Snyk

“Your sneaks. Amazing security business that's got great customers who love it, But it was valued at seven billion dollars, and it's now three hundred million ARR growing 15%.”

“If you want to get developers to use a security product, you have to build a developer tooling company not a security company.”

“And we actually introduced an ability to patch. Sometimes you have a library that's vulnerable and doesn't have a fix. And we introduced, you know, we introduced an ability to patch because oftentimes it's like a line of code. So install the old version of the…”

“For security, it's governance. So it's probably like a business unit, minimum unit. But for developers, because of that single developer and because developers are more empowered, DevTools generally win bottom up. You have to win over the developer first.”

“We reached out to open source libraries, and we got them to install it. And that was a big deal because it created this sort of viral loop of people seeing that this is possible. Every time you're You know, you open a fixed pull request on a repo that someone …”

“It took us a moment to realize they're not gonna pay. They're just not gonna pay. And the payment was like 20 dollars a month.”

“I got to, like, you know, ask me for the partner meeting, stay over the weekend in Andreessen Horowitz to sort of present to, and nobody converted. And everybody basically peeked behind the curtains, saw there's no revenue, says, oh, classic DevTool.”

“That was like two years and two months in, we were at a 100,000 ARR not awesome. And we burned four million dollars by that time. You know, four months later, we're at six 50. A year later, we're at four and a half million. A year later, we're at nineteen mill…”

“I sold about a third of my ownership, and it's in nine figures.”

“The last acquisition that really I sort of felt like we were talking in, in concrete numbers was early in the journey. It was in sort of two hundred million range, and I think later on we talked about multiple billions, but we would, they didn't get to, like, …”

“You know, guy from sneak, Harry, do you know how many rounds he raised before? He raised his A three rounds of capital before his A. Guess who gave him all three rounds?”

“If Guy went out trying to raise capital from someone else and I didn't have enough capital to give to him, he would have gone out of business.”

“What's working often is unsustainable, and it's your sneaks, your figmas, your big IDs, which actually may take a bit longer. But you wouldn't allocate to them if you were doing it on traction.”

“It took him two and a half years to kind of get out there and get his first, you know, two and a half to three to get his first million of ARR.”

“I would rather crash and burn than pivot to just sort of focusing on the security audience in that, like, I don't want to build just another slightly better must trap. I want to build something that matters.”

“And it's Nick, for instance, we started it in Tel Aviv and in London. And in Tel Aviv, I had, you know, this like, you know, anything is possible, fearlessness, sort of tech depth, security depth. And in London, I had kind of, you know, product discipline, dev…”

“When you're founding a company, if the answer to the core value proposition that you have isn't yes, you know, if you can't kind of rationalize why it is more needed in five years time, you should pick a different idea because You know, you wouldn't be at any …”

“And really a year later, we were still at a 100,000 ARR in the budget. So at this point, it's like two years in and, you know, many millions of dollars burned and, you know, tens of thousands of users.”

“This was still eight months before we got to a 100,000 ARR, but then four months after that, you know, instead of a 100,000, we were at six 50, and a year after that, we were at four and a half million”

“I think right now there is a lot of platform consolidation. You know, I will admit that Snyk is benefiting from that, you know, now that we have the breadth.”

“If something is high frequency, high pain, it's all about comparing it to the existing solution, because, like, there's no way that they're not doing anything about something that is high frequency, high pain. And so it's all about the better mousetrap. It's a…”

“So Snyk has a certain amount of brand power. You know, there's a certain amount of like fairy dust, sort of DevOps fairy dust that all the security companies want. You know, there's a certain amount of that, that the people believe, but it's not a sustainable …”

“I'd sort of say that's Nick's two primary powers are, you know, one was counter positioning, which sort of still holds in the security space, this notion of, Coming in developer first is, is to an extent at the expense of some CISO power, of some sort of top-d…”

“I mean, the name that comes to mind is Amit Patel who is an angel investor who joined us in that sort of round in which, like, everybody was looking at it and sort of saying, you know, thanks, but no thanks on it, you know, and Boldstar did the top up. I think…”

“It was hard. It was also one of the better decisions that I've made.”

“All the money that I have at Sneak, you know, my wife and I were planning to give that away.”

“Last valuation after our Series F was at 8.6 billion. We're securing the software of millions of developers now, well over 2000 paying customers, now around 1300 people, of which around 500 in R&D, with nearly 70 folks in our product org.”

“The first hundred or so users really just came from the founders engaging with the Node.js community and the interest that drove.”

“I think we probably had maybe around 5000 free users before there were any attempts at monetization.”

“A JavaScript developer just won't care if you support Golang or Rust, but will absolutely care if a key feature like automated package upgrades just isn't available for their ecosystem.”

“First of all, that, that integration in terms of connecting your code with security scanning like that was a first of a kind integration. Like no one had done that before.”

“There are hundreds of thousands of these package pages, but they're just automatically being generated continuously.”

“All the traditional solutions you need to sign up, you need to pay to get access beyond more than a couple, but these were just, they're all out there in the public domain.”

“But the first self-serve monetization efforts only really saw traction with individual developers paying a hundred dollars a month or purchases in larger companies. They just didn't happen as everyone had hoped.”

“Flow is just this incredibly important concept for developers and you want to strive to keep them in that flow for as long as possible. So the GitHub kind of pull requests are a great example of that. Someone can sign up for Snyk and they could theoretically b…”

“The team went on to build out a functional sidecar product that Allowed users to basically try sneak without needing to sign up by simply pasting their code in for us to scan and giving them some results there and then. So, you know, we saw really great result…”

“Product led sales is a really important motion for us. And so taking the knowledge we have, the insight we have around behavior With the users and their teams and their companies within the product and making that available to the GTM teams outside in smart wa…”

“The best way I've found to articulate a growth strategy that fulfills the promise of usefully guiding the team's execution. It's the loop based model we forge as specific kind of documentation that, that I think is great around that. Being able to identify the…”

“And now we test conformance to schema of the instrumented code in our CI processes. So we have absolute confidence in the data.”

“And if I had to pick one meeting that is the most important in the growth team, it would be this.”

“So most of the org is functional ownership based. There are a lot of really complex domains in the core product. So having that localized knowledge is important to be able to kind of own and run the code that team ship. The growth teams on the other hand are s…”

“For Sneak, the real drivers to move from free to a paid plan, for example, is when you want to secure business critical code. And you start having needs around governance and compliance.”

“And what's, what's fascinating there is that the product driven cohort contribute a relatively greater amount to net retention.”

“Now, habit moment that we define as a team being activated, it's related to fixing vulnerabilities within 30 days of team creation. And the reason that is, is chosen, it's because there is a significant correlation with downstream, and in that case with activa…”

“Sneak took about almost a bit over two years to get to a million ARR. Which is considered slow. If you look, if you think classic enterprise slaves, but two years later, there were already a multi-billion dollar company.”

“We've gone from 23 to 84 to 250 to 450 people in annual increments in terms of staff.”

“We've grown I think about 200% in, in revenue and sort of a similar number in, in ARR.”

“We did raise about three hundred and fifty million dollars during during that period of time as well.”

“A security person needs breadth. They need, if you solve the security threat, but you only solve it for 50% of my apps, you're not very helpful security. I'm going to need to buy another tool or find another solution for the other 50% because I need to cover a…”

“The industry has been seeing containers as the evolution of the VM. And they've been trying to retrofit VM patching practices onto containers while we saw containers as the evolution of the app.”

“We ship every new product we've added, and now we do it intentionally... We ship it as an add-on first. So we don't ship, you know, crap products pardon my French here. You know, we ship very good products, but very narrow ones. And we ship them as add-ons. An…”

“Unless we can actually build something that is fast enough for CICD, which these tools are not. And that is accurate enough to actually be usable to developers, because as it stands, these tools are not usable for developers.”

“Many players rely on it now as their sort of information source for properties because there is no other good one really in the yeah.”

“The majority of our business is still freemium and inbound led.”