Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / 152: Christian Torres, CEO of Kriptos - importance of technology partners and why he brought on his first salespeople very early

Transcript

152: Christian Torres, CEO of Kriptos - importance of technology partners and why he brought on his first salespeople very early · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

0:32
SPEAKER_00: Data classification as an idea is not new, but doing it successfully at scale is really, really hard.
0:40
SPEAKER_00: In this episode question forest, the Steel and co-founder of Trypto explains how to solve this problem and how he's building this company.
0:59
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Sales BlueBird podcast, which exists because at cybersecurity startups, it's hard to get repeatability and scale development.
1:08
SPEAKER_00: Sales Bluebird gives you tips, quick experiences, examples, ideas, and inspiration for people who know a finger fans but building great cybersecurity companies.
1:19
SPEAKER_00: I am your host, Andrew Monahan.
1:20
SPEAKER_00: Our guest today is Christian Torres, CEO and co-founder at Cryptos.
1:26
SPEAKER_00: Christian, welcome to Sales Bluebird.
1:28
SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Andrew.
1:29
SPEAKER_01: Thank you very much for the invitation.
1:31
SPEAKER_00: I'm looking forward to our conversation for a couple of different reasons.
1:34
SPEAKER_00: One is you guys were at uh RSA recently in the early stage expo.
1:38
SPEAKER_00: So I love talking to early stage companies.
1:40
SPEAKER_00: And secondly, I've got a tangential experience around what you guys do.
1:44
SPEAKER_00: So I'm keen to understand that you're doing the market.
1:47
SPEAKER_00: Before we get there, though, two things I need to do.
1:49
SPEAKER_00: First of all, I want to ask our audience.
1:51
SPEAKER_00: I just literally the last week set up on the salesbluebird.com website a wall of love where people can go and give feedback, uh, reviews, testimonials about if you enjoy the podcast and the value you get from it.
2:05
SPEAKER_00: So if you're a listener and you want to support the show somehow, the single best way right now to go do that is go to salesbluebird.com, look at the top menu, look at the wall of love, and then there's a blue button there, I think it is, where you can click it and go and submit your own.
2:20
SPEAKER_00: So if you have a couple of minutes to do that, I'd really appreciate that.
2:23
SPEAKER_00: And then secondly, Christian, let's get to know you personally before we get into the business side of this.
2:28
SPEAKER_00: I have on my list here 35 questions, believe it or not.
2:32
SPEAKER_00: The good news is I'm not going to ask you 35 questions.
2:35
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to ask you to pick three numbers between one and 35.
2:39
SPEAKER_00: Actually, it's 34.
2:40
SPEAKER_00: So don't pick 35, 1 and 34, and uh I'll read out the question that it corresponds to.
2:46
SPEAKER_00: Why don't you give me your first number between one and 34?
2:48
SPEAKER_01: Sure, let's start with number six.
2:51
SPEAKER_00: What is your favorite summer pastime?
2:54
SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's a really good question.
2:57
SPEAKER_01: Well, I love deer bikes.
2:59
SPEAKER_01: In my life, I had uh four or five deer bikes, and I used to do enduro in the mountains.
3:05
SPEAKER_01: So I love to drive a motorcycle around the mountains and so on.
3:10
SPEAKER_01: So I remember really well just full summer in which I enjoy with friends, with family, going around mountains and riding, riding bikes.
3:19
SPEAKER_01: You know, it's really a good place, a really nice sport to see amazing views, but enjoy in teams.
3:26
SPEAKER_01: So I really love that.
3:27
SPEAKER_00: And when you say mountains, I'm presuming the Andes, because you're from Ecuador, right?
3:32
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
3:33
SPEAKER_01: I'm from Ecuador, I'm from Quito, and maybe if you don't know too much about Quito or Ecuador, we are in the Andes, and basically we have amazing, amazing mountains and you could go around and enjoy.
3:46
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so a deer bike, it's amazing to have up a dirt, right?
3:50
SPEAKER_00: Oh, I'm sure, yeah.
3:51
SPEAKER_01: It's a good place for riding.
3:53
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, those are proper mountains.
3:54
SPEAKER_00: Those are big mountains, the Andes, right?
3:56
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, incredible.
3:58
SPEAKER_01: So yeah, I love to uh motorcycles, I love to ride spikes, so at the end, yeah, I really enjoy that kind of things.
4:06
SPEAKER_00: One more number between one and thirty-four.
4:08
SPEAKER_01: Let's go with number 10.
4:10
SPEAKER_00: Number 10 is what's one event in the world that you haven't been to yet, but you'd love to attend?
4:18
SPEAKER_01: Event I would love to attend.
4:21
SPEAKER_01: That's a good one.
4:22
SPEAKER_01: I think I'm not a really good soccer fan, but I think it will be really interesting to go to uh see soccer playing in Champions League on Europe.
4:33
SPEAKER_01: So I think that will be at one really good event that I hope to do it soon.
4:39
SPEAKER_00: I'm actually with you on that.
4:40
SPEAKER_00: I grew up in the UK, so I'm a you know soccer fan, football fan.
4:44
SPEAKER_00: My team from age eight is Liverpool, and European Champions League nights in Liverpool and Enfield are pretty special.
4:52
SPEAKER_00: But uh yeah, I'd love to go to one of those.
4:53
SPEAKER_00: What a great atmosphere are we gonna have, right?
4:56
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
4:57
SPEAKER_00: One more number between one and thirty-four.
4:59
SPEAKER_01: Oh, let's go with number eight.
5:02
SPEAKER_01: Eight is tea or coffee?
5:04
SPEAKER_00: Tea.
5:06
SPEAKER_01: One good point is we have amazing coffee in Ecuador.
5:09
SPEAKER_01: In, you know, at the end, Latin America has great coffee even in Colombia.
5:14
SPEAKER_01: It's really well brand name coffee everywhere.
5:18
SPEAKER_01: But I prefer tea.
5:20
SPEAKER_01: I don't know why, but I really prefer tea.
5:23
SPEAKER_00: And any particular kind of tea, or is it just the the normal English breakfast type tea?
5:28
SPEAKER_01: Just the normal one, to be honest.
5:30
SPEAKER_01: I don't have any specific one, but I love green tea.
5:33
SPEAKER_01: Uh it could also be the you know, tea with fruits, you know, dry fruits that give that different taste.
5:39
SPEAKER_01: So yeah.
5:40
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
5:41
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I uh again, growing up in the UK, tea was what I started off on, and now I probably drink more coffee than tea these days, but I do enjoy a cup of tea, that's for sure.
5:49
SPEAKER_00: Well, Christian, let's move on to the business end here.
5:52
SPEAKER_00: You are the co-founder and CEO at Cryptos.
5:55
SPEAKER_00: Why don't you give us a sense of where Cryptos is on their journey of growth and establishing themselves in the cybersecurity market?
6:01
SPEAKER_01: Sure, Andrew.
6:02
SPEAKER_01: Right now, well, Cryptos is a company that has clients in seven different countries.
6:07
SPEAKER_01: We had classified over 160 million documents so far.
6:11
SPEAKER_01: We had deployed our technology to over 75,000 users.
6:15
SPEAKER_01: We are in the data classification space.
6:17
SPEAKER_01: We work more with enterprise customers, with banks, insurance companies, retail, manufacturers.
6:23
SPEAKER_01: And as a startup, we had raised$5 million through three investment rounds.
6:29
SPEAKER_01: One has been public this week, um, the last one of$3.1 million.
6:35
SPEAKER_01: We just announced yeah, this week after RSA.
6:38
SPEAKER_01: And yeah.
6:39
SPEAKER_01: Congrats.
6:40
SPEAKER_01: Thank you, thank you very much.
6:41
SPEAKER_01: We are the team of Latin American founders.
6:44
SPEAKER_01: We have people, well, I'm based in Miami.
6:47
SPEAKER_01: We have people around the globe, people in Mexico, in Colombia, in Chile, in Argentina, in Ecuador.
6:54
SPEAKER_01: And yeah, that's a general overview of the stage of cryptos right now.
6:58
SPEAKER_00: And you mentioned you were in data classification.
7:00
SPEAKER_00: Why don't you give us a deeper explanation of what you do for data classification?
7:04
SPEAKER_01: Sure, Andrew.
7:05
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, basically at Cryptos, we help businesses to locate sensitive information.
7:11
SPEAKER_01: So we develop a technology that classifies documents and structured data.
7:15
SPEAKER_01: It could be a Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF document automatically using AI.
7:21
SPEAKER_01: So our AI algorithms are capable of understanding over 1,000 variables per document based on the content and context to determine a sensitivity level.
7:31
SPEAKER_01: Before we protect information, we need to understand where is that sensitive information located, who has access to that, and that's the space we are in the data classification, data governance to understand where's your risky asset.
7:46
SPEAKER_01: So, yeah, cryptos is a technology that makes all this process automatically, classifying millions of documents in an incredible short period of time, adapting the AI algorithm according to the internal vocabulary, the internal policies of our customers.
8:01
SPEAKER_01: And at the end, we are classifying millions of documents with the same criteria.
8:06
SPEAKER_01: So you could protect that information with any cybersecurity tool on the market.
8:10
SPEAKER_01: You could improve cybersecurity risk and compliance strategies on your business basically.
8:16
SPEAKER_00: And is that why people want to classify documents then?
8:19
SPEAKER_01: So crypto is my second cybersecurity company.
8:22
SPEAKER_01: The first one, we developed a secure email service with PGP encryption.
8:27
SPEAKER_01: So you could trace emails, you revoke the access.
8:29
SPEAKER_01: It sounds really good, but at the end, it didn't grow as cryptos, to be honest.
8:35
SPEAKER_01: And that's where we realized that classification was a really core for any company.
8:40
SPEAKER_01: You know, the small, medium, big corporates, they invest in cybersecurity tools to protect information.
8:46
SPEAKER_01: But at the end, when they implement, they realize that millions of documents need to be classified, and that's a really huge challenge.
8:54
SPEAKER_01: So that's where we start cryptos because we start making manual data classification workshops to our customers so they can understand where's their sensitive data, trying to sell more of our first product.
9:06
SPEAKER_01: But then we turn out that classification, it's really important, has a high impact in the cybersecurity strategy.
9:14
SPEAKER_01: And we built our current technology with fully automatic classification of unstructured data.
9:21
SPEAKER_00: And I think you touched on it.
9:22
SPEAKER_00: The old way, let's call it, of doing data classification was essentially relying on users to know what to do, right?
9:30
SPEAKER_00: I remember going back many years, Christian, in 1998.
9:34
SPEAKER_00: Actually, I first started selling PGP in my career, so PGP encryption at the time, it was mostly PGP email.
9:40
SPEAKER_00: And I would have deal sizes shrink unbelievably dramatically because of the realization that we really want a few thousand people to be encrypted email.
9:51
SPEAKER_00: But when they realize that the user has to choose when to encrypt and not encrypt based on what they think the classification of the data is, they naturally had real doubts about how many people would know what to do.
10:01
SPEAKER_00: So my 5,000 user deal would go down to like a 30-person pilot pretty quickly and not do much more after that.
10:07
SPEAKER_00: So classification is so important when we're thinking about what to do with data, right?
10:11
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
10:12
SPEAKER_01: Basically, understanding where's your sensitive data, it's a core business if you want to protect that information.
10:19
SPEAKER_01: And it's a little bit funny what you just said, because data classification in the last 20 years had been a manual effort, which doesn't make sense because it's about perspective.
10:30
SPEAKER_01: Even if the company is classifying according to the ISO 27001, their own policies or you know, specific policies of classification is about perception.
10:40
SPEAKER_01: You could not ask, I mean, Peter from HR to classify a document according to its sensitivity based on ISO 27001.
10:48
SPEAKER_01: For me, it could be confidential, for you could be restricted.
10:52
SPEAKER_01: It's not about who had classified well or not.
10:55
SPEAKER_01: So manual data classification doesn't work.
10:58
SPEAKER_01: We are a company invested by Barclays Bank, so we want run the acceleration program of textures in Tel Aviv in Israel.
11:05
SPEAKER_01: And this problem of data classification, you could find it everywhere.
11:10
SPEAKER_01: Big corporates, medium corporates, small companies, you know, at the end you need to make this classification, and you cannot make manually.
11:19
SPEAKER_01: As I mentioned, we had classified over 160 million documents so far.
11:23
SPEAKER_01: In average, a user has 4,700 documents on the endpoint, on the PC.
11:31
SPEAKER_01: So imagine you classifying that amount of documents, it's impossible.
11:35
SPEAKER_01: And we had discovered with our technology when we run to classification with our customers, computers with 1.2 million files in their laptops, computers with 400,000 documents.
11:49
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and it's incredible like how that amount of information had uh stored over there, how that computer gets all that data and understanding if that's 10% of information could be confidential, 30% of that information could be confidential, what's the impact if tomorrow that laptop could, you know, the information could leak it out, uh leak out.
12:13
SPEAKER_01: So if you have a breach, that has a huge impact in your business.
12:17
SPEAKER_01: And we had discovered users with 90% of confidential information, confidential and restricted.
12:23
SPEAKER_01: So understanding your risk is basically it it stands with data classification.
12:29
SPEAKER_01: That's the impact that you could have.
12:31
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and when I remember back recently when I was working in this area, I remember, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, two main challenge areas.
12:38
SPEAKER_00: One is actually finding the data these days, because it can be in so many different places.
12:43
SPEAKER_00: Like you mentioned laptops, but you know, phones, clouds, consumer storage, corporate storage.
12:48
SPEAKER_00: There's lots of places these files end up, is one area.
12:51
SPEAKER_00: And then secondly, you know, doing the actual assessment to classify it accurately, because you do need to have that accuracy in there.
12:59
SPEAKER_00: And wondering how you're tackling both those challenges.
13:01
SPEAKER_01: That's a good question.
13:02
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, you've got manual data classification, then you have a second generation of regular expressions to find the specific words, a specific format such as social security number, the ID, to try to understand where's that kind of information inside that document.
13:18
SPEAKER_01: But at the end, you could not determine the sensitivity of a document just by a word.
13:23
SPEAKER_01: Maybe from 100 million documents, you find specific regular expressions of the 30%, 25% of the information.
13:31
SPEAKER_01: But what about the other 70%, which doesn't contain these specific formats, and you could not determine a sensitivity level because you don't have those kind of specific formats or regular expressions.
13:43
SPEAKER_01: So that's where we build this technology to analyze over 1,000 variables characteristics.
13:50
SPEAKER_01: We train our AI algorithms, and how cryptos is tackling the problem is by analyzing over 1,000 variables, characteristics, adapting to the internal vocabulary of our customers, internal policies, and running with the same criteria all the documents classification so you could determine that sensitivity level.
14:10
SPEAKER_01: And this is AI.
14:12
SPEAKER_01: At the end, you need to train AI algorithms.
14:14
SPEAKER_01: This is a process that we do, especially for our enterprise customers.
14:18
SPEAKER_01: For SMB, it's more like we already got algorithms already trained, but you need to keep giving feedback to the algorithms to keep having a highest currency, right?
14:29
SPEAKER_01: So we understand all this problem.
14:31
SPEAKER_01: It's to be honest, is a really challenge in terms of technology and so on.
14:36
SPEAKER_01: We don't compete with a DLP, with a CASB, we complement our strategy as a company is in data governance more than protection of information.
14:46
SPEAKER_01: We label that document so we are compatible with any cybersecurity tool in the market that reads and takes action with a MetaTax.
14:53
SPEAKER_01: It could be we have a partnership with NETCO, we had integrations with other kind of amazing technologies on the market.
15:00
SPEAKER_01: So it's really important to have that feedback and understand how you could classify that data.
15:07
SPEAKER_01: At the end, the user doesn't have the knowledge or the criteria based on a regulatory compliance, a framework to determine that sensitivity, the policies of the business.
15:18
SPEAKER_01: But you will have a high impact, good process of classification.
15:22
SPEAKER_01: That's what cryptos brings to the market, basically.
15:24
SPEAKER_00: And how do you find the data then, Kristen, as well?
15:27
SPEAKER_01: Good question.
15:28
SPEAKER_01: Right now, the most critical storage of data is on the computers, on servers, on the cloud.
15:35
SPEAKER_01: So we are capable of classifying that information in these three environments.
15:40
SPEAKER_01: We are launching also outlook classification and Gmail.
15:45
SPEAKER_01: So basically it will be email classification.
15:48
SPEAKER_01: But you already said that information is mobiles, it's everywhere.
15:53
SPEAKER_01: You have a storage box, rock box, and so on.
15:56
SPEAKER_01: We label that information.
15:58
SPEAKER_01: So at the end, with cybersecurity tools, you could trace that data.
16:03
SPEAKER_01: But now we are focusing on the more critical data for now.
16:07
SPEAKER_01: That as I mentioned, these are the three environments in this stage with cryptos, and we are opening that in the next years.
16:13
SPEAKER_00: Got it.
16:13
SPEAKER_00: Before we move on to the next area, I want to compliment you on your above-the-fold elements on your website.
16:20
SPEAKER_00: In a world where sometimes people get a little bit cute or clever trying to describe what they do.
16:26
SPEAKER_00: When I looked at your website, I immediately knew what you do.
16:29
SPEAKER_00: It says classify, locate, and label your critical information.
16:32
SPEAKER_00: And then the subtext is we use AI in order to automatically classify unstructured data.
16:38
SPEAKER_00: That's absolutely crystal clear.
16:40
SPEAKER_00: I understood immediately what you do.
16:41
SPEAKER_00: So congrats on getting to that level of clarity right there.
16:44
SPEAKER_00: Thanks.
16:45
SPEAKER_00: Who's the buyer for your technology, Christian?
16:49
SPEAKER_01: So our clients, you have three perspectives.
16:52
SPEAKER_01: The cybersecurity team, he gets a lot, a lot of good feedback with a classification, a lot of insights.
17:00
SPEAKER_01: So we are talking they could protect with any cybersecurity tool.
17:03
SPEAKER_01: So now all the information classified by cryptos I didn't mention before, but for example, our technology had classified 25 million documents in a couple of weeks.
17:13
SPEAKER_01: We could classify between five and 15 documents per second.
17:18
SPEAKER_01: So we are making this completely processed automatically really, really fast.
17:23
SPEAKER_01: And the idea of that is also to have real insights of your documents.
17:28
SPEAKER_01: If a document had been modified, it had been changed, we could keep reclassifying so you have information in real time.
17:37
SPEAKER_01: So for cybersecurity teams, it's really important.
17:40
SPEAKER_01: So that will be one of our buyer personas if you want to mention like that.
17:45
SPEAKER_01: The second one is risk, because after you classify data, then you could understand who has access to that information.
17:52
SPEAKER_01: And that means which are your critical users, critical areas, critical departments.
17:57
SPEAKER_01: We work with companies of 100, 200, 800 people, 800 users, but also 2,000, 5,000, 12,000 users.
18:06
SPEAKER_01: So you could understand, okay, the 20% of those users are my critical, you know, users that I need to protect that information and I could generate an 80% of impact, you know, the Pareto at the end.
18:19
SPEAKER_01: So that's how we see and we help them.
18:21
SPEAKER_01: So you could understand where that document, who has access to that.
18:25
SPEAKER_01: So risk uh teams get a lot of really interesting information with the classification of cryptos.
18:32
SPEAKER_01: But then you have compliance, because at the end, if you are talking about GDPR, CCPA, ISO 27001, the framework NIST, and so on, everyone talks about identifying your data.
18:46
SPEAKER_01: So we had customers that they had been the top one banks in their countries classifying millions of documents because they use our technology.
18:56
SPEAKER_01: And in front of their regulatory entity, they have showed the impact of classification and now they are changing the way how to protect information based on a good classification, based on how we do it.
19:09
SPEAKER_01: Our classification is based on sensitivity, that is really important.
19:13
SPEAKER_01: Confidential, restrictive, internal use, public documents.
19:17
SPEAKER_01: So you could modify, you could customize.
19:19
SPEAKER_01: Maybe you said secret instead of confidential, that's no problem.
19:23
SPEAKER_01: But based on sensitivity, you could have a different approach because that one single user could have different kinds of documents, and the idea is to protect according to that sensitivity.
19:35
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
19:35
SPEAKER_00: But so let's say you you wanted to get into, I don't know, decent-sized bank in the US.
19:41
SPEAKER_00: Would you start with security or risk or compliance as your first protocol?
19:46
SPEAKER_01: The three.
19:46
SPEAKER_01: The three we start cybersecurity, risk, and compliance.
19:51
SPEAKER_01: But it's not like a huge difference between the one and the other.
19:55
SPEAKER_01: The three of have the same urgency of classifying beta.
19:59
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
20:00
SPEAKER_00: It's good in terms of getting the the mind share, presents a challenging uh sales environment, right?
20:05
SPEAKER_00: Do you have a sales team right now?
20:06
SPEAKER_00: Have you got that for or or not?
20:08
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
20:09
SPEAKER_01: We have our own account executives, but we also work with resellers partners around the globe.
20:16
SPEAKER_01: One of those is, for example, Telefonica, one of the biggest telcos worldwide.
20:21
SPEAKER_01: Also, we work with distributors.
20:22
SPEAKER_01: Ingram Micro is one of our distributors, for example.
20:26
SPEAKER_01: So these had been, you know, to grow the business to complement with their own services, with the portfolio products that they already deliver to clients.
20:36
SPEAKER_01: So yeah, we had been growing.
20:38
SPEAKER_01: At the end, we are from the beginning to the end in front of the client as a company.
20:43
SPEAKER_01: That's like an internal policy that we have as a company, because we want to generate as a brand this impact to our clients, right?
20:52
SPEAKER_01: We train to our resellers, we train to our partners, but at the end, we are in front of the client from the beginning to the end.
21:00
SPEAKER_00: So I would describe that as a sell with model, right?
21:03
SPEAKER_00: As opposed to a sell-through model.
21:06
SPEAKER_00: Is that fair?
21:06
SPEAKER_01: Yes, tier one, tier two, and direct model, those are the three that we handle right now.
21:12
SPEAKER_00: Got it.
21:13
SPEAKER_00: And when you made the decision to bring on your first salesperson, your first AE, how did you know that you were ready to make that critical hire?
21:22
SPEAKER_01: That's a good point.
21:24
SPEAKER_01: I think we bring it really early, and that was good because the product had involved a lot.
21:29
SPEAKER_01: You know, the technology, we had understand a lot of things of the impact that we had go through to our clients with our product, with our technology.
21:39
SPEAKER_01: So we decided to bring our two first account executives back in 2018 when we started the company a few months later in 2019, and we stayed with them growing and understanding the pain of the customers.
21:54
SPEAKER_01: And then we dropped to more account executives, the partner distribution channel.
22:01
SPEAKER_01: And you know, right now it's an strategy that we want to internally keep growing our account executives as well.
22:09
SPEAKER_00: So you had the luxury then of having the previous business and you had people, a couple of AEs for that, that you then they evolved as the company evolved, it sounded like.
22:32
SPEAKER_00: Oh, okay.
22:32
SPEAKER_00: I misheard you then.
22:33
SPEAKER_00: So that was super early before we even had something to sell.
22:35
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was early.
22:37
SPEAKER_01: And our design partners, because to build our technology, we needed a data set of documents classified manually, you know, garbage in, garbage out in terms of AI.
22:49
SPEAKER_01: So we need a good data set of documents classified correctly with a higher currency.
22:54
SPEAKER_01: And our design partners in the first year of cryptos help us to train the AI algorithm, but we go with these account executives.
23:03
SPEAKER_01: As I mentioned, we got a first one in 2018, then another one in 2019, which understand from the beginning what was the value that we were adding to our customers and keep growing the complete sales process at the end.
23:17
SPEAKER_00: And do you have a bigger team now than a couple of years ago?
23:20
SPEAKER_01: Right now we have the team of pre-sales, the team of marketing.
23:24
SPEAKER_01: Now we are building a new team of SDRs.
23:26
SPEAKER_01: Also in customer operation, that department had grown differently.
23:31
SPEAKER_01: That was not right now.
23:32
SPEAKER_01: We have implementation, we have support, we have customer success.
23:37
SPEAKER_01: So with all the investment and the structure that we have been growing in the last months, it's to keep improving and applying some processes because at the end, you don't know what you are selling, just you keep knowing in a daily basis, right?
23:54
SPEAKER_01: And the impact.
23:55
SPEAKER_01: So that's where we want to go step by step, no too fast to documentate that information and share that knowledge with new people.
24:04
SPEAKER_00: Even with an AE or two AEs joining so early, I would imagine that you're as the CEO and co-founder are really involved back then in all the sales motions.
24:15
SPEAKER_00: I'm wondering how you've thought about how do you do less of it and train or enable the sales team to do more themselves, that whole transition from founder-led to sales led and what learnings you have from that.
24:26
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, I'm as a founder, I'm involved until now with the sales team, you know, especially for our enterprise customers.
24:34
SPEAKER_01: But um it's a challenge.
24:36
SPEAKER_01: It's not easy, it sounds easy when I just share right now, but uh you have a ton of challenges when you incorporate more senior account executives with experience in the industry to understand specific things into the data classification space in the impact of risk in terms of compliance and so on.
24:54
SPEAKER_01: Transfer that knowledge.
24:55
SPEAKER_01: I mean, all companies, I don't think just cybersecurity startups are challenges with that, right?
25:02
SPEAKER_01: Understanding which are those hacks to solve in front of the client, the pain that they are having right now.
25:09
SPEAKER_01: Data classification could have that impact in different perspectives, but it would depend on the maturity and the need of the customer.
25:17
SPEAKER_01: Clients that got DLPs, CASVs, or clients that are looking to invest in this kind of cybersecurity tools, other clients that are looking, other kinds of protection, because at the end, under structure data is everywhere.
25:31
SPEAKER_01: So they already have a leakage or a problem.
25:35
SPEAKER_01: Users they are not handling properly the information.
25:39
SPEAKER_01: So, and they have discovered that.
25:41
SPEAKER_01: So maybe they want to tackle that in a different way.
25:44
SPEAKER_01: And it's not about just blocking the user, it's about training the user as well.
25:49
SPEAKER_01: They label it's real important, and all that information that I'm sharing right now with you, new account executives, our partners need to know, need to get involved with that impact with data classification.
26:01
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I really like how you put that because the implications of classification are many and there's many nuances to it because this is not a new idea.
26:12
SPEAKER_00: I mean, people have been trying to classify data for decades, right?
26:15
SPEAKER_00: But trying to do it at scale and at accuracy is hard.
26:18
SPEAKER_00: And if you're coming fresh into it, I'd imagine you really want them to understand the context of what's been happening and why people uh haven't been able to do it so far all that well.
26:26
SPEAKER_01: Yes, it's a challenge, and you need to build exactly like the structures of what stage is our customer, how you cool impact.
26:37
SPEAKER_01: It's it's not just a single product making from as you can see with other kinds of technologies from the beginning to the end, with the same kind of pitch, you have sometimes problems on the cloud, on the servers, on the endpoint, connection with atin-specific DLP, CAS, VCM, encryption uh tool, compliance, the challenges.
26:57
SPEAKER_01: It's really open.
26:59
SPEAKER_01: It's it's a challenge.
27:00
SPEAKER_00: There's a challenge for sure.
27:01
SPEAKER_00: I'll tell you one other challenge that I'm sure you're thinking about right now.
27:05
SPEAKER_00: So RSA 2022 was last week in San Francisco.
27:08
SPEAKER_00: I mean, there were 750 or so, I think, vendors represented there.
27:15
SPEAKER_00: There's probably another four or five thousand that weren't officially there that were somewhere around about.
27:20
SPEAKER_00: Trying to get attention and trying to differentiate in a market like that must be daunting.
27:25
SPEAKER_00: And I'm wondering how you're thinking about trying to rise above the noise in the industry and and get people to listen and pay attention to cryptos.
27:33
SPEAKER_01: We got feature as one of the 10 coolest cybersecurity startups of RSA 2022, and we were with great companies next week.
27:43
SPEAKER_01: Congrats.
27:44
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
27:44
SPEAKER_01: There were companies that had raised 30, 50 times what we had raised.
27:49
SPEAKER_01: You know, it's it was really uh a huge difference.
27:53
SPEAKER_01: But at the end, yeah, you are right.
27:56
SPEAKER_01: I have heard from a ton of assistants that they have heard and they are hearing the same, the same, the same every year.
28:02
SPEAKER_01: Data classification needs something that catch up a lot of the attention from the beginning of some specific people are having these kind of pains, troubles.
28:12
SPEAKER_01: But also, yeah, it's funny in the booth we were rapping the most expensive chocolate of the world.
28:19
SPEAKER_01: And everyone gives you headphones, everyone gives you the iPad, their Raspberry Pi.
28:24
SPEAKER_01: We were giving you the most expensive chocolate of the world.
28:28
SPEAKER_01: Different, it's not cybersecurity, but how we had take the attention of tons of people as well, know more about what we are doing, having, you know, different ways to having that kind of approach.
28:40
SPEAKER_01: And at the end it works, and we have a great time in now getting those conversations into their companies, right?
28:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's definitely a challenge, right?
28:49
SPEAKER_00: And I think that those that think differently and bigger perhaps and bolder than others are the ones that are gonna be the ones that rise out and actually get noticed.
28:57
SPEAKER_00: I mean, the cool thing about your area though is that because what you do is so important to a bunch of partners on the integration side, both in consulting but also product, there might be a bit of a draft there, you know, route to market that is a bit thirsty for this done properly, I would imagine.
29:13
SPEAKER_01: Yes, yes, for like we don't compete with the cybersecurity tools that you have on the market that protects information.
29:21
SPEAKER_01: We complement, and our partners know that they had already sold different cybersecurity brands to their customers, implemented.
29:29
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the idea is to improve their services, improve their tools, and it's how we are approaching them.
29:37
SPEAKER_01: They already understand that.
29:38
SPEAKER_01: Andrew, you already said you are really familiar with classification, manual data classification, regular expressions.
29:45
SPEAKER_01: Everyone got a module of that.
29:47
SPEAKER_01: But uh, you need to go more in deep to understand that data and the way that how we're doing right now, it's catching the attention of the cybersecurity ecosystem, right?
29:58
SPEAKER_01: In a real problem, which we are talking about billions of documents everywhere.
30:04
SPEAKER_01: You need to understand where is that data.
30:06
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, I kind of look at this and go, two key questions for companies.
30:10
SPEAKER_00: Will your regulatory requirements go up or down in the next five years?
30:14
SPEAKER_00: And will the amount of documents you have go up or down in the next five years?
30:18
SPEAKER_00: Both of those will be a large increases.
30:21
SPEAKER_00: And therefore, the quicker you handle this, quicker you you try and solve it, the better.
30:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you already said if I ask you how many documents Andrew you got in your computer right now, in your laptop, in your desktop, uh, you don't have an answer, right?
30:35
SPEAKER_01: But we are talking about thousands of documents, millions of documents, which you could share everywhere, anytime, and who contain really sensitive information.
30:47
SPEAKER_01: And the impact of a leak of just one document will have really high, and you know, I don't want to imagine, but you could imagine what could be that impact, right?
30:57
SPEAKER_01: In terms of regulations, in terms of an economical impact.
31:01
SPEAKER_01: We had clients that had defined from the billions of documents that they got the specific 500 documents, for example, the crown of jewels through the methodology of crown of jewels to determine those specific documents that if just one document leaks out, it could generate an impact of 20 million dollars, just one document.
31:22
SPEAKER_01: So it's about that before you could take an approach of protection of information.
31:29
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
31:30
SPEAKER_00: What's your big vision for cryptos in the next five years, Christian?
31:33
SPEAKER_01: Sure, we are growing a lot in the data governance space.
31:37
SPEAKER_01: Crypto will be involving from a product to a platform, which we are getting a lot of insights and visibility for our customers.
31:46
SPEAKER_01: Classification in more environments, in more platforms.
31:50
SPEAKER_01: I mentioned a few that we already got, some of that we are going to launch as email.
31:56
SPEAKER_01: But we know that data is everywhere.
31:58
SPEAKER_01: So we want to classify Dropbox, Box, Teams, you know, different kinds of platforms so our clients will get that complete visibility of all that information.
32:08
SPEAKER_01: And through a platform which you could trace that data and get that insights for protecting as well.
32:17
SPEAKER_01: So that's how we see cryptos evolving from a product of data classification, that's how we begin.
32:23
SPEAKER_01: So a platform that will help you with more than classification.
32:28
SPEAKER_01: We're talking about compliance, we're talking about risk and cybersecurity as well.
32:32
SPEAKER_01: We are in the same three standards, but you know, evolving in a different way.
32:37
SPEAKER_00: Well, that's a big vision to go after, and I'm sure the team that you're building is gonna be excited to go after that as well with you.
32:43
SPEAKER_00: If someone wants to get a hold of you, Christian, and continue the conversation or even talk about any roles of the company, what's the best way to get hold of you?
32:51
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, for sure.
32:51
SPEAKER_01: You could send me an email.
32:53
SPEAKER_01: My email is ctorys at cryptos.io.
32:56
SPEAKER_01: If you want to look at the website of cryptos, then you have also more ways to contact.
33:01
SPEAKER_01: At the end, we are really open to have conversations with partners, with clients, with media partners as well.
33:07
SPEAKER_01: So yeah, feel free to reach me out.
33:09
SPEAKER_00: And cryptos is k-i-p-tos.io.
33:14
SPEAKER_00: Exactly like that.
33:15
SPEAKER_00: Cryptos.
33:16
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
33:17
SPEAKER_00: Let's wrap up with three more personal questions, Christian.
33:20
SPEAKER_00: Three more numbers between one and thirty-four.
33:22
SPEAKER_01: Let's go with number one.
33:25
SPEAKER_00: Number one, dive bar or cocktail bar?
33:29
SPEAKER_01: Cocktail bar.
33:31
SPEAKER_01: I like cocktails, so uh a mojito could be good.
33:35
SPEAKER_00: Another number between one and thirty-four.
33:37
SPEAKER_01: Let's go with number 20.
33:40
SPEAKER_00: 20.
33:40
SPEAKER_00: Oh, here's one.
33:42
SPEAKER_00: What happens when we die?
33:43
SPEAKER_01: Oh, it depends how you die.
33:45
SPEAKER_01: Uh no, just kidding.
33:47
SPEAKER_01: I think, yeah, for me, we just stop and that's all.
33:51
SPEAKER_01: But uh, it depends on how you enjoy life, how you grow in when you were live.
33:56
SPEAKER_01: So I try to just live day by day and enjoy this opportunity that we have right now.
34:03
SPEAKER_01: That it's having this conversation, meeting people, traveling, be right here in life until we pass away.
34:10
SPEAKER_00: All right, last one between one and thirty-four.
34:12
SPEAKER_00: Let's go with 26.
34:15
SPEAKER_00: 26.
34:16
SPEAKER_00: What's the last book that you read?
34:18
SPEAKER_01: It's not the last book that I read, it's the book that I'm reading right now, which I really, really enjoyed.
34:25
SPEAKER_01: Is The Hard Things About Hard Things.
34:28
SPEAKER_01: So I don't know, Andrew, if you have heard about that book.
34:31
SPEAKER_01: I have, yeah.
34:32
SPEAKER_01: So yeah, basically, that book, you know, life is not easy.
34:37
SPEAKER_01: Has a lot of challenges, and I think that Ben Horowitz shared a little bit of his life about the huge challenges.
34:45
SPEAKER_01: And I think it's more a book of entrepreneurs, but yep, that's the one.
34:49
SPEAKER_00: I could see as a founder, that is the ideal book to read.
34:53
SPEAKER_00: To, you know, I guess help you know that it is a struggle.
34:57
SPEAKER_00: There are ways to figure things out, and good things can happen at the end, right?
35:01
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, if someone had made a company successful, why would not do it as well?
35:07
SPEAKER_01: So at the end, we are humans and everyone faced challenges.
35:11
SPEAKER_01: It's just about the effort, consistency, and that push that you make to make this happen.
35:17
SPEAKER_00: Well, thanks for that, Christian, and thanks for joining me today.
35:19
SPEAKER_00: I wish you every success in 2022 and 2023, and uh hope to keep in touch with you going forward.
35:25
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
35:25
SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Andrew.
35:26
SPEAKER_00: Well, that was a conversation that I really did enjoy.
35:29
SPEAKER_00: It got into an area that uh I've got some experience of selling around back in the day, and it was good to hear Christian's take and their approach of how they're looking to solve it.
35:39
SPEAKER_00: I had three big takeaways.
35:40
SPEAKER_00: The first one was how Christian explained the evolution of how classification has been done.
35:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, this is uh an area that's been going around for a long time.
35:51
SPEAKER_00: Very few have solved it so far, but he's very clear how he described it.
35:55
SPEAKER_00: If you remember in there, he talked about the progression from manual to doing regex-based classification and now doing AI.
36:04
SPEAKER_00: So to me, that probably helped overcome some of the objections around while we've tried to do this before and failed, things like that.
36:11
SPEAKER_00: We say, well, look, this is how things have evolved over time, and now we're at a stage of using modern-day technology to try and do it more effectively than before.
36:19
SPEAKER_00: So I just thought it was really interesting and very well packaged, thinking about it like that progression.
36:24
SPEAKER_00: The second one was how important partners are.
36:27
SPEAKER_00: Now, at the end of the day, doing data classification in itself is not really a big outcome.
36:33
SPEAKER_00: It's what you do with the classified data that's so important.
36:36
SPEAKER_00: It needs to be used in a certain way.
36:38
SPEAKER_00: And Christian explained how important technology partners are.
36:42
SPEAKER_00: He said again, again, DLB and CASB, for example.
36:45
SPEAKER_00: And he also talked about traditional security channel in terms of single-tier and two-tier model going through retailers.
36:52
SPEAKER_00: And that combination is, I would imagine, quite important to go to market to get some draft off the work that these other companies are already doing.
37:00
SPEAKER_00: And the third thing I thought was kind of interesting, it took me a little bit to understand what he was saying, but he brought on two AEs really early, but he was still involved in the selling, right?
37:10
SPEAKER_00: And I think he still is a little bit.
37:12
SPEAKER_00: And what I kind of got from what he was saying was him and the AEs were doing a lot of co-selling.
37:18
SPEAKER_00: Now he's still involved, but I think he said, you know, more in the enterprise deals is where he gets involved.
37:23
SPEAKER_00: And for me, the reason I bring this up is that I think this is actually a very effective approach as you're adding in salespeople and how to think about the involvement of the CEO or the founder in sales, right?
37:35
SPEAKER_00: You can't have the hard cutoff, right?
37:36
SPEAKER_00: I've got two or three AEs, I need to wash my hands of this and just let them kind of do their thing.
37:42
SPEAKER_00: That's not effective.
37:43
SPEAKER_00: And you don't want to be too involved either, right?
37:46
SPEAKER_00: There has to be an element of, you know, we're adding people in for scale.
37:49
SPEAKER_00: We won't get scale if the founder, the CEO has to be inside every single deal all the time, right?
37:55
SPEAKER_00: So what I've got from what he was saying was he brought them in early, it was very collaborative with the two AEs that he had.
38:01
SPEAKER_00: And as a team has grown, he's kind of stepped away from some areas but still been involved in others and think through clearly and carefully about how much they need to know as they're taking on the knowledge of the background of the classification, things like that.
38:14
SPEAKER_00: So for me, that was a big takeaway.
38:16
SPEAKER_00: But for me, it's a great conversation.
38:17
SPEAKER_00: Really wish Cookbooks have a success for the rest of 2022 and 2023.