Nikhil Gupta, founder and CEO of ArmorCode, discusses the origin of his prior startup and the industry category cloud security posture management (CSPM).
Insight
Gupta: Three early customers are a startup 'kiss of death'
“If you know you'll have three customers, I call it as a kiss of death. Because anybody like who's 42, 45, who is in an industry experience of 20 years, you'll be able to get three customers, you know, I know.”
Opinion
Gupta: Security is the only hindrance holding AI back from 10x scale
“So there's only one hindrance in today's world for AI is security. If there was not a security concern, security would be AI would be 10 X.”
Disclosure
Gupta repeatedly discourages prospective founders to test their genuine commitment
“Like many entrepreneurs or people who want to be an entrepreneur come to me, I discourage them. And when they come after three, four times, then I know that they really want to do it.”
Insight
Gupta says Silicon Valley enterprise early adopters' risk tolerance drives startup success
“And then also for enterprise space, you know, if you look at Google, Facebook, Intel, all of these were startup at some day in the Valley. So the risk taking capacity of the enterprises or the customers, early adopter customers is also high. So that's where it…”
What-if
Gupta says Avid Secure sold because it lacked moat against free tools
“There was no moat. We are doing really good visibility. We are selling, but then at that point, what would have happened here is these large companies could have come and given it for free. So, and you have to think as an entrepreneur at any given time, especi…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Gupta: Cloud security pain persisted despite $500M invested in 2016-2017 startups
“Now what happened was, there was almost a half a billion dollar investment happened. There were companies who had raised hundreds of millions of dollars for cloud security, and people thought their problem is solved. And when I was looking at that problem, I r…”