The AI Era of Cybercrime: How Malwarebytes Is Evolving Its Security Stack | Marcin Kleczynski

7:46Joubin Mirzadegan:18 years. Literally half my life now. I just did the math. That's insane. And so you were, whatever, 18 years old? When we officially launched the first product back at the University of Illinois.

7:58Marcin Kleczynski:And how old were you when you first started hacking away at this? Can you tell the story? Yeah. So I was like 14 and screwed up my family's computer. You know, that white Dell box everybody had with the CRT and, you know, anyway, degauze it and all that. And this is back in the day of like LimeWire and Kazaa and all the illegal stuff you were doing probably, downloading pirated video games, music, whatever.

8:22Joubin Mirzadegan:Yeah, I had a full library of downloaded videos.

8:24Marcin Kleczynski:Yeah, it turns out if a video is called an EXC executable, it's not really a video. And so I didn't know that at the time as a kid. And like, you know, it's actually funny, like a purple gorilla started jumping around my screen trying to sell me advertising called Bonsai Buddy. It turned out to be spyware like many years later. But I didn't know what to do. So I turned to like this group of volunteers on the Internet helping people for free. I mean, if... Like a Reddit thread? Yeah, it was a forum at the time, spywareinfo.com. It's long since defunct, but... Why don't you buy it? I mean, there was very little use for that at the time.

8:59Marcin Kleczynski:And then it just went belly up. I guess, you know, not enough donations and such. But a woman from Belgium came to my rescue. She works for us today. Come on. In 2004, she sent me a long list of things to do to fix my computer. And it's like, you're going through it. And, you know, I got a reboot worm. So this thing keeps rebooting the computer. Like, I just, I went, there's got to be a better way. and 14-year-old me and this guy on the message board, 30-some years old, are building an antivirus. Can you imagine telling your mom you're working with a 30-year-old dude on the internet? Can you imagine him telling his wife he's working with a child?

9:34Joubin Mirzadegan:But did he know how old you were?

9:36Marcin Kleczynski:It must have come up. We ultimately met when I was 18, 19, and we had launched. We had already made a million dollars before we shook hands in person. You never met?

9:44Joubin Mirzadegan:Never met, yeah. So you made a million dollars at 18 years old?

9:49Marcin Kleczynski:Yeah, I mean, the business did, right? We were an S-corp, so we were, like, dishing all these dollars out to try to pay taxes. It wasn't real, like, business at the time, not until many years later, but it was just the weirdest experience. I mean...

10:02Joubin Mirzadegan:So when you got to college, you decided, you and the same guy? And then two more founders after that. And then two more founders after that decided that you were going to properly go for it?

10:14Marcin Kleczynski:Yeah, January 21, 2008, we launched Mauerbytes, and that was it. I mean, it was literally a perpetual license, donationware. It had a donate button at the bottom that said, pay us$25 and you could have free product forever. And we grandfathered those people in. So anybody that supported us between 2008 and 2014 and bought a lifetime perpetual license from us, we honored those licenses today. You can use the product for free.

10:38Joubin Mirzadegan:Come on. Yep. And how much does the product cost if you're not using it for free? $40 a year now.

10:43Marcin Kleczynski:That's not bad. No. to protect your, I mean, Jesus, you see what's happening all around you, right? In terms of just not even all the businesses that are getting hacked, but people. I mean, every single day, my mother gets a notification saying, Instagram has reset your password, or here's this thing from Microsoft, or the IRS is calling you. Scams and spam is all around us every single day. It's no longer viruses and sort of the stuff from the 2010s, but your identity is out there, your social security number is out there. You can go to our website and type in your email address. We'll tell you everything about you.

11:15Marcin Kleczynski:Everything. Everything. It's scary. Huh. I'll have to do that. Yeah, please. Or maybe not. Maybe not. Or maybe not, yeah. We'll show you your password. We'll show you your social security number. We'll show you your address. And we'll show you a way to basically try to get that off the internet. So you started the company.

11:29Joubin Mirzadegan:Did you drop out of school or did you stay in school?

11:31Marcin Kleczynski:No, I graduated. I did an extra lap, four and a half years or one more semester. I got a computer science degree with something like a 2.5 GPA. Yeah, it was good because... Computer science was one of the only, I guess, degrees at the time that, you know, in 2008, that you could actually watch all the class recordings online. So I tried to optimize my calendar a little bit and do that as fast as I can. I lived in a fraternity house, too. So that was even wilder.

12:00Joubin Mirzadegan:Did you start as the CEO? Yes, I did. So you were the CEO of this company at 18 years old, basically? Yeah. How long did it take you to get to your call at first 10 employees?

12:11Marcin Kleczynski:oh that year for 2008 and and we so one of the unique things about malwarebytes is we hired from that exact community it's like hey you're helping all these people for free do you want to get paid for it and so mika from belgium who helped me in 2004-5 like i said she's our director of threat research today she manages a team of people that is helping the world become a safer place like i've never met her still still no way people in the company have met her i've never met

12:39Joubin Mirzadegan:That's impossible.

12:40Marcin Kleczynski:She refuses to leave Belgium. I have not been to Belgium. No way. She's never traveled here for a -

12:45Joubin Mirzadegan:Never traveled here. You've never insisted like, hey, we have a company offsite. If you refuse to get on a plane, you refuse to get on a plane.

12:53Marcin Kleczynski:No way. Yep. I've met a lot of people in the business. I've done many video calls, phone calls. It's just a unique culture for sure. Now, don't get me wrong. That scales to a point, right? And I've long read about companies. I think Automatic, Matt was on your series here. You know, they're fully remote. Like, when I moved out here, we made that change, and I wouldn't go back. I think there's a big opportunity of being in the office, being able to whiteboard at least, you know, a substantial amount of folks. We did do get-togethers off-sites, like you mentioned, called the Summit every year. And it was like three days of getting together, doing all these, you know, team building, but also exchanging ideas and just really, really fun times.

13:38Marcin Kleczynski:That just got way too big for that.

13:40Joubin Mirzadegan:How many employees?

13:42Marcin Kleczynski:We're about 800 people. Okay. Yeah.

13:45Joubin Mirzadegan:And so when you were like 18-year-old CEO of Marcin and you were coming out to Silicon Valley to start the company and it was profitable.

13:59Marcin Kleczynski:Very, yeah.

14:00Joubin Mirzadegan:It's been profitable from the jump. Yes, absolutely. and you're, like, rolling in, like, it's a very different path. It was. It's a very different path.

14:09Marcin Kleczynski:I'm in the cornfields of the Midwest. Yeah. I don't know if you know where Urbana-Champaign is, but there's two hours of corn north, south, west, east.

14:16Joubin Mirzadegan:Yeah, and were your friends like, oh, this guy's balling? They didn't know. What do you mean they didn't know? I didn't want to advertise that. I didn't want to be treated differently. Like, you join a fraternity, you know. But you were balling, like, by college standards. By college standards, of course. Yeah, yeah.

14:31Marcin Kleczynski:Like anybody that has a salary in college is falling by college standards. So, yeah, I mean, but like, again, to put it in perspective, I lived in a beaten down fraternity house. Right. I wanted that to be my experience in the four years, the four precious years that you get to go to university. Right. So you're telling me none of your fraternity brothers had any idea. My parents barely had an idea. And why is that? I don't know. It's a great question. I've never reflected on that. And even to this day, like if somebody sees me with a Malerbytes logo, I'm just, yeah, I'm just an engineer for the business.

15:03Marcin Kleczynski:Like I, I want a genuine experience expression, right? I don't, CEOs, you know, I'm very much a servant leader. Like I care about people around me deeply. And then to me, it's building a great business for them, our shareholders, like, and our customers. I mean, that's, those are my priorities, not really flaunting what you do, what you have. Like you can still get to the same outcome and get feedback about the company or whatever, right? That's really cool.

15:29Joubin Mirzadegan:And, um, if you don't have to answer if you don't want to, but you had mentioned that, uh, part of the secondaries went to founders that maybe it was good for them to not be a part of the business. Yeah. Can you, was it the first, was it the first co-founder? Was it others?

15:48Marcin Kleczynski:No, all of the above. I mean, everybody participated in the business, including, you know, uh, investors that had been in the business for many, many years.

15:54Joubin Mirzadegan:But also like, you know, the actual question behind the question is like you met the first co-founder online. He's like double your age. Then you are already making money in the business. I'm just going to take a guess that the other two co-founders were like business people or like professionals that were going to come in and like professionalize the business. So one, yes.

16:15Marcin Kleczynski:The other was a PhD candidate at Yale. Super smart guy. He was our kernel developer. uh and and it was really weird like again this is my me being naive early on it's like okay there's three of us around the table even though i've been here the longest we've never really discussed equity how about we just divvied up this way and it was because it was it was there was no market data there was no thought i mean you know yeah here's how the pie will get split up and you know look i never have any regrets we are where we are in life and like you can always say what if and what if that but they were a big reason for my success as were all the people that have come through the door at malware bites um so you know i think it was a very unique way to structure the business but i certainly like the outcome did it become a pain in the ass i feel like having a four-person quote-unquote founding team there's a lot of opinions and me being the most junior you know none of us knew what we were doing i guess like none of us have ever started a company and with the CEO title I certainly had to take the lead in a lot of ways but you know you've got a lot of opposing opinions that you know you these are your founders you value their opinion but at some point somebody's got to make a decision and maybe that's not the popular one so that in that regard it was a pain in the ass and like you know those founders never knew necessarily you know at the end of the day buck stops with you right the CEO of the business Right.

17:45Marcin Kleczynski:So sometimes you got to make the decisions and they're tough. Right. Did you ever think about relinquishing the CEO title? I feel like if you don't think about that every day, you're kind of a bad CEO. Right. And maybe not in the beginning, but certainly today, is there somebody that can turn this business into 10 times what it is, you know, what it could be? Right. So always on the top of my mind, just because I think that's what you have to think about as a good leader. but I'm excited more than ever. We've gone through a lot of chapters, some of them extreme highs, some of them like, you know, extreme lows.

18:21Marcin Kleczynski:I'd say the last three years have been transformational for this business. Like what kind of, you know, entrepreneur sort of brings in private equity and says, this is going to be great, right? It's a tool. It's a tool that, you know, you recognize, I recognize that we have some challenges that somebody like that can solve, help us solve.

18:40Joubin Mirzadegan:Yeah. What do you think the challenges that you saw then three years ago needed to be solved?

18:46Marcin Kleczynski:Yeah, one of my biggest mistakes, I guess, as a leader of this business is not realizing that the market was fragmenting in that consumers, we serve businesses as well. And so consumers like you and I, we care about privacy, identity, basic antivirus, whatever, scams, AI, etc. Whereas businesses are, you know, are thinking very differently. They need managed services. They can't hire people fast enough. and we had one management team, one engineering leader, one product leader, one website. And even though the business was sort of half and half consumer and B2B, the strategy was no longer working.

19:20Marcin Kleczynski:And we fell behind. I mean, this is one of the reasons we actually separated the two businesses into Malwarebytes, which is consumer facing and a very strong consumer brand that never was going to make it in B2B, right? And ThreatDown, which is our B2B kind of new brand as of the last kind of year and a half ago, two years ago. and they have two distinct management teams. So product is focusing on products for consumers, products is focusing for, you know, products for businesses and everything changed overnight. I mean, the business on the consumer side became more profitable, started growing.

19:52Marcin Kleczynski:We surpassed three plus million paying subscribers. On the B2B side, you know, the go-to-market needed to change dramatically. Security sold to the channel. So it was just a different set of people needed. We needed to split these businesses apart. We had no idea what we were spending against each of the opportunities. It was just flying blind. And it was one of my, you know, sort of biggest regrets. Again, not saying I'd ever go back because we are where we are, but lesson learned to never try to do it all for everybody.

20:21Joubin Mirzadegan:Did you not know this or did you know it and you were too scared to do something about it? Probably both.

20:28Marcin Kleczynski:I think bringing private equity in was sort of the catalyst of, okay, I'm willing and ready to accept this change. But you always thought you can make it, right? Because Malwarebytes, the reason B2B even exists for Malwarebytes is people like you and I had the same problem at home, and we'd infuriate the IT and security person by running Malwarebytes at work. and that infuriated IT security person would lean in and say, huh, this looks pretty interesting. But that only scaled to a point when, you know, when the product strategy and engineering work is not aligned to making that experience good, it just was never going to work.

21:03Marcin Kleczynski:And then I'm not a go-to-market person. You might have already seen that. I'm an engineering geek kind of product leader. So finding people that are really good at that, I've found to be a black art. and finally I've unhooked a little bit of that with the two new GMs I've brought in and they're very much go-to-market centric. So very excited about that. But yeah, these are the things I wish, I always tell people that are founding companies, find somebody that's the opposite of you. So for me, I'd go back and try to find somebody that's great at sales and marketing because it doesn't matter if you build something awesome if nobody's going to use it.

21:39Joubin Mirzadegan:That all checks out to me. I definitely, definitely agree. Um, do you think that like, uh, as the kind of like self-admitted geeky product technical person is part of the, like, even if you see the market fracturing, there was almost like, you know, what it will mean for you to go and like break everything apart. Like what cultural tax that will be paid you will be viewed like you're gonna have to in some cases fire people in other cases top people you're gonna have to restructure the whole org like it's like heavy stuff yeah three

22:20Marcin Kleczynski:three years in the making and you know uh we like others went through some layoffs during the covid time i mean a lot of the bay area was affected by that we spent a lot of time figuring out who goes where with with which part of the company uh the daunting task of like launching a brand nobody knows about threat down i mean you've probably never heard of that business and it's the formerly you know formerly known as malarbytes for business um splitting the financials apart and now doing the legal separation i mean it was just and again this is the stuff that uh the private equity partners vector in our case was really helpful with because that's what they're good at they're not great at product strategy and building culture and stuff like that that's what you know they count on me for but they're very good at helping you know an entrepreneur that's really gotten to pretty serious scale and is nervous about what's next, right?

23:09Marcin Kleczynski:And I think they really bought into separating the two businesses because that's just where the market's going. Even our competitors did this. Symantec, we used to have Norton. Norton is now the consumer brand. Symantec was sold to FireEye. And then McAfee as well. I mean, McAfee, you know, sold their B2B business and is, I'm sorry, that's who went to FireEye. Symantec with the Broadcom. And then McAfee is McAfee Consumer now. That's a consumer brand. So it's pretty similar to what they're doing strategy-wise. So look, I think that's how private equity thinks. I know who I'm working with and I love those guys, but it's very black and white on a lot of topics.

23:47Marcin Kleczynski:And that's okay, as long as you're willing to learn and adapt. But yeah, it's not like the VC world, right? Where there's a lot of autonomy and there's definitely more scrutiny. And I like that accountability. I think I thrive in that kind of environment. And so that's why I think it's been smoothish sailing. And it helps when the business is growing again and more profitable and the results are up on the board, right?

24:09Joubin Mirzadegan:Like, are you just going to run it as a profitable company? Like, how does this play out?

24:13Marcin Kleczynski:Yeah, it's a great question. I've not thought that far ahead. I mean, certainly, you know, investors expect a return and that return needs to be delivered in a specific amount of time. And I think Malarbites, the consumer part of the business, is extremely desirable to a lot of the next-gen players out there. There's a lot of privacy companies, you know, that are getting bigger and bigger. And so, and it possibly has a future being public too, right? With the profile, you know, it's accelerating growth. It's nearing 200 plus million in ARR. Like, it's a great business. On the B2B side, same story.

24:46Marcin Kleczynski:Like, when, and no surprise, we've tested the market. We've been around 18 years. Of course, you test the market, right? when buyers just don't understand the two businesses smushed together, it sort of determines what you need to do, right? So I think, look, both sides of the business have a great opportunity ahead of them. I don't know what the definition of that is yet. I think it's been three years of cleaning things up and making the management team changes and getting the strategy right, the website separated, the tactical stuff and all that. And now popping our head out of the foxhole and going, boy, like there's big opportunity here.

25:18Marcin Kleczynski:What do we do with these two businesses, right? Do you just not touch the B2B side? Like, how do you how do you organize yourself? So I have two general managers. Mark joined my consumer business unit three and a half years ago now. So that was pretty early on. And I was the de facto GM of the B2B business and having to sort of do all the tough kind of cleanup work there and get the brand launched and make several, you know, leadership changes. And I just finally brought in a GM of that business a couple months ago, and she's doing great. She comes from B2B security, channel sales, and just knows exactly what to do and is able to do it.

25:55Marcin Kleczynski:So I have two GMs, I have a CFO, corp dev individual, and head of threat research as well. So that's kind of a pretty flat organization for all things

26:05Joubin Mirzadegan:considered. And what are you doing?

26:07Marcin Kleczynski:Well, I'm thinking about, you know, well, was running the B2B business. That was a bulk of my time, but thinking very strategically about how we differentiate in consumer. Because of all the challenges I outlined, Malwarebytes was falling behind from a product strategy perspective. We did basic antivirus. We had a VPN and that was about it. So why would you choose Malwarebytes if you can go to one of our competitors and get a full turnkey package? You'll pay in an arm and leg, but you'll get a lot more protection. So the last three years have been pretty obvious around, okay, we've got to go solve some of these things.

26:39Marcin Kleczynski:We need identity protection. We need personal data removal. So this is the service I told you about. You type in your email address. We'll tell you everywhere your information is listed. And we'll also remove it for you from these data broker websites. So that's immediately stopped a lot more spam voicemails for me, scam emails that you get from the Nigerian prints, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Nigerian prints, yeah. People fall for that stuff. And the reason it's so poorly written is to weed out people like you and I who will see right through it. So really the next kind of chapter for me this year is focusing on what's our product strategy going forward?

27:23Marcin Kleczynski:How do we differentiate? We've caught up. We've exceeded. Now what do we do to protect individuals against the next wave of threats here, which are plentiful. I mean, you see what's happening in AI. AI has enabled these threats to be, you know, I mean, there are AI attacks happening autonomously on businesses. So like when you ask the question around, does AI help the cybersecurity cause or hurt it? It's kind of both, right? We could do a lot with AI to automate and protect, but the criminals, the cyber criminals are using it to their advantage. they can find you know every tidbit of information about you to generate a well-crafted email that looks legitimate from a person that you trust and now you're sending money and you're wondering how the hell did that happen i mean these are real life stories we hear from consumers uh that write us and say i wired five hundred dollars i wired a thousand dollars what do i do it's like i can't really help you right at what role have you had the hardest time evaluating uh in leadership you mean?

28:24Marcin Kleczynski:Yeah, I think it's been always on the go-to-market side. It's easy for me to see through somebody that isn't competent around product strategy, engineering, processes around that. For me, it's not knowing go-to-market well. I'm not a very market-y person. I always say I can't market my way out of a paper bag if I tried. I discourage candidates in the interview process because I'm just transparent of everything that's broken and what we need to go fix. Some people like that. But that's always been the hardest for me, like marketing leadership throughout the 18 years as a CEO of this business. It's been hit or miss.

29:00And I it's just hard for me to identify,

29:04Marcin Kleczynski:you know, what is a quality individual in that regard and good fit for us and what is not. Yeah, it's not easy, is it? It's not easy. No. And what I found is like LinkedIn. You know, it tells a story. A lot of people have I found the people that have the greatest backgrounds on LinkedIn often perform the worst. Yeah. What do you think that is? Maybe they follow the job for the clout, not the, I don't know. You know, some people are part of successful companies, but they arrived well after the success took place, right?

29:39Joubin Mirzadegan:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I have a hypothesis, which is that, like, if you believe that will counts for twice as much as skill, then if this job that they're taking is not the most important job of their life and they've already made all their money or they've already like they don't have much to prove because they have all these fancy logos on their pedigree, then you're probably not getting that much will.

30:13Joubin Mirzadegan:and you know like i don't know any uh job that i've been in if it's the biggest job that i've ever been in it feels existential to me yeah i have i have to figure this out like my career rides on this it's how i feel every day you know uh and i think that's a motivating feeling 100 i agree i mean i doesn't matter how much money you give someone it doesn't matter

30:36Marcin Kleczynski:I've found the people I've taken a risk on, maybe is the right way to put it, outperform my expectations. I mean, people that were, you know, on paper, maybe not the strongest candidate or the most experienced or worked at the flashiest companies.

30:50Joubin Mirzadegan:What do you think is a good, like, as you've gone through and hired, you know, whatever, 800 plus people now, what do you like, what do you think is a good hit rate for the amount of people that like you consider getting right?

31:03Marcin Kleczynski:I'd say 50-50 would get lucky.

31:05Joubin Mirzadegan:50-50, you'd feel good.

31:07Marcin Kleczynski:Yeah, I think one thing I'm driving culturally in our business right now is as we interview people to join our business, it can't be different groups interviewing. So like one thing that has really driven me nuts is we interview for a role, but you know, and there's nine candidates in the pipeline and only this person interviewed that person, this person interviewed that person. There's no consistency. We're not getting in a room together discussing, is this the right candidate for our business? So, you know, I've made it very clear. What I'd like to see is we have a hiring committee. That is the committee.

31:38Marcin Kleczynski:Everybody interviews the same person. We split the topics. So we're not all asking the same questions and, you know, leading up to a conclusion just off of one, two questions that mattered. So that's proven to be more effective. I feel like. Cultural fit, you know, there's references. I mean, I think that's been OK. It's hard to assess cultural fit. You know, you can ask some questions around that, but we've hired people that were just huge assholes and like never would have known about it in the

32:09Joubin Mirzadegan:interview process they they interview great i know everybody says like uh you have to do references references matter so much i maybe i'm completely wrong here but in my life like i've never had a reference that i can't like that a candidate has given me not a back channel but a reference that hasn't gone well yeah like it's never happened so i always ask the question listen

32:32Marcin Kleczynski:I always say the following, which is like, listen, this person gave you as a reference. It's obviously going to be positive. I'm not trying to find out what's negative. If you tell me something that's negative, I'm like, that's bad, right? People give references to be positive references. So I always ask, look, I'm getting to know this individual. In the first 90 days, what do I need to look out for? And that's usually where the truth starts to come out. Well, they're not as organized. Okay, thanks for letting me know that for the person that needs to go into finance and be very good with spreadsheets and organized.

33:00Marcin Kleczynski:Yeah. or they're not that creative or whatever it might be. Right. So I feel like if you ask that kind of question in the first 90 days, what should I be looking out for so I can help the individual? At least some truth will come out and you may already have a decision made on the individual. At least you can help them out in the first 90 days. Yeah. Yeah.

33:17Joubin Mirzadegan:The way that I ask the question is, um, what job do you think I need to hire next to help that person be successful? and almost always they'll say a job and almost always they'll describe that job. And almost always that job is the perfect antonym to whatever that person is, right? Like they're just describing that person's weakness. I love it, I've got to try that. By describing what the person that you would need to hire next to them's job is.

33:45Marcin Kleczynski:I need to try that, yeah. I mean, it's good to know what these individuals, even if you've already made the decision to hire the individual, like knowing where you truly do need to help them, I mean, that's 90 days you're going to invest, you know, into that individual. So do you not daydream about doing something else?

34:04Joubin Mirzadegan:Like, I guess like I think you're the politically correct answer is like, yeah, no, like this is my life. Like this is it, 18 years. But don't you think that like part of you is like, OK, I could go and whatever, screw around and ski. or part of you is like, okay, like this new technology, like you're a technologist, this new technology is here. And it's very difficult for me to transform my own business with this technology because we're 18 years old. Like there's only so much you can actually fundamentally do.

34:36Marcin Kleczynski:Like, do you not find yourself wrapped up in that? Yeah. Don't get me wrong. I'm intellectually curious. And, you know, in my quote unquote spare time, you know, geek around. I mean, I, I love flying, for example, I'm a pilot, you know, do that quite a bit. Um, so like I personally, I feel fulfilled. I don't, it's not like I don't have the time to, you know, vacation or, or do, you know, have, have hobbies. I don't have kids. So like that makes, you know, a lot of free time, a lot of spare time professionally. I'd be lying if that thought hadn't come up often. Right. Especially as the years racked on, but I feel like every time that's happened, I've thought about what's next for this business?

35:16Marcin Kleczynski:And is there anything out there that would surpass my excitement around that? And the answer has been no. I mean, I looked at the state of the business three years ago when Vector invested, there was a lot to do and it's all things I've never done before. And where can I do that if not here? Right? So launching a new brand, splitting up a business, you know, the P &Ls of a business, creating a new strategy for this part of the business, it was intellectually stimulating. And, you know, three years later, we're not, we're through the sixth inning on that, right? There's still some work to be done and it's all stuff I've never done before and I'm excited to do.

35:49When that runs out, I don't know.

35:52Marcin Kleczynski:I mean, it's, you know, what's the next challenge? I always want to be challenged and it's just my, you know, yeah. I mean, I think it's professional boredom is not something I would want to go do.

36:05Joubin Mirzadegan:Yeah. And do you agree with my point that like with with AI in the in the state that it is and the way that it's progressing, re-architecting your own business? Like, I believe you'll have a good story around it, but like fundamentally, it's a different architecture. Yes. And you would have to basically replatform your entire company in a unique way. and maybe you could do it, but it's very hard and you'd have to cannibalize your own business in order to do it. Like it's just, there's only so much you can do.

36:41Marcin Kleczynski:Yeah, I think there are healthy applications of AI.

36:45Joubin Mirzadegan:I'm sure you're dealing with this daily,

36:47Marcin Kleczynski:you know, in your role as well. And like, I feel, I wouldn't call it a bubble per se, but what happens next? Well, there's so many players raising hundreds of millions of dollars, multiple billions of dollars. and is there enough demand for it, right? There are things that are changing our lives and the world, yes. There are applications of AI that are, you know, nominally better than what's out there today and cost an arm and a leg. I don't know. I mean, I'm curious your thoughts on just AI in general, but feel like, you know, there's a lot of, like the cockroaches will survive, I guess, is what I've always said.

37:24Marcin Kleczynski:But there's going to be a lot of fallout on the other side of this AI wave, I'd say.

37:28Joubin Mirzadegan:Yeah, I think you're right. My perspective is we are definitely in the moment in time we were peanut buttering this like panacea to all of world's problems. And I would say there are some things that when we say AI, like let's just kind of more crystalline it as like large language models that they're great at. And there's some things that they're not great at. And I would say in the industry, we are just assuming they're great at everything and we're solving every problem using kind of one hammer on one nail. And I think if you're not applying it well, I think that's not good.

38:11Marcin Kleczynski:Don't get me wrong. My head of engineering was pounding the table a year ago saying, you need to give me these licenses so we can have our engineers write code faster. He was the first person bought in, and I saw it with my own eyes. I asked ChatGPT to write malware a year and a half ago. It did a damn good job. Did it? Yeah. That's scary. I mean, now it won't let you do it, but it did a damn good job at the time. Did it? Yeah, you could fool it to get you what you want, right? Yeah. Like I said, these attacks will happen autonomously. I mean, they already are. People are, you know, cyber criminals are writing prompts and, you know, scan this network, deliver this, et cetera, et cetera, right?

38:47Marcin Kleczynski:So, like, these things are really happening right now.

38:49Joubin Mirzadegan:Yeah. You know, one thought that I've been having recently is like if the to your to your head of engineering's point about these these these models applied towards coding and writing software like that rate of change is absurd. Yeah. Like, I have not seen anything that is taking the leaps and bounds in the way that the coding models are. And I'm kind of like, you know, on the like bubble question. I'm like, OK, let's just assume that there is zero progress from today moving forward. And let's just assume that every application fails except for coding. Yep. today, right now, I'm like, I'm still quite convinced that's going to change the world.

39:43I agree.

39:45Marcin Kleczynski:I 100 % agree. And I've seen it with my own eyes. Just that. 100%. 100%. And I do think like, you know, not to discount AI, I've uploaded, you know, images of an x-ray to see like, will it know what it is? And it's just like perfect, right? So it's interesting what it can do for health, for engineering, you name it. There's many applications, but there's also so many companies vying for that top space and hundreds of millions of dollars going to billions of dollars going towards them. Like, what does that mean on the other side when many don't make it? Right. And so to your original question of like, you know, of course, as a cybersecurity company and one that's, you know, still relatively small compared to many players out there with a lot to go do, like AI is helping.

40:26Marcin Kleczynski:right and we're going to apply it uh within reason where where we're needed and where we want to you

40:32Joubin Mirzadegan:know grow i do think that at least for these ai native applications and infrastructure companies the thing that where where i think the music will stop is that there is basically an insatiable demand to just continue to consume this technology and that is like artificially inflating growth rates in a way that I don't think is sustainable. And then you're investing ahead of those growth rates, assuming they will persist forever. And that's what happened during COVID. There was a lot of talk about PLG and bottoms up. And there was something implicit in that that the product will sell itself. And that's true as long as there is insatiable demand.

41:23Joubin Mirzadegan:But then at some point that spigot turns off and you have to actually like distribute your product to the world. And, you know, we may be in a time, I don't know, we may be in a time like that now where, you know, I think Anthropoc grew from, I don't know, like a one to nine billion dollars or something. Phenomenal.

41:40Marcin Kleczynski:I mean, it really is.

41:41Joubin Mirzadegan:It gets absurd.

41:42Marcin Kleczynski:And those are not necessarily the companies I worry about. Right. They've got they've got good customer usage, et cetera. It's the sort of, you know, startups around the fringes. in cyber, trying to automate through AI, et cetera. I mean - You're skeptical. Yeah, I mean, prove it, right? Get to some scale before raising tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah. What do you think is some scale? Yeah, asking an entrepreneur that sort of bootstrapped this thing in the beginning without raising money, you know, B2B is a very different animal, right? Consumer is a lot easier for me, just conceptually.

42:18Marcin Kleczynski:I feel like you can create viral loops and a lot of the PLG that you had referenced so I feel like a business in the consumer space can get to five ten twenty million dollars and really prove it's you know prove it's worth on the b2b side you're asking the wrong person I mean I just I know that you know Silicon Valley was about growth at all costs for a lot of years and maybe still is so I don't know but a couple million bucks on the b2b side if if you can do it I mean that's when you put money behind something I guess it is an interesting question though because if

42:51Joubin Mirzadegan:If you're an entrepreneur and you are offered$20 million before you've reached that milestone. Oh, you take it. You take it, right? You take it. Do you take it? Of course you take it. You take it, right?

43:10Marcin Kleczynski:The alternative is you go on your own, right? Of course you take it. $20 million in the bank account helps. $20 million further from death. Exactly. Of course you take it. That's not my point. And it's like, you know, looking at, and I think investors were really hyped in the early days of AI. And I don't know, it's, you know, do you remember the SPAC stuff? Like all the early SPACs got done and then none of the later SPACs got done, right? Same thing with AI. I'm sure a lot of the early deals got done. And if you're an AI company now, sort of doing the same stuff other AI companies are doing, are you really gonna be able to raise money in this environment?

43:42Marcin Kleczynski:I don't know.

43:42Joubin Mirzadegan:Yeah, but this is the like pernicious thing about that. Cause if you pull it, if you pull that string a little longer, um okay so you get offered 20 million let's just assume that because they're leaning in they get more they get more of your company than they otherwise would because it's less mature okay let's just assume that happens and you can like get over that then uh the first thing that everybody inside of your company does is ask for a raise uh because you've now raised all this money then you uh then you have a new investor that has growth targets that they expect you to hit and so they say go higher and so now you've recalibrated your baseline of all of your employees to a certain salary so you can't really hire below that and so now you have these aggressive hiring plans that are relatively removed from your growth plans because you haven't actually figured out repeatability yet and so then you're stuck with a aggressive hiring plan when deep down somewhere inside of you, you know, you may not actually have product market fit yet that you can reliably count on.

44:46So then you hire a sales team to go like sell it.

44:48Joubin Mirzadegan:Then you hire a bunch of engineers. Now you have a bunch of new people in the company. The blind are leading the blind at this point. You start to lose a sense of what your culture actually is. Then even worse than all of this, your company feels successful because you have raised money and they are making good money. And so then they stop like losing the edge that they otherwise have. And so, so like, if I go back to the original point of, if you're an entrepreneur, do you take it? Like, like if you pull the thread all the way and you believe that all of those things are to happen, do you still take it?

45:23Marcin Kleczynski:It's amazing how much Mike Judge got right on the show of Silicon Valley because everything you just described legitimately happened in that show. And he ended up taking less money at a lower valuation, right? Because of exactly what you just said, the stakes continue to get higher and higher. And I've seen CEOs, you know, get fired because of that. Like they just can't grow into that valuation. We've been very prudent. You know, I think we didn't have to necessarily raise that first round, the series A, but back to trying to professionalize some of this business. It was, you know, four hackers trying to build something and actually bringing in an investor that had seen stuff before was really helpful in the early days.

46:00Marcin Kleczynski:So I don't know, Doing it again, I'd probably be, you know, if somebody offered me a multi-billion dollar valuation with very little revenue, I'd question the intent and authenticity of that. Yeah. I think there's market comps out there that make sense.

46:14Joubin Mirzadegan:Yeah. That is how it goes, though, isn't it?

46:16Marcin Kleczynski:AI just adds zero. That's right. Just adds zero.

46:18Joubin Mirzadegan:That's right. That's right. That's right.

46:20Marcin Kleczynski:Well, it's like, you know, if I were to try to brand new clean slate, raise money for a consumer cybersecurity company right now, I don't think I could. I think that's a commodity space that very few investors would get excited about. You think so? Yeah, I think there's a lot of companies that are out there doing it and have done it, right? And it's hard to build a brand. We're established, so it's easier to acquire customers. A lot of our business is organic because of the Malwarebytes brand. Because if you go to a Geek Squad or an Apple store, the Genius or the Geek Squad technician will recommend us.

46:49Marcin Kleczynski:Like trying to do that all from scratch in this day and age. I don't know. I, I, I always think about what's next in terms of the journey for Marson and like the next company. And how do you repeat that? Right. I don't know. Gets, gets me nervous sometimes.

47:03Joubin Mirzadegan:Yeah. I, I totally agree with that. My, um, at least in Roadrunner, the amount of star and early days, like, uh, I'm not comparing what, where Roadrunner is to, to Malwareblades, but the amount of stars that had to align. in this moment in time with these people, with this problem, doing this thing, feels so unique. It feels like such an N of one thing to happen that it's almost hard for me to believe that that could happen again.

47:34Marcin Kleczynski:I agree.

47:35Joubin Mirzadegan:Do you know what I mean? It stresses me out all the time. And knowing how hard it is, I'm sure you're like, all right, if I know how hard it is and the stars all aligned, I can't imagine the stars not aligning and how hard it would be.

47:47Marcin Kleczynski:I continue to be impressed by multi-company founders who have nailed it every single time. I mean, it's crazy to see somebody like Elon and all that, but every time it's a hit, right? Or Parker Conrad, right? I mean, what's next for me? I don't know, but hopefully it's not a zero.

48:11Joubin Mirzadegan:Yeah, I think the even more impressive thing beyond the execution is the willingness to like like, uh, how would I say it? Your like identity and ego is wrapped up in being the successful CEO of a successful company and being willing to start at nothing again, where nobody knows what you're doing and nobody cares. And you will likely be wrong and be the CEO of a failed company. Like that's a hard pill to swallow when you've reached the pinnacle of a mountain.

48:43Marcin Kleczynski:No, for sure. And, you know, my friends always ask me, they all in early days tried to start a business and, you know, and it's like three months in and they're like, I'm not getting any success. I just went three months. And I know I will forget this advice to myself. I will forget how long it took. I will be three months into another journey and going, why isn't this thing moving or, you know, or, or, or becoming more successful. But, you know, if you go back to the beginnings, it's not easy. It took four years to get a product out the door. It took four years. Yeah, from 2004, when I was first sort of helped on the internet to when we launched the first product, it was just like iterating.

49:18Marcin Kleczynski:You know, I was building locally on my machine and yeah, it took four years to just get something out the door. And a lot of it was using that same community. But yeah, it was not an overnight kind of ship something and all of a sudden money's flowing in. Four years is a long time. Yeah. Look, I mean, I was high school going to college. It wasn't really, you know, it wasn't really a serious business either. So I'm glad we sort of went the way we did and shipped something stable 2008.

49:49Joubin Mirzadegan:Has the way you've managed your life shifted knowing, like, I imagine you were like very intense all the time when you didn't think it was going to be an 18 plus year run. Yeah. And now that you've settled into your second decade of running this company, you've had to settle in, I imagine. like what does settling in mean if that's all true it stops the all-nighters i remember those

50:12Marcin Kleczynski:days and and they were not productive as much as you might think they are i remember i was working on a problem till six in the morning and finally i just called it quits went to bed for three hours woke up solved the problem in minutes it was an engineering you know coding issue like more hours awake solving the problem is not necessarily what you need you need to be able to take a step back and just like reboot a little bit right so i feel like a lot of that more recently is just reasonable hours. I mean, not a few hours, but reasonable hours, a couple hours, you know, Saturday, Sunday, not a full day, Saturday, Sunday.

50:45Marcin Kleczynski:I mean, these are kinds of things that have made me more productive and finding time to actually go to the gym. Like I love cooking because like chaos in my life, cooking is just following a recipe. Just the, the, the, the steadiness of that is like calming to me, same with flying. It's just like following a checklist and so on and so on. Very little chaos in those kinds of environments. So I saved that for work and then everything else is sort of structured for me.

51:11Joubin Mirzadegan:Yeah. That's super interesting. I do the same thing. I cook every Sunday and I basically cook the same meal every Sunday. Nice. And I don't have to think about it. When I go to the grocery store, I know exactly where those items are. I don't have to think about what items I'm getting. It's the same ones every time. I go home, put on a podcast and, you know, it's the same thing. Like, it's just the same thing. And it's like my, yeah, I did it last night. Like, it's my happy place. It's like a time of solace where I can just get kind of lost in the routine of it. Um, it's useful, isn't it?

51:44Marcin Kleczynski:Well, it's why jobs were the turtleneck, right? Isn't it just to not have to think about it every day? Just put on the cognitive load. Yeah. I mean, you know how much time we spend thinking about real problems at work. It's, I don't want to do that in life. Like, what do we want to cook tonight? Same thing as last week. That's fine.

52:00Joubin Mirzadegan:You know, it's how, how often do you, um, this is a weird question. How often do you dream about work? Huh?

52:08Marcin Kleczynski:I don't think anybody's ever asked me that. Uh, you know, I think only in the, only in the, only around the negative things, which is funny. It's more about like, you know, the tough decision that's coming up. Um, maybe call it a nightmare, not a dream. Yeah.

52:23Joubin Mirzadegan:It's more of a nightmare. I don't, I don't know.

52:25Marcin Kleczynski:Yeah. I don't really dream about happy work, which is, I guess tells you everything. Yeah. Yeah. You said the same thing, huh?

52:34Joubin Mirzadegan:Um, I would say when I am going through something that is stressful, that I am not sure, like there is no book that I can read. Yeah. There's no advice that I can seek. it's like an end of one decision that really matters to the business uh it will it will enter my subconscious and i will dream about it well and that's how the brain's working through

53:01Marcin Kleczynski:problems right and probably ended up uh the other morning with a better decision in mind or

53:07Joubin Mirzadegan:you know works through the problem yeah but it it is like uh you're right it's never the good things. It's never the good things. Yeah. I wonder if it's like my mind trying to process it. Totally. You think that's what it is? I think so. Yeah. I mean, I, you know,

53:23Marcin Kleczynski:you wake up rattled, but more with more clarity, I feel, or at least I do. So, yeah, I mean, that's my brain's way of kind of working through the tough stuff.

53:34Joubin Mirzadegan:And like you mentioned, you have no kids. So has work been your priority forever? since you were in high school?

53:44Marcin Kleczynski:Yeah, I mean... Like, it is the thing. It's like your identity, right? If you build this business from, yeah, I mean, 14 years old, I guess, is my first, you know... Somebody donated me the Malorbite's domain name, by the way. That's how the name got started. So, like, yeah, from 2004 to now 2026, that's 22 years. I'm, you know, that's more than half my life just spent excited about this opportunity. And look, there's, you know, there's troughs and peaks of that excitement, But yeah, I love what I do. It's helping people. It's hard to get, it's hard to complain about a mission statement that strong, right?

54:19Marcin Kleczynski:It's helping people stay safe online. I've seen enough emails from customers where we've literally saved their ass. That's just like, that keeps you going too, right?

54:29Joubin Mirzadegan:Yeah. Yeah. Has anybody been able to stick with you for this long?

54:35Marcin Kleczynski:Uh, there are at least 25 to 30 people in the business that have been around for 14 years, 13 years. Damn. And we celebrate every anniversary.

54:49Joubin Mirzadegan:Anniversary of what? Every year.

54:50Marcin Kleczynski:Every year, everybody.

54:51Joubin Mirzadegan:But what is the anniversary date? Uh, from the day they started with the business. Oh, they started. Yeah.

54:56Marcin Kleczynski:So we've got pictures of them and like, there's so many, and we do monthly all hands. There's always a picture of somebody 13, 14, 15 years on the job. Yeah.

55:04Joubin Mirzadegan:That's insane. Oh, so you celebrate every employee's anniversary. Correct. Every month, yeah. Every month on an annual anniversary. Exactly, exactly. And you put a picture of them or something? Why do you do that?

55:15Marcin Kleczynski:Cultural. But why? I want to recognize those people, especially. Because they deserve it. They work their ass off. And at some point, money is money. I mean, of course, if I could pay everybody an extra zero on their pay stub, I absolutely would. I can't, right? We've got to remain disciplined. So it's the little things that go above and beyond. I mean, wherever we can. One thing I've made it very, I've made clear to, you know, to, I have made it a point that I'm always reachable, especially with people that have been here a long time because they know best of what's going on in this business.

55:49Marcin Kleczynski:You know, you can't just sit there in armchair, you know, run the business. You've got to get feedback from these individuals. So like, to me, it's just all part of the culture. We started it 15 years ago and we haven't stopped. how often do people reach out oh quite a bit i mean we've got slack i'm very open um you know sometimes the old timers which i am one you know you see at an event annually and it's like we've we've been working together this entire time and you know so it's great to to see these faces and like a lot of these people are not nine to five type people right when we started this business

56:25Joubin Mirzadegan:from 2004 to let's say first couple of years,

56:29Marcin Kleczynski:these people we picked off these message boards who, like I said, I've hardly met a few. They're not nine to five people. I don't think they would thrive in that kind of environment either. So you've got to manage them accordingly. Like you've got subject matter experts that are best at what they do in threat research, engineering. They work from home, they work on their schedule, but their output is amazing. And you've just got to respect that. Yeah, it's a different breed. It's a different breed. And that's what makes it fun is like you've got to manage these people who are more like you, like me, and these professionals who have had careers and will have future careers.

57:03Marcin Kleczynski:It's a dichotomy for sure.

57:05Joubin Mirzadegan:Would you describe it as fun? Yeah.

57:08Marcin Kleczynski:I have fun every day. Look, there's parts of my job I don't like, just like everybody else, right? But there's a lot more parts I do like, and that makes it fun for me.

57:20Joubin Mirzadegan:Do you have a, like, if you have, in a given week, is there a percentage that you think you're doing that you like versus don't like?

57:31Marcin Kleczynski:I think it ebbs and flows. Like if we have a week of a hackathon, like I'm 100 % dialed through the needle, like needles falling through the floor here, right? If we've got a board meeting, I mean, every CEO is dreading that week and, you know, depending on if the news is good or bad. So it's less about excitement at that point. It's around just managing expectations. Here's what went well. here's what didn't go well but I mean you're familiar with that too and I'm sure you know what that feels like you know every quarter or whatever yeah getting in the boardroom yeah

57:59Joubin Mirzadegan:yeah I just wonder like uh people ask me are you having fun and I haven't exactly known how to answer that because and again like the businesses are in different places I you know if we were a profitable business you know like it might be different I suspect I still feel the same way Like I, I, I, I describe it as I feel alive and there's no scarier feeling than like feeling dull without a purpose. So I definitely feel like I have a purpose and I feel alive. And that is immeasurably a good feeling. Like I really love that feeling, but it would not, I would not describe it as fun all the time. You know what I mean?

58:45Joubin Mirzadegan:And like, because there's always like a stress tax that exists because like even in the elated moments, something is usually weighing on me. Yeah. That dampens whatever, like unadulterated fun is like sitting with my buddies and playing a game of poker or something. And you know what I mean? Like there's no, there's nothing else behind it. And so I have a hard... I feel like it's what I'm supposed to be doing. And it is not fun doing something that you don't feel like is your calling. But calling the job fun is, I don't know. I don't know if I would describe everything as fun.

59:33Marcin Kleczynski:I hear you. I think the euphoria of those really high highs, you know, maybe masks, what we want to call it, right? To me, that's fun, like winning or being able to put up a big score on the board. And you then quickly forget about the really low lows of like you were screaming into your pillow about something. One thing I found that does make the job more fun is there are people in the business that give me a lot of energy. And I want to marry those believers and kind of divorce the naysayers, as somebody told me many, many years ago. And I feel like, you know, a person's run with the business sort of comes to an end when they just suck the energy out of the room.

1:00:14Marcin Kleczynski:And like actually do make it less fun, right? To your point. But there are people in the business that are just high performers, great attitude, and just want to keep winning. But when things go sideways, they're also there to pick you up. And that gives me a ton of energy. Like those are the people I want to work with. And I will bring on the metaphorical boat, you know, for the next opportunity down the road, right? Yeah.

1:00:36Joubin Mirzadegan:That makes sense to me. The, the way that I think about it is, um, you know, post roadrunner, my life meaningfully had to change and it became much more roadrunner centric and you kind of only get like one, one and a half things outside of that, you know? So like your health and then maybe like the relationship or whatever it is. Right. And the thing that I have particularly felt good about is like on a Saturday, maybe it used to be that I would go play golf with some, with some friends or on a Sunday, maybe it used to be like, you know, yesterday there was like a bunch of football, like the Niners were playing and whatever.

1:01:24Marcin Kleczynski:I'm a Bears fan. So there you go. There you go.

1:01:26Joubin Mirzadegan:Uh, and in this instance, like, you know, Saturday I was in the office and Sunday I was in meetings all day and I didn't watch the football game, but I remember thinking, Oh, I wonder what the score was, but I never felt like I wanted to be doing that instead. You know what I mean?

1:01:44Marcin Kleczynski:And that, if, if, if that counts as fun, then okay.

1:01:48Joubin Mirzadegan:Like I'll take,

1:01:49Marcin Kleczynski:you know, I think you're having fun. Yeah. Maybe, maybe.

1:01:52Joubin Mirzadegan:Um, well, I appreciate you doing this. Yeah, for sure. It's been great. This is fun. This is good. Yeah, I like it. This is fun.

1:01:59Marcin Kleczynski:Are you hiring? Absolutely. Now that we've separated the two businesses, both Malwarebytes and ThreatDown are hiring across the board, from marketing to engineering to product to finance, et cetera.

1:02:10Joubin Mirzadegan:When you hear the word grit, what do you think of?

1:02:13Marcin Kleczynski:Yeah, we talked a lot about grit today, just the opportunities. To me, grit is just getting kicked in the teeth over and over and over again and considering it fun, maybe. but just continuing to keep going and knowing that there's a prize at the end of it all. And as we talked about today, like I've had plenty of opportunities to leave this business. There've been many, many times where I've been kicked in the teeth, but I feel like the grit is what keeps me going. And I think there's a prize at the end for everybody.

1:02:43Joubin Mirzadegan:I appreciate it. Thanks, man. Thank you, man. Really fun. 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. This podcast is a Kleiner Perkins production, and I'm Juven. Thanks for listening.