Automated security and compliance
Following the pain: Nonstop ideation, prototyping, and talking to people in founder's network looking for pain.
B2B Alexa
Lukewarm interest
https://arc.net/l/quote/xkmgunhv
“Our first couple of ideas were just total garbage. There was a lot of whiteboarding. I think the failure mode in this part of the process with the whiteboard is that it’s just all so abstract. There were no customers or users. Back then, I tended to be a shiny-object person, so left to my own devices, my natural inclination was just to go find all the shiny objects on the surface. So I was, okay, no, don’t do that. Pick one or two spaces and go really deep. You’re not allowed to look at anything else. Not allowed. I chose (1) team collaboration tools, because, I thought, I don’t know if I truly love this but I know it from my Dropbox days, and (2) security, because it seemed interesting and I wanted to learn it. They both seemed big and important and interesting, and I had all kinds of security and compliance challenges at Dropbox. I also felt like I’d be happy learning about that space, and I also wanted to work with startups. Within collaboration, we were asking ourselves, ‘What are the macro trends and new technologies shaping the world?’ It’s late 2016, and so ... voice! Team collaboration software is also emerging, and so the answer is B2B Alexa. At the whiteboard stage, it makes so much sense. And in reality, zero sense. We recognized that if you can do it on a whiteboard, someone has probably done it. There’s no $20 bills on the sidewalk. Also, when you’re changing context from B2B Alexa to other ideas like, I’m going to make a better wiki, to solving security, to whatever, you’re spreading yourself too thin and you’re not going deep enough to actually learn anything that someone else hasn’t. So within the security bucket, I started asking all the startups I knew about security, and they all looked at me really guiltily and said, ‘We don’t really do anything. We know we should, but we don’t.’ Everyone wanted to do security, but it was hard to prioritize until customers asked for it. So I started doing it for them scrappily and manually, and that led to what Vanta is today. When I tell founders this, sometimes they’re like, ‘Well, how did you know security was going to work?’ You don’t. If you know the answer to that, go for it. But it’s only obvious if you look back.” —Christina Cacioppo, founder and CEO
3 months
Nothing