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So what you really want to do is you want to understand for a given user what is the use case that you are solving for them. You start with the users you want to reach, the people that you want to reach in the first place. Developers as a whole, and then developers within enterprises. Then you wanna say "Well, what's t... |
And then as you expand it, when you think about like "Okay, another use case for us is developers in open source", like an open source project developer. Well, what is the use case that I solve for that user? I help them integrate into their open source project an ability to identify and fix known vulnerabilities... An... |
The open source developers - what do I want them to do? Well, above and beyond, again, like the first case, being successful and loving the solution, what I want them to do is tell the world. I want them to help the world know that open source security matters, and that Snyk is a good way to address this... So if they ... |
\[48:34\] So these are all very Snyk-specific examples, but I think that the key distinction here is when you have a solution and you think about how do you bring it to market, there's this aspiration that it'll be a freemium-led go-to-market; so you want to get these masses of people using your product, and you want s... |
And you know what - if you can't figure those out, that's entirely legit. You don't have to have a freemium model. If you don't have those solutions, if the minimum use of your product is one that really should be commercial, then it should be a free trial. But then you should adjust your methodologies, adjust your exp... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I like the distinction between freemium and then having a paid tier with a free trial... Because in most cases, in any sales opportunity, period, you have "Okay, we're done doing whatever we deliver. What is success?" And that's use case. "What is successful use of software? What is successful use o... |
There's a lot of developers out there who need to focus on security around open source, their software etc. and so this freemium model allows you to do that, and the benefit you get as Snyk is to enable them to tell the world, because they've had success with it. And it's a band of people that will generally, as you sa... |
**Guy Podjarny:** \[51:45\] Yeah, for sure. I think a freemium user is a legitimate entity in the funnel. It's okay that they also advance to pay. The key distinction is basically, if we were to standardize the definition of what success is - a free trial's success is understanding your product's capability and their a... |
You know, for instance in one of the biggest media companies we had an open source user; an avid open source user loved the product, used the product, heard that their organization is reconsidering their open source security tooling or open source governance tooling, and introduced us into the company with a very warm ... |
Another example actually within a financial organization is that we had a team that was more frontend-minded, that really liked our technology, and used the free tier. It was a small team, and the volume that we provided with our command line interface in the free tier that we had was sufficient for them to actually ce... |
Fundamentally, I think the easy question is "Who do you expect to use your free tier of your product, and what for, and for how long?" And if the answer to the "How long?" is "Very briefly", or just as they evaluate, or if the "Who do you expect to use it?" is just not someone you care about in your funnel, like it's j... |
And by the way, an extreme version of this is open source-based software. People should ask the same question when they say "Should I open source my software?" Because open source to an extent is an extreme version of freemium. It's a freemium that you cannot back out of. So we have to think "Who is it that would actua... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Where do you begin then? How do you extrapolate that against, say, tiering your product? Do you begin with identifying what might fit into freemium, and then everything else is divvied up into tiers? I guess maybe specific to you, how did you define your tiers with Snyk? |
**Guy Podjarny:** I think the distinction of freemium -- so it depends on where you are. If you are an open source-based solution, then that's a very big decision. It's a one-way door to sort of go open source... Pretty much. So you have to really think long and hard to do it. And it's not that flexible. If you're a se... |
\[56:24\] But for free tier, if you manage to build any sort of community around it, you have to be much more careful about changing what's included. It's always easy to add, but it's hard to reduce. |
So I would say you actually probably should spend more time thinking about your free versus commercial, than the way you split up your commercial... And this at the very beginning, when you introduce the free. |
And then within the free, it boils down to the questions that I talked about. I don't have as crisp a framework for this, but it's to say "Who is going to use your free tier? For what use cases? For how long?" and then "What do I want this user to do? What do I want this user to do to sort of help my business?" If you ... |
From here, you either got the right answers, like either you've got a very clear answer - you know, for Snyk, we started and the focus was developers. Developers get to use the product for success; it's really when it gets to large teams and when it gets to engaging with a security audience that you go to commercial. T... |
If you don't have the right answer, you have to either continue experimenting on what your free tier should include, so that you can find the right use case that you can support amidst this relevant user base... Or if the user base was the problem, you need to go off and say "Okay, so this is the relevant user base her... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** There's a couple key points I wanna touch on, but I do wanna move into your story of Snyk and what's going on there... Dev tooling, security-first, developer-first security - all these things that are really important in today's world... But kind of layer in for me - you mentioned helping earlier; h... |
**Guy Podjarny:** Yes, for sure. To me, a lot of it came back to the community. Some of the help with Akamai was to help the odd founder and connect them with relevant customers... But a lot of my investment at the time was helping the performance and ops communities. I was very much a part of the Velocity Conference, ... |
\[59:56\] So Snyk was founded in this combination - for me, a combination of my two journeys. So it was on one hand the application security background, the constant desire to get developers to embrace security, and on the other side this first-row view, if not actual on-stage participation in the change of DevOps, and... |
So I built a company from the get-go with not just a technology perspective, but a community perspective. It was the idea that if you want to build a solution that really is compelling for developers, that the developers actually want to embrace, it's not just about building a developer tool, it's about building a deve... |
We talked about builder and breaker, and we had these long conversations about "How can we be a builder, not a breaker?" For instance, to give a very specific example just to show how deep it went - the color scheme of the website. We talked about how I tell you about vulnerabilities in your application, and some of th... |
So every tidbit about how do we work - we're free for open source, we give a lot to the community, we participate in these open source foundations... So a lot of it actually got embedded into the company of being one that works hand-in-hand with the outside world, with the developer community. We shipped a really minim... |
So if I go back a little bit to the founding of it, I think that notion of brand -- not brand, but rather almost the karma of people helping out, it really helped get the DevOps community to take that leap of faith, to say "Yeah, we know we haven't liked security tools before, but we kind of trust Guy..." I also brough... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:04:05.19\] Especially as you lead with this developer-first security dev sec ops - you often hear just DevOps, and you've gotta put security in the middle there... And what we often find is developers -- security is, to some degree, an afterthought; it's like performance, making it work etc, an... |
**Guy Podjarny:** Yeah, and I think it's more about the developer -- it's maybe more the word "developer" in the developer tooling, than just the tooling. So the key difference is practically all security solutions out there are built for auditors; they're built for security people, which makes sense, because they're a... |
Then what happened was that as an industry we built auditor tools and we integrated them into a developer environment. And lo and behold, they didn't work well for developers, because developers are not auditors. They don't have the same needs, the same surrounding responsibilities, the same pre-existing expertise... S... |
For example, in the world of known vulnerabilities, the norm is to tell you "Hey, this application uses 500 libraries. These 5 are vulnerable. Go fish. Go figure out how these five came in." Well, in practice as a developer you don't use 500 libraries, you use 15. And those 15 brought in these hundred, and those hundre... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Where they're hanging out at. |
**Guy Podjarny:** Exactly. So we built an integration into GitHub, and that was really hard. We had to build the technology to take source code that wasn't built, and the dependency system hasn't kicked in yet, and approximate - build out the dependency graph without building the app, which every dependency ecosystem i... |
\[01:07:54.16\] So all of these are just a few of many, many examples of "Think about it through the developer's eyes." And I think all of those approaches, whether it's discovery, or where do we integrate, and the core technologies, how do we present results - those were very different. And the tools is what makes it ... |
So what we need to do is we need to make it easier -- like, if there's a line of how much you care and a line of how hard it is, the line of how hard it is to be lower than the line of how much you care. So we're gonna inch along how much you care. We're gonna educate, we can learn security breaches, and all that; we a... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Guy Podjarny:** Everything we do... Like, we went into container security - same approach; what is different as a developer? What do I need from a container security solution? And if I just throw one example, it's like it's a separation from the base image to the Docker file. From a security perspective, if there's a... |
So a lot of these things -- and then the last example I just can't not mention, it is the automated fixing. Maybe the biggest difference between a developer and an auditor is that an auditor's job is to find problems, and a developer's job is to fix them. |
So if I build a developer tool that just finds problems, developers are not gonna like me too much. So what we've built is we've built a tool that actually finds those problems, figures out how to fix them and package that up as a pull request and opens that up to your repository. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, thank you. |
**Guy Podjarny:** Then you want that. Then you get that reaction, of saying "Why would I do that, if the tool can do it for me?" |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right. |
**Guy Podjarny:** Anyways, I get excited a little bit when I talk about it, but I think there's a lot of passion because this needs to happen, and it needs to happen across the industry, to really think about developers' needs versus the security mandate and expect developers to fall in line. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. I think a lot that comes with a mind change to developers, right? For a while it had just been just DevOps, and as of recently, and part of a lot of the movement you've done and the work you've been doing in community, as you mentioned of your journey, has been around changing minds. I heard ... |
So you can built a great tool, and it can do all these amazing things, but if developers don't consider it - well, then how do you help developers shift left? |
**Guy Podjarny:** Yeah, exactly. I actually like to say that shift left is really important. It's this notion of moving testing, and the security activities earlier in the cycle... But I like to think that the big change is not shift left, but it's top to bottom. It's this notion of shifting security from being central... |
Security has to take the lens -- like, developers have to change, they have to embrace a bunch of these things, and the tools need to simplify it, but actually, security needs to change very substantially as well. They need to change from being ones that succeed by doing, by being the expert that understands both appli... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:12:23.07\] Well, yeah, developer-first security is an interesting concept and interesting thing; obviously, you've built a ginormous business around it... You reached unicorn status. You haven't even said that yet, Guy. I mean, you started from the bottom and now you're here. It's crazy that th... |
**Guy Podjarny:** Yeah, as part of our commitment to the community, or a part of the need for the community to go through this transition as they did in DevOps is around giving the community places where they can share knowledge. Security is really quite terrible in sharing practices. There's this sort of natural tende... |
So early on, we tried to just sort of educate and share practices, and then subsequently I started the podcast "The Secure Developer", and then we built DevSecOps, which we called The Security Developer Community at first, and then we renamed to DevSecOps And then the last big event was DevSecCon, which we acquired... ... |
And in DevSecCon, a lot of it is just around literally, physically coming together. Now, of course, Covid-19 will change that and we're making it virtual to the extent we need at the moment entirely, but it's around physically meeting. A lot of times what happens -- and again, it's all learnings from DevOps; we're repl... |
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