How Kevin Mandia Built the Most Trusted Name in Cybersecurity

22:59But I do think times are different and I've got to grow with them and learn. You know, there's a different expectation amongst AI native engineers and what they get when they show up at work than five years ago when you were hiring engineers. So I have a lot to learn. I do not believe there's a cookie cutter approach to companies other than perseverance and constant adjustment, ability to change. There's certain traits that will always apply, but if you think you can just show up and do this, you know, hey, you know, I started one company, I'm ready for the second one. Oh, you gotta clear the, you know, erase the whole whiteboard and start over.

23:35How much have you raised? Over, right around 200 million. 200 million.

23:39Joubin Mirzadegan:And like just getting past go. Yeah, exactly. Think about that. My day, and so, and I didn't - And you bootstrapped the last one. Yeah, you got it. And so those are the differences. Definitely adjusted to the times. Well, that remains to be seen. Like, that's the neat thing about all companies, by the way. You got to love this. And I do love it. You don't know whether you've done the right thing or wrong thing till you've already done it. You know what I mean? Until you're looking in the mirror going, hey, man, we've won. Like, I've never felt, and I actually believe when I've looked at great founders that have won by my definition of, hey, they met their objectives, they never felt they had won.

24:16They just kept going. And every day they showed up going, I got to get better. We got to do better. We're not very good. I've had this conversation with founders and it's the ones that are like, oh, hey, you know, this thing's got legs of its own. We're good. Those are the ones that I actually worry about to some extent. And so we've raised a good amount. We want to and I think you need that in today's day and age, even just for the unfortunate optic of it. You know, yes, we got a decent valuation. But at this point, do I believe 200 million is enough to run the distance? I actually think it could be, you know, I don't think you need hundreds of engineers anymore to build a product that can bring someone to IPO, you know, so I think there's a lot of folks still learning, but it's different times.

25:02And I, and every day I wake up going, here's the good thing that'll never change. What do we do today to get customers? What do we do today to make money is actually the question I ask myself. And I usually write down three things. And then that usually means call these three CISOs and tell them about us. You know, you do that every day over time. If your product's better, you'll win.

25:27Joubin Mirzadegan:What are the unique problems that you didn't expect raising all this money now? And I'm curious, maybe it's the capital deployment problem. Like, do you have to fit, like, how do you, like, to your point of like, do you go on the side of an F1 car? How do you spend the money thoughtfully and productively? So a couple of challenges will be, I think what you will find, and we've already done it. So we're over 60 employees and a few of them, they're down the road. Like in other words, do you really need a sales engineer when you're about to release product? Maybe. You hire things ahead of the power curve, but that's the nature of today where you kind of jam in.

26:07We need to do rapid growth. So you're doing things now for six months down the road. At a profitable company, you're doing things now for now. You know, that's a big difference. Like we have go-to-market professionals on board before we've had product release, you know, minimum viable product. That is something that you try to contain that window to a short duration when you're running a profitable company. But with funding, you're like, hey, let's bring them in now, have them get, you know, the material ready, how they're going to train the team, the discipline, the funnel, the definitions of the funnel, the velocity expected, the conversion rates, blah, blah, blah.

26:44You're doing all this stuff ahead of time. And, um, you know, the bottom line is, and you just track your pennies less, you know, you really do. Um, which is kind of nice. I used to sweat it, you know, weekly. I used to look at what do we spend and where are we at and how do we collect when you raise this much and you're early on, like right now I can tell you, we're just in team building. That's what we're at. Like, we got to get the AI native engineers on board. We're doing good there. Let's get the Fortune 500 pen testing team on board. We've done that. You know, let's get our federal team started.

27:19We've done that. But if we were running profitable, it just, it would have made this take four times longer. You know, we would have thought about it and made some money first, drove some customers first. So anyway, it's a lot easier right now, but at some point, the pressure hits. You know, we release our product, then we're off to the races to prove to ourselves. Because I can tell you that the only metric that really matters, it's funny, I've always believed this, anybody can be interested in your product. Getting a deal done, that extra, that's the 90 yards of the drive, right? You know, it's, you know, we got to prove that we can get deals done.

27:56Joubin Mirzadegan:Kevin, one interesting thing I find too about Armored is just the composition of the team. I mean, you have security research and engineering, then you have AI talent, then you have kind of core engineering and then maybe the classic, you know, go to market folks, like how does that all work together? Because that's a little bit like a new muscle for a lot of our AI companies that we're seeing. Yeah. I think the thing that I'm seeing right now is the development, Josh, is happening at a speed we've never seen before. You know, you have like Claude developing overnight for you and our guys coming in and checking it and upgrading it and doing over a hundred commits a day.

28:28When you have that, it's always been, for me at least, what's always been hard is you have a strategic vision. here's what we will do as a company. And you have to translate that to daily engineering. And then your go to market has to be aligned with the daily engineering. What do we have for the first time in my career? Engineering is ahead of marketing. Normally, marketing go way out and be like, oh, we're done. And we're not done ever. You know, we never got there. You know, 15 years later. Right now, I'm worried about how do we take that old construct of go to market and keep it up to date with where we're really at.

29:01And I think what will happen is you end up having used to be once a quarter, you'd bring in the engineers and a demo, a bunch of stuff for the, the, uh, go to market team or the sales professionals and the sales professionals tweak some things and move out. And you had, you know, PMs that were driving, here's where we're at. I think it's now like every Friday, we got to do the demo. And every Friday, we got to look at the sales force. You get that, right? This is where we're at. This is what we've got now. And it's just going to be a much more rapid cycle, uh, in engineering that you've got to be ready to bring to market.

29:35Interesting.

29:36Joubin Mirzadegan:How have you responded to this like new generation of talent? Like, uh, going to Josh's question about like these, you know, like the, the it's different. And by the way, like, I think I can safely say the market has gone insane. Like, uh, maybe it has changed and evolved and people are making more money than they used to. But it is insane right now. Like it is not sustainable. Um, and so, you know, like expectations are different, but on the other hand, like if you are a 21 year old, who's extremely sharp and very fluent with, let's just say Claude, right. You're pretty darn lethal relative to what you used to be 10, 15 years ago.

30:19Joubin Mirzadegan:And so there's like these very quickly changing dynamics that I'm sure you're observing and being like, whoa, this is not how I used to do it. I'm just curious how that's been. So I've always relied on leaders to build the culture for what they've got. Like the company culture at any company I run is you got to do what you say you're going to do. And that's about it. And then you come down a rung, sales is going to have a whole cadre of sales professionals with to some extent its own culture. This is how they want to lead. This is the talent they want to attract. That's the imprint they want to have.

30:51There is no question. I'm relying on, you know, Travis Lanham, you know, my co-founder, David Slater, and those folks, they're setting the engineering culture. They're the ones getting the talent. And you want to shield that. It's a special thing. Keep going, grab the talent. You're winning. You're getting the team that we need. and you support that. And so we have engineers recruiting engineers. We have the sales person saying, here's how I'm going to run sales and it's going to be this way. It all bubbles up to the accountability of, hey, you got to do what you say you're going to do when you're leading these functions, you know, and that's it.

31:30But I've never been one, you know, people call it, let the engineers go raise their pirate flag, slide pizzas under the door and get stuff done. I do believe in the leaders developing their own subculture to their discipline. And that has worked for me in the past. And, you know, that's a great way to get scale as well. If you have a founder that leads every function, that's ridiculous. That's interesting.

31:57Joubin Mirzadegan:And then I guess is the byproduct of that that you then, in order for that to work, have to hire the leaders first? Yes. Because they have to imprint the culture before they hire somebody. I think so. For me, I can tell you this. I'm not the most salesy sales culture guy. I do need an intermediary to run sales. It's just not in my nature. It's just the way I am. I am a consultant's consultant. I've always been a white glove, customer facing. Our customer's problem is my problem. Some people will say I'm not a product guy. You know, I think I am, but I haven't proven it to people. But I've also recognized I'm not an engineer's engineer.

32:36I'm not coding every day. I haven't lived that life. So I still believe in you got to give latitude to those disciplines. I never came up through the ranks of marketing. So I want our marketing professional to do that. But all I can do, and I think this is true of all CEOs, especially when you get to scale, is because I've done it. I've run a company where it was one person, me. Then I've run it when it was 50 people, 200, 500, and all the way up to 4 ,000. Right around 500 is when I found, oh, you don't walk the halls and manage a company anymore. You only talk to like eight people every day, and they are your mechanism to drive the company forward.

33:14And once you realize that, it's those eight people that are really setting the culture and the people that they bring in underneath them setting the culture. It still reflects the founder. It just does. There's some things that will permeate the whole org. But what I've learned is over time, the CEO is not an expert at everything. The CEO is not a CFO, not a CMO, not a CRO, not the head of engineering. Over time, all you do to manage people is make sure you have an alignment and they do what they say they're going to do. To me, a leader that doesn't follow through with what they say, for example, for sales, it's very simple.

33:53Here's our closest to the pin for this quarter, and here's what I think we're going to do. That's kind of one of the things you judge them on. You also want to make sure they get their compensation right. They run variable comp. You don't want anyone complaining about pay. So you have these things where you're like, you just tell them up front, listen, get pay right. I don't want anyone complaining. And make sure, you know, you call it right. Because these are the things that matter to me. And you hold them to that. And they set the culture that they need and the training and the discipline that they need to meet those objectives.

34:23And it's very rare I'll bungee in and say, hey, we got to change some things in the way you're doing stuff. No, because then you change the leader. That's the way I look at it. Like if you're telling someone, the minute you're constantly telling somebody how to lead their people, I think that's what you learn as you get through your career. Like when I was younger and an earlier founder, I did manage a lot of people. As you get to scale, you're not really managing a lot of people. What you're really doing is holding people accountable. They're managing people, you know, and that's just how I, you know, I'm going to carry that here where you don't need the leader for everything right away.

35:01though, because then you'll build like, we'd have 30 attorneys. If I hired legal counsel right now, I have to come to you, you know, that if I hire a CFO right now, next, you know, it's like, we have 19 tax experts. Wait, what? So you got to be careful. But when it comes to the things like sales, marketing, engineering, those leaders you need pretty early.

35:21Joubin Mirzadegan:What about the things that you feel like you're extremely competent at? So like, let's just say like your services business. Still hire people better than you to do it. And you don't get involved. You get involved. You watch it. You don't get officious about it. But absolutely, your goal is to hire, like, the sales professional that's better than you at running sales. The engineer that's better than you at running engineering. The consulting lead that's better than you at running consulting. That's how I did. I mean, I hate to say it. That's what I did at Mandiant. I looked around the table and everybody there was actually better at what they did than I was, you know.

35:53Maybe the only thing I had was a constant state of urgency, you know, and that was it. but they could run their businesses, you know? And I think that's the same thing we'll do at Armaday. And if you don't have the right leader for these disciplines, you're not gonna scale well and you'll have to change them out.

36:10Joubin Mirzadegan:Out of curiosity, and this is for any founder trying to hire an executive in a space they don't know well, or maybe find a co-founder. I mean, how did you find Travis and David and realize that they are as exceptional as I believe they are? Well, you still learn, you know, But I've watched these two and I'm still impressed with what they do. They do things from like, how did they even know how to do this? Like, okay, they're ahead of me. You watch the energy and you just, first thing is this, it's like the honeymoon phase, you observe. You need a body of work to observe to know, hey, where's this going and how's it doing?

36:46And then even I had to go, oh, this is going to be different for me. And I got to watch this, but it's working. Like I look at the talent and the way I judge the talent is I go straight to our red teamers that have been doing red teaming for 15 years. How do you like what we got so far? And they're like, oh, we're shocked at where we're at. This is pretty good. You know, if that was different, then maybe I'd have to start looking at it. So we've had it easy so far. Everything's working. We'll have tough times. And you got to prep for tough times. And I'll give you, you know, something that I did years ago and I discredited it while I didn't realize how important it was at the time.

37:19is every time I did, and I didn't even like them, by the way, when I was at Mandate, I hated offsites. I was like, we don't have time for offsites. The reality is when you do an offsite and you have your executives in the room, I always did something that would surprise them a little bit. And seasoned executives have no problem with this, which is like, tell us what your mother did or your father did and how they influenced you. Just a quick question like that. Or you'll say, I want you to give us a five-minute presentation on the highlights of your career or a 10-minute presentation on the lowlights.

37:52You ask things just to make sure they can talk openly and unfiltered, period, because if they can't handle those questions, they're gonna really struggle being an executive. I actually believe that, meaning you're not gonna be able to handle it when you have difficulty at work. Like, this isn't working and we have to talk about it. What I've observed in my own career, Some people call it thick skin. I don't even know if I call it that. Dead reckoning increases alignment, increases velocity, and it's good business. People need to do it. And I think people in their 20s and 30s sometimes have to learn that.

38:31I was lucky enough at FireEye when I was the CEO of FireEye that the whole team was already there. When I really looked around and said, hey, let's do this drill. it was remarkable when people briefed the highlights of their career. It was remarkable when people briefed the lowlights of their life and it created a mutual respect between people that allowed you to say whatever you needed to say at the moment. You never felt hesitant to just speak your mind and say, hey, this isn't working. We got to do better. So at Armadid, I'm trying to do the same thing. Guys, to be great leaders, we're going to have to have difficult conversations.

39:08You gotta get mutual respect. Because what I've found is if there isn't respect, that's when things start to go a little bit bad. You know, when people go, oh, that person can't do the job right, and I have a problem with that. And the longer you keep that person around, the more I don't respect you for keeping them around. So we've gotta create that. Now back to the original thing, like I'm observing the founders of Armadid. This is their first go. And they're creating just an incredible camaraderie, a great energy. They did things where I remember thinking, wow, you take a bunch of guys from Google, they're just going to spend a ton of money.

39:45What they actually did was they started just throwing everybody in these, we call them bunkhouses, and they were bringing everybody in and they were being so successful. I'm like, there's nothing to correct here. You know, they are founders. They are building this company. And my job is to make sure what they build can get to the customer as smoothly as possible. And that's my role at this company. So I know it. It's a little different in Mandiant where I was the sole founder. This is Mandiant. We're going to respond to breaches. We're going to do this. Here, I'm more learning and observing. This is how they want to do business.

40:19And it's working. It wouldn't be where I went because I didn't even know some of the ways to attract the talent they're attracting. I got to be the carpet they walk on to get into the accounts. And that's kind of my role at this. But we're about to start having metrics. And that's when you start having those difficult conversations of, hey, what do we got to do to get this done then? Or how do we get more blood from the stone and get things done? But for now, it was honeymoon phase. I think team did incredible. I've been absolutely impressed with my co-founders and how they lead. I don't know where they learned it.

40:58It's just like magic.

40:59Joubin Mirzadegan:How did you decide on like you having been in the industry for as long as you had, like probably could have had your pick of the litter of working with anybody basically. And you definitely could have picked multi-time entrepreneurs. You could have picked the seasoned co-founders. Like, why did you make the decision that you did? I'm sure you had a lot of options. Well, when Travis, when I met Travis and he pitched on what he wanted to do, I very quickly learned this is a, he's different. Um, I've, I've seen him do things. I don't, I'm like, like, for example, I'm like, ah, we need a financial plan that's loose and maybe we should be thinking this way about it.

41:37And I kind of just spitballed it out loud. And the next day he's got it in a spreadsheet, you know, he's like, here's the financial plan. I'm like, actually, that's pretty good. It's as good as what a, you know, a finance guy would do. and he's tracking costs and he's getting people pumped up and he's all in a hundred percent. I think I picked it because I've seen so many founders, you know, it's, uh, for a long time, if you're in cybersecurity and you're a founder, I got to meet you. I got to see what you were doing. And with Ballistic Ventures, we're getting pitched all the time. When I met Travis and then Evan Pena, who I've known for like 12 years, who's the head of the red team and David Slater, who came from Google, they stuck out.

42:18All of them stuck out. I just went, hey, and then they exceeded my expectations after we started. So right now I'm happy. It's almost like getting recruited in the latter stages of your career, like you're Tom Brady, you're 45, and hey man, go to Tampa Bay where we have the best defense and let's go win. I feel like this team's incredible. And I feel lucky that they found me and I found them. Um, I cannot do what they do. I don't think me, like, I can't attract a 21 year old. Like we, we had one guy, I can't believe I'll say this on your podcast. We had a sophomore drop out of, um, uh, where was it?

43:00It was in Georgia. Um, somehow Georgia tech sophomore dropped out to start our company. And I'm like, I can't make that happen. 19 years old, he's like, I'm going to learn more joining Armiden than staying in school studying this. I agree with him, by the way, that I guess I'm on the hook if I need to talk to his parents about why he dropped out. But I can't make that happen. Travis can, our team can. Like, come join us and you'll learn faster. You'll have more mission impact. And that says a lot. Or hiring a kid that just graduated MIT that was working at one of the major cloud providers just joined us last week.

43:35I'm looking at that talent and just go, man, that's awesome. So I'm the benefactor of, of, uh, of this, this founding team.

43:44Joubin Mirzadegan:I want to make sure I get this right because there's a lot of things that happened along the way here. So kind of like help fill in the dots on connect the dots for us. So you're, you solo founded Mandiant, right? Bootstrapped it. Yeah. Raised money. Yeah. Went for about 15 ish years? 17, 18. 17, 18. Sold it twice. Sold it. So then after 17, 18 years, first sold it to FireEye. Right. By the way, I was just on that. FireEye was about 10 years in. 10 years in. I just interviewed the Qualtrics founder. Kind of like a similar story in some way. So 10 years in, you sell it to FireEye. And at this point, then you go to FireEye.

44:24Joubin Mirzadegan:Right. How big was the company when you had sold it to FireEye? About, you know, 106 million in revenues, maybe 160 million in sales that year. And you sell it for about a billion? Loosely. It depends on your metric. We sold it for 90 % stock. So, you know. 90 % stock? Yeah. 10 % cash. Would you have preferred it to be 90 % cash? No, at the time, you know, Dave DeWalt was CEO of FireEye. And I can tell you when he called me and said, hey, we're going to do this deal, Man, it pumped me up. And to his credit, somebody once asked how many times was Mandiant almost bought? And I think I counted 14 letters of intent to buy us.

45:05And by the way, I don't think we had a banker for any of them. You know, DeWalt called me up and said, we're going to do this deal. And he was on my board and he was running FireEye. And I'll never forget. He was on the Mandiant board. Yes. He called me up and said, sometime in October of 2013, he said, we're going to do a deal. It'll be about a billion dollars. You'll join FireEye. We'll do this and this. And when he called me, I'll never forget, it was the only offer for Mandiant that pumped me up. I went, man, all right, I'll join this guy. And so we had a good run for about a year or so. And then it turned out the FireEye products were kind of like a second layer behind a pre-existing firewall, you know, pre-existing platform.

45:47So there was some pressure on the core products pretty quickly, but that's how I sold is I just got pumped, you know, so you do a stock deal when you're pumped, you do a cash deal, I guess, when that's what's offered to you. But I believed in the FireEye story at the time and I believed in the leader and I was pretty excited about it. And how long were you the COO of FireEye? About two years. It was loosely that, You know, for the most part, you know, I was like a sales resource to some extent, an evangelist for the company. But about two years at FireEye, a little bit more, two years and three months, and then I became the CEO.

46:22Joubin Mirzadegan:Okay. And then how long were you the CEO before you then spun it out? About seven years. And in the meantime, you were like selling off pieces of the business? We sold. It took a long, you know, in hindsight, this is where I'd tell you I'm a cybersecurity guy first and maybe, you know, the caricature of CEO second. It was obvious right away we had co-joined twins. You know, we had a core product going like this, and we had some products going like this. And what we had is just a portfolio that needed very strong management. We had to slow down the decline of our core products. We're a public company.

46:55And what's sad is what was hard to manage, I should say, the kabuki dance of slowing your decline while investing in your future. Very complex to do in a public market. And you had to do both, and they both mattered at an equitable priority. So we had to buy companies. We took a lot of chances. But about six and a half years after I became CEO, we sold off FireEye products with some Mandiant stuff to Symphony Technology Group. And -

47:25Joubin Mirzadegan:For like a little over a billion dollars. Yeah, it was 1.2 billion. And it was a good package. But what I learned was, oh, you couldn't sell it till you cut the cost, till you shaped it and made it profitable. I kept going to people saying, this is what it could be. And everybody went, well, then make it that. So I'd never go, oh God, you know, we had to do the cost cuts on our own, which is never fun. And something that's a hard lesson to learn to do. So then, then seven years at the helm. Well, yeah, we sell, once we sold FireEye products, in a way, the remaining asset was liberated to transact because it was highly valuable.

48:05It was a public company, but it was not a public company for a full quarter ever. And we had most of Q4 of 2021, maybe. And in the middle of Q1 of 2022, the Google deals announced. So we never had a full quarter. Oh, dang.

48:26Joubin Mirzadegan:5.7 billion? 5.4 billion. Cash or? Yeah, it was cash. There's probably some deferments for me, but it was all, it was really, you know, it was just simple. Let's get this deal done. Yeah. Yep. to Google's credit, tremendous. That's badass. And how big was the team at that point? The Mandiant leftover team was maybe about 2 ,800 people. And how long did you last at Google? You know, that's funny you phrase it. How long did you last? There's an underlying tone. Yeah. But I mean, I went into Google like a lion. I went in going, man, Google really can. There's a fit there, right? Google wants to get into enterprise security.

49:05Man is pretty good at advising at the highest levels. So I went in two last. And I do believe this, by the way, when you're CEO and a deal happens, I always believe you got to stay as long as it takes to make the integration work. And my gut is that's two years. And at FireEye, I did buy seven or eight companies. And I remember I've had this conversation with companies I bought. Hey, you owe me two years. that's built into the price. So I had an easy time at Google. I enjoyed it, but I was never quite a fit. You know, part of it is just, you're right, you're a founder. You're used to operating a certain way and suddenly, you know, there's just a whole cast of characters around and it's a little bit different.

49:50But I was there for at least three years, I would say. Yeah, it was about three years.

49:58Joubin Mirzadegan:can you um give a brief point of view on like there's a lot of stuff happening inside of our government today like how we are doing offensive security sure maybe a different version of offensive security than how you think about it but like i'm just curious like what do you think of all this like this is some pretty insane stuff that's happening in the world and i just want your point of view like non-political but just like your point of view as a practitioner on what's going on. Yeah, I think as a practitioner, I've always felt, and again, I was in the military back in the, well, way back in the 90s, but you think about it all the time.

50:32There is no doubt that the cyber domain is an active part of any conflict. Even during times of peace, there's an escalating hum in the cyber domain and nobody really knows where a line is, you know, or demarcation line is to acceptable and unacceptable cyber activity. But I do believe in the future, you're going to have autonomous air, land, sea, and cyber weapons. You're going to have whatever side has the software that can think the fastest, learn the fastest, and is secure is going to win the battle. And that's a strong cyber component to it. So I just think of modern warfare all the time.

51:09I think I've always done it as a kid. I've had the privilege of lecturing at different schools on modern war, and I've lived in the cyber domain and seen what nations bring to bear in the cyber domain. And we only probably see 80 % under their capability because we're at times of peace for the most part. You just know that in the future, when you have autonomous swarms of drones, autonomous boats, space, this conflict will be fought with software and it's going to be, the cyber component's going to matter. And Armiden, we, you know, we want to make sure that organizations, you know, when you look at the United States and you look at capitalism, you know, the risk profile of every company is, unless you regulate it, is picked by the company.

51:59You're going to have AI on offense for probably well over 98 % of the attacks, maybe even 100 % of the attacks in the future. You are going to have to make the shift change. If you're a bank, if you're retail, if you're manufacturer to withstand these attacks, just to run your business. And so we're going to live through the, and one of the reasons I'm really excited to be at a startup is how do you sit on the sidelines of a shift change like AI coming? I mean, that's crazy. Don't you want to get in the ring and like freaking live through this change? You bet. And, uh, so I look at what's going on in the world today is just a logical, uh, progression of technology being applied.

52:41Unfortunately, in many ways, when technology emerges just throughout history, it's the bad

52:46Joubin Mirzadegan:guys use it. Bad guys use it and nations use it for war and differentiation. And that's no different with AI. To the extent that you can talk about it or maybe whichever ones are public, what's the worst breach you've ever seen? You know, there's so many. And in the sense that they're all bad when you're the person going through them. But the worst one, the worst one. You've lived through one? Yeah. You got breached? Yeah. With the SolarWinds in 2020, I was a victim. And I remember repeating in my head the very things I had said to those who went through breaches. There's been a lot of impactful breaches with great leadership.

53:21And I actually learned how to respond to my own breach by our customers and how well they responded to theirs. You know, just I met with some great CEOs over the years that had in their mind, it's a lonely planet when you're breached and you know it. And when you're going through it, you do think it's an existential crisis for your company. And And just, I've seen real incredible calm under duress. But yeah, I went through my own, but mine going through my own was not as bad as some of the ones where I felt for customers. I can just tell you this, whenever you're responding to a breach and the people that are suffering, like their email was stolen and posted online, I always felt the worst about those.

54:05You know, nobody deserves that privacy violated like that. you know, photos or emails. It's just horrible to see. I've always had this kind of special spot for those. Or just in a, you know, that's pretty brutal. Yeah. But I'm not gonna name names. I think it's hard to do that. There's no public stories. Not the ones I would tell. You know, those people don't want to remind you. I don't even want to know. But I've responded to a lot of breaches or even I felt the impact. Even I was like nervous. I was like, and then I would walk out. I stayed nervous. I'd be like, man, I'm just... Do some of them haunt you?

54:39Not haunt. You just, you feel for the people. Nobody deserves some of the crap they went through. Like, you know, like if you have a few drinks at a bar and then you walk out and someone punches you in the face, you don't deserve it. And that's implying they had weak cybersecurity. Most companies really care about this stuff. They are trying to be secure. Right. I think they've been sucker punched. And it's, they don't haunt me, but it is weird that you get the same physiological impact your customers get sometimes, you know, externally, I always look calm internally. A lot of times I was like, holy crap, this is a horrible situation, you know, and you can feel it.

55:17I'd be like, man, I don't, I can't eat either right now, you know? So, but there's, and then you go through it yourself. And in reality, going through my own, I, you know, I found this out. I don't gain weight under duress. I lose weight. That's a good thing. but my own breach didn't feel as bad to me, even though I hated it, as some of the ones I felt for our customers.

55:38Joubin Mirzadegan:Do you - Could have been worse. Yeah. Pay or not pay on ransomware? I've never met a CEO who wants to pay. I'll tell you - I've never. It's never - But are you like, do you ever try and talk them out of it and say just pay? No, I don't have an opinion one way or another. I do know there are circumstances where you can see that sometimes the best outcome, usually if somebody does pay, it's not because they are trying to get back online. They're being extorted and they make payments to protect their customers. We don't want medical records going out. We don't want health records leaked. We don't want our whatever data to go out because it'll hurt our customers.

56:17Or it's a hospital and we got to get up and running. And the fastest way is to get the key. I've never, ever had any CEO go, hey, let's just pay it. It's never been the default answer. Not in hundreds and hundreds of these. No CEO wants to pay. Is that a pride thing? It feels like you're getting sucker punched. I don't know if it's a pride thing. It's a realization that you are fostering the problem when you pay. I think that's it. And you don't want to support a criminal element with millions of dollars. Nobody wants to be robbed. Nobody wants to be extorted. I think it's more a, in a way, it's not pride.

56:55It's almost like we got breached. we're going to have to suffer the consequences and we're not making it easier by paying to recover. So the only payments I've really ever seen first, and by the way, I'd never try to know if they pay or not, and I'd never advise pay or don't pay, but I think I've seen situations where I might've paid, you know, it's a, I get it. When you think that by paying, you can safeguard people, I can understand that logic. But again, no CEO starts there. Never seen it.

57:30Joubin Mirzadegan:Thank you for doing this. Hey, no sweat. Thank you. Anything else? Do we have time for a quick Armaden pitch? Plug it. Armaden pitch. Well, I think Armaden's name of the new company that Travis started. Well, Armada Fleet. Yeah. It's a combination of two words. and Armada is one of the words, and Armadan was available. There's no doubt in our mind, within two years, all attacks are going to be AI-driven. And AI, what's interesting to me is most humans don't understand it. The speed at which it can operate at is incomprehensible. It has total recall of you, your networks. It's great at understanding structured languages, such as code, to find vulnerabilities.

58:17And it can communicate at speeds where if all offense goes to AI, that means defense has to be autonomous. You cannot have a human in the loop to defend against an AI-born threat. So we believe there's asymmetry as well. One person on offense can create work for millions of defenders. That asymmetry has to be leveraged. Let's create at Armadon the ultimate offensive weapon in cyberspace, the ultimate platform to assess your security, because then we can train your defenses to withstand the most effective attacks, the emerging attacks. So I believe in five years or less, that will be standard. In an AI world, an AI-driven, AI-led world, cybersecurity will have Armaddon on offense, training the defense so that it can withstand the bespoke attacks and the speed of AI-driven attacks.

59:17That'll be the most effective and cheapest way to actually get cybersecurity done. So Arminen's needed. It's absolutely a necessity. And the good news, that is an optimistic message. In the age of AI, finally, we have the tools to scale all the attacks so that we can all understand what they are before they even happen. So Armiden has to build a nation state grade capability on offense to train the defense. And there was never a technology that allowed anyone to be aware of all the attacks that were possible. What is the art of possible on offense? Didn't exist. I think we can get there. We may miss things from time to time and we will, but it's a hell of a lot better defense than what we have today, which is we have no idea how we're insecure.

1:00:05We don't have enough red teaming capacity to learn where our holes are. And we have a defense that doesn't communicate at speed to orchestrate autonomous defense. We can drive that with Armaddon. So that's the optimistic message. We will, with Armaddon, be the seal of approval to give you a confidence that you can defend against the most modern attacks.

1:00:30Joubin Mirzadegan:Are you hiring? Absolutely. What are you hiring for? Everything? No, I think the ungated hires, we want the AI talent. And we want people that just love the mission of, you know, that they are vulnerability researchers. Folks that want to know, how would I exploit Android? How would I exploit iOS? How would I think about finding holes in things? We think we can automate that and we think it's critical to do so. But we love AI native engineers. We love the energy of folks who believe in the mission that the only way to create a great defense is testing it repeatedly with the best offense. till you're winning.

1:01:08You know, and I've always said, if you're the best defense, wouldn't it be great if your practice squad over there had Tom Brady at quarterback coming at you? I mean, you're gonna get pretty damn good. And that's what we wanna be. Sorry, Tom Brady, it's probably a violation of... We wanna be the Tom Brady of office. Scratch that one, but you get it. That's what Armidin wants to be.

1:01:30Joubin Mirzadegan:When you hear the word grit, last question, what do you think of? Perseverance. You know, it's a great title for this podcast. When you talk to founders, every founder will tell you grit or perseverance is what creates success. It is not easy every day. If you think you get up every day and there's no kick to the face, you're going to get surprised all the time and you can never get down about it. You like the best entrepreneurs are always onwards, always going forward. Nothing stops the pursuit of excellence and grit's what it takes. Thanks, guys. Really fun. Thank you. That's it for now. If you liked the episode, please leave us a review or go back into the archives where we've done more than 200 episodes with some fantastic folks.

1:02:17Joubin Mirzadegan:This podcast is a Kleiner Perkins production and I'm Juven. Thanks for listening.