The Exchanges

Q And why did you decide to go like the consulting round instead of starting like, I don't know, like an internet company or whatever else was like kind of hot at the moment?

A You know, I, I just, you, you build what you don't, right? And I knew here's the problem. Here's what people need. Here's the, the itch that I can scratch. So it just, it fit really well. Like I understood the, I guess the horizon, the problem set, you know, I had, I had excellent contacts within these hedge funds that were spinning over the prime brokerage. These were all people that I'd worked with that became CTOs there. And I recognized that they needed these solutions that a tier one bank would have, but couldn't afford them because they were, you know, a hedge fund that's running two or three billion of money still has concerns, but they can't afford their own full-time security staff. Whereas a tier one bank, you know, like Morgan or Goldman would have.

AI assessment note: “I had excellent contacts within these hedge funds that were spinning over”

Q Did, did actually, did taking that, that line, which, which you don't recommend, but did that fuel you or did it like suffocate you? Like what was the impact of that emotionally on your desire to kind of make this thing work?

A That, that was just a cushion. And you know, it, you know, like it was just like, it, it cannot fail. It cannot fail. There are plenty of times where I felt Okay. I just can't do this anymore. And between, you know, what I felt I owed my family and maybe surprisingly the, the true believers along the way who were the first clients that really believed in what we were doing and supported us almost, you know, bend over backwards to support us in every possible way, acting as references and acting as, uh, you know, opening their networks to us and really cheerleading those sort of early Johnny apple seeds. I did not want to let them down because they put their reputations on the line and, you know, their own jobs on the line to, to help me succeed. So that, that was at least as big a concern or a thought than, than the money itself.

AI assessment note: “That, that was just a cushion... So that, that was at least as big a concern”

Q Yeah. Well, what were some of the things like, I'm curious on the unnatural like services that you rendered, like what, what was it that, that they needed that you ended up building for them?

A Yeah. So we, we started looking at network traffic, so attacks from the outside and then things from the inside that were inappropriate. And so, you know, that, that was just purely on network traffic and we had to sort of push the limits of what you could do looking for bandwidth defenders. If there's problems on the network, you could play the traffic back when there's, you know, internal HR investigations started looking into that. We looked at, you know, and so we had this very interesting place in the network where we could see pretty much everything that traversed these choke points and You know, so we can say these are, this is why you've got bandwidth problems. This is why you've got jitter. This is what you can do from grabbing, ah, voice data and spinning it out into MP three's for use later because it's trading environment. You need to have that kind of stuff going on. So we ended up building tech like a circular queue and memory to pull data as fast off of the network, the next, right? The as quick as possible things that just didn't exist before. And that's. There's just a lot of the crazy sort of breakthrough first time situations, right? We, we had all this incredible data and from that we could start building up permission lists. So, you know, there was a point where people were downloading malware just by single click, right? And so we, you know, we, we built u…

AI assessment note: “we ended up building tech like a circular queue and memory to pull data”

Q How much did you raise at that time?

A It was like a mil, a mil and a half. So nothing extraordinary. You're just no local, you know, Canadian investors. I think, uh, Al-Karim Jivrev, who's with Espresso now was an early, an early investor as well. Just enough to let's, let's bring in people who've done this before and, you know, transform it from just a bunch of cybersecurity cowboys You know, shoot down the bad guys to an actual business. And so as he's doing that, he's learning about information security and cybersecurity, and I'm learning what it takes to, to build a business as well. So in this sort of mutual, I'm watching what he's doing. He's watching what I'm doing and both sort of elevating from that.

AI assessment note: “It was like a mil, a mil and a half.”

Q like this is a moment whenever we talk to an exited or partially exited founder that, that we go through, like you spend so much time, you know, building something and there is like that, that kind of zero to one event where you exit, you know, or, or majority exit or whatever. Like, I'm always curious the feeling of it. Like what was the day after that actually closed?

A Like, you know, I, I think, you know, that, that was, it just felt like another day to be fair. You know, I stepped back, you know, two years ago. Almost like three guys were during the summer, two years ago. And that, that was more, that felt more like, you know, a different chapter closing, right? It, it felt the way I described it was, it was 20, it's been three years now. So, uh, you know, it was 21 years, almost 21 years. I said, as soon as you're with my baby and, you know, I would go to places and introduce myself, Eldon Sperkarafi Centaur. That was my surname. Right. And You know, and I said, look, I've been 21 years in my baby. As soon as my baby can drink legally in the States, I shouldn't have to be a helicopter parent anymore. And so that was like the stepping back. That was the, you know, is I don't need to be a helicopter parent. Uh, and, and so here we are. That's the, that, that was the feeling that I felt like it was, it was, you know, there's a group I belong to, which is a lot of, uh, exited founders. And you go through these same sort of group and things where you're, you know, You start doing some angel investing. You start, you know, you have maybe, uh, you start working on your health a little bit better. You reconnect with family. You read a bunch of books. You start traveling, you know, maybe you have a small, small mental crisis. Like what do you do? W…

AI assessment note: “it just felt like another day to be fair.”

Q And I assume like what, what were the numbers back then? Like year one would have been what, like a couple hundred K terms of revenue. Yeah.

A I think it took, it took about to get year seven, I think. Where we hit a million us, especially at that time, there's a few early stage investors that would come out and talk to us, my word about or whatever. And we, we described this thing that we're doing and they'd say, well, you know, we, we really like hardware. We really like software. We don't understand service at all. So they had no real interest in funding that. And you know, a couple of years after that last one came by, they, they boomerang back and said, Hey, we're, uh, You know, we'd like to talk to you again as well. We haven't changed it. Like our, our numbers are up, but we haven't changed anything. And they said, no, no, no, you, you have an annuity. And this is before, you know, Bessemer came out with.

AI assessment note: “it took about to get year seven, I think. Where we hit a million”