In this episode of the B2B Go-To-Market Leaders Podcast, Vijay Damojipurapu sits down with Cy Khormaee, co-founder of AegisAI, to explore his journey from computer science research and early Microsoft days to entrepreneurship, Google, and eventually building AegisAI. Cy shares insights into curiosity-driven sales, the challenges of scaling security solutions, lessons from pivots like reCAPTCHA, and how entrepreneurs can stay ahead of technological and market shifts while remaining grounded in customer problems.
They dive into:
- How curiosity and problem-solving shaped Cy’s GTM approach from Microsoft through startups.
- Lessons from Contastic and Google that informed AegisAI’s AI-native solutions.
- Why focusing on real customer pain is the foundation of entrepreneurship.
The role of referrals, trust, and customer success in scaling GTM motions.
Practical advice for young professionals entering sales and go-to-market career.
Connect with Cy Khormaee on LinkedIn
Connect with Vijay Damojipurapu on LinkedIn
Listen To The Episode:
Curiosity-Driven GTM: 3x Founder Cy Khormaee on Building AegisAI
So first and foremost, always the question that I start off with, I mean, there’s a question I always start off with for the podcast, and the listeners love it, which is how do you view and define go-to-market?
Yeah, I mean, for me, it’s all about getting the right product to the right person. You think in a perfect world, everyone has everything they ever need, but look, it’s a messy marketplace, like new things are happening all the time, needs change. It’s actually really hard, both from the buyer’s side and the seller’s side, to make that great connection.
And I think the art of go-to-market is efficiently bridging that connection. So you almost imagine the platonic ideal of go-to-market is imagine every single person that could benefit from your product instantly had it in their hands with no transaction cost. And when I think about the effort of go-to-market and go-to-market professionals, it’s to go from a state of the world that is total chaos and no one has what they need towards that platonic ideal.
Yeah, no, that’s a great explanation. I think this is the first time I’m hearing, putting it more succinctly and magically, if you will, which is, hey, a certain set of people have a specific problem, you have something that will solve the problem, connect the two, as simple as that. I mean, it’s very simple to say it, but it’s super, super hard to execute against it.
I think that’s well said. That’s exactly right. It’s simple, but it’s incredibly hard.
And for what it’s worth, that perspective, I don’t think it’s changed my entire career to go-to-market. So it’s always trying to solve that problem and every different variant, every different problem that every different set of stakeholders, but it boils down to those two things. Yeah, fantastic.
All right, let’s take a step back, big picture. And if you can walk our listeners through your career journey and what led you to what you’re doing today, we’ll get into startup after that.
Yeah, I’ll try and get my life’s journey in two or three minutes.
And it’s a bit of an interesting journey, particularly for a go-to-market audience, because I started my life as a computer science graduate. So, actually, I was doing natural language processing research. I was thinking about doing a PhD.
These are not typically things you see, I’m sure, for the average go-to-market leader. And so those led me to take my first job at Microsoft. I built a lot of early ETL solutions.
The first version of Microsoft Ad Center was all kinds of built in my team. And then I got my first taste of go-to-market. Actually, there was a great leader named Philip Desautels, whom I ended up working for.
And I remember I flew out to Boston to meet with him. And he was telling me, Hey, I’ve got this great team. We’re helping universities adopt developer technologies.
You should come and be a go-to-market person here. I’m like, oh, sounds cool. I don’t know anything else other than that.
I remember he had a gold Rolex that on the back of which was said, Thanks from Bill Gates, signed. They’re like, Wow, that’s impactful. I don’t really understand what this is, but I like it.
So let’s go. So I picked up my life, flew out across the country, and took a role I’d never done before. And yeah, I was just off the races.
Also, I think I was one of the youngest reps in the field. So I think I started at Microsoft when I was 19 years old. I think at this point I was 20 or 21.
So, just barely able to take a customer to a bar at this point. Wow. We’re getting out there and selling.
And it turns out I loved it. I love the aspect of really helping customers. It really fit the natural curiosity.
I had to really understand what they were trying to do. And then the freedom to run your own business. I was running a mid-Atlantic territory for Microsoft.
And there was just a lot of latitude in doing what you thought was best to meet your customers’ needs and finding ways to help them. I remember one of the best relationships we built was with Georgetown. It really started with me helping a professor get a codec working before her class.
I think all the banks were super useful. What else can you do? So again, it’s all in service of finding that solution for the customer. So after that, I spent a decade as an entrepreneur.
I built a company called cmls.com in the commercial real estate space, built a company using AI and NLP to automate sales outbound, which is becoming a very hot theme now. But we were one of the earliest companies to do this back in 2013. And we were funded by Lightspeed Ventures in that case.
We sold that to Sugar CRM. So we became part of their Sugar Intelligence Suite. And all of that led me to Google.
I just made that one note on just being an entrepreneur, I feel like it’s all about go to market. For me, when I look at the problems, technically, we can usually figure out the technical problem. They’re hard.
You need brilliant engineering to get that done, but they’re usually there. The real binary thing about entrepreneurship I found is identifying the customer pain and making sure you’re very clear on that. And they’re going to try all kinds of things to solve it on building products, on creating solutions, on delivery mechanisms, on marketing, on sales.
All that’s going to change a lot, but that core customer pain is not going to change. If I think about our current business, by the way, like email security, people are getting phishing and spam for the whole 50 years email’s been around. That hasn’t changed.
So it’s a mission that’s very clear for us. So all of that really is what eventually brought me to Google, where I got to work with our current team. And at that point, I ran browsing and reCAPTCHA.
And really, my mandate there was to take these incredible pillars of the security community, things that have really protected most of the internet. When I say most, I think browsing today protects around 5 billion devices, which is the vast majority of the internet. And reCAPTCHA protects more than 7 million websites, which again is maybe the majority of the internet.
So these incredible platforms are being them to market as enterprise solutions. So, really empowering them to grow from being these incredible free platforms to pillars of Google’s GCP business. And so we got to see a chance to build go-to-market enterprise motion and security for the first time with this team, all while getting to work with some of the biggest ecosystem players, all the way from India Railways, all the way to Spotify.
So we worked forever and across the board. And really, again, just coming back to that process of helping connect this great need. In that case, it was defense against phishing, defense against credential stuffing, with the customers that needed it at scale.
And then all of that was really the accumulation that led to me founding AegisAI with Ryan. So we worked together. Ryan was my engineering partner at Google.
Bhadra was our head of product, was one of the product managers at Google. And so we all worked together at Google for five or six years. I think between the three of us, we’ve probably been around at Google for 30 years working on this problem.
They all worked on the space in this area for Google with me. And so we said, Hey, we saw this rise in AI-powered attacks coming. It’s really getting more sophisticated.
It’s really getting more complex. There must be a different solution here. And so we got inspired to go build the agent-based solution, something that was LLM native, founded this, and turned out it worked really well.
It was an incredible journey, and it was really something that worked better than we ever could have expected. A quick story on the actual founding was after Google, Ryan, and I had continued to surf. Folks can see maybe in the background, I got my surfboard.
So we were surfing in Aracera and Portugal together and reading AI papers as geeks do when they’re on vacation. And we just had this intense realization that we had to build something now. This was the moment when agentic and reasoning technology was really taking off.
The threat was more real than ever because adversaries were using that, and we needed to put the right defense in the hands of the defenders. So that trip, we flew back to New York, and we just got to work building and iterating. And then the rest, as they say, is history.
Wow, man. You packed an amazing, what, 10, 15, 20 years of your life into what, 23 minutes, A-plus job for you on that. But there’s so much to unpack. And I’m sure even if you spend the entire 60 minutes just on that, I’m sure I’m doing a lot of injustice in terms of uncovering so many things. So let’s spend maybe a few minutes. So, going back to your time at Microsoft, you moved to your first go-to-market role. And that’s when you discovered the whole thing, that first of all, you were curious, that really bubbled up. And then something else was trying to understand the problem of a customer. So expand on that. I mean, I’m thinking more from the listeners who are either young in their go-to-market journey, or they’re trying to get better at that. That’s super critical. So expand on that, if you can.
Yeah, it’s a great question and a great lens. Let me kind of think through that a little bit there. So, just to understand the problem, what we’re solving was a very nuanced problem in that team at Microsoft.
So we were part of what was called the Developer Evangelism Organization. And the very specific problem that we’re solving was that companies, in fact, Microsoft, and other companies wanted to implement more Microsoft technology. That was a fairly universal thing.
And their problem was, there weren’t enough people trained on that technology to successfully meet that demand. We actually got into the business of training. So we do things like writing curriculum for universities, getting more students trained on .NET, helping people understand the great tools they had back in the day, like SQL Server and integration services.
So again, just on the problem, whatever the problem is, you just have to understand it. And then the solutions can be very different. So in this case, we’re actually largely creating, promoting, and helping train for these developer tools for companies to implement more Microsoft technology.
It’s a very odd problem if you think about it. One, when you hear about it, it’s fascinating. Of course, that role evolved from being that into selling more of these classic developer technologies.
But the problem itself is very interesting. I think that’s one. And then two is on what young people can learn.
And actually, I just had this realization because I was talking to a young person just a couple of days ago who’s interested in entering the sales industry. And traditionally, you enter by cold calling. It’s very frustrating to get into sales.
And that’s kind of how you do it. But I think today, it’s very different. It can be led by technology.
There are all these new tools out there, you know, like Clay, all the new stuff coming from HubSpot. It’s very different and automated. And I think there’s a new era there.
And so it does harken back to even my start at Microsoft, where there were a couple of things we were doing that are very different. I did that was very different. So I think when I started again, I was 20.
I was the youngest rep on that team by a decade at least, and probably the average age by 15 years. I think one of my colleagues responded saying he had a t-shirt that was older than me, which was true. He actually wore the t-shirt at some point, which is super funny.
You know, I was using tools. At that point, I was one of the first people on the team to successfully use mail merge to do mass mail, which is mass mailings back in, you know, the 2010 era. That wasn’t a thing that you really saw, especially with corporate executives.
Imagine being the only person doing that. Incredibly powerful, automated list building through, at that point, they were called Upwork. So, contracting platforms.
And then we also did Facebook advertising. So we were acquiring Facebook users for a nickel a piece. And we didn’t even know that, but we knew I was getting an email.
I’m getting the right to contact this person for a nickel. That’s a screaming deal. And so the way I distill those learnings that are obviously not relevant today, because the world has shifted to today, is that marketing and go-to-market is an intensely competitive zero-sum game.
Like your message needs to beat out everyone else’s. And the way to do that is by leveraging new tactics, new techniques, new technologies, and new marketplaces. You must be looking towards the future and using what is new, or you’re going to be drowned out.
And so if you’re a young person or a person early career, thinking about entering the space, I highly encourage you to master, not the old tools. Don’t worry about Salesforce as much. Don’t worry about as many of the things that everyone else in the org will know.
Worry about the things that they don’t know. Like what I love when I talk to sales folks who I’m going to work with is, teach me something new. Teach me a tactic, teach me a tool, teach me a way to use Clay that I’ve never seen before.
And in fact, one of the reps we’re just going to hire soon, that’s one of the ways he really impressed me, is that he is more up-to-date on the recent tools to scale, go-to-market in a customized way using AI. And I’m like, great. I want you on my team because not only do I think you know something more than me now, but you’re kind of proven as a curious individual who’s thoughtful about both how to sell, as well as how technology works, who’s going to keep me ahead of the game in the future.
And so anyway, I think it’s a phenomenal time to enter, become a seller as a young person. I think this is a golden era where you get to go in there and experiment and innovate and create new things with AI instead of, you know, dialing for dollars, which, you know, I can recall doing plenty of that in my early career. Yeah.
No, again, I think you hit on so many important points over there, Cy, which is curiosity. If you keep that thread burning, if you keep having curiosity fire burning, you’ll find ways. You’ll find ways to, first of all, figure out how to identify the problems, how to identify the right set of problems, and innovative ways to solve them.
I think that’s a common thread across. It doesn’t matter what role, what industry, or how many years of experience. Yeah.
Also, add it really, if you extend that from the problem to the customer, and you start to really understand the customer as a whole, you use it to build the relationship. Like, the biggest compliment I can get from a customer is like, Oh, I feel like you really understand me. And you can follow these customers in different roles because they know you understand them, you understand their business, and what they’re trying to do overall.
So you can add value to them in many different ways, well beyond maybe whatever specific solution you’re selling today. And there’s going to be instances where you get to work with the same people, sell to the same people over, you know, my career is almost 25 years. So decades of time selling and selling to the same person because you’ve built that trust and that understanding.
And that extends all the way to their business and the person, not just the current problem they’re serving today. So you can actually extend that even further to these big relationships that will really help you build your career over time. Yeah.
Very cool. And then we are still only in the Microsoft part of your journey. So if you go to the first company that you founded, which is CIMLS, is that how you… It’s CIMLS.com. CIMLS.com. Yeah.
That’s a real multiple listing service. Still up and running today. The idea was it is a multiple service for people to post, buy, and sell commercial real estate.
So the folks don’t know, you know, there’s a regulated market in residential MLS, and the MLS, every company we work with works for that, right? But it’s less regulated on the commercial side. There is no similar MLS that’s run by, you know, the organization realtors. And so it was left at that point up to companies to go build those. And so we kind of built that over time and really got to see at that point, the power of data at scale, what it looked like to really go-to-market from a small company standpoint, because you’re really out there, you know, with Microsoft, it’s a bit of an unfair advantage. You never knock on a door and you’re like, hey, I’m from Microsoft.
Well, mostly people want to talk to you. Most people understand who you are. And there’s almost always an existing relationship. It’s the easiest way to sell. You got the power of the brand behind you. That’s impressive. And by like the biggest brand, one of the most, you know, this is during the Balmer era, like most well-recognized sales teams, well-oiled machine, these people have it on lock and still do to this day. So it was a great place to get trained, but it wasn’t the hardest challenge you could face. I think the hardest challenge is, hey, I’m coming from this new brand. You’ve never heard of me before.
Yeah. Brand. Yeah.
And you may not have even heard of the category before, because this is the point, there wasn’t a category for these commercial, industrial multiple listing services. And so to go out there and educate the market in commercial brokers about how this worked, we had to enable them to start to transact on this platform, really understand how to use the internet, right? This is all a very early era where most of these professionals were, you know, very high-end. They had a small set of relationships with these brokers and buyers and people doing development in the space, how the industry worked, you know, you’re selling, you know, 20 to a hundred million dollar properties. It’s a pretty handy hand deal. But as it turns out, even at that rate, creating a liquid market with the internet and with online postings is very powerful because then people can get to know each other. There’s more exposure for every deal. It’s very much a win-win for everyone to create a more efficient marketplace that didn’t exist. And, you know, that really was a mixture of that good go-to-market as well as unlocking the power of AI and data. I remember one of the first things we did we put a lot of the city of Portland listings online ,and, you know, they have this data that’s publicly available, free to use as part of the public record.
Yeah. I remember paying $300 for a DVD at the city office. Putting that into our database and then making it searchable, indexable, and making it accessible.
So if you think about that problem, you know, every broker, every buyer would have to go to the city office. Yeah. Get the DVD, load up. Yep. Yeah. Go search a CSV file, which is not what your typical broker wants to do on their Saturday morning. Put it online on easy websites. So on their phone, they can go in there while they’re on the job site and search it and see what’s up and get educated and then reach out to that buyer. And so again, it’s back to that simple thing of giving the people what they want, making people’s lives easier, and leveraging the right technology to do so. So my bigger question is, so here you are at Microsoft doing developer evangelism. Yeah. And then you switch industries, switch domain,s and go into CIMLS. I mean, what is it that actually took you there? Why?
Yeah. No, it’s a great question. So, actually, this is a company that started with my dad…
Yeah. No, it’s a great question. So, actually, this is a company that started with my dad.
And so my family had been in the commercial real estate space for a while and saw this problem firsthand, where we’re relative newcomers to the real estate market in Portland. And we recognize how deep the real estate relationships go. I mean, one of the good examples, one of the families that has a lot of real estate in Portland is the NATO family, and they have a highway named after them in Portland. And so you’re like, okay, that’s kind of how deep these run. If you want to be a newcomer or you’re like an immigrant family, as we were coming in and starting to kind of play in the real estate game, you actually want a more liquid marketplace.
And so we saw the problem firsthand. I understood a lot about data and technology and how to kind of put all this stuff together. And so we said, hey, there’s a really big opportunity here. It’s the right place. And then maybe lastly, I had a really strong drive to own my own business. I think Microsoft was great, and it gave me a wonderful taste of what it was like to run your own business. And I was like, I like the freedom. I like eating what I kill. I like kind of surviving on my own metal and merit. I really love the harshest form of meritocracy. So going from an engineering role is pretty cushy. And you go to commission sales, you’re a little more in that ballpark. And then you go to be an entrepreneur, and you’re all the way there. You kind of joke, you’re like, your death is your default. If you do not succeed, your company will fail. That is the current state. So you must succeed. You must earn that right to exist in the marketplace. By default, you don’t have it.
Yeah. Cool. And then it looks like you had an exit, and then you went to Lightspeed Ventures.
So EI slash fellow, is that right?
Yep. That’s right. And so the quick history there was I had a great exit, got to work with folks at Sugar. We were able to commercialize that. So I think a lot of the stuff you still have in the Sugar Intelligence Suite is still stuff we built and sold them at Contastic. So very happy. There’s value there that carries forward to this date. Somewhere along the way, I went to business school, so did my MBA at Harvard. And I still had an intense desire to build.
And so, prototyping things all the time. And in this case, I had been inspired by my time as a seller. So I’d seen the power of technology firsthand in sales. And I said, hey, there should be, in this case, a mobile CRM. It’s crazy to me that you’re writing notes on your phone or not writing notes at all. And then going back and inputting them into your CRM. And so this is a bad solution. There should be an easier way to do note-taking on the fly, to look up customer data on the fly. So I’m going to meet Vijay. Let me look at his LinkedIn profile. Let me look at what’s happening in the past. And this was in 2013, 2012, I was working on this.
I took this to Chris Sheppey at Lightspeed as part of the… He was one of the leads of the Fellows Program. And I was like, hey, let’s develop this. Let’s kind of build here. And so he was kind enough to take me in and work on developing that solution in-house that eventually became Contastic. We’ll talk a little bit about pivots and a couple of things we learned there. One is that people really don’t want to take notes on a mobile phone. It’s a thing that every sales manager wishes their team did, and they wish they took more notes. But the sales rep actually wants to do it.
And so quickly we pivoted from that into really living in the inbox and really fitting with a seller’s workflow. Because if you think about most sellers, most professionals, what’s the first thing they do in the morning is they go in there and they check their email. Great. Let’s actually put it there.
And so the way our technology worked was behind the scenes every night, we’d look at all of your Salesforce interactions, everything on LinkedIn, the news about your customers, what we thought your pipeline looked like. We use AI, by the way, to do all of this. This is, again, an early version of AI using NLTK and the Stanford Parser, and very early iterations would then become LLMs.
And in the morning, you’d come in and you’d see a bunch of little blue emails that kind of looked like emails. We input them via a Chrome extension. It’s like, oh, you haven’t talked to Vijay in a couple of days. Here’s an article about his business. Why don’t you reach out? You clicked on that, and it would pre-populate an email. It said, Hey Vijay, it’s been a while, man. How’s it going? I just saw this article. I was thinking of you. Let’s grab a coffee or something.
So we basically have the system pre-populate all that email. So as a seller, you just went in the morning. You didn’t have to do the pipeline review or think about what to do; all that mental mechanics to figure out what happened with all the account details. You just click that box. You do a quick spot check on the email and make sure we didn’t miss something that happened in text or off-platform, or something that maybe is more relevant. And then you could go.
And the beauty of that is that by shrinking the amount of time and energy it took to send these emails and do this follow-up, we could essentially enable every rep to carry a pipeline bucket that was 10 times bigger than they could before. And as we all know, one of the great secrets to sales is that if I’m in touch with more people, but maybe we’ll have more activity, more deals are probably going to shake out of that sooner rather than later. And it’s fairly linear.
And that’s a really powerful lesson. By the way, I learned at Google too, where by doing this mechanically, I was able to carry a pipeline that was 10 times bigger than anyone else. I was really able to be a top-performing rep because of that mechanized approach. And so building software for that was something I was really inspired to do with Contastic and at Lightspeed.
Yeah, no, fantastic. And thanks again, jogging me back to the memory of Contastic because that’s where you and I met, and our paths crossed at SugarCRM. So I was the product marketing counterpart for SugarCRM Hint. That was the branded name we gave for Contastic back then. And it’s still surviving. So I think we should both take credit for what we built is forever, we’re going to live on forever.
Yeah, I mean, I’ll take a very small credit, but kudos to you and your team. I mean, definitely, you guys did something.
So my brain, as you’re sharing all your stories, Cy, it switches to something else. So for me, I met go-to-market leaders, founders who are really strong in one area, I mean, on the business side mostly. But what I’m sensing is you have that, of course, curiosity, you have the knack of understanding the buyer and the problems, but there is also a part of you that’s very tech-oriented and geeky. Yeah. So expand on that. I mean, how did you figure that out? How did you build it? What do you do? How do you balance the two?
Yeah. It’s an interesting question. I mean, I kind of joke, it goes back to my family. So my mom was one of the very early sales reps for Merck. So she can tell crazy stories about her CRM. She was mailing in forms, and she was driving through the ash cloud of Mount St. Helens when it erupted. So she’s a very well-tuned seller.
And then my dad is an engineer. He was one of the very early engineers who developed the inkjet technology for Hewlett-Packard and is still an electrical engineering professor today. So I think it really started at the beginning, where I was just incredibly lucky to get, of course, the genetics, but also the training from these two very different people who really helped develop both sides of my brain.
And then in university, I just always had a deep fascination for technology. That’s why I studied computer science initially. And then that sales side really came out as I was running that business for Microsoft. And I found what was really powerful is exactly what you pointed out, Vijay, that combination of a technology-aware seller is really powerful.
So I was kind of a kid with my co-founder, who’s deeply technical, spent a decade working on detection technology at Google. He had a CS major before that. I understand just enough of what the really smart people are saying to explain it to the rest of the world. And that’s always where I sat as a product manager, as a seller.
That’s a continual theme for me in the roles where I know enough to have a really good conversation with incredibly smart people about what they’re doing, and then help them package and communicate it to everybody else. I think that’s been my very special ICP or special intersection of talents in the world.
Yeah, very cool. And something that really caught my attention, going back to the time when you were talking about you and your current co-founder surfing in, is it Portugal or Spain?
I think Portugal.
Oh, it’s Portugal. Yeah. You mentioned something that really caught my eye, and where there’s also selfish interests or wants for me in going down this path is that I want to teach my kids that specific aspect. You mentioned you actually sat down and read research papers. That gave you that moment, or an aha that there’s a business problem out there. So expand on that. What is the thought process like, and how did it go about doing that?
Yeah, it’s a great question. My daughter’s a little bit young; she’s three, so we’re not there yet. It’s a question I’m sure the rest of the audience is wondering too: how do we build natural curiosity into people? And I’m going to harken back to my parents. So both of my parents, my mom later in her career became a teacher, and my dad, of course, is a professor.
So I had the great gift of not only their diverse skillsets, but also their deep steeped of pedagogy. They thought a lot about this, and they thought they were very deliberate about how they kind of helped us explore our world. And they really did well, the biggest thing they did was they took a very light hand. They really let us follow our interests and they’d encourage and support them. And if there was a challenge with their support, they kind of know just to go figure it out.
But they really framed the world as like, look, it’s a big world out there. There are a lot of things you can think about. There are a lot of problems. What’s interesting to you? And when you’re diving in, we’ll support you, but you’ve got to go figure out the answer. You’re very capable. Go figure it out.
And so that’s always, I think, been the start of my curiosity. And then, as I think about why we’re reading these research papers, it was because of that curiosity. That curiosity leads you in different directions, where we see trends. And it was pretty obvious at that time that AI was a trend. I mean, look, it wasn’t pretty easy.
We’d seen the early versions of TensorFlow and the transformers of Google, because we were there in 2017 when it was invented. So we started to see that we’re like, hey, this is really significant. And then in 2022, 2023, we saw the GPT land and saw the impact of that. And then it’s kind of patently obvious.
And then you’re like, okay, this is going to be a trend that’s bigger than the internet. This is going to be a trend that’s going to transform life larger and faster than anything we’ve ever seen in our lives. Yeah. Let’s understand everything about this, and let’s understand what the frontier is, and let’s understand how this applies at a technical and at a business level.
Because I believe strongly, and I know we know this, but I teach the AI course to MBAs at UCL as well. How do we think about crafting businesses in a different way? And so that’s really what informed us to read these papers is to look out ahead of the curve and think about what was coming.
What’s interesting about computer science papers and research papers is that they often significantly outdo the coverage of what technology can do. If you think about that as an example from neural networks, I kid about this with a good friend of mine, who I went to computer science school with, who’s in the AI space now as well. It’s been theorized since well before 2000 that unsupervised learning and neural networks could get us here. There have been papers written, proofs, and all of these things were done in the literature in 2000.
That’s true, yeah. Only came to fruition today. So I want to really look into the future. I want to do something by looking at research and looking at what the smartest people are thinking about as the theoretical foundations that might exist in the future.
The difference is, I think, the pace of technology is moving without hyperbole, like 10 to 100 times faster. So what took about 20 years for the last generation will take two years. When I look over the horizon, for me, the horizon is six to 18 months, technology, which has never been the case before. So that’s what really got us inspired.
And then maybe to close it that way, thinking about what I can do for my daughter to really encourage this, is just to encourage her to solve more of her own problems. And so whenever she has a problem, I think her first instinct is like, cry for help from dad. That’s the first instinct: get me to do it. And I got to resist, like I love her, I want to help her, I want her to have a happy life.
But I think the best way I can do that is actually by not helping her with all the small things. So she can develop the capability, the curiosity, and self-reliance to solve the big things later when I’m not there. And so when I think about my role as a father or my role as just anyone trying to educate or train, it’s giving people enough rope, enough safety, enough capability to solve their own problems as fast as possible and grow as fast as possible. So that when it’s not in my control to protect them or help them, they can solve it on their own.
Now, this is great. I mean, I love the way you actually tied in. It goes back to how your parents brought you up; that’s key. The whole go explore, be curious, and it’s up to you, we’ll support you, it’s up to you, go figure out your path. That’s a curiosity and with a support level behind it. And there is also the element of what you’re seeing firsthand at large companies like Google from a technology point of view and a technology trends point of view. So that translated to you and your co-founders saying, hey, there’s something happening in the AI world, and both of you are grounded in research papers, are the harbingers of what’s to come. So go back to that world. And so, how do you go about figuring out which research papers and on what topics? That’s key.
I mean, it’s a great question. I mean, there are a couple of ways that it’s not elegant. Like, look, you start by just Googling around and getting a grounding on the space. And what you’re really trying to do there is build a reference floor.
So when you think about, you know, PhD students, they actually write papers, they do a basic research review of like, what is the state of the art in the space? What’s ground level? And so reading like, read the transformer paper, read all kinds of basics in the space. And then inevitably, as a curious, smart person, you have a bunch of questions that occur.
You can look around at those. And then once you do that review, a couple of things will pop out of it. You’ll get a basis in terms of what the different areas are, what’s soft, what’s hard, what’s promising, and what’s not. And then two is who are the interesting people in the space? And then you dig in, you look at more and more of what they’re doing, what they’re looking into, and you can start to follow folks and kind of dig in there.
What’s really interesting with AI, though, is I think it’s one of the spaces that’s really broken the most research paradigms, where it’s really like a new category that got invented. And so innovation is coming from everywhere.
An example I could give is, we deploy customized versions of open-source models at AegisAI. That’s kind of a lot of what our core technology is. And you’d suspect, like, oh, it’s all going to be from the two or three big companies. But it’s really not, right?
We started, of course, by using the model from Facebook, LLaMA. And then we moved to the Microsoft Phi model. And then we looked at some other models from other companies in like e-commerce space and things you’d never suspect. And then now we look back, we’re using a lot of stuff from Google’s Gemma. Really, every two, three weeks, it’s a new adventure. Every two, three weeks, it’s a new set of technologies.
And it’s really not bound by just the big companies and big institutions. I think it’s such a giant gift that, like, hey, this idea of an LLM and a neural network works, and it got dumped on the world. There are so many different ways that we can dissect and understand this technology. It’s almost like a giant alien mothership with all this new technology landed in New York City. And everyone there can go on the ship and look and poke and prod and figure out what to do with it. Just all kinds of innovations coming out all at once, which is incredibly exciting.
It does make this research a challenge, but I just think kind if you continually follow the thread and you’ll get to some interesting conclusions. Maybe the last thing I’ll add there is just take those and then immediately implement them. So, I think there are a lot of things in theory that are like sound good or are fully understood in your head.
I’ll tell you what, when you deploy something in production and you look at the quantified results, then you really know what the nature of the thing is. And so, taking that from that initial curiosity, where you’re looking across all the papers to reading and understanding the content of the papers and what’s going on and what technical implications this has, and then taking those implications and then deploying them live into production, that journey is really where you get to truly understand every aspect of the technology in a way I find deeply gratifying.
And of course, at the end of the day, you get to solve that customer problem, which is the whole point in the first place.
Yeah. Wow. I mean, clearly, again, I go back to the whole thesis behind how top-tier VCs invest in startup ideas. And just listening to that last few minutes of how you are talking about how you uncover the problems, the rapid pace of the technology changes, and connecting it to the customer problem. I think that’s the magic connecting the dots. It’s not easy. It’s only a very rare few people on earth who have that combination.
Yeah. Well, I don’t know if it’s that rare, but I think that is the combination to look for where you’ve got the right problem. I think one of the mistakes people make, by the way, is they go the opposite way. They find a really cool technology, and then they try and point it at a market that either doesn’t exist or is too small.
You can never know because the problem isn’t real. Going back to our first conversation, where you really need to start is a big and real market. And for us, email security is a big and real market. Look, it’s $5 billion spent now, it’s going to 10 billion. Every person who uses email can tell you a story about how they saw phishing, spam, or malware. It’s universal. It’s a clear problem.
Now, it’s very hard to solve. We have to work hard to solve it, but there’s no doubt that the problem exists. And then to your point, the second part of the VCs’ love is seeing a technical breakthrough that has evidence. And what we showed them was, hey, we are deploying this model on top of existing, in this case, email workspaces of customers of large companies. And we’re finding a lot of bad stuff they’re missing. It’s proof that the technical innovation solves the problem.
When you put two things together, you’re right, you get real magic. But I’ll emphasize for any founders or entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs out there, focus on a problem, focus on a big real need first, because that’s the immutable thing that will not change. If you don’t have that, you’re not going to magically find one.
Start there and then innovate, and then find different ways to solve that problem. There are a thousand different ways to skin a cat. And so you can really figure out what that is, but the fundamental problem won’t change. So you’ve got to start there.
Yeah. So coming back to the focus, the central theme of this podcast, yes, it’s about customer, problem, product, and tying all of those things together. Let’s go back. I mean, if you can jog back in your memory and pick and share a go-to-market success story and a go-to-market pivot story. I’ll let you choose which one you want to start with first.
Yeah, I know. I mean, let me think about that a little. There are a lot of good ones.
I know, a lot of… I can clearly see that. Yeah, totally. Think in your head. There’s a lot. Oh, there’s a lot.
Let me start with the pivot story, because I think it’s a really… I think that’s the more interesting one, because success is fine, but we all like to choose… You learn the most from the pivots.
I think where reCAPTCHA started is maybe one of the most interesting ones. So I’m sure we all know reCAPTCHA is the little thing you have to click on before you get into the website you really wanted to. Is it a stop sign? Is it not? Is it a crosswalk? Is it not? The existential question we all wonder about.
And where reCAPTCHA really started at Google, when I got there was a way to do machine learning training. That really was kind of the purpose. It was leveraging a little bit of anti-spam to get there. But we’d reached a very interesting crossroads for that specific technology, that image technology we were clicking on.
One was that it wasn’t working very well anymore, because there were real adversaries that had real humans working to solve them manually, who are going to be better than you or me at solving them, because it’s literally their profession. The second was that the machine learning data coming back from it was less and less valuable, because Google started to build its own custom labeling systems on its own.
So both sides of the business were being squeezed, and they had to kind of figure out what else we could do. And at this point, they were reporting through the maps or the geo-organization at Google, and I was part of the security organization. I’m like, hey, maybe we can amp up this thing that has a massive footprint. It’s got a lot of the right makings to kind of stop spam on the internet. But we just need to find a new way to apply it.
And in talking to that team, they’d started to build a new system they call V3, that instead of solving the images, they solve it by looking at the behavioral patterns on the site and using that to stop the attack. Now, the benefit of that is it’s an incredible user experience, because there is no user interaction, and it keeps you safe.
In fact, on this call today, the Zoom call is protected by reCAPTCHA, and we never solved anything because it’s observing all the interactions and being sure Zoom bombing isn’t happening. That’s just an example today of how it works.
And so again, I take no credit for the innovation. Very smart people had built that before me and were kind of figuring out how to bring it to market. I said, Hey, well, the way for us to bring it to market is to pivot this tool from machine learning and just spam into this new space that was happening called credential stuffing.
So many passwords have been leaked on the internet over time. It was very easy for adversaries to guess the right password and hack into your bank account or email, whatever else they wanted to get into. And so what companies needed was a layer of protection that detected not just who was logging in, like who was holding the key, but also where they were coming from, like what’s the nature?
So I kind of joke, it’s just like you hear someone kind of jiggling the keys at your door. That’s not enough. I want to actually look through the peephole and see who it is. I need both of those.
Allowed companies to do that. And so we pivoted this kind of anti-spam ML training technology into this anti-fraud world, this credential stuffing world, and really built a $100 billion-plus business out of this in a very short order. And we did so all with pivoting this business, again, like pointing this technology at an existing problem or a new problem that was really urgent.
And so that was kind of one of the pivot stories. Let me take a pause there and see if that story made sense. There’s a lot of technical jargon in there. I have to unpack whatever’s helpful.
Yeah. So a couple of things over there. I’m thinking from the wider audience spectrum point of view. I mean, I get the technical aspect and the problem it solves, but what’s not clear from a listener’s point of view is the business aspect. How is Google monetizing this technology? Got it.
So it’s very simple. So every time now that you see an interaction that you want to get a score on from a CAPTCHA, every time, for example, there’s a login event, the customer will, in this case, Zoom, will pay us a tenth of a cent or something in that range to score it and tell them what we think. You do that millions and millions of times, billions and billions of times across the internet. And so you have that model.
What’s interesting about the go-to-market for this, by the way, is that a lot of it was driven through product-led growth. So a lot of this was adopted just by engineers inside large companies. One of the great stories was Pinterest. A great team, an innovative team there was looking at adopting the solution.
They adopted it, and they were using it at scale in Pinterest, which is a giant business. And then their team calls like, hey, so we got to get our execs together and we got to do a real deal because we can’t be paying lists on this. We’re going to production. I’m like, great. That happens to be the best sales call you could ever have.
And so that was kind of a unique thing that was part of this business. And so it was very powerful. And then of course, we got to partner with some spectacular go-to-sellers from a former ex-company, Chronicle, that became our sales team led by Aaron Pan and John Turner. And we were able to really scale out with them.
So we had this very powerful motion of our product team, our engineering team, and the sales team, all very closely aligned, all working together on all aspects of the product, everything from go-to-market to kind of this sales motion. Because the sales could actually come from the website, even for very large customers. They could come from our sales team. They could come from relations we had on the product team.
We really all worked together. And I think one of the great learnings from that was how such a close partnership between those three functions — and honestly, sometimes can have less than steady relationships — that incredibly tight partnership and bond that by the way exists to this day can really supercharge your business.
Fantastic. And your role was playing the lead product manager for that. Is that right?
Product director across all these businesses.
Fantastic. So question here. I mean, clearly, yes. When everything works fine, it’s amazing. But there are so many days in between where things are falling apart. Yeah. What almost broke you down in this journey?
Yeah. I mean, there are so many. I mean, I’ll tell you the start, right, where we were working with this business. And initially, like, no one believed there could be an enterprise business built out of this.
So I remember standing in a room saying to our GM and like Everett and all the other execs, like, hey, I’ve got a thousand customers I can sell to. Like, this needs to be a real business. We need sellers. We need support. And there was a year or so we couldn’t get a lot of interest.
And so, you know, the way I solve it, by the way, I think about my inclination seller as well. How do you solve a sales problem? Yeah. I rolled my sleeves, put on those shoes, and went to sell some stuff.
But you were the first salesperson for this.
I was the first salesperson. So we sold, I probably personally sold a million, $2 million of it. I think PayPal was our very first customer, by the way. So it was a crazy deal. We did a seven-year deal with PayPal for this. Yeah.
And yeah, I was driving with, of course, in partnership with a rep in the account, and we’re getting it done. And that was a way for us to build the initiative and interest in getting a full sales team. Because then I went, took this over to Aaron, who was going to be our future head of product or head — sorry — head of sales.
I was like, hey, I’ve already sold a couple of million dollars of this stuff. You’re really smart. Like we could do this. We can scale this. He immediately got it. It was like, hey, let’s roll this technology, enter the opportunity.
But I’ll tell you, you know, if you’re a PM or you’re in an organization or trying to get them to start a new product line of sales, the best gift, the best proof is to go to a sales team and say, hey, so I sold like a million dollars on my own and I’m not very good at sales. Like, you guys are good at sales. What do you think you could do with this? And then immediately, you’ll see the color signs go off in their eyes.
Exactly. So how did you go about doing that million or $2 million in sales? Like, break that down for us, if you can.
Yeah. I mean, it’s nothing different than any other seller, right? You go out there and say, Look, here’s the problem. I believe the problem is credential stuffing. I believe people with really important accounts are going to be the most worried about it.
Let me go out and see which GCP accounts that I can reach have this problem, and let me sell to them. So I cold-called my way in either through the reps or directly to the account across all the accounts. I started giving the initial presentations, kind of gauging interest, ducking and weaving with the initial product flow, and trying to fit the problem statement they had.
And it was it. So again, there’s very little magic in that process. It was simply like going back to the roots of hard notes, getting out there and making sure you reach the customer, you understand their problem, and then you understand if there’s a fit between the problem and your problem.
Fantastic. So let’s come, I know we are coming up against time over here, 10 more minutes, but let’s cover the major chunk about AegisAI now. So your journey at Google brought you in touch with your current co-founding team. And so explain to us, I mean, you did touch upon that, but explain to us, like what is the foundation problem that you’re solving, and how are you thinking about it from a go-to-market perspective?
Yeah, of course. So again, the problem goes back to keeping your email clean. Like, I think everyone listening probably does not — if they look at their inbox right now, they probably almost certainly have spam. They may have some phishing. That is not good. I do not want to see that. They don’t want to see that, right? So that is a problem that’s 50 years old, as old as email.
So that is what we want to fix. And more specifically for CISOs, who is who we really sell to, we want to give them the guarantee that there is not going to be malicious content in their users’ inboxes attacking their infrastructures. By the way, the number one way all the attacks start is through an email attack.
And then second is we’re not going to block their legitimate email. So they’re not going to call us from the CEO asking where my email is. So those are the two key customer promises.
And then how do we go to market is an interesting question. The CISO space and security as a whole is a very interesting markets because it’s constantly in motion, right? So there are always new attacks coming out. There are always new surface areas, like AI in this case, where the CISO needs to constantly think about and manage the surface area and the attacks on it.
And so there’s this continual game of new solutions coming out all the time. And so CISOs are bombarded by new vendors, but they also need to interact with the new vendors to solve the new threats. And so it’s a very dynamic marketplace, but one that is very noisy.
So one of the best ways we’re able to break through this, back to that original thing we talked about around curiosity and building those relationships. We’ve done that over decades with these customers. So we’ve got a lot of trust for very technical, smart CISOs who are at the top of their game. We’re like, yes, this team is a legitimate team. What they say is real, and they wouldn’t tell me this otherwise, and they’ll protect my data to keep me safe. And so I want to take a bet on them.
So that’s really how we start the nexus. It’s kind of built that trust, that first set of customers, that reputation, and the initial set of installs to test us out. From that, we built evidence, found that we’re detecting in many cases, 20% more malware than other tools. And we’re doing so at 90% less error rate than other tools we see. So then you get evidence, and you get customers who can speak to that evidence.
And then start rolling it out through all the typical channels. We started this call chatting about our launch events we had. We had great customers come in from Salesforce to, and we had the FBI local office show up. It was amazing to get to know those folks. We’ll do threat reports. So again, to add value, we want to add value in any way we can to our customers. So keeping them abreast of what’s happening is very important.
And then the last but not least is just referrals. The best way I earn future business in a space that’s very trust-based is to win hard for my existing customers. I want them to be deliriously happy with the value they’re getting, with the solution we’re offering, with the support they get. And then tell the people in the space, because guess what? No other CISO is going to care what I have to say as a sales guy. They’re going to listen to their peers.
And so my job as a sales guy is to make what those peers say as positive as possible, which means 90% of my energy I put into serving those customers, making sure they have an amazing experience, making sure I do everything possible to make them successful, not just in my product pilot, but across their entire business. That’s what I view my job as. And they’re going to do the job of helping promote us and share within their community, because they want to share something that works well with their peers.
Yeah, fantastic.
Especially on the last point, right? The reason why I want to have really been done on that is I’m actually helping some of the large companies and businesses around expansion and referral. Referral and expansion is the lowest CAC possible to increase your NRR, period. But for you as a startup and a founder in early stage, it’s quote, unquote, easy, because your skin is heavily in the game, you’ll invest in and you will want your best customers to actually bet on you and refer you. But as you scale, let’s say, AegisAI three or even five years down, you’ll have salespeople, you’ll have sellers, you’ll have customer success teams. They may not have that same fire or commitment as you, founders have. So how are you going to solve that problem?
It’s a great question. And look, you’re kind of getting to like, things just dilute over time. I think one important thing is like, I intentionally like to have a relatively small team. So we hire relatively low numbers of relatively very high-talent people. So we tend to hire the top 1%, like quite literally out of Google’s talent bar. Like that’s kind of what we’re hiring.
And so that helps to kind of fight the dilution. The second thing is you want to maintain continual visibility. So something I learned a lot by working with Microsoft, you think about Bill Gates would look at people’s code.
Yes.
I did sales calls with Steve Ballmer when I was there, and I was a very junior rep. I think there were 13 layers between me and Steve. And Steve was still there on the ground, selling stuff, working with customers every day.
So I think you can never, ever lose that touch, both to see what sales is doing and see what people are doing with their customers, as well as to hear from your customers directly and participate directly with them. And that kind of brings me to the last point is you never lose that.
Maybe who you focus on changes. And I love thinking about Mark Benioff in this. Mark is an incredible customer-facing leader who spends a ridiculous amount of his time in front of customers. That should never change for a CEO.
My job will always be chief customer officer. My job will always be to serve the customer, help them out. If anything is going wrong, I give people my cell phone number. I want them to call me. I want to help them.
And I never want to lose touch with that. I always view that as my number one job to see that and then communicate it within my organization. And so I think that’s how you really are able to maintain that over the long run.
But you’re right. It gets harder over time, but I would say the importance of it never changes. If anything, it increases. So it’s something over time. I’m glad you’re working on it; you’re building more systematic tools to help with this because it is a major gap in the marketplace. I see a lot of companies struggle with this mightily.
Yeah. And I think it’s one of the most underserved opportunities in the space. Totally spot on. I’ll reach out to you after this podcast, but you’re so spot on. Where I see a huge problem when it comes to go-to-market is a lot of dollars being invested in new logo acquisition, but a lot of money is being wasted and not tapped into in your existing customer base. Yeah.
I’ll add on one other thing that I’ve seen. It’s been a struggle, even as a customer of many new vendors, is I have problems that they’re not solving for me, that they should be solving. And I see them investing in go-to-market, and look, they’re two different departments, which is where this really, the problem really starts.
I’m sure technology helps. The support and the sellers don’t talk to each other. And so there are different buckets and different seemingly independent functions, but they’re really not.
If you have an unhappy customer, that’s going to torpedo 10 of your deals. You’ve got to make sure you find that customer and you fix that problem. At the same time, if you’ve got a deliriously happy customer, they’re going to bring their six buddies to your next dinner. They’re going to be like, hey, you got to talk to these guys at AegisAI. They solved my problem. I don’t have to worry anymore. Life is great.
There’s no better promotion. There’s no better detraction than that. And I don’t think you can survive if you let that go. And so companies really need to stay on top.
But maybe the last thing they need to think about is that it’s not an immediate cycle. If you make a customer unhappy, that doesn’t really hurt you until a year or two down the road. Then it really hurts you. So you really want to look ahead and really proactively keep an eye out for that before you see it in the revenue numbers.
Because by the time you see it, by the time that first rep says, Hey, we had a negative reference call from one of our prospects, you are a year or two behind the ball. What I’d love to see is more sensitivity, more tooling to keep an eye on what is happening, so you can get in front of that as the customer is facing that. And so, by the way, they also feel like you’re on top of it. You’re helping that customer in real time versus two years later, you’re kind of finally following up and you’re already kind of behind the eight ball there.
Fantastic. Yeah, I wish we could spend more time, but maybe take two next year or something, Cy. But before I leave you, one final question on a very light note, which is if you were to turn back the clock and go back to day one of your go-to-market journey, what advice would you give to your younger self?
Oh, that’s an amazing question. By the way, the favorite question I get to hear on your podcast, too, because I should make a little compendium of all the answers. I think it’s probably a little bit, but just like what we talked about, I think the number one thing isto do things differently.
Coming to this market as a new seller, do not copy what other people are doing. If they’re doing it, do not do it. Go do something different. Because I think there’s absolute room for innovation, and that’s how you’re going to win.
Look, go-to-market is an inherently competitive marketplace. You need to find a way to differentiate. That’s how you’re going to bring efficiency. That’s how you’re going to win. That’s how your message is going to break through the noise.
And so, just number one, always think about doing things differently.