Do the Work Before You Start the Clock

0:00I think it's super important to front load all that thinking. Why would you do that thinking after you've raised money, after you're constrained to a path? Do it before that you have a more compelling case to discuss with investors. And then you also are signing yourself up for a long journey that actually has the likes to be successful. You know, you raise the money to have the capital, the feudal operations, and then you press the go button, right? As opposed to raising the money, shop clock starts, and now you're spending three to eight months trying to figure out what you're doing. and you feel the pressure because, you know, it's better to do that actually in like a non-pressured environment because it's so, so critical.

0:33And then you turn on the shot clock as soon as you're ready to go.

0:36Vineet Edupuganti: If you build it, they will come. It's a famous line from a movie about a man who builds a baseball diamond in the middle of his Iowa cornfield. And people do show up. He also makes friends with the ghosts of several famous baseball players. It's a fantasy. It's inspirational, but It's no way to start a business. Before Vinit Etipaganti co-founded Cogent Security, he and his team talked to around 100 potential customers and tried to identify the assumptions that could kill the company before they committed to building it. We talk about how to choose a problem worth solving, win the first customers, and recognize when you've learned enough to stop researching and start building.

1:14Vineet Edupuganti: I'm Walter Thompson. This is Fund, Build, Scale. Are you building something that's hard to explain? It can be a sign you're working on something interesting, but it also raises the risk that you're missing out on fundraising, sales, hiring, and media opportunities. I help early-stage founders sharpen the narrative. What matters, why now, who needs to care, and why they're the right team to make it happen. If you're preparing for a raise, a product launch, an important customer meeting, a panel discussion, or even a hiring push, I can help you pressure test your story before the stakes get higher.

1:51Vineet Edupuganti: Visit the FundBuildScale website to learn more or email fundbuildscale at gmail.com. Thanks very much for joining me today. I appreciate the time. Thank you for having me. So as I understand it, Cogent helps large companies deal with software security flaws before they've been discovered. Do I more or less have that correct? Correct. So in organizations, right, they typically have millions of vulnerabilities that live in their software, their infrastructure. And so what Cogent does is it understands those vulnerabilities, investigates them, figures out which ones matter, and then fixes them before AI-powered attackers can actually exploit them.

2:31Vineet Edupuganti: Yeah. So previously, you were at Abnormal. Talk about your work there. You're a machine learning engineer, and you went to kind of product leader, basically. At a really pivotal time in the company's growth, kind of getting there when headcount was exploding, revenue was also going off the charts. I want to talk about how that experience kind of prepared you, I guess, for Cogent. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I think what was really interesting about my time at Abnormal, I joined the company when it was just a couple dozen folks. I think by the time I left, it was close to a thousand people, right?

3:01So it was a pretty significant multiple that happened on the headcount side, on the revenue side. And I think during my stretch there, it was one of the fastest growing cybersecurity companies of all time. So really tremendous company building journey and experience, just witness and learn from. and a lot of those same lessons we've applied into what we've done in cogent. I think a few specific things that were very helpful there. One, I had my hands strewn across every single part of the business, basically everything from engineering to product to sales to customer success. I think that's one thing that was really useful was just to understand all the different core systems and engines of the business and how everything fit together.

3:40And I think it was also really interesting learning in terms of product market fit and picking what problems to work on. Then eight years ago, but even now, email phishing is one of the top ways that people get compromised. And so I think solving a problem that is universal, that's at the base of the hierarchy of needs and where you have the ability to deliver a valuable and differentiated solution, that's ultimately the crux of everything, right? And off that, if you execute well and build the right systems, many of which are actually repeatable from one company to another, you can further amplify the success.

4:13But there's a couple of core basics that you have to get right. And I think abnormal was a very good learning lesson in understanding what those things are.

4:20Vineet Edupuganti: So let's unpack those, like those core basics. I mean, every company is different, certainly. But like, what were the things, I guess, that were like just the most applicable, the things that carried over the easiest from abnormal into cogent? I think one thing that was really important, I alluded to it earlier, was just market selection, right? A framework that, you know, one person told me once was, imagine that you have a key stakeholder, whatever your buying persona is. if they just slash their budget by 80%, would they still hold on to, you know, your specific product offering, right? Is the problem you're solving that painful and important for them?

4:53So I think that's one thing, you know, is just like how critical and important is it? I think the second thing, does the problem you're solving map to some very clear economic value? Is there a business case that's very obvious? In the world of cybersecurity, reducing risk is very important. So, you know, if you were to look at one of the top ways that people get breached today, it's phishing stolen credentials right that's kind of where abnormal played and then for us cogent it's exploitation of vulnerabilities right that's the number one way that people get breached today it's the fastest growing way so understanding that obviously if you could reduce the rate of critical vulnerabilities being exposed if you can cut that exposure window that's gonna be helpful from risk reduction efficiency gains right from manual work that people might be doing internally so i think building that case and having a very clear connection to it is super important And then there's also kind of an analysis of the broader market.

5:45And as a founder coming into solving a certain problem, you almost want to be encyclopedic, right, about the history of the space and the different players in it. And I think one thing that's very interesting is when there's public companies that do billions of dollars of revenue in a given market, and yet the problem is not solved and the customers you talk to are not satisfied, right? That's indicative of some level of value associated with the problem, and yet opportunity to go do things in a different and better way. So I think that was like one thing that was very important was that very detailed market level analysis of picking the right problem to work on.

6:17I think another thing that carried over as an important principle was just the criticality of having a great team, right? Ultimately, a lot of problems can be figured out. You can tune your execution, you can revamp your planning process, but you need to have the right people in the right roles. And that's true of executives, but even of individual contributors, making sure they have the capability, the drive, the lean-in and cultural alignment. That's another core component that we've tried to emulate here as well. Actually, just picking up on that last point.

6:46Vineet Edupuganti: So, I mean, when you were at Abnormal, they were really scaling headcount dramatically, like my research suggests. Were you managing folks at Abnormal before the company, like before you left? Yeah. Yeah. So I had an org there of several dozen people. And that's one of the difficult things, right, is preserving some of that culture and that bar as you continue to grow. Right. And so I wanted to dig in, that because it's like you're how do you starting from scratch instead of like, you know, having like a team of recruiters who, you know, you contracted months ago and working them with them for a while and there's like a pipeline there.

7:18Vineet Edupuganti: But like when you're, you know, you're working at, you're scaling cogent, building a technical team quickly. What were the initial challenges there? What were the things that kind of, apart from money, obviously? I actually think that's the hardest problem to go and overcome, right? Because in the very early stages of a startup, it's just an idea. Maybe you have like some credibility and backing from your past. Really, you're getting a bunch of people to take a bet on something that's unproven. As you get further, right, to like, you know, product market fit, and there's a little bit more brand and aura around the company, it's a little bit easier of a pitch because people can have the opportunity to come in earlier, but they still feel like there's been some de-risking.

7:56But to get those first one to five people to go and take the plunge is very hard. So what becomes important there is really the storytelling, right? of like the vision of what can this company be? What's the problem in the market? That's especially challenging also when people don't have immediate intuition for these problems. As with us in cybersecurity, it's not something that everybody touches and many of the engineers that we pulled in are not from that space. So that was a very core component of education. I think a second piece is just, you know, founder background and experience, right?

8:25Do you have credibility and any sort of indication that your past experience might be predictive of future success with this endeavor? if you have VC backing at the time that you're hiring, leveraging the investors to both source candidates for you, sell them, convey their social proof. And then the process you run is also super important, right? The thoughtfulness you put into it, the care and attention from the founders, that can be another thing that's very differentiated. But ultimately you have to compel people that the upside, the opportunity, what the company has the chance to go and achieve outweighs any risk that they may run into.

9:02And again, this process becomes way easier over time. Getting those first couple of engineers is very, very difficult.

9:07Vineet Edupuganti: I know this is a while ago and your messaging has evolved a lot since then. But do you recall the storytelling levers you were working back then with your first five employees? Because I know from experience, if you're talking to somebody, you don't have a company, you don't really have customers' revenue yet. You don't have an office probably. So it's like you're asking someone to really, you know, you're describing something that doesn't exist. Ask them to take a risk. They probably already have a job. They got to go home and tell their spouse, oh, I talked to Vineet, you know, he made me an offer.

9:34Vineet Edupuganti: What are they doing? And then they have to explain to somebody else why you're worth taking a risk on. What was the story that you were carrying to those conversations? Yeah, you know, I think one thing that was really interesting is around that time in 2024, we started to get the first evidence of AI-driven exploitation of vulnerabilities. And I think what became very clear was we were no longer in a world of, you know, human-unhuman and, you know, this cat and mouse game. still adversarial, but we're now in a world where you're being attacked by a machine and the humans on the defensive side are running around in spreadsheets.

10:04And so I think like that mental model for people was something that clicked very nicely. And the beauty and the one advantage we have, I think in any recruiting process or sales process, you have to find your unfair advantages. We are very mission oriented, right? You can't possibly be working at Cogent and, you know, attracted to what we're doing and not think that this is like a positive thing for the world, right? versus there's many other areas of AI or software technology where things do get very dubious. So I think that was a very core selling point along with some of the other elements around just like, hey, here's the founding team.

10:37Here's folks we have in our pipeline, whether customers or recruits that you might be working alongside. Here's the type of culture we have. Here's what we're trying to build. I think just being really transparent in detail and even showing the pre-work, right? Like I would, for candidates, like flash out my spreadsheet of all the customer discovery I had done. That way they know I'm not pulling something out of a hat, but they can see it. Like, okay, this person has some rigor behind their process, right? There's intentionality here. So I think when you don't have much, which is the case when you're just starting out, you have to think about what you do have and how you convey that and tell the story effectively.

11:10Vineet Edupuganti: Nice. And so, okay, Cogent moved. When did actual, when did, what was day zero? What month and year was that? This was October, 2024. Okay. So you move pretty fast from like formation to customers and then seed funding in series A. But how much time passed between, I guess, day zero and your seed round? It was about the same time. So, you know, I think the business that we're in in cybersecurity and enterprise cybersecurity, there is like maybe a little bit of market risk, but really not as much as other businesses. Our focus is on the execution side of things. And that's where the real risk and differentiation lies.

11:46And so you need capital, right? You need to hire a team and build a product and everything. So that was important for us is raising the money. And we did a lot of validation before we actually decided to go and work on this problem and raise the money. But once we had the conviction, it was raise the money, go start hiring people, and then scale out.

12:06Vineet Edupuganti: Real quickly, I mean, like, what's the one-minute version of how you stack that validation to the point where you're ready to start talking to people, investors, hiring? What was your process? Was it just customer discovery? Was it your only experience? Like a mix of both? I'm, I'm guessing. Yeah. And I think like, you know, for all these things, it helps to have some kind of like inkling that anchors you because the search base is infinite, right? That you could be doing AI for marketing, you'd be in cyber, right? There's infinite things. So I think it helps when, you know, Hey, there's like some kind of founder market fit.

12:37There's some domain that you have experience and that you truly understand and it makes sense and you have credibility. I think also, if you know about a problem, I knew about this problem from before. and was connected to a lot of organizations that had expressed the challenge that if only someone could go and tackle this age-old difficult thing. So anchored by the zip code is good. And then within that, I think there's a few different elements. One is talking to a bunch of customers and customers means different segments of the market, small, big, executive buyers, hands-on users, right? Really painting that picture and understanding what is the workflow today?

13:12What are the gaps? What should it be? What are people optimizing for? what are they paying? That's like one component. There's another component on just like market analysis, right? What are the trends of how this landscape is evolving? You know, competitors, right? Like in pretty much every problem you're going to go tackle, there's some way this has been done before, almost always through technology. Sometimes maybe it's humans that are leveraging, you know, manual process to go get it done. But why has this problem not been solved, right? What is the clear why now? What are the challenges that the prior generation ran into that you have to circumvent or avoid, right?

13:46And almost building that North star and product marketing, right? Of what needs to be true. I think that's very important. And then thirdly, just understanding kind of like the TL wins and where the puck is going. I think we've never been in an era where things move so fast. And so there's a risk that you could do something that makes sense today. And then actually in 12 to 24 months, you're off the path, right? And we packaged all this up into this big document. The format I like is the PR FAQ. This is like the Amazon style working backwards document. So it was like Cogent GA, even though we had nothing at that point in time, one to two page press release, right?

14:21So here's what this big launch looks like. Tons of customer FAQs of things that they'd be asking. Why is this different than X? What are the limitations of Y? And then tons of questions that are more internal FAQ around, you know, how we would go and actually bring this to life and all these different components, what the top risks are that the business would face, almost like the pre-mortem of why this would fail. I think it's super important to front load all that thinking. Why would you do that thinking after you've raised money, after you're constrained to a path? Do it before that you have a more compelling case to discuss with investors.

14:54And then you also are signing yourself up for a long journey that actually has the likes to be successful.

15:01Vineet Edupuganti: It makes sense. And it's almost like having, like creating a story room. In addition to your data room, I'm not sure you could metaphor me, but like, it's, you know, it's something that other people can see and feel in touch that you don't have to just kind of carry it in your head, like an imaginary color you're trying to describe to somebody else. Right. And then, you know, you raise the money to have the capital to fuel operations and then you press the go button, right. As opposed to raising the money, shot clock starts and now you're spending three to eight months trying to figure out what you're doing and you feel the pressure because, you know, it's better to do that actually in like a non-pressured environment because it's so, so critical.

15:32And then you turn on the shot clock as soon as you're ready to go.

15:35Vineet Edupuganti: Do you have a sense of like approximately how many people, like customers, potential customers you talk to when you're just doing the discovery before you started building? Oh, probably at least a hundred. Okay. And so how did you, how did you structure like the, the inputs, like all that, all the feedback you're getting, all the, you know, the vibe checks and everything else. Like how did you like structure that data so that you could actually could make sense of it and share with the rest of the team? Yeah. I think for us, it's important to have a very structured template, right? of just what questions you're going to ask.

16:06Keep it consistent. You don't want to blow an interview because, you know, you didn't ask the right things. You forgot a certain step in the process. So I think having that structured template is very helpful. We would run through that and everything from understanding the set of priorities that they have within their organization, current workflows, budgets, you know, the challenges and gaps that were not working, board level requirements. So really kind of drilling into all those things. and we did different types of conversations we would do in some cases like blinded calls right to where people don't necessarily reveal all the details but you can get maybe some more granular insights on elements that wouldn't make as much sense in person uh we would do certain calls that you know we'd show some like very primitive mock-up type thing just to give visibility and have people point at something concrete so um really what it comes down to is like you know first discovery to like figure out what's going on in this broader landscape and get the right context but then selling the product that you don't have just like front end only basically confirming the validation there and the alignment there to again really reinforce that this is something that could move the needle in our prep call I think you mentioned like you know

17:19Vineet Edupuganti: spreadsheets when color-coded matrix matrices but I do wonder like did you was there was there always consensus when you're bringing things I have a lot I've had a lot of experiences like but I was working in startups before becoming a journalist. And so talking to product managers, sometimes I would bring them, you know, literal customer concerns or objections. And a product manager might say, well, you know, customers don't always know what they want. And so there might not be a consensus over what even the customer data is saying. Is that something you had to work with? Or were you really like in tune with people you were talking to as far as like design partners and that kind of thing?

17:53Look, I think it's a combination of both. I think, you know, from the customers, there's a lot that you can glean about the problems they face. and then sometimes until they see the solution, they don't know what's possible, right? So would you pay a million dollars for this hypothetical solution we're proposing? The interest of that has like mixed, you know, trustworthiness because, you know, maybe they haven't really seen the solution or interpreted the value. But is solving vulnerability management, if you could basically diffuse the critical vulnerabilities in your organization, is that an important thing for you?

18:23If someone says no, well then, you know, that's telling, right? So it's about the types of questions you ask, and some things are more trustworthy than others. And ultimately, you just need to accumulate a data set. And so color-coded matrix, we had spreadsheets with dozens and dozens of rows mapping to every customer conversation, columns across different dimensions, like the firmographic details, number of employees, location. So we could slice and dice and do analysis on this. We had columns around intensity of pain, budget availability. and then you try to find patterns, right? And for anybody where they're like, hey, this concept makes no sense.

18:59This problem is not important. Why? What's unique about them? What segment of the market do they map to? They're kind of doing this detective work. I actually imagine is these reasoning models have gotten so good. This whole process is probably actually way easier now than it would be. There's a lot of manual work of parsing customer nodes and doing all this stuff that you could basically build like a cloud workflow for right now. So I think actually the entrepreneurs of 2026 have a leg up.

19:24Vineet Edupuganti: How much domain expertise does a person need to have, I suppose, before they can really commit? Can they come in, see a problem in July and then build something by September? Or do they really need to live with it for like months and months before they actually have the authority? I think it all depends on learning speed and then how complex the domain is. So optimal, assuming everything else also checks out, is you have all the domain experience ahead of time, right? And that just fast tracks things and you've been marinating on these problems for a while. and then if not then yes i think you can pick things up in a couple of months but i think that requires really immersing yourself right i don't think it's like a one week hey i want to go tackle this new domain and all of a sudden i'm going to go after it i think you need to you know do the work right and uh you know just like really understand uh in depth and i don't have like specific heuristics around like length of time or number of hours but a good just like heuristic is, is there any question that you could be asked that you feel like you don't have the answer to, right?

20:23When you're engaging with prospects or investors, like, you know, you should have thought about everything that they might ask ahead of time. That's something that, you know, and that's where this whole premortem concept of, you know, listing things out of the PR FAQ, thinking about every possible objection and path and thinking through that and mapping that out. So that's really, really paramount, I think, that you understand that and have that depth of expertise. And even with customers, I mean, and of course, I have this now after so much time, but you start to very quickly get this pattern recognition where you can always predict what they're going to say on the call.

20:57That's another good heuristic, right? If you kind of know what the customer is going to say before they say it, you probably have a pretty good knack and intuition for the problem space.

21:06Vineet Edupuganti: how do you distinguish between doing discipline research and kind of just endlessly just delaying the decision to start? I've been in that process myself sometimes where I'm researching something, I'm refining my offering, and I ask a lot of people for feedback, but then you can get trapped in that kind of that feedback lane. What was the specific evidence that gave you at Cogent enough evidence to actually move from research to execution? I think there's a couple of gates, right? I think like the first gate is your own discovery of just, is this a problem space that makes sense. Then there's like some of like the initial solution market fit given like this high level demo and like some of the stuff we want to go do.

21:43You know, Mr. Prospect, Mr. Customer, does this resonate? You know, you get some positive feedback there. And then there's the commercial side of things, right? Of, you know, example things for us was people who had signed up as design partners, X number of people willing to pay over$100 ,000 for the solution if it were to do what it said it was going to do on the box, right? Some of those signals, I think, are very, very helpful. And, you know, it's not going to be one size fits all. It's going to be very, you know, business by business. But I think that methodology and framework of there's a couple of phases to this process and there's exit criteria of each phase might help you stay a little bit more organized and, you know, disciplined around it.

22:23Because I have seen people get stuck in analysis paralysis and they're just like researching forever. but oftentimes i see that the most also with people that have less intuition for the space that they're actually in but it does become more of that random walk whereas i think if you have a little bit of a grounding and you kind of have that sense that something's there and now the work to be done is just like hunting that down and extracting it things move along more quickly and i think anybody going through that process has the and seen it so that's another good forcing function right is people people want to get started and get the ground running

22:55Vineet Edupuganti: This is kind of a left field question, but my sense is that hiring early stage, early stage cybersecurity companies really live and die on talent. And so you can't bootstrap talent. I don't think unless you've got a lot of really true believers. Is that are people bootstrapping cybersecurity companies or do you really need to the UK? Yeah. You know, it's capital intensive and it goes back to the point on there's not much market risk, right? So the thing you have to really prove is can you build a great product? Can you get early customers? Then can you start to scale, go to market? And so for that, you need people.

23:27People have expenses associated with them. You have infrastructure bills, right? So you don't get to actually de-risk and prove out any of the main hypotheses unless you raise capital and you allocate that capital, right? That's why you actually see a lot of cyber companies with mega rounds, right? And sometimes you mean the hundreds of millions of dollars coming out of stealth. And that's the main reason is to do something ambitious in this space. It's a time-intensive and capital-intensive journey.

23:52Vineet Edupuganti: Right. I mean, I guess, yeah, the real risk would be like working on the wrong problem with the wrong people, which, again, you wouldn't know until you spent some money. So, I mean, I hear you saying that you're not facing a lot of market risk if the product works. But in practical terms, like what does no market risk look like? What did it look like for you? I think it goes back to a lot of the customer discovery that you're doing around the urgency of the problem, the budgets that people have. right and i think if presented with the magic bullet or when you ask the customer to describe the ideal solution in their words if that kind of maps the north star of what you're building towards then um then it makes a lot of sense right so as an example we can fix every vulnerability that matters with no human intervention yeah everybody wants that subject to the price point being something that's within the realm of reason um now going and doing that in practice there's a million different edge cases and caveats and difficulties that you might have um but there's some problems, right, where you could say, hey, if I went and did this perfectly, would you buy it?

24:49The customer would still say no.

24:50Vineet Edupuganti: So those are probably not the areas to go tackle. Yeah. Adoption risk, execution risk. I mean, how did you? Okay. Well, I mean, so how did you attempt to reduce like your remaining technical risks once you actually had a team on board and a problem isolated? Yeah. And look, ultimately, that's like some of the risks that you're underwriting when you go on journeys like this. Right. And how do you de-risk that? I mean, it does really start with the team. And so we made a conscious decision. Yes, we operate in cybersecurity, but the best engineers for an applied AI company, which is truly what we are, come from the valley or at top companies like Coinbase and Databricks and Google DeepMine.

25:27So that really is the core DNA of our engineering team. The idea was we're going to get the best and the brightest and have better talent than any other cyber company to be able to out-compete. And then there's other things that potentially come into play, partnerships and alliances you can forage, things of that nature. I think being based in San Francisco is a big advantage. I think just word spreads fast here and people are trying unique things. There's new methodologies getting invented here that we quickly know about because we're very much in the know. And then you have to work in quick cycles.

25:59And the architecture is really critical, the foundational architecture that you have. If you quickly discover that's not the right thing, you have to pivot from that. But the technical risk, that execution risk, that's what founders, investors, everybody early in the company building journey is really underwriting.

26:17Vineet Edupuganti: Any thoughts or advice for a first time technical founder who's in the CEO spot and they're building a team, but they can't realistically hire the best engineering team in the valley? What do they do? I mean, I've seen, I see, you know, crazy billboards with incomprehensible messaging that draws attention or, you know, a weirdly wrapped bus ad kind of a thing. But like, what are the real tactics that are going to move the needle if you're actually trying to move, you know, get people on board with your thing? Yeah. I mean, ultimately, I think it comes down to in a world with no social proof, like you are the social proof as the founders, right?

26:51And so I think working through your networks and things like that, right? Maybe there's people you've worked with before. That's the best way. Friends of friends, right? Like the in-network hiring was a big force of the first five to 10 engineers that we were able to recruit. So obviously you have to turn over every stone there and literally go through your whole LinkedIn and ping everyone and understand who they know and do this breadth first search through the network. I think that's really critical. And then we didn't do this. I can't speak to whether it's effective, but there may be some kind of like bootstrapping.

27:19thing, be, um, you know, get a couple of contractors to start building out some concepts in a lower cost way, get a little bit more traction. Now you have something that's a bigger package to go and sell to people. But, um, look, I think there has to be alignment of your strategy to what you're trying to solve for. If you're solving for a very technically intensive, complex problem space, you need A plus talent. If you can't get the A plus talent, you have to figure out a way, or maybe it's not the right time to embark on the journey.

27:48Vineet Edupuganti: I want to talk about how Cogent earned its first handful of customers. I mean, and I'm guessing a lot of the, is it fair to say a lot of these folks came out of the customer discovery process? Yeah, many of them did. And also through relationships, events, I think to get those first couple of customers, again, it's really, really hard, right? And now that, you know, we have a bigger customer base, I'm seeing that flywheel effect. Some person comes in, they're like, oh, I see this person on your website. Or I want to do a customer reference. You put them in touch with someone similar and they're able to convey the brand, right?

28:24And sell on your behalf. But in the early days, you have none of that. And so it's a tough effort and it's all again on the founders. You got to like go door to door and, you know, spend a lot of time with people, really convince them. One of our first customers, I probably met them individually 40 times, 50 times, right? before we even got to integrating the data and putting the product to the test and things like that and then iterating with them. So for them, there's a lot of risk, and especially in the world of cyber, where there's a lot of sensitive data crossing hands and if something goes wrong, the cost and the embarrassment level can be fairly high.

28:59There's a lot of friction. And so getting over that initial activation energy is very, very difficult.

29:04Vineet Edupuganti: I mean, looking back at Cogent's early, early customer building kind of, I guess, go-to-market motion. Like what? And like, let me just read you a short list of like, you know, four bullets. You tell me what the breakdown was. Existing relationships, conferences and events, new relationship building and just hustle. How did it all break down percentage wise? Yeah, hustle probably like, you know, cuts across the first three. But yeah, I'd say maybe like 50 % existing relationships and then 25, 25. And then in all cases, like even if you know someone really well, it doesn't mean that they're just going to go and, you know, put you into their company.

29:44There has to be like a real need, right? You have to align with many other stakeholders that come together. So yeah, I think that's really critical though. It's like either having those relationships beforehand or cultivating very deep relationships. without even necessarily expecting anything to come out of it. I think that dovetails nicely with the market analysis and reputation building in the industry and all these things is to kind of build that cohort of people that you are connected to in the industry. Even now, there's people that we met very early, even before the company started. We still catch up periodically and frequently, more socially and to exchange market insights with no expectation of them adopting a product.

30:26So I think you really have to think about these relationships long-term. But some of them will translate into collaboration in the short term.

30:33Vineet Edupuganti: I mean, I think you mentioned like your first five customers was like pulling teeth. But I do wonder when you got that, when you got the first yes, were you ready to onboard a customer? Were you ready to go to contracts? Do you have a process? And or is it kind of a mad scramble as far as like, oh, my God, somebody, we landed a customer. We got to get them on board. Well, even before landing them, there's the, you know, design partnership phase and things like that. Right. And which that is what I was talking about is having a lot of activation energy as well. Right. So even to get someone to work with you, forget the commercial expectations is hard.

31:02And so I think the most important things there are, you know, you'd really differentiate as a startup through speed, right? And people really enjoy having a hand in things, seeing their ideas come to life with a product development team that's basically outsourced, but feels like an extension of their team. So I think that was really important for us. and even to this day, some of the folks that were part of the journey in the early days, they acknowledge, right, that, hey, it is still really cool to see what this has become relative to where it was, which was nothing basically, right, when we first started.

31:36So iteration speed is critical. And then obviously, like, you know, once you reach a certain level of maturity and things like that, the conversations can start to turn commercial. But I think it's important to get a couple of those people who can really build things out with you versus, you know, just going straight to GA it's, it's, there's always going to be some unanticipated edge cases or challenges that are going to be impossible to foresee unless you really battle tested it with a couple of customers.

32:02Vineet Edupuganti: Were they, were they all pilots the first five or so, or it was a mix of like pilots, design partnerships and like paid deployments like, or

32:13no, all, all unpaid. And so these were unpaid design partnership types of engagements. Got it. And then, you know, again, after some period of time, we turn it into commercial of, Hey, have we met the needs that care about? Is this something that you actually want to use in production to run your workflow? If so, then let's work through that process. Cool.

32:29Vineet Edupuganti: I mean, like, what, what were, what were the, what were you asking them to trust you with, I guess, and that, at that early, earliest stage, like what was, what was their biggest risk guys? Like just like a lot, uh, that you'd fail and their data would get public or what was the real or losing time? Cause I've, I've talked to like CTOs, for example, And one of the things I've heard repeatedly is that like the biggest risk isn't that it's not going to work. The biggest risk is just kind of the, the overhead of working with a startup to try to, to try something basically. And the fact that if it doesn't work out, then like they have a lot of egg on their face.

33:03Yeah. I think that's a core component in the short to medium term. By the way, I've heard stories of startups like working with design partners and then pivoting. And then now everything that was part of the roadmap, the time that that design partner is putting in completely wasted right because now the startup is going off and doing something else so there's that of short-term time risk there's security and privacy risk and all that stuff right potentially given like the data that could be transferred and things like that there's long-term risk right what if you partner with the company it makes sense you adopt the product and then two years later they run out of money and they shut down and now you have to go a different path right so there's that saying um nobody got fired for buying IBM, right?

33:41So you can just go with the established solution, right? As a practitioner, and nothing's going to happen to you. You go to the startup and things get messed up or the bet doesn't pay off. To your point, there's egg on your face. So what do you need to find? You need to find people that have very high intensity of pain, where they care enough about solving the problem to where they're willing to partner with someone. And or number two, very high alignment of vision, right? That keeps them going. Because even though your initial version of the product is probably not going to be very good, bluntly.

34:10They see that, hey, in iteration two, three, four, five, as you guys work out the kinks and get to where you want to be, it's all going to start clicking and making sense.

34:18Vineet Edupuganti: I do want to spend some time also talking about what product market fit actually looks like. Everyone has their own definition, certainly, and it's going to vary from company to company. But I think something you said, kind of recalled from the prep call, was that product market fit, it's not a single moment. It's, it's, you know, it's, you have to step back and kind of, it's something you see, but you don't really, you can't point to it. Like, let's talk about that. Like talk about like when at Cogent, when you kind of sensed you were approaching or had passed or were there at it, like kind of in the neighborhood of product market fit, like what did that, what started to change?

34:55Vineet Edupuganti: Like just barometrically. Yeah, I think there's like the analytical way of looking at it. And then there's maybe the more qualitative way. So I kind of view product market fit as have you figured out the buyer journey and the customer journey right from first touch point all the way to making them successful in deployment? Can you do that at scale? Can you do that in a repeatable and efficient manner? Right. And so you can basically decompose all that into a bunch of different areas, right? If you do a million demos and none of them convert to next steps, not good. Now, if all the demos convert and you integrate for a pilot or whatever it is and everything falls apart, also not good.

35:31And so I try not to look at it as this big monolithic thing, but really a collection of maybe four or five related, but somewhat independent problems as well. And those are things that we can optimize, right? We could have maybe the best top of funnel conversion, which might be really good indication that we're in the right place at the right time. And there might be things at the bottom of the funnel that need work because maybe the product is not self-serve enough or, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So I think working back from really optimizing all of those components is helpful when you're thinking about where to place your tokens in terms of investment allocation within the company.

36:06And then qualitatively, I think there's like, again, across that journey, different checkboxes you can look for, different signs. One is speed, right? So I think like, you know, for us, as we matured, we noticed that things were moving way quicker, right? It was like, have a conversation. Customer is like, hey, before you go, like, can we compare calendars? usually it's the sales guy that has to go ask that question, right? But when the customer is the one who's saying, hey, before you leave, we need to meet again, that's great, right? And they're meeting next week, not next month. And then wanting to start that pilot within the next month and wanting to even purchase, right, within a couple months.

36:39That time compression is, I think, one interesting signal that you just viscerally feel that things are moving fast. I think engagement with the product, right? So people using different components and all the surface areas, feature requests and even bugs, right? Getting filed consistently. Bugs sound like a bad thing, but it's actually a really good thing because someone cares enough to go call out some problem. Yeah. There's a, there's a job to be done that is not being fulfilled. So things like bad people requesting sessions, right? On the product roadmap. And do you have XYZ capability? Post sales customers looking at you as a partner as they build out their more comprehensive strategy.

37:15So there's all these like more, um, hard to, to measure, but the kind of like instinctive signals where as this thing start to happen, it's like, all right, we're barking up the right tree and, you know, we're, we're in the right zone here where as we polish certain things up, we're just going to continue to extend and optimize the cycle.

37:33Vineet Edupuganti: So how long did you stick with, I guess, kind of founder led sales before bringing on like an actual team? We, we took a unique strategy. So, you know, for the first stretch, it was founder led. And then, um, we hired one leader within go-to-market. We hired several sales engineers, actually. And the idea there was that founders are cracking open the doors and it's so, so hard to break in. So hard to delegate a job that's really difficult until the founder has kind of mastered it. So the idea was myself in particular, I was responsible for getting these leads in place, getting folks to the table, telling people what the product was to implement, but also selling the vision to get people excited and get people to go on the journey with us.

38:16And then we need people to run the evaluations and work with customers. So we started with SEs. And then as we kind of got the first crop of customers on board, made successful, you know, started to see a little bit more repeatability and consistency of how things were happening. Then got our account executives in. And then now that's something that we're scaling very aggressively.

38:37Vineet Edupuganti: A lot of people out there, you know, they're thinking about starting something or they haven't made the leap yet, but they have something in mind. Um, if you were talking to like a technical founder, who's kind of still deciding whether to start something, um, I guess kind of what do they need to validate before they start building? I guess like as far as the problem, like, is it really just more like they need to talk to 20 people and make sure that this is a problem worth solving? Or is it more like, is it more of a personal conviction thing? I think like even before chasing down what the problem is, the product, all that stuff, that's actually the next step.

39:12The first step is should you even start a company? And I think there, you know, one macro level question that every aspiring founder should ask themselves is imagine you had a clone of yourself, right? It's like a VC clone. You have a million dollars you can go allocate. Would you put that million dollars in yourself? Right. And for many people, as they do that kind of like introspection of imagining that clone of themselves looking down would say, no, I'm not experienced enough. I'd rather put that money in someone else. Right. You have to kind of come to that point. And I think where your internal conviction is such that, yeah, I would love to be investing those dollars into myself because I think I'm very qualified and ready, et cetera, et cetera, right?

39:51To go and embark on the journey. So I think that level of confidence has to be there, but that confidence will stem from things like experience, relationships, industry domain knowledge, you know, your confidence and your ability to go recruit a great team, attract customers, you know, all that type of stuff. So I think that's one thing that's very important as well as really understanding what you're signing up for, right? These journeys are not easy. There are many more de-risked paths to success that involve way less work hours, way less stress. And so really introspecting and understanding why it is you want to start the company, what you're hoping to get out of it.

40:27Are there other paths to achieve the same outcome in your broader life and career that might actually make more sense or be paths of less resistance? And then if you're really in that mode of, all right, I need to go do this thing. and I know I can do it. Now there's all these tactical things, right? Of hunt down the market, get the team right. I think those are the two most important things. You get market and team right. You buy yourself time to figure everything else out. And then of course, attracting capital, right? I mean, you have to keep money in the bank to sustain operations. And I actually know people, right?

41:00They have interesting problems to thinking of, good solutions, even solid teams, but they don't necessarily have that backability factor to attract the capital necessary to execute on their vision. So it's actually one more leg of the stool. And then from there, you know, different things can be worked out, problems can be solved. But I would focus disproportionately on all those elements I just mentioned. Get those things right. And that's half the battle. There's still another half of the battle, which is on execution and doing all the things, you know, ghosting corporation and working hard and competing in very dense marketplaces.

41:37Every industry you're in right now will have a million different companies potentially trying to do the same thing. But you have to get the foundations right if you want to be able to eventually scale.

41:47Vineet Edupuganti: I mean, at this point in time, given how fast things are moving and how much, I guess, AI has just kind of changed the way you can build or how quickly you can build, what makes a cybersecurity startup fundable to you right now, summer of 2026? It can't just be the idea. it's going to be the team as well. But what makes a team, a first time team that doesn't have a success under their belt, what makes them fundable? It's a good question. And I think also, if you look at like the distribution, I don't have the hard stats, but a lot of founders backed by tier one VC firms are first time founders, right?

42:25So it's absolutely not something that's, you know, impossible or even uncommon, right? I think it's very common. Now, of course, like the more at bats you've had, the more learnings you've had, obviously you can bring those experiences and that battle-hardened insight into your next journey. So those folks, if the first couple of company journeys they were a part of were successful, can have a good advantage there. But I think on the first-time founders, it's basically, is their strong founder market fit? Is the credibility there based on their past experiences? Have they worked at top companies?

42:57Have they seen scale? Have they been in a startup? What is their pedigree and network and things like that. It's really just like asking the question of all these things. Can this person attract the customers? Can they define the right market and product strategy? Can they eventually build out an executive team as well as get the first ICs who are really strong? And then do they have the agility, the drive, all these things to scale because every three to six months, your job is going to look different, right? So I think those are the elements that are probably the most important. And actually on those dimensions, again, many first-time founders are very adequate and even superior on those aspects.

43:34But I think like also being able to tell that story to investors is absolutely paramount.

43:40Vineet Edupuganti: Vinit, thank you so much. This has been great. I appreciate the time and perspective. Thanks for having me. The fund build scale theme was written by Michael Tritter and performed by Michael and Carlos Chárez. Michael also composed Ocean, the track he heard at the top. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe and leave a rating. It helps more people find the show. You can get the Fund Build Scale newsletter on Beehive, follow along on Instagram, and if you have a guest suggestion or a question, reach me at fundbuildscale at gmail.com. Thanks for listening. Fund Build Scale is a production of Truth and Soul Media, LLC.