Illumio

“And actually another one of my mentors said to me on, on the really good days, you're going to think you have it all figured out. And on the really, really bad days, you're going to think it's the end of the world. And I promise you, neither one of them are ev…”

“We've been doing this without a market for most of our life. And now I very much believe there is a market.”

“You know, we raised eight million dollars to start the company. Andreessen Horowitz took the bet on us that literally, and I am not exaggerating, I can't say hundreds, plural. I can absolutely say many, many, many dozens of venture capitalists, including just …”

“We live in a post breach world. Every organization either has been breached or they're terrified they're next on the list. And they rightfully should be because this is no longer an anomaly. It's not if, it's when. If the biggest companies in the world and the…”

“I was describing the problems I heard customers talking about when they tried to take their firewall and plug it in in public cloud, and it just didn't make sense or work. And that was the genesis of the conversation that became Illumio.”

“I had probably spent over those two years 50% of my time in front of prospects. I can't call them customers because none of them were paying us yet, but let's call them prospects.”

“Now, literally everybody from Illumio all the way to Microsoft talks about the future of security is really being based on a graph.”

“We were never going to, in my opinion, we were never going to raise the capital for something this hard and this new from what I'll refer to as a generic VC.”

“Sometimes pitching a hundred is actually no better than pitching eight. If it turns out that there's only three that really are going to get your pitch, the other 97, it's going to make no difference at all.”

“One thing that I'm incredibly, incredibly proud of is that I can say that I'm working on a team For a company that literally has never done an economic driven layoff. We've never done a riff in the life of the company.”

“When you are going out into a market that doesn't exist, you are literally evangelizing. Not you. You're evangelizing the problem. You're educating on why the customer even needs to think about, let alone care. Then when they agree that maybe it is a problem t…”

“I don't think that walking around with conviction that's based on nothing other than belief is a good strategy because you can throw a lot of good effort and a lot of good money after Bad if you walk through your sort of decision making that way.”

“Again, a huge shout out to Andreessen Horowitz from the very, very beginning because they had built this model that now so many of the VCs have rightfully copied. But this executive briefing center, what they called their ABC and what Andreessen, you know, did…”

“Our first customers were some of the biggest banks in the world. And fortunately they believed in us and the problem we were trying to solve enough that we didn't do a lot of 50 or a 100,000 dollar deals in the beginning. Quite frankly, most of our deals were …”

“We raised in the first six, seven months of the company's life over forty million dollars. The team hadn't hit 20 people and we already had 40 plus million dollars in fundraising. And basically, the month we started generating revenue two years later, we raise…”

“The difference between being very, very, very, very early in something and being too early in something T O O of course, it's really only one word. And the word is actually not time. It's bankruptcy.”

“The reality is that I believe now more than ever, having been a part of helping to build this company, I believe that At the end of the day, the one thing that's out of your control controls more of your destiny than anything in your control, which is the mark…”

“I had one meeting with the partner. It lasted for less than an hour, and two weeks later, they had signed the term sheet to give us eight million dollars to start the company.”

“Gartner didn't write a report with the word in it until two years ago. And we had already become a company of over 500 people.”

“And the world was moving away from that, not from those addresses, but from writing your policy and describing how you wanted your environment to live and how you wanted to protect it. People were moving into the same thing that they do in cloud, which is you …”