Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / RSAC Innovation Sandbox Finalist: Rad Security with CEO, Brooke Motta

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RSAC Innovation Sandbox Finalist: Rad Security with CEO, Brooke Motta · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Cybersecurity Go to Market podcast for a special showcase episode where we are talking to leaders of the companies selected for the 2024 RSA Conference Innovation Sandbox.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: These are the very, very few, in fact, only 10 companies out of the hundreds, if not over a thousand that applied that the judges have selected as the most innovative startups in cybersecurity today.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: I am your host, Andrew Monahan, and today we're talking with Brooke Mota, the co-founder and CEO at RAD Security.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: Brooke, welcome to the podcast.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me, Andrew.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: I'm looking forward to our discussion here, Brooke.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's slightly in time for you and the company, you and your co-founders, uh, which are actually recording this two weeks before RSA.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_01: So we're getting down to the last few days before we're all going to be there in San Francisco.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: And we want to learn more about what Rad is up to.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: But uh let's learn a little bit more about you first.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: How did you first make money as a kid, Brooke?
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: So you threw allowance, but also I lived directly across the street from a swimming pond where people would come every day in the summer in Massachusetts.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so I had the traditional lemonade stand, so nothing too wild and too crazy.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: But uh at the time I thought it was the craziest thing because no one else did it, and it was a great spot to do it.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you must be one of the few people that actually made money with a lemonade stand.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: I did just have people coming and going from um the swimming pond.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: Location, location, location when it comes to retail, right?
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: Next question is what's an embarrassing or funny moment in your sales or startup career?
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: I just feel like I'm always embarrassing, at least to my 13-year-old daughter.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: I'm the most embarrassing person alive.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: But um one time when I worked at Bug Crowd, I was about to go on stage for a presentation, and two minutes before going on stage, I changed an image in my deck, and it was a picture of King Kong, but he was holding paraphernalia, and they shouldn't have put that picture in a presentation.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't even know it until I was on stage presenting it.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's my embarrassing story.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: Did you just look at the image and take a double take and go, what the heck is that?
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: A woman named Peyton, who I worked with, was sitting in the front row and she's mortified.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: Don't change your images two seconds before walking on stage.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I love it.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: Final question.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: What is the story behind you getting your first job in cybersecurity?
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: So my first job in cybersecurity was at a company called Rapid Seven, which is based in Boston where I'm from.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I actually applied off of Craigslist ad because that was a legitimate way to get a job back in those days.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I was one of the first employees at Rapid Seven, um, where I worked for 10 years.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: But uh yeah, I applied off of Craigslist.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so it was a really interesting opportunity and really exciting place to be.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: I was on Newberry Street in Boston.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: So if anybody's ever been there, it's the best shopping area in downtown Boston.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: So every 20-something year old girl dreamed of working around there.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: So it was great.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: Where in the world did you have your first sandbox, Brooke?
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm from uh Massachusetts originally.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: And if you mean where do I grow did I grow up, I can explain that.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: So I grew up in a really small town called Lakeville, Massachusetts.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't even have stoplights, I don't think, when I grew up.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: There was a local barber named Fred who cut everyone's hair, the same guy.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't have a grocery store.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: The only place to buy food was at Savus Plaza, which my friend Katie Savus, her family owned, and that's where you'd buy milk or eggs or something you needed urgently.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: But it was a really lovely way to grow up in, you know, uh the woods where we could have adventures without cell phones.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: We'd ride bikes for hours until, you know, all hours when we had to come home.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, that's sort of where I grew up.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then I moved to Boston as I got older since I really wanted that city life experience with accessibility.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: And um, I haven't left city life since then.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: What happened to your accent though?
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: The Massachusetts accent.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, my accent.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, oh.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I can go into it if you want me to uh and talk about getting wicked hammocked and going to the packy, but I feel like that's not for the reviewers.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe we should edit that off.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: Oh dear.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: What's the story, the fun story about the founding of Rad Security?
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: Take us back to that moment in time when you and your co-founder said, you know, I think we might just start a company.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: So um there are two sort of moments in time that serve as like the foundational moments of our of us starting this company.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: So the first is was actually created before my time.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: So Jimmy Mesta, my co-founder, um was working at a telecom in um Denmark.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: And while there, he discovered an attack path through Kubernetes that had it been properly exploited, would have shut down the entire country's 911 operations.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: So no one in the country would have been able to use um their equivalent of 911.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so he said, gosh, there's probably a better way to uh solve for this problem than just having consultants like me coming on site and helping them to secure their Kubernetes infrastructure.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so um he said, let's come up with an idea for a product.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um he then reached out to me soon after that aha moment had happened.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: And um, we joined forces with my sales and go-to-market background, um, with his CISO background, leadership and security background.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then we started the company.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: Very good.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: So that was the second moment of him making a phone call to me.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: We actually went on a hike in Flagstaff where he's from and talked about how we would run a company if we were to start a business, whether the market readiness was there, where we would go to start.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's how we joined forces.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: So you're out of breath in the mountains outside of Flagstaff at whatever four or five thousand feet that is, right?
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's exactly what it was like.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: We have a picture of the exact moment too where we said, okay, let's do this.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: Let's start a company and leave corporate America in the sense of typical corporate America.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: Well, what's the problem you're looking to solve at Rad Security and who cares about it inside the organizations you're selling to?
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, sure.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: So today in cloud security, the way that most vendors are identifying issues, for example, the XZ vulnerability that first uh recently came out, is to look at signatures and CVEs.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's the way we did at Rapid 7.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: That's the way it's always worked.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: And since then, we discovered what if we, instead of just identifying signatures and looking for CVEs, we were fingerprinting an environment for known good behavior and then started to identify drift from known good behavior so that we could identify anomalous activity ahead of a signature being created or a CVE.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so this unique approach has awarded us the finalist selection at RSA, but it's also helped us get some really nice customer traction.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: And to fully answer your question, the people who are interested are um detection and response teams, infrastructure security teams, cloud security teams, those sorts of people.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I would imagine with the cloud being ephemeral, changing all the time, people using it in different ways all the time, getting some sort of fingerprint must be quite difficult to do that you rely on.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: But it seems like you must have correct a way to do it that is trustworthy.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: So just um long story short, we maintain a master fingerprint for uh applications in the environments that we uh that we uh scan and uh and can uh help identify behavior that's in drift from those master fingerprints um as they evolve.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, very good.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: So what's the big goals for the company for 2024, Brooke?
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so we are in process of raising at the moment.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so soon we will be announcing what's happening there and uh and who are uh partners on that journey.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we from there are going to be hiring some um talented sales and marketing people, some product leadership, um, some researchers to help us identify um zero days and those sorts of things.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so um we're really excited to expand the team as uh we grow in 2024.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you got two exciting things happening then.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: You got the innovation sandbox, which is one thing, and then you get the chance to go and grow and try and create the dream that you and your co-founder be working on.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly right.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: And for the week of RSA, except for wild exuberant celebrations for winning the sandbox, what else you got planned for that week?
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: Any events or parties or briefings, things like that?
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: So on Sunday, I'm doing a founder um round table that is being organized by Leaf Dreisler.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: And uh we're gonna be at B-Sides doing that.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: And then soon after, we are co-sponsoring a dinner at Fang um restaurant right next to Muscone.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's owned by um Caleb Sima's wife, and so it's a restaurant that a lot of people in security really like and want to support.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so yeah, we're uh really excited about that dinner.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: So if you'd like an invite, you're welcome to join.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, and then otherwise we'll be around.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: There's lots of different parties that we're headed to.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, that's a party that we're hosting on Sunday night.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: Awesome.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: That sounds like a lot of fun.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: Well, listen, I wish you every success and luck for the innovation sandbox itself and also for all the plans for the year as you get the next round in and go away and build the company.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much, Andrew.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: I appreciate it.