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• Developer empowerment is key to security hygiene |
• Two-factor authentication and Zero Trust Network are recommended security measures |
• Snyk's rapid growth between 2018-2019 |
• Challenges of scaling a company too quickly |
• Need for additional leadership to share responsibilities |
• Introduction of Peter as co-founder/CEO in July 2019 |
• Benefits of having two leaders with different perspectives and expertise |
• Importance of knowing when to step back and focus on core competencies |
• The value of trusting relationships and being open to change |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What turned me on to reach out to you was your recent raise... And often, businesses use raises as a mechanism for marketing, but also in a way a position of gratitude, to some degree... What do you think about that? It seems like every time you raise - which I've only seen a couple of them, but any... |
**Guy Podjarny:** Yeah, I think a part of it is definitely kind of an acknowledgment of success. To an extent, in startups you kind of move from raise to raise for a while, as you build it up... And there's definitely that moment of just taking stock, and saying "Okay, I have this smart external entity here, who is wil... |
There's a similar type signal that I've always really liked, which is when customers expand with you. I think that's another one, where you're just like "Hey, did I just tell a good story, and sell you something that sounded compelling?" But then when they get to the point where not only do they wanna renew, continue u... |
\[04:01\] I think the other more significant aspect of a raise is that every time you raise money, you're kind of doubling down on going long... Because you get to a moment -- at a high-level, you can claim that fundraising and exiting (selling the company) are kind of a similar transaction. They're very different for ... |
So to me, definitely the last two raises, which were kind of big - big in number of dollars raised, big in valuation - they were more about that. You sort of say from the get-go - or I did, and I believed it, but I had to commit to it again, concretely... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** To own it, yeah. What's that like? |
**Guy Podjarny:** ...that this is not about a short-term \[unintelligible 00:05:11.15\], it's about a real, long-term, sustainable company. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Did you have to do any sort of soul-searching during this commitment? Like, "Do I really believe in Snyk? Do I really believe in what we're doing? Do I really believe --" Because it seems like everything you've done in your career has led you to do what you're doing now, which is sort of the way it ... |
**Guy Podjarny:** Yeah, yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So you're in the perfect place. |
**Guy Podjarny:** I never really had any lack of conviction about Snyk and its journey being the right thing for long-term approaches. Snyk is about dev-first security, and it's built on a core thesis. We can dig into that over the show... But it's built on that core thesis that developers have to embrace security now ... |
I think what does always happen when you go from round to round is that you have to commit around the independence. So the journey I think I was committed to and I don't think I've ever veered away from it. The commitment to doing that journey with you in the leader seats, versus under the umbrella of a larger company ... |
1:Yeah, because you don't have to just be good at what you do, you have to be good at being the leader. I was gonna say "what you do" again, to double-enunciate that, but -- you have to be good at leading, and sometimes you're really good at a particular skillset. And maybe you've been a good leader, and you have good ... |
**Guy Podjarny:** Well, I think there's two things that I'm saying. One is it's just the conviction on -- like, regardless of your role or what your role you play, it's just that it's almost the next phase in risk management - do you want to bet, quite literally, financially, that these shares that you have here in the... |
\[08:25\] And yeah, definitely there's that other aspect, which is you don't know what would be needed off you. I personally have brought on a new CEO onto the company, Peter, who - it's probably a story in its own right that we can cover... But you know, it was my initiative, and it was an acknowledgment of both what ... |
I had the luxury of this not being my first rodeo. I spent about a decade in AppSec, and through three acquisitions of Sanctum - they got acquired by Watchfire and they got acquired by IBM. Then they founded a web performance company and got acquired by Akamai, and I was CTO there for a bunch of years... So I think tha... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You definitely have to recheck yourself - retrospective, recheck yourself, whatever that might be; everybody's version of that is different, because life changes... It's not just about businesses, it's about your family too, in a lot of cases. You're not just leading a company, you're leading an opp... |
**Guy Podjarny:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You mentioned your acquisition processes over the years... I do wanna talk about Peter McKay at some point, so let's earmark that, but I wanna go back to some of the learnings you had from Blaze to Akamai. You'd mentioned that was the one that put you in a better financial situation; I'm assuming th... |
**Guy Podjarny:** Yeah... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** But what did you learn from that process? It sounds like you've thwarted off a couple acquisition opportunities over the last couple of years, however long... But having gone through an acquisition process and being acquired, what did you learn that you didn't like about that process? Or what did yo... |
**Guy Podjarny:** \[11:59\] I think Blaze was an amazing ride. If you don't mind, I'll actually go a little bit further back... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Please do, yeah. |
**Guy Podjarny:** It's a learning exercise. So I was in this Israeli company called Sanctum. It lived over the bubble; it was one of the pioneers of the application security space, building the first web app firewall app shield, and the first web app security scan , AppScan. And Sanctum raised a lot of money shortly be... |
And for me, the next 2-3 years were very seminal in my learnings. First, I moved, I relocated - a big life experience, seeing something that is different, which I loved, and I think I learned a lot from. Second is I got much closer -- Israel is a great technology hub, but oftentimes when you're there, you're a little b... |
I actually did a stint as a tech sales person, and then I took a product role; I went out of development, into product. So I learned a lot about the outside, and I learned to appreciate what a good go-to-market looks like. AppScan's sales first quarter after the acquisition were the best ever for AppScan; this is the f... |
So to me, I think that's my first takeaway, which is appreciate go-to-market, learn the interaction, appreciate sales, as I was a part of the org for about six months, and then kind of learned that product. And then when IBM acquired Watchfire, I guess I'm gonna say that there's a bunch of things I learned what I don't... |
I'd say my two primary learnings were - you know, one is we got acquired into Rational; this is a security company. We got acquired into Rational as a part; it's the same journey that I'm on, this sort of developer journey to build security into development tools... And one of the key challenges, which we did some righ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Guy Podjarny:** The other thing I learned is the importance of some technical things, like banding. When you get acquired by a company that is a large company, it's really important to negotiate the bands, the tiers that the different team members would be on... Because it's really hard to change them inside; there's... |
And I guess kind of an appreciation - and again, some was done right and some was done wrong - of how important it is to shield an acquisition. To have that acquisition be protected from the beast, from the acquiring company at the beginning... But then also, similarly, it's really important to not make the steps be to... |
\[16:06\] So I ramble a little bit, but that was a very educational exercise for me. I wasn't a founder in that journey, but I had enough of a role in the diligence of both of those acquisitions, and even acquire a company inside of IBM. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, the key thing I hear there that you're saying though is that despite not being a founder in that scenario, you were able to leverage that learning to when the day came for you to be, to have that skillset. I think that's an interesting path, and something for those who are not quite there yet,... |
**Guy Podjarny:** Yeah, absolutely. And I think to an extent it's like -- you know, you get what you put into it. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Guy Podjarny:** I kind of joke that I don't have a first gear and a fifth gear. I don't really know how to go at speed, so I dive deep in... But I definitely use those opportunities, with the relocations/acquisitions to learn, to try new things. I like -- I think it's a Marc Andreessen statement that says "Replace ca... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You'd mentioned the banding - I'm not sure how deep you wanna go on that point, but I'm interested in the negotiation process, because the best time to negotiate or set terms is during the deal-making; that would make sense. When you talk about banding, can you go into that a bit more, in terms of h... |
**Guy Podjarny:** I'm even gonna talk about this a little bit in the context of the Akamai acquisition of Blaze. At a high level, what happens is big companies - every company; we do this now at Snyk as well - increasing (once again) to a certain size, you start tiering the employees in terms of seniority. You want to ... |
So if you're a smaller company, you might have five tiers; you might have a junior person, and you kind of progress up to your top-tier individual contributor, you might have individual contributor and manager tiers, and they would somewhat overlap... But you tier somehow. Now, because it's different people, different ... |
Larger companies - there's a magic number of ten, if you look at IBM, and I think Google is like that... Generally, there's these ten tiers. Tech roles are oftentimes -- the minimum is like a four, and maybe one and two are the temp receptionist or janitorial roles, things that are a little bit outside the technology o... |
So when a big company buys a small company, you have these things - you have VPs, you have directors... A VP in a company of 20 is very different than a VP in a company of 20,000. It's not the same type seniority that you expect in the scope of responsibility. So there's a matching exercise that happens during the acqu... |
\[19:59\] So if I was to try to condense this, so the guidance is, in the moment of acquisition, that's not the most important thing. You're trying to figure out "Would your team have a good home? What's the responsibility of the team over time in the acquiring company? Would you be successful, would people be happy?" ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha. |
**Guy Podjarny:** So it sounds small, but it's just like a bit that was actually a topic of conversation in that IBM acquisition after... Because a lot of things were done right. Again, I don't wanna nitpick, I'm just sort of talking about this as an area of learning. When I went on to found -- I left IBM and I co-foun... |
First of all, on a personal note, which might be interesting to people - my son was born in October. I took parental leave -- I was living in Canada at the time so you can take up to almost a year as a father, parental leave; you didn't get paid much, but you could kind of fall back to your job after. So instead of res... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It was pretty fast. |
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