Vanta

“If I'd invest in every founder that I'd met, every founder that I've met, I'd be 17 X more successful. One seven X more successful. I would have had two and a half percent of deal. I would have had two percent of 11 Labs. I'd have a seed check in Flettersport,…”

“One of the original, like, founding hypotheses of the company is if you want to start a security company for startups, you should actually start a compliance company. Because your customers never ask you for Security, but they do ask you for compliance.”

“We have 15,000 customers.”

“Our growth rate's actually quickened the last couple of years and quarters and months, and so it bends up 60% annual plus for the last couple of years since that milestone.”

“Arguably, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars in market cap attributed to that billboard.”

“Now that we have Probably 30,000 audits completed.”

“The theory at the time was GDPR is written by lawyers at a very high level. You see, it's like not a spec you can handle an engineer, like comically kind of bad as an engineering spec, but like, it's fine. We will clarify that in court over the next 10 years, …”

“I think for a startup that's never done this, it is unhelpful, because it sort of opens up, you know, a maze in a way that's just not great, and that's why being prescriptive, like, is part of, I think, the, and Vanta's initial product market fit, I think it's…”

“GitHub gets 92% of all of the questionnaires they receive answered through Vanta.”

“We probably have a couple dozen of them, and if I think about our roadmap, you know, knock on all the things, like, well, like, hundreds by the end of the year.”

“The pros are that European enterprises are the ones that care the most about AI, and this is where they would turn, and so it's the thing that has the most market traction so far. But like none of these are like breakout. None of them have product market fit.”

“This summer.”

“He came to me and was like, I want to spend 60,000 dollars on this ad, and my deal with him was like, fine, but you got to sell four more Vantas, because the Vanta basically cost 15,000 dollars, and the next month he sold like 34 more Vantas because of the pod…”

“In the early days, before we had competitors, we tried to basically make this call response of, like, someone says, talk to you, someone says Vanta. And this really close association, which in the early, again, when we were just competing against consultants. …”

“I think the second part is market sizing is bullshit. You know, you can, like, be as academic or whatever, strategery-ish as you want about it, and, like, the market size today is only a predictor of the market size today.”

“The market for startups getting SOC II in 2018 was zero dollars. Truly zero.”

“I do think there's always a bit of, like, built-in tension, you know, in the system that I actually don't think is a bad thing. Like, I'm comfortable with conflict and things and thinks, like, companies are more successful and more comfortable they get with co…”

“I think when it gets, when it feels like someone's just becoming devil's advocate, that becomes negative from my perspective, because it's just like, I'm just trying to find issues in everything and any plan you can find issues in, you know what I mean? So I t…”

“The board is, like, harsher when we're doing well, because there's, like, no real problem to, like, talk about, you know what I mean? So it'll be, like, pushing on all these, like, little things that, like, kind of matter, but not as much, but, like, If anythi…”

“I think what you gain is a faster decision-making process. So when you want to go through and decide, hey, do we need to do this big technical re-architecture, and that's gonna trade off against some product features, you need to go through and, like, make tho…”

“I never give them, like, complete ownership, if, like, in that regard, I would say I always assign a PM with it. And it's a PM that's like exciting cause it's cool to work with like the CEO and the founder on things.”

“I think when you're still in the thousands, though, like, you should still be doing it, and I think that's part of our philosophy. Like, at Vanta, I think we really expect people to be in the details, and that's something that I believe a lot. Like, It's just …”

“He actually just puts, like, what level of feedback is in front of everything. Like, this is an idea, this is a suggestion, or, like, I expect you to take action on this. I think that's something I've learned from my team, that the, like, the more I've kind of…”

“And that was like one of the fixes we did this year where we're like, wow, when we talk to the general sellers, they just don't know how to go into these deep conversations for the new product. They're kind of scared about selling it because this thing's alrea…”

“Our expectations, you're going to write a PR your first week and like ship something to production.”

“We ask people to write dates and commit to them. We expect us to be able to hitting, like, 90% of the dates, which I think is, like, reasonable. If it drops down to 85, I'm not worried. If it drops down to, like, 80 or 75, I start to get worried. Like, I want …”

“That's why I think my biggest regret is one of my biggest regrets is actually passing on Vanta because I met Christina But I had already committed. I was like, this person is going to win the market, but I've already committed to another company in the space. …”

“And so we have to make sure that we're not creating a bunch of noise, we're creating clarity. And to do that well, marketing and sales have to be tied at the hip and build an engine that delivers the right message at the right time.”

“So we've got tools like Clay, we've got tools like Koala and Common Room that very much are allowing us to get even more and deeper information.”

“We've got clay. It's enriching our data. We're then taking clay and integrating that data into our CMS, which happens to be web And we're updating our landing page in live time with the information we have that's relevant to the user.”

“That same information is then available for our SDRs in their AI SDR tools. So think Alice, think Reggie. That's providing them information that they can then craft into outreach and be very personalized, but also in line with the messages that marketing is sh…”

“So on the qualitative side, we're using Gong. And Gong is taking all of our sales information and conversations and then giving us information on what Points or positioning are creating the most objections or driving the most closed ones, and that allows us to…”

“Data enrichment very much is where we're finding the most value today, because it's able to give us not just so much more depth, but so much more depth live time that we can react to.”

“On the image side, I don't yet feel that we're there yet with the programs, but the opportunity is clearly coming, and the improvements we've seen in these platforms and their ability to create images has been night and day, and so I expect in a few months' ti…”

“And Vanta is creating a budget to ensure that teams can go out and test these tools and have that growth.”

“We're right now working with a couple different tools to improve our attribution. Those tools look like hockey stack or green data, and they're able to do a great job of measuring the different touch points you have across your go to market, marketing and sale…”

“No matter how smart, how fast these tools get, brand is gonna be the reason why people trust your business, come to you, and return. It's the way they feel on your site, They feel, you know, talking to a sales rep or reading a case study. It's defensible. It's…”

“Everyone has always wanted to build a product that just answers the questions correctly the first time. That wasn't possible prior to some of these foundation models, but now it is”

“So CrowdStrike has recently talked about How they had one of their customers I think it was the CEO, but an executive at one of their customers actually impersonated in this credible way and, you know, go ask employees that I think over video to go do somethin…”

“These models kind of let you, again, they understand the best practices, you can get them to understand the regulations, and then they can ask you some questions about your company, or you can tell them about your company, and they can kind of merge all of tha…”

“You cannot change the code. You can get very different answers and so it's almost a different mentality on building. Again, when it's deterministic, you ship it, and you can kind of move on. Again, you want to keep an eye on it, but, like, it'll keep doing wha…”

“The joke that's not a joke about Vanta is I think if you want to start a security company, you should start a compliance company.”

“I grabbed a desk at a friend's company, and so I would wake up every day and go to work, and I would, like, go to his company and, like, sit with his engineers, and they would be doing their, like, work for the company, and I would, like, be doing my little bl…”

“These regulations are complex and nuanced, and there's, they're actually Full of gray and the gray is kind of purposeful so companies can figure out what's best for themselves. But I think that ambiguity led lots of folks to look at it and say, oh, you can't a…”

“We started with SOC two SOC two, which was the closest thing that existed at the time to like a default business software standard. It's not a law. It's more like a de facto standard, but that seemed like the first thing companies get, so the first thing we st…”

“Compliance does sit in this intersection of something you might need to do or really feel like you need to and something you don't want to do. And so one thing I found is like when you offer A service or a product in that intersection, customers tend to be so …”

“Where we first really had go-to-market success was selling to engineers and heads of engineering. And One of our early customers described us as like a babble fish, a translator, between engineering and audit, right? And I think there was something kind of dee…”

“Asking someone, hey, you're, you have this career path at the Silicon Valley company, you have this mortgage, you have this annual bonus, like, do you want to make one third of that amount and like sit in a room with us and see if this will work? It was like a…”

“The questions, the exercises in our interview process are all sort of ripped from the headlines. Like, they are just real things we are thinking through. And I think repeatedly through the interview process, trying to be very direct and transparent about what …”

“A lot of what these compliance workflows are taking information in one format and putting it in another. So taking a policy document and turning it an engineering config, and a control, a rule that's followed basically. You know, turning all of this into like …”

“I do think it is a useful founder skill to convince yourself you like each phase.”

“Compliance is this, like, great wedge into all of these other security processes in the company, and so it does really feel like, or it's kind of the hard parts of Vanta, it's like, hey, there's so much opportunity, there's so many adjacencies, which do we cho…”

“Vanta, the way they approached it, Christina, she was like searching for a pain. She was obsessed with talking to everybody about a pain that they needed solved, and then she just like built it in spreadsheets, so she started with the market very much so.”

“I turned down Deal and Vanta at Preseed, and I did both the times because I knew the founders were amazing, but I just didn't like the business, I didn't like the category, something else other than the founder.”

“Last valuation, I believe, 2.4 or five billion, but who's counting?”

“I think the build something you want is a bit of a red herring. It works in some cases, but you're also very limited to your experience.”

“I think there's a, the shut your eyes, imagine the future What's it look like? Build that. I think this makes sense in retrospect. I think in the moment, it's pretty hard to generate reasonable startup ideas during that.”

“The only question that ended up mattering was, what would make you stop working on what you're working on right now? And to your point, it turns out my present self always thinks I should keep going. But my past self sometimes thinks current self should stop, …”

“So on the false positives, anything that is not, can you do this for me now, tomorrow, next week, is a no. And people are really kind, and they want to be kind, and so they don't say, like, rarely do they say no, but a lot of like, oh, maybe next quarter, or l…”

“A couple places, but I guess in go-to-market, our expectations around quota, around attainment and all that, they're way off industry. They're way higher.”