything else, but I saw the trend going on, so I'm like, hey, uh, I think so.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: I might I need to move on in for from infrastructure, I need to go to the cloud side.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: So then I joined VMware, and at VMware, essentially I was into you know virtualization software and things like that.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: But again, constant pressure was coming in there.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: And during the journey, you know, as an entrepreneur, I always was having a day job and a night job.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: And every night I was doing a hustle and one or the other ideas, and I kept on failing on my entrepreneurial endeavors.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so much so in 2015, I was kind of shown mirror by one of the venture captains with all due respect, where he's like, hey, you know, you're 42, you haven't started a company yet, and you know, you don't code, and you are not from the prestigious institute of technology or Stanford MIT or Howard, and nobody wanted to work with me.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: And uh also I didn't have like you know good bank balance to take that risk.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so at that point, I always like an entrepreneur.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: I kind of gave up, went back and told my wife for the third time I'm not an entrepreneur.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: This is 2015, 2016, and 2016.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I just recently posted on a blog, like uh I was embarrassed and I was fired from the company.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: You you put it on the blog?
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I had my rejection letter.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: So I put my rejection letter or sorry, firing letter.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: It on the blog, you just put it in a couple of weeks ago because uh the reason for that is I want to share with the world that uh you know rejection is the first place, or firing is the first step.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: And it was a good sign.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: I'm glad that I was from VMware.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: So I was fired over there, and uh that was a very humbling experience.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: As age of 42.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: So again, yeah, so it was uh, you know, I needed money, I had you know, 10-year-old daughter, family pressures, things like that were there, and uh and I I was just humbled that I was a entrepreneur, not an entrepreneur.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: So it was a pretty interesting time to come back and did some meditation and things like that.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought uh I'm not going to be an entrepreneur until my daughter goes to college and I'm done with the financial responsibilities.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I took a job, I call it as a health and a wealth framework.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: So during my meditation, I came with that framework and I realized that uh, you know, health and happiness is more important than wealth.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so do what you're passionate about.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Oh, I like meeting with people and you know the space.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: So I took a job as a you know, channel manager, business development manager in a security company, and this was 2016.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: And before that, your experience was all in virtualization.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: So my experience was very vivid, right?
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: So starting from doing marketing and you know, computer manufacturing, then I went to telecom, I spent uh wireless uh advanced intelligent network, and then I was doing multi-service access platforms.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: So I had 15 years experience in telecom, then I went to data center, and then from data center I went to VMware virtualization.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: So I've been changing the field, and then I went into security in 2016.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know S of security or C of cloud.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: And you are changing complete passage age of 42 again, right?
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: Like people don't change their directions.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: And see, for me, I I call it as a not star.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: So for me, all along, and the way I drive here is that if you think about it, I call it as a if there's an X and a Y axis, right?
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I call it as a X axis as a health and happiness, and Y axis is wealth.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, as an individual, you need to have a not star, right?
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: Some people say I just want money, some people will say I just want happiness.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, I was a greedy bastard, so I want it top right over there.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: But if I had to choose one amongst the other, I wanted to be happy.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: So I tilted towards that, and when I was at my lowest, I thought that you know what, it makes sense to go towards happiness.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I looked at it, and happiness was talking to people doing business development, and as a career, it was not a great choice.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: I could not have ever, you know, achieved my dream of being a serial entrepreneur and a CEO.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: And that has been my dream since 1993 in my second year of college.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: So now what happens is if you go all along, the life journey is never straight line.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: So my NordStar was here, and every time I'm going there, you will go up, down, up and down.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: But as long as you are clear of your North Star, and I am a great example that you can get it.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I tell people I'm not the smartest, it took me 26 years to get there.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I know one of the things you want to talk about is like any advice for entrepreneurs and all.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, you need to have your Nord Star very clear why you want to do that, because this journey is very painful and it's very difficult, and with all distractions and all.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: So if you do not have clear, and thanks for sharing your story, very inspiring story as well, that if you don't have that clarity, you know, you cannot make it.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: So that's where it was there that um, you know, in 2016, 2017, I was working there.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: Then I was working in a network access control company and which has got nothing to do with cloud security.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: But I was talking to the customers, I realized there was a big pain.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what happened was there was almost a half a billion dollar investment happened.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: There were companies who had raised hundreds of millions of dollars for cloud security, and people thought their problem is solved.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: And uh when I was looking at that problem, I realized that customers were still crying and they still had the big pain.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: And what was the pain that customers were seeing?
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: So pain was basically I didn't have a visibility of what's happening out there.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you cannot secure what you can't see.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: And people were solving those solutions one way or the other, but at the end of the day, how you get it?
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's a very different way.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, I spoke to a lot of customers, that was a common theme.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's when again, you know, I woke up again as I even though I had promised my wife and everything that I'm never going to be an entrepreneur until my daughter goes to college and I'm done with financial things.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe I could have been 55 or 60.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: And 2017, I I one fine day on my anniversary, I went back to my wife.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, company had filed for S1, the company I was working for.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: First time I was going to make money, and I decided to quit.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so that has been my journey.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: And uh when I did that, and I got lucky, and year and a half, like uh, you know, I would secure my previous company, became one of the most successful companies in Silicon Valley, which is not heard of.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I did pretty much everything unconventional, right?
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: From you know, starting a company with a founder I'd never met physically ever in my life, and those kind of things.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: You have to take those risks, you have to take those crazy decisions.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: Now you had sold a company in 2019, right?
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: So why did after one year you start another company?
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: So it was very interesting.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: So whole life I was chasing a dream which I thought.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: The dream was accomplished.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so I had a kind of a vacuum and 0.01% kind of entrepreneurs get the kind of exit and the life um their dream come true.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: So, yes, in two, three months, once I sold the company, I was kind of looking inside.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, what do I want to do next?
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: And person like me cannot retire.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: So I looked at various options and I'm like, I want to be um build another company, do I want to go into a big, large company?
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: Do I want to be a venture capital?
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: Do I want to retire?
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: All those things.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: I was thinking through that, and again, went back into you know meditation and stuff like that.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I realized that uh, you know, I'm young and I like building.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I realized that I want to build something.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: And then and I was helping a lot of companies because once I was acquired, I had a you know, golden handcuff.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: I couldn't.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I started helping, I was doing a lot of advice and things like that.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: And during that, I had some ideas, and then um, you know, when COVID happened, you know, again, most people go the other way around, they were saving their own families and individuals, and I was doing that, but I wanted to save the world.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: So that's when I decided to start RMR code.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: So your uh because you don't come from a security background, so your problem discovery process is very unique.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: Can you tell about that process in what case?
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: How can entrepreneurs learn and replicate that process?
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: So there are two types uh of entrepreneurs.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: 90% of the entrepreneurs are I want to build and solve a problem which I'm going through as a painful, right?
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: Most of the companies, whether you look at Intuit and other companies.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: 10% on the other side, and I'm not Elon Musk, but if you look at Elon Musk, he started first was payment, and then was Tesla, then was SpaceX.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's all first principles.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: So you go back, you look at an existing problem, and in those 26 years, I probably vetted out maybe thousand ideas.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: May I have pitched hundreds of ideas, and they were all over, right?
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: So I as I was telling you, I was looking into electronic health records, I was looking into Zoom before it was Zoom.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: I had an idea half-written patent on Uber in 2008.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: And going through a lot of research, right?
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: For each time I would get an idea, I'm like, oh, it's very painful and all those things.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: And when I was going deeper, then I realized that, oh, somebody else is already looking at it.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: So that was one of the things which is there.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: Now, with Avid Secure, because once I got the success, I had multiple ideas.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: But what got me triggered into armor code was out of all those ideas, I'm like, okay, what do I do?
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: And things like that.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: And COVID happened.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: Then I was, you know, literally standing in the line for getting that uh toilet paper and all those things.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: And by the time my number came, actually the toilet paper was over.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: And there was an aha moment for me that you know what?
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's a worse pandemic.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't sure in five years we'll be sitting like this, and in that particular environment, whole digital transformation will happen.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: The inventory will change, the payment will change, the delivery will change.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: So all digital transformation is happening.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: And because it was COVID, good news was bad guys were at home, and bad news were they were at home because that means you will do much more hacking because you cannot go and physically do those things.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: So that was an interesting intersection of digital transformation and here.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: So that is when I kind of narrowed it down to this.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the other piece which is there, and which I always tell is customer thing, right?
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: So even in have it secure, I didn't have any idea of cloud, and I didn't have any idea of security.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: All I did was it's a problem statement hearing from the customers.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: So again, same thing in Armor Code.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: I spoke to almost 300 prospects.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: In matter of how many months?
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: I would say three, six months.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: And uh because in general, like, see, I realize that security is a huge market.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I think so, there's nothing which is future-proof in the world of AI.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: But uh I think so security for the next 20 years is going to be huge.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: And and the importance is going to increase more and more.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so as a result, I chose that as a market, as a security as a market, because you know, when you're starting in COVID and you didn't know like people will be coming out of their home for the next 10 years, so then you have to have a very fundamentally sound business which is going to grow.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: So security was one.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: Second thing was as an uh by the time I had experience with those buyers.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: So if I'm going to sell somebody remotely, I would rather sell to somebody buyer persona that I'm aware of.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then what is the enterprise sales looks like?
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: So all of those things were there.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that's when I talked, and you know, of course, in armor code, I had a little bit of advantage of having the credibility.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, for the product.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: Second numb founder, we had like Fortune 50, 100 companies in my first startup, and those, you know, I was closing half a million dollar deal, sitting in my pajamas in pre-COVID days.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: So all those credibility and the confidence, right?
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: Because what happened was in July, like we started, we founded the company over Zoom, we built the whole team over Zoom, and year and a half, two years, we are just you know starting customer contracts and all of those things.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: All of that was possible because you know, I was building a lot of those experiences from the past.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: And you mentioned that you know, now you had the luxury of calling two to three hundred potential customers.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: Were there CISOs?
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of them were CISOs.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: But what I do is typically don't call just to that CISO level.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: Again, as I said, you have to talk to the CISO, CISO minus one, CISO minus two.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: And even over there, what I do is I don't call to the people.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Typically, that I know very well in the beginning.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: But what happens is there is a blessing and a curse for a second time founder.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: Your idea gets buyers.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: See, first time when you're starting a company, people will tell you the truth.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: And they will say no, no, no, no, no.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what happened last time, right?
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: In I would secure.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: So this time, a lot of people I went back, the same people who had said no.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: And they must be feeling like, oh, I said him no, he still proved me wrong and things like that.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: And if Nikil is thinking about the problem, probably has done the research.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: He's more knowledgeable than me.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: So so indirectly, a lot of those things happened.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: So what I did was I kind of a mix.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: So I spoke to a few people to figure out the problem statement.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: And once the problem statement was there, then I found out a whole bunch of people that I didn't know.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: Who didn't with whom I didn't have relationship and credibility.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: And it's an art to go back and make people comfortable tell you the truth.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: So uh if you can share about uh some, you know, and it'll help the other entrepreneurs prepare when they're doing customer discovery.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: What are the five questions that you asked if you remember?
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: So so again, general things what happens here is that uh I'll ask the customers like how big is the problem?
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: So just in this case, you know, in case of armor code, yeah.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: What were you asking?
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: So basically, first of all, thing was that okay, uh so armor code, so I'll take a step back and I'll describe out armor code so that I come in.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: So we are agent TKI platform for exposure management.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: Now essentially what's happening here is And can you also explain in Leman Towns?
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, in the Lemen Temps is a vulnerability management.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: So what happens is anytime when you are doing a security, uh, whether it is physical security or software security, infrastructure security, there's a whole bunch of uh scanning you do, right?
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: I may have a scanner or a pen testing and things like that.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll do and I'll have let's say 1000, 10,000 a million vulnerabilities are there.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: For every AppSec engineer, there is 200, 300, 400 developers.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: So that ratio is very skewed.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: So you cannot fix all the million vulnerabilities or 100,000 vulnerabilities.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: So first thing first is you triage and say, okay, am I going to fix this or not going to fix things like that?
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: So you bring it down.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: And then to secure any product, it's not just one tool.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you have 10 tools, 20 tools, depending upon the size of the organization.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: So that problem becomes very big.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_00: So how do people do it?
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, I go to this console and I'm going to triage all of them.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to download into an Excel sheet.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to get from the other ones, right?
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: And out of all of them, then I am going to fix it.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: And my internal customer is the developer.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: So I go to developer.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: Developer is very busy, you know, solving the cool and sexy problem.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: They don't want to do a security bug.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: So they have zero interest in solving this problem.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the reasons why I picked this problem was that I used to be a developer back in 99.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: Then I did a lot of operations, and then I came from security.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I had a very good understanding of the personas, internal customer, external customer.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: So even though we sell to security people, but their job is to make developers' life happy.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: So how do you do that?
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: Because I have been on the developer side, I exactly know the developer doesn't want to go out of Slack, developer doesn't want to go out of Jira, right?
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: And they hate the tools that security people tear.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: So world's largest entertainment company, I was walking the floor there in Southern California.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: And in and they have a lot of theme parks and everything else.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: So I was walking there, and the director of product security called a developer and they said, Do you know who this guy is?
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I don't know.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, you don't know Nikhil Gupta, founder and CEO of Armor Code.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: And the developer said, Found uh Armor Code.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: Why do I care?
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: And that was the biggest win for me because 5,000 developers in that company were using it, but they didn't know about Armour Code.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: So what happened here is we helped the security team and everything was transparent that developer didn't even know about it.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: So here, not only understanding the buyer persona, buyer persona's internal customers we are aware of.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: So those things are very important to understand all of that.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so that is we are stitching it together here.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: So the questions I understood the process.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: So the fundamental thing which I use is the five eyes.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'll say, okay, you know, why are you doing this show?
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_00: I'll say, Oh, I want it to, as you said, I want it to start a company, I want to understand, I want to learn from others.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: Why do you want to do that?
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I want to so when you ask five times why, the fundamental pain problem will come.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: Because again, as you heard, in I would secure, I didn't know about C of Cloud and all here.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know we have vulnerability management.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: But I go with the first principles.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: And with first principles, in fact, that is I see as an advantage.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: But what happens here is if you look at it, and I studied a lot of companies, there are 7,000 security companies.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: And when you are starting a company in COVID, when you don't have to, like I was kind of ready to retire and best building my dream home, and I had to convince me, and more importantly, my family why I want to do this here is that you have to very conviction.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_00: And there are 7,000 security companies.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: How do you do that?
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: And there is a 7,001 security company, and why it will be successful, and why, when these are hundred billion dollar companies are there, like we have today, you know, some of the biggest brands of whether it's an AI company, whether it is the largest manufacturing uh credit cards and all of those companies, right?
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: Why would they come to a no-name company when there are so many of them are there?
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: So for me, I had to have that conviction.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: So for that conviction, I went back and I got into those details and I understand the overall process.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: I asked them five ways.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes I said, like, there's a difference between uh first name and second finder.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: I say, okay, is this a pain problem?
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: Because based on my research and all like you were asking, is a vulnerability management?
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's a pain.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: And people were like, oh, this company tried to solve it, that company tried to solve it, this is not solvable, and all those things.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, forget about companies.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: You as a customer or a buyer, CISO or a director of vulnerability management, do you see the pain?
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_00: Answer was yes.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_00: Then this is the advantage coming outside in.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: Coming outside in, I don't know what I don't know.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm coming with first principles of trying to solve your problem.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: Now, there are two types of founder, as I said, which is very important because my strength can become my weakness.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: So I do not encourage everybody to do this today.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_00: Because what happens here is if I am in healthcare and I know this pain for 20 years, this nobody better understands.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's a great way to start it, right?
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: But in in this particular case, in the first principle ones, the challenges is that you know there is a lot of unknowns and all.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_00: But knowing yourself, knowing yourself is very important.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_00: And that's one of the important things about an entrepreneur here is that you should know who you are, what your strengths are, what your weaknesses are.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: These things are super important for you to to your play or strengths, right?
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a whole thing, you know, I should write a book about that, but you know, how do you choose a founder?
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: Things like that.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: And there should be complementary skills, buying technology and all, because a lot of times people will say, okay, oh, I I can write a code, or I know the problem.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: But but I take a business first view, and and as a result, with a founder first.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_00: So again, idea here is there are no um magical formula.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: There are two methods here.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_00: Knowing your stretch, you can go this way.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_01: So, one question you were asking uh the CISO and the teams was why is vulnerability management, is vulnerability management a problem?
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: Why is this a problem?
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: What was the other set of questions?
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_01: And how how do you do the business today?
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_00: So when they walk through the whole pain point to me, so that is understanding customer mindset, right?
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: And while explaining this, oh, it's much bigger problem than I thought.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_00: And then the last piece is how much are you going to pay?
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_00: So you ask them, of course.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, because that at the end of the day, in enterprise sales, ultimately is you're solving a business problem, right?
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: And you decide.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: So from my case, because I'm going to sell to mid to large digits, like so we sell seven-digit deals, we sell six-digit deals, and all those things, we are very clear.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't want to solve a problem which is going to be$500 worth of problem.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_00: And there's nothing wrong.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_00: There are companies who will make 5 million or 50 million customers with 500 or 50 bucks.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's a different segment.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: In enterprise sales, depending upon who you're building on enterprise company, that's what you charge.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll ask them and they'll say, Why, why should I tell you, right?
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: Those things will come in.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_00: But when I walk through that, I will reverse engineer.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, oh, okay, this much, how much will it be paying?
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_01: So can you also share your 330, 300, and 3000 formula here?
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, yeah.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_00: So it's again interesting thing is a lot of time, um, you know, founders will come in and this is my experience.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: So I call it as 330, 300, 3,000 rule.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: Three is like if you have three customers, right?
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_00: If you know you will have three customers, I call it as a kiss of depth.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because anybody like who's 42, 45, who has new industry experience of 20 years, you'll be able to get three customers.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I know so.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_00: Your friends will write you a check.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: But what happens here is friends will write you a check, and there's a good chance a VC will write you a check.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_00: But what will happen is then you get a million, two million, three million, depending upon how you are.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_00: Now, like always a case of death, you're not drawing any salary, you're starting, there is a huge opportunity cost, and at the end of the day, a lot of those companies fail.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_00: Majority of them.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you get 30 enterprise customers, that's pretty successful.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_00: You should be able to make a$30 million business, maybe$50 million business.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_00: If you are assuming each enterprise will pay a million dollars each.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_00: No, I'm talking about the exit.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_00: I'm talking about the exit multipliers and all industries there.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_00: But if 30 enterprises are ready to sell, because what will happen is when I spoke to 300 people, so probably 200 were saying the idea is good, which gave me the conviction.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_00: All of them, maybe 50 said, okay, I'll be ready to do that.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_00: But that numbers decrease.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I can have three friends to write a check.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: I can't have 30 friends to write a check.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_00: So now when you are selling it to 30 enterprises, that means the problem is real and people are paying you.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: And in my case, my bar was like, okay, you should be able to pay me, you know, 50, but eventually to seven digits, 50k to seven digit.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_00: So that means it's a good enough validation, and then some large company will acquire you at that point.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_00: Then if you have 300 enterprises, so then you can make a 300 million dollar company, right?
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_00: Again, I'm talking more conservative.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_00: Exit value you're talking about.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: Exact way, exit value.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_00: And again, there are companies with 1 million revenue sold for 500 million dollars.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_00: I am very conservative.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_00: Those are exceptions, though, those are in such and exactly.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: So they are like natural bonds, so you don't want to do that.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_00: I'm dhoni.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_00: Then we have who will use a brute force, if you will.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_00: So from that perspective, so if you have 300 customers, there's a good chance you'll get a good 300 million dollar exit.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_00: And if you get 3,000 customers, guess what?
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: You have a public company.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_01: You have seen this?
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_01: Once uh you have 3,000 enterprise customers.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_00: See, this is the research I did.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, right.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_00: So what I did was when I see there is a reason why I studied 7,000 companies.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_00: I looked at all of them, I did all the maths and I figured it out.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_00: Like there are not that many, there are probably 15, 20 public companies in security space.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_00: So you have to look at your space.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_00: So in your space, you go down and deeper.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_00: Devils are in the detail here, right?
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, as a second-time founder, you know, your dream and aspiration is to make a public company and all, and you begin with the end in mind.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, okay, if you have to go there, what would it take?
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: And then you look at uh so many security companies are there, they have 3,000 plus customers and things like that.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_01: Was somebody else arranging these meetings for you, like an EA secretary or an agency?
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_00: See, I think so.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: There are certain things uh uh as a founder, you cannot uh what you call it as uh outsource.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_00: And now, fast forward, maybe you can have it.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_00: AISDR.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_00: Not AISD, you could have AISDR, but see, from my perspective, I because LinkedIn and other things, and I've been building a network, and I would go, as I said, I'll just switch out to people who are not in my network.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_00: Because I as I said, like if I know you for seven years as a CSO, there's a good chance that you know you can write 50k check.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_00: You can write a 50k check and then you will be biased, and it's like, well, I know Nick Hale, I don't want to disappoint him and all.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_00: So, but when I go to um LinkedIn and say, okay, I don't need an ABC person, and I'm like, hey, they took a meeting.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, give me your honest feedback.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_00: We may not talk ever in life again.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: These are the five questions.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_00: Does it make sense?
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: Those kind of things.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_00: So you are having getting those difficult questions answered before.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of people think entrepreneurship is risk taking, which is wrong.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_00: Entrepreneurs are risk mitigators, and again, all my advice here and suggestion and experience is on the enterprise side, right?
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_00: So take it with a pinch of salt, and I tell that if you're in young in 20s, then probably ignore a lot of my advice because my experience is for more experience.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_00: There are certain things which is common, but certain advice I would say you can take bigger risk, right?
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_00: You can go with a different uh perspective.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_00: And my learning here is because I did the same thing here.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_00: I listened to a lot of podcasts like me on show.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_00: So thanks for having this.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: It makes a lot of life easier for the entrepreneurs.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then you think globally, act locally, listen to different people, right?
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_00: Get all of that.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, so that is where it is there.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I heavily rely on LinkedIn, especially again because of uh a uh you know enterprise type of business.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe if I have to do again, I will definitely look at how AI can help.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure EI can help me parse this information, record this information.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_00: I'm the old school guy, literally, I had this big piece of paper.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_00: I was just writing down.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_01: You had this much bundle almost like a dairy.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_01: And today, if you can share roughly in Armagode how much you have raised, rough what scale, whatever you can share uh the company that.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: So we have it's 81 million dollars.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we have some of the top investors like you know, Sierra Ventures, Servin Ventures, Highland Capital, and most prominent is ballistic ventures.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_00: So these ballistic ventures is the number one VC firm for security-specific things.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_00: We have partners like Ted Slime, Barmakh Nefta, Kevin Mandia, and all.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we are almost 200 people company.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we have some of the top brands you can think of.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_00: You know, one of the things, one of the vision I had when I started was COVID will change the way we live, work, and play.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: And Armor Code vision was we want to secure the way we live, work, and play.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I was in Singapore, the number one building in Singapore is a customer of ours.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_00: I go and make a payment, the payment company is Armor Core, right?
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_00: You go to any hospital, I hope you don't have to go to hospital, but the hospital beds and all are there.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the world's fastest growing company, you're talking about AI, they are our customers here.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_00: You're talking about security companies, the largest of the largest security companies.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_00: You have companies who are managing 3 trillion, 5 trillion asset under management.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_00: So we have those best of the best uh customers.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_00: Like you look at the cars, you go to UK and all those things.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_00: So we have in Fortunate and Blessed, we have customers, the top insurance company, the top financial companies, top technology companies, top security companies, top healthcare companies, top entertainment companies, media companies, and uh, you know, top manufacturing companies.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_00: So these are the six or seven or uh top IT outsourcing companies are customers.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_00: So we are growing uh fast.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: We are hiring aggressively.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_00: If you know any audience you have your friends or somebody else, love to have them there.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_00: And uh yeah, so those are the metrics there.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_00: We've been growing 100% year over year, and uh it's uh it's a great journey, very exciting.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_00: We uh created a community called the Purple Book Community, which I was telling you earlier.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's a community of security people by the security people for the security people.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_00: So talking about AI and also, we are actually helping a lot of these companies adopt AI faster and securely.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_00: So there's only one hindrance in today's world for AI is security.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_00: If there was not a security concern, security would be uh AI would be 10x.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_00: And that is what Armour Code is playing a role in helping companies.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_00: So either you are building a product or you are doing a productivity.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_00: So we can help you make your build your product.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: Every company is a software company, so we can help you build your product securely or even in shadow AI, right?
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_00: Or in how do you fit in productivity?
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_00: So that's one.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_01: So Nikil, you have a framework, and this is probably the last question that I have, but this is the most action part.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_01: You discourage people from starting their own venture or becoming entrepreneurs.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, why is that?
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_00: So basically, the main thing here is you should do entrepreneurship for the right reasons.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_00: Uh a lot of people want to be an entrepreneur because they see it's glorified.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_00: You see Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and all.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_00: But it takes a lot behind the scene there.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_00: And uh again, in my journey, as I said, that uh it took me 26 years to realize that's more of a normal one.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_00: So if you look at most successful entrepreneurs, they have their own pain parts and journey.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of them share or don't share.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, a lot of entrepreneurs do entrepreneurship for just making money.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_00: And my experience says, and when I look around in 30 years, there are many, many more easier ways to make money.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_00: So if you have to endure and you could be lucky that you may be successful in 10 years or 20 years or 25 years, if you are very clear how you want to go about it, and then you can live with that, and it's more of a family thing, it's not your individual because in your journey, you know, if you are doing it for the wrong reason, you're sacrificing family time and all of those things, and then you realize and you take financial risk.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_00: So that's my whole reason here is that make sure that uh you're very clear why you want to do it, you're knowingly entered in there, even after that, it's a challenging journey.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, when you discover yourself, and as I've shared earlier for other answers, one of the most important things I feel for entrepreneurship is knowing yourself and what is there.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_01: So, and you spent 20 years discovering your why.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_01: What what came through that journey also?
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I think so.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I'll not lie, back in 2000, uh, one of the first uh startups in Silicon Valley I joined was to make money, quick money.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_00: It was a great team, great investors, and everything else.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_00: And um, Silicon Valley is where the magic happens there.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_00: And then after seven years of blood, sweat, and tears, and very close to you know making you know seven-digit outcome, which is a dream, American dream, um, unfortunate situations happened, and I ended up making$1,500.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_00: $1,500 where I could have made a$1.5 million maybe a year before for reasons and outcomes outside of my control.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_00: So that was a wake-up call for me.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_00: And uh it was very hard.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_00: And in 2007, once that acquisition happened, again I went back for self-discovery, actually lost confidence and everything else.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_00: I found out two important things after seven dog years working, you know, 24 by 7 for seven years, that I still wanted to do an entrepreneurship.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_00: And then the second thing was the culture and everything else.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_00: And my clarity was very clear that you know there's no guaranteed money, there's no quick money.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, if that theme, so if you go back and look at the company which I was there with Noble kind of laureate Turin Award winners, starting a company with$190 million, if those companies can fail, you know, any company can fail.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_00: So if I have to look at technology-wise, that was the dream team.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_00: I have never seen any technology more technology company like that.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_00: So those are the reasons that's where kind of I learned over the period of time and like, hey, why am I doing this and things like that?
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_01: And people come to Silicon Valley all from all over the world, like a lot of people, even from India, that you get success in Silicon Valley, but nobody tells you the hard part of it.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_01: It took you 20 years in Silicon Valley, you're right.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_01: So there was no shortcut.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_00: So there is absolutely no shortcut here.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Silicon Valley is a dream, right?
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_00: And uh again, I know people are looking at all over the world.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_00: So in Bangalore, and now the advantage with AI and cloud, which you can start anywhere else.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, most important aspect here is there's no shortcut for sure.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_00: You may get lucky, and I tell that uh the odds of winning a jackpot in Vegas is much higher than you know being an entrepreneur and you.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: know without knowing a lot of those things you get lucky and so so again I my again only advice here to the people is that really really know why you want to do it and uh you know if you really believe in and to your point like many entrepreneurs or people who want to be an entrepreneur come to me I discourage them and when they come after three four times then I know that they really want to do it and then you know once you know your why then you'll figure out a way so for example with me where I started right in Delhi in the first job with nothing to do with the technology and things like that I always look forward and said okay my dream was to become a serial entrepreneur and CEO.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know what space what city nothing and I was working backwards from back.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_00: So that way the advantage here is if your North Star is clear your why is clear you work backwards over there and then you can continue to fill the gap and there's only one Silicon Valley in this whole world because you know you required capital, you require people you required universities for that and you require people like now things are changing I see in Bangalore and everywhere else but um almost 25 years ago when I started in Silicon Valley failure was not considered failure.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_00: But anywhere else you go and you lose a job and then we'll say oh you know all kind of stigma is attached and all of those things here.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas in Silicon Valley you lose your job you are fired and nobody will you know challenge you for that you can go back and you can moonlight and things like that.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_00: So in general people kind of embrace and then also for enterprise space you know if you look at Google Facebook Intel all of these were startup at somebody in the valley so the risk taking capacity of the enterprises or the customers early adopter customers is also high.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_00: So that's where it's a combination of things why um Silicon Valley gets more uh successes than anywhere else but uh yeah man my last question to you is uh what did you learn about enterprise sales?
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_01: You shared an anecdote where and I'm talking about the psychology part of it right where you shared sometimes you will not meet a customer who is paying million dollars but you will meet a customer paying$5000 annually so it again depends upon the what the value and uh so how do you pick an enterprise?
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_00: So typically you start begin with the end in mind like in armor code I was very clear that you know I used to call one to one as like Fortune one to one person company eventually will become our code customer.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_00: But on day one Fortune one will not become your customer because they will want little smaller company they don't want to be the guinea pig.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_00: So that kind of trickles down over there.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_00: So understanding that what is the path and the journey is a part of it is also product strategy.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_00: So this time I was very clear that these are the customer base I want to build but in order to support Fortune 5 Fortune 50 companies the platform needs to be at a different scale and so as a result we put enough fundamental in the architecture space but you have to have a delicate balance because you cannot be building a product for five years.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_00: So you have to sell it and again from the customer perspective even one of the largest entertainment companies which I said earlier in the day that it all plays that if I come to you and you know like you are a Fortune 50 company is like hey is the CEO is coming around and you want to talk are you really a big company and things like that.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_00: So that's where you make a difference.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_00: Now if places where there's even a smaller company is there and they are kind of concerned about how big you are and all and then you go back and ultimately like we just signed a very large deal in large insurance company and I'm going to meet with their CISO all of those guys but if the team was able to handle it and all of those things.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_00: So so that is where the balance founded and a CEO becomes here is that what time you meet and things like that.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_01: The power dynamics you are saying.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_00: So power also plays a big role so what happens here is that and it's just not one size fits all.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like about the capability they will have a request for proposal RFP process is there and sometimes you know some companies they will see they will want to see you.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_00: So if there is a technology adoption life cycle right so in uh uh Jeffrey Moore's book is an innovator early adopter early majority late majority and all so it depends upon where the customer is there so in the early days yes of course you know hey I didn't have a big sales force or anything like that so I'm going there.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_00: Now at our stage where you know we are growing rapidly so then you want to make sure that you're looking at a system you're looking like a big company there and again you also build a system so I trust my sales team and sales team comes back and they will themselves it's like hey Nikhil I don't want you to come into this meeting because we look too small.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_00: So so power dynamics only part of it and that is where it is there and it depends again and and full disclosure like hey any of the advice here is no one size fits all like so you listen to it you talk to a few people and I'm hoping you are getting some good nuggets out of here which will help you in your entrepreneurial journey.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_00: But again I'll you know encourage people here and I like to say that you know dream big and dream often dreams do come true if you never give up and I'm a very good example of that.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much Nikal really appreciate and I learned a lot from your journey and I take a lot of nuggets you know or even our portfolio to apply you know how you built it how I think you think from backwards you think from a point of view of if you have to take a company IPO you want 3000 customers from that point of view.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_00: How do you build the entire product entire machinery backwards from it really appreciate you sharing very candidly and thanks for having me again and great enjoy and thanks for sharing your journey