S3E15 - Guy Podjarny, Founder @ Snyk

Guy Podjarny is the Founder of cybersecurity firm, Snyk. Founded in 2015 the company specialises in offering developer-first security and was recently valued at over £8bn. Prior to Synk Guy worked as CTO at Akamai following their acquisition of his startup, Blaze.io. Guy has spent his career becoming an expert in web application security, a topic which he covers in depth on his own podcast, The Secure Developer podcast. 

Guy spent some time with James and Hector to discuss how a big vision starts with small steps and why he believes everything is a product. The trio also cover topics such as managing a cap table over several rounds, how to enforce company values and what qualities Guy possesses as a founder. 

Make sure to like and subscribe to the Riding Unicorns podcast to never miss an episode. Also don't forget to give Riding Unicorns a follow on Twitter and LinkedIn to keep on top of the latest developments.

Transcript

James: [00:00:00] welcome to riding unicorns. The podcast about growth startups. I'm James Pringle and I'm a technology entrepreneur and investor and the founder of Pringle capital. My co-host is Hector Mason. Hector as a partner at B2B investor episode one ventures. Our mission is to uncover what it takes to build a unicorn business.

For season three, we're speaking to some of the best founders, many from unicorn companies and asking them about their journey, operational insight, tips, and lessons they've learned along the way.

Today's episode is with Guy Podjarny, founder, president and chairman at Snyk. Snyk is the leader in developer security, sneak and pass the world's developers to build secure applications and equipped security teams to meet the demands of the digital world. Snyk has raised over $1.4 billion from investors such as Salesforce ventures, [00:01:00] BlackRock.

Target global Excel, Google ventures and bolt stop benches. In this episode, we covered the art of product management, business management, cybersecurity hiring, and much more. Let's get started.

James: Hi Guy. Welcome to riding unicorns. Thanks for joining us.

Guy: Well, thanks for having me on,

James: It's all pleasure. So I we're starting every episode in season three by asking our guests, what does entrepreneurship

mean?

Guy: For me and entrepreneurship is about, I guess, creation and impact. it's about thinking about problems from a new perspective, which is, uh, unhindered creative process. So you can, you know, you're coming at it with nothing to lose. And so, you know, you, uh, not limited. You don't need to like, maybe be a little bit limited in practicality.

We can talk about that, but generally it's a creative process. And for me, the, outcome of that creative process is the impact is. Things that, you know, make your dent in the universe, make a difference at whatever it is, meaning or macro a [00:02:00] universe that, you have. So I think that's about it.

There's a lot of in the journey of it. I love working with people, you know, I love, solving problems. Like problem solving is a fun part, but fundamentally it's about creation and it's a

buddy.

Hector: I think it's come up before we probably discussed it on the podcast, but definitely founders are not getting enough credit for their creativity. you know, you could call it a creative art and there's probably more science involved in there. Isn't doing a painting, but requires creative minds for sure.

I want to kind of start off with, what a big idea sneak is. it's not an idea that you can spin up an MVP for in a week. and it strikes me that there's probably a kind of chicken and egg problem where, you know, you need to have a load of open source code secured for there to be any prospect a client, paying you To be a customer.

how did you kind of get things going? How did you get started? What was that first few months like

Guy: So snakes, sort of big vision was, was developer for security. Open-source security was actually, uh, is actually a stepping stone [00:03:00] in it. And the big idea was. In this world of cloud and dev ops security has to be embedded into a development because nothing else would work. You know, it's all around these independent teams and they're running to it.

And so that was the mission. That was the mission in the beginning. And it is indeed the big mission. And that's a good thing. And I'll talk about impact, as we touched on the beginning. that was the, problem statement Security has to be embedded into development. light bulb moment was to get developers to embrace security. You have to build a developer tooling company, not a security company it sounds very simple when I say it like that. but that was the statement at the beginning. And the hard thing is really around executing on it.

and I think, um, the commitment was to this. and this destination with a certain willingness to crash and burn before we pivot out of it, like no, not really being willing to deviate. and I, I generally think that as a, startup, you should have a big vision, but have a path of small steps to get there.

So the ideal [00:04:00] path is there is some big destination that you're trying to do It's ok that it's massive. In fact, it's desirable that it's massive But you need to understand what is the next step or sort of the first step that you need to do, and maybe like a loose understanding of what's the step after that makes it very natural to proceed towards that destination.

So for snake, for instance, okay. Developer security is that destination, but you can do security. Security is very broad. You have to tackle a risk. Okay. What risks? We're going to start with open source. So open-source security. That's already kind of a fairly big, space and it's not one that would be tackled.

Well, what do we, further narrow this to? And we focused on the node JS ecosystem, dev tooling companies are very much about the, the, depth, all around getting a community, getting an ecosystem, winning it out over, and then continuing on.

and so the journey was really okay. Let's, get in the position in which we, we win over no JS developers as they consume open-source NPM packages and we help them make [00:05:00] those secure. And then once we're in that position, it is very natural to then add additional languages. Like a lot of that technology obviously leverages, obviously there's some.

Okay, so let's add additional languages. And once we're in that position, in which we're in, we're connected to developers, workflows we'd know security teams that are bidding on it, what else do these users and these, buyers want to do? Well, you know, they want to tackle other risks. So can we add which the choice of the order is very important, but each of these steps are really a natural step, but we'll add container security.

We'll add, code security. We'll add infrastructure as code security. Evolutions, as part of the path. And it's all a part of that journey towards being that broad developer security. But a good example actually now is cloud security. we build, sneak, for open source and then we build sneaker container, which is kind of natural because container is a different problem than opensource, but it's also similar enough because.

It also deals with [00:06:00] open source dependencies, but in a different world, it's now operating system dependencies versus application dependencies. So that made sense. So we had leverage when we got into that next step, and then once we're in that container space, we're in containers and we moved into infrastructure's code, which also made sense because.

Kind of build Kubernetes configuration security to just sort of understand what those mistakes are and then evolve into infrastructure as code. Now that infrastructure is code we've just acquired a cloud security company, a cloud security poster management that's around post deployment, which makes sense because we know the infrastructure is called path to it.

And now we're going into the deployment. So big vision, small steps. You don't need to know the full journey to your destination. But to need to have a sequence of steps where if you ended up getting stuck in each of these steps for a couple of years, you don't regret having made that step. It still is valuable.

in its own right

James: It sounds a little bit like you treat company building, like you do product management, you kind of break it [00:07:00] down. So I'm really interested to understand a bit about your product management and product building kind of philosophy, because I can tell just through the answer that you'll look at something you're very good at.

So what did you do in the first 12 months from a product perspective? And what tips do you have for founders that are probably acting as a product manager in the early

days?

Guy: Yeah. So first of all, Uh, product, and also for everything you do, your V one is going to stop, you know, like it's not going to be, great because it's B one and there's a lot that you don't know. and I guess it's been around, that's a good thing. Cause it means, there's so much better than you can be after a little while.

So everything's a product, your product is a product, your company's a product, the culture and the organization is a product. Your sales process is a product and all of those are going to have you one and it's going to be terrible. And the only way to get to V2 is to get through one. and so you need to get going, and learn for art.

And I generally always optimize for learning. on that sense, for sneak, we actually launched a product within about a month and a half of, starting the [00:08:00] company was a Chrome it'll beta product, but it's out in the open, and it was available self. And we started improving it.

and we didn't ask people for money and the promise was positive and we learned so much through it. Then you, I'm a big advocate of putting your product out there. I think people over-rotate on staying in their cave and coming out a year and a half later with some wonder and just sort of hoping that it is better.

I don't subscribe to that path. I think you need to get going and you need to optimize for learning. Yeah. You need to think about the type of feedback that would progress you down the right path. So a frequent, what I think is a mistake, is, people wants to build a self-serve product led offering, but for the first year and a half, they work with the design partners and they, build that product.

Then they think that at the end of that, they will come out and make that product self-serve and the flood gates will be. and that basically never happens if you're a good, [00:09:00] you optimize for the feedback that you get. If you're not good, that that's a different problem, but if you're a good you'd open minds for the feedback you get.

So if you wants to create a product that promotes itself and is successful as self-serve, you need to be in a place in which you're trying to do it, and you are failing in various ways. So you're learning from those mistakes and you make it better. it's Nick's case that iteration was get the product out there as beta spent about nine months.

Figuring out, you know, how to actually get developers to not just run the test of their obligations, but actually connected continuously, which led to some learnings around our GitHub integration and such, and then open it up for people to purchase, to find out nobody's buying it because we managed to optimize for the developers that are using it.

But we haven't actually worked on getting security teams to buy, or development management To purchase. So we spent the next year and a bit trying to crack that knots two years in, we had a hundred thousand in ARR, not awesome. but we had tens of thousands of [00:10:00] developers and we had, fortunately investors that had conviction in division and we had that willingness to crash and burn before we pivot out of developers.

and so. we learned, we worked with customers, we solicited feedback. We continued to do that fanatically. and we, we figured out that, you know, what's the many problems that we had to solve notably, we had to broaden the platform. We had to build certain security, specific capabilities.

And then once we did that really kind of got us the table. Of that developer user base, once we also figured out how to sell it, and we continue to do that. I think you have to put yourself in a position where you're getting a constant stream of feedback towards the destination that you actually want to do, and to put yourself out there and just, be ready to receive.

Hector: And got off to this, sort of slaving away building products towards this huge vision, but not necessarily getting the traction that, you were hoping. Was there a moment when suddenly you realized, okay, this is really starting to work. was that a moment in time or was it a very graduate.

Guy: I don't know that there [00:11:00] was a moment. I think, it's a journey of many discoveries, through it. So there's definitely some moments that were more significant than others. you know, you always have your first deal, your first, enterprise deal, your first renewal. I love the renewal.

I think renewal up until you get the renewal, you always have this nagging doubt of saying, did I just sort of sell them well, and it was compelling and it now. when you have one, then sort of multiple people actually renewing the product with you. it's an insult to their intelligence.

If you sort of think that they're just doing it because you're a sort of, hoodwinking them into, doing it. You probably build something of value that they're willing to pay again, and sometimes even pay more to continue using. So I think that's a, important moment. I think what is important is to.

Find solutions to specific problems. So that did happen often. So, we launched the command line interface and people would download it and they would use it and they were positive about it and they would tweet about it, but they wouldn't put it into their build. They wouldn't use it [00:12:00] continuously.

And after a bunch of iterations, we, figured out this notion of connecting it's to GitHub as an app, because that automatically creates a continuous, integration. When we launched that there was a very clear, ah, yeah, we really correctly solve this. Cause you see the numbers are very different and how that, works.

Similarly, the, we needed to support GitHub enterprise because everybody was hosting. Now it's like getting a little bit diminishing, but everybody was hosting their code locally and we had to solve that problem. and we figured out a solution. technical solution to address that.

Once people started accepting that into this house. so, you know, you identified and correctly address the problem in terms of, business trajectory. And probably for us, like the one that we would have cracked that maybe moved us from would this work to, okay. There's a thing here. probably about two years in, as I said, we read about a hundred thousand, IRR four months later, we were at six 50.

And a year later we were at [00:13:00] four point something million. that stretch, I don't know if there's a moment, but that year, definitely the beginning of that year. And at the end of that year was a different sentiment.

James: And was that exciting or

scary?

Guy: Both, so sneak is, doubling company size and more than doubling revenue every year for quite a few years. and I like to say that's not these time that's war time. the problems accumulate at a pace that is very hard to keep up with.

And the implication of not keeping up with them is high. So when it's going well, it's not relaxing. it's just as demanding, but you do shift out of. Out of existential mode into, really kind of, seize the moment and you know what I maximize those. I think I naturally am not wired to be comfortable when I'm comfortable.

I quickly change that. I also believe that if you're comfortable, you're not growing. and so, I don't know. To be in that state [00:14:00] for too long. So whenever we could, we piled more on and so far we haven't

crumbled.

James: Yeah, it's very interesting, something that we talk a lot about with, unicorn founders, which is fundraising. So, some of our listeners might not know, but you've raised a lot of money. Crunchbase puts a 1.5 billion, that's from sort of top investors, such as Salesforce ventures, black rock Excel, tiger, global many others.

How do you manage a cap table through so many rounds? And what tips do you have on fundraising? I mean, how, how do you think is the best way to

approach.

Guy: So I think the most precious asset that you have as a human and specifically as a founder is time. and so, when I think about most things that I optimize for in the company is around time to market. I also think you almost never have as much time as you think you might've had an idea, but you were exposed to the same kind of market realities that [00:15:00] triggered the idea as a few other smart people out there.

and so you almost never have quite as much time as you think. so in that sense, I, I think it is important to use venture capital and fundraising to accelerate different points in time. Different types of, investors would help you accelerate more while others might slow you down.

And there are definitely points in time in which more money, one. You don't really know. I forget what you're telling an investor. I know just like, as a founder, when you think conviction, you don't really know how would you translate these new dollars into accelerated growth. so my, my philosophy is you are one I'm a fan of stage focused investors.

And I think if you take money from a growth investor at the seed stage, you're losing an opportunity. You're missing an opportunity to get. an investor that focuses on seed that might have the right connections. In that case, they might help you get to product market fit better, or they might help you get first employees better.

They might help [00:16:00] you get customers that are more looking for companies with which they can be a design partner. and even, generally a seed focused investor would help you get your series a which then in turn, I think series a investors, they focus on. Finding your first repetitive monetization approach as at first, we're just trying to get a good product by the end of your AA and into your B you need to start being smarter, defining your market, and of course these letters are somewhat arbitrary and sometimes they move.

I think in those cases, Those funds in turn would also help you get a series, a series B sometimes, intermix. But then I think as you get into your seat, suddenly you want scale. I think the value of an operational arm for a VC at the series a is nice, but it's not as important because at that time you don't need a hundred customers.

You need the right five, the right 10 when you're doing your series. you're looking to get from, you know, you want the a hundred customers, and it [00:17:00] is more practical for you to have a venture capital with a partner's arm or a group that focuses on helping you get exposure to more customers versus needing to pester the partner that you work with.

every time. to get those done that's one view, which is I like seeds, focused investments. And the point in time to think about when is it that if you got the infusion, you would actually be able to run faster. And then the last comment I would say is, uh, you know, I know VCs like, a portfolio of, investments.

I like, a portfolio of investors. you mix. Different investors that bring different types of skills into the background. Some might be geographically local versus ones that are more sort of global or oftentimes S uh, if you're not from the U S in the first place, some might be, indeed a strong operating arm, or maybe you're letting them be a secondary investor like, for us.

Excel led our series a and then GV came along, as a secondary, investor as a smaller investor in the series. And grew their position over time. but also the [00:18:00] importance of their operating arm became very impactful as we moved on. So at the beginning that were helpful as we strengthen our relationship with Google and turn them into a customer, but then over time, they also, helped us get any more customers.

But I think thinking about the investors together versus thinking about every investor on their own, is very valuable as well. Maybe I'll share one more than I might. If it says Google for full companies, once you get big, then, fundraising has a PR effect and a war chest effect. And so once you are in a mode of success and you're growing rapidly, the reason element of, hit the gas and claim the markets and say, okay, now is the time to go big to raise larger amounts.

To find opportunities to accelerate through acquisitions, almost like stake a claim, put yourself in a position where, others might not dare, try and take you on because you're moving so well clearly building traction. and you [00:19:00] are so well capitalized that, you know, it sort of seems impossible to overcome though.

You never actually, invincible, don't let that get into your head, but, uh, but, uh, trying to fundraising can be a vehicle for, creating a sense of fact, in the.

Hector: Yeah, definitely. I think having spent three years or so in, VC, you realize quite quick, How much more than just getting money into the bank to hire people, fundraising isn't actually how much sort of signaling there is and all of these different leavers at play around fundraising, which I think you've summarized really well.

then I think there is also this, Glamor at the moment in particular around kind of taking money from like a later stage investor at pre-seed. and I'm obviously biased because I would say to all of the founders listening, don't go to target global at pre-seed come to episode one. but there is definitely that glamour and I, and I don't think it is always the right thing to do.

but God, I really wanted ask you is. Scaled up through these stages [00:20:00] of funding and as you've hired more and more people I think are now over a thousand employees, keen to understand how you build a culture, how you continue hiring amazing people. and also ensure, I don't know whether you guys are remote first.

I think you're a lot of developers and I know lots of developers like working remotely. So I don't know how you've kind of thought about all of that and how it plays into your culture and, ability to high-grade.

Guy: we are indeed over a thousand people and we've invested in culture. I think like everything, culture is a product and you want to iterate and evolve it, but it, does come down to first and foremost, the people that you hire, that's the most important thing. So if you want to have a more competitive culture, you hire people that are more competitive.

If you want more collaborative, that's different. If you want people that are more. Individualist versus team players. First, Nick, we have four core values that were present our culture quite well, which are one team. We work together a unit. You succeed with the team because of the team, not that the expense of the team, we, ship it.

[00:21:00] So we deliver, we don't believe in hiding in your cave and thinking, you know, better than the rest. And, coming out with something wondrous, we ship each relatively quickly and we get feedback from. we care deeply. It is, uh, high, empathy surrounding to our customers for our missions, for the communities in which we live.

and for one another, as our colleagues, and the last one is think bigger, because the opportunity has always been bigger. So that one is like semi aspirational to always remind ourselves to, aim higher, and find those opportunities. And I think that represents it well, You can't control culture, but you can scaffold it.

so you want to try and make it easier to go down the right path for sneak. We started the company, dual headed in London and Tel Aviv, and we instilled a rule that no team will be co located. and so even when we were just a couple of teams, the teams were still half here, half. I think from early on, we had that somewhere between 20 and 40% throughout the life of the company that were remote.

And liked that model [00:22:00] of multiple offices distributed first, but not remote first because, we get real advantage from the cultural centers, social centers, brand awareness and sort of, you know, hiring. efficiency that comes from the local presence, but the work is virtual.

And so we can hire people wherever they are. And there is greater global mobility because the offices are our cultural environments. they drive the energy, and we've used that further to. As we expanded into, into Ottawa in Canada and into Boston, which is probably our biggest office right now. and as we acquired companies in Zurich and in Sweden and, we really take advantage and Halifax and, and elsewhere.

these hubs help us emanate the culture, and help us draw amazing people locally while the distributed nature. Let's us hire great people wherever they are and increases our flexibility, not just of internal moves, but also where we acquire companies that are [00:23:00] also great talent.

James: And guy, you mentioned that your, values at the start of that, answer, and they were very clear, you knew exactly what they were at what point in the journey do they come in and become set in stone? Is that day one or is that, day, 365 or later? And how do you think about enforcing them?

how strict are you with that? Didn't meet our value, they're gone or, you know, how do you go about doing that

enforcement?

Guy: first of all, I think your values are never set in stone. We evolve as individuals, as organizations and I think values need to evolve. They should evolve slowly and intentionally, but they should evolve. So I don't think you should ever think of them as, as set in stone. and they should always represent the reality.

So really what you're doing is you're in first and foremost and coding existing behaviors into terms. So you can reinforce them, coding those behaviors, even before you put any like language into values, is hopefully something you're enforcing, but just choosing who you hire [00:24:00] and which behaviors you are doing.

So that starts at the very beginning of the first people that you work with. we did our first iteration of the values of first values workshop, probably.

I think it was two and a half years in, uh, we did our first values workshop assisted from what, someone from outside, during a, an in-person all hands. Uh, and we came out of that with, 12 values, which was way too much. And so within about six months, we reduced that to seven values, which I think held us for maybe another year, until such time that we understood that that's still too much and you have to reduce the number so that people are remembering it and you can repeat it.

And we got to the four that we have right now, and actually one of them, we did change last year. It used to be ridiculously easy to work with, instead of think bigger. Which is also, it's still embodied in the company's culture was still easy, but we felt like that was more already a part of the one team and out of the, sort of the the care deeply.

and we [00:25:00] felt like we needed to embody this slightly more aspirational value of when it works well in the company is when we think bigger. And therefore we, uh, put that in. How do you enforce it first and foremost by who you hire and who you. Absolutely. Secondly, by what do you recognize shine and then third by repeating them again and again, and again and again, especially as the company grows and you think you've said it many times, but people might not remember it, and repeating them in functional usage, put them into the interview plan, hiring.

How do they fit this value, this value, this value of this. You know, put them into comments around recognition. Hey, this person really embodied one team, watched such a great ship at mentality as we've done this and this. so you really have to put in front and center and people would remember the values, but more importantly, it would remind them that this is how they're supposed to be here.

Hector: Very interesting. And, I wonder if looking back, over the last [00:26:00] seven or how many years it is since, founding. What do you think you've made any big mistakes and big decisions that you should've made a different decision? and obviously hindsight here is 2020, but if you could change one or two things, that you've done over the years since founding, what would you

change?

Guy: So I've made a ton of mistakes. but I don't know if I would change them because I think the. And product is the result of both the successes and the failures. and you know, for instance, you can claim that being in a state in which you're at a hundred thousand ARR, two years in is a mistake, and a failure.

And it's not because I anticipated it is because I thought people will purchase when they opened it up and they didn't, and it took a year to figure it out. But you can also argue that had I not made that mistake, we wouldn't have stayed because we might have pivoted to security needs prematurely, and it might not have put us where we are today.

I don't know that I would undo them, I think repeatedly and a bit more sensitively. [00:27:00] primary mistakes that I would redo have to do with people, notably not parting ways with someone fast enough. oftentimes when you knew it's going to be there, especially at the leadership level, and secondly is not bringing in someone where, you know, you have a gap.

So the two are very related it's as the company grows, especially when it grows rapidly, all parts needs to move at a certain pace. And there's this real problem of growth, outpacing talent, Snick. Roughly 20 people to roughly 80 people, two 50 to four 50 to a thousand in annual increments.

the likelihood within two years that the right person to lead a function when you were 20 people. And when you are 250 people is the same person is low. and that that person has grown that much for a 10 exercise. and so you have to be. You have to be constantly alert. And when someone falls behind and the company is growing very fast, their ability to catch up is very low.[00:28:00]

And the worst thing you can do for them and the company is to let them get to a state of failure. two and a half years ago, I brought on Peter Mackay's our CEO, and I took on a lucid president role. and that was one of my best moves for a variety of reasons. but one of them is that Peter is amazing at identifying when someone is not keeping up, but helping them move roles or bringing someone else on top of them before it is a failure and subsequently putting everybody in a better.

And I'm happy to say that practically all the executives and leaders that we've brought someone on top of them are still in the company and doing very, very well and continuing to grow thrive and are probably still doing the biggest job they've ever done now, under the new leadership. and so I think, my best move was to bring theater to LA, to do those, most of my mistakes happen before that, in not moving fast enough on it.

James: And that's one of Peter's strengths, but I would interested to understand about you as the founder. What would you [00:29:00] say your biggest strength is? And maybe as an add on to that, what do you think is something that all founders should try and improve on or try and add to their skillset?

Because it's just so critical to build. Uh, unicorn or

a big.

Guy: so it was a bit uncomfortable tooting your own horn. I think I, I am good at. Methodically solving problems and explaining them in a way that is easy to understand. So sort this, combination of analytical skills and communication skills. That is probably my biggest forte. I'm a talker.

I love, communicating, but I find that when I am able to explain a complicated. Space like developer security, open-source securities, supply chain security, or others in simple terms in turn. It helps me think bigger, because even if I can hold the complexity in my head, it's still easier when there's a simple principle or [00:30:00] definition that I can build on top of.

And so it helps me grow. and I, I love distilling other people's ideas. I actually host a podcast called the secure developer where I get to ask smart people, questions about security leadership and growth. my best part about that is actually distilling the blurb, uh, at the end. I don't know if it's the best, but one of the parts I like about it is distilling, episode into like my key learnings out of it for a LinkedIn post after.

and, uh, I think it's great. Yeah. To just understand what you've learned from it and, uh, and doing it. I think communication skills are something people undervalue founders undervalue. First of all, they think they're doing it for other people. They think they know it all or they understand the problem.

And now they're trying to. simplified for all those dummies who might not get it right way. I think that's the wrong approach. When you simplify a topic, you understand it better, and you can tackle it better and it would focus you [00:31:00] better because when it's complicated, you're not focused.

You don't know where to put your investments, but also very quickly. As a founder, you can only go so far on your own. And your ability to impact would be primarily limited by how much you can rally others to work and row in the same direction. and so I think investing in communicating and crystallizing your message and in shrinking the message to fewer.

and in focusing it on, customer needs on user needs on the needs of the person you're talking to, not on boasting the technology capabilities of your products, the more successful you will be.

Hector: Really interesting. I think when people ask me. Like how to work out, whether someone is smart and I'm by no means the person who can do that. I do think it's when people can distill complex things into simple terms then convey them with, words. because it shows, it shows that they have organized thoughts and, part of being a founder, I think, is [00:32:00] having structured and organized thoughts and being able to. develop a product vision around that. And as you say, rally the troops and all of these different things.

So I guess that's a compliment towards the end of the show, so, so sneakers now, a, an 8 billion, I think it's roughly an $8 billion company. So it's a massively valuable, company and thousand plus employees. I wonder. Um, how ambitious are you with the future of the company and what could that future look

like?

Guy: we have the, kind of the humble goal of embedding security into software development. thing is going to take us a while to get there. but fundamentally, I think that is, a humongous opportunity that would keep on growing everything in our world is becoming software driven and, and the decisions around that software is those decisions are made by developers.

and. More and more responsibility would move to these developers because we want them to move fast. We want to remove dependencies, move roadblocks from their path. And so they become increasingly powerful, but they can't handle. All of that complexity on the road, we have to make security [00:33:00] easy for them.

And the importance of security is only growing as cyberwarfare and in general, some of the threats to our existence and our data into our personal lives becoming increasingly cyber related and digital related. And so I think that those two waves are driving a lot of our growth and I think would keep on fueling it for a very long time as we.

Reach more developers to help them secure whether they're building as we help tackle more security risks that are, are within the control of these developers. as we constantly aim to improve how well we tackle those security risks, how easy do we make it to fix a security problem to prevent a security problem in the first place?

and. So nothing shy of world domination a little bit over here, but it's, uh, it's really around building that building a platform so that every dev tool can embed security capabilities into it, powered by sneak, building the right [00:34:00] solution that all developers in the world would be delighted to use.

It would feel like they're building better quality software, uh, and not feel like it slows them down too much in

the.

James: Well, I think that's a brilliant way to sort of wrap up the questionnaire on, how your buildings sneak. but we always like to end our. With just a quick dinner party guests game. So if you could have dinner with any three people in the world or in history, really, who would they

be?

Guy: I think at the top of my list is bill gates. You know, because I, I admire much of the entrepreneurship skill that he has, but even more admire his dedication to the foundation and to solving world problems posted, which I'm inspired by. And I, I would like to follow, guess a little bit on that vein, probably Obama would be a, the next one, which frankly is just a massively inspirational person, with his achievements and also strikes me as brilliant.

I guess to spice things up, I'd say like Anna Kendrick would probably be my third because I think she's fun and hilarious and sings amazingly. [00:35:00] And, uh, and if I'm having a dinner party, I don't know that I'd want it with all the heavy people like myself and build and, uh, and, uh, and Obama

either.

James: Yeah, that's awesome. Well, thank you so much, guys. It's been really brilliant to hear your writing unicorn story, and it's been an incredible journey so far with sneak sneaking. We wish you all the success going forwards as well. so thank you so much again for coming

on.

Guy: So thanks for having me happy to share.

James: That's it for this week. I hope you were able to take away many learnings from this episode. Thankfully, we have plenty, more amazing guests and insightful conversations coming your way. Every week, every Wednesday. Be sure to subscribe to riding unicorns on apple, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Thank you again for listening. If you're interested in supporting the show.

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