Razvan Todor - The secret power behind cybersecurity at scale

In this episode of Partnerships Unraveled, we sit down with Razvan Todor, VP Strategic Partnerships & Alliances – CSG at Bitdefender. Razvan brings a rare lens to channel work: a product leader who shifted from owning roadmaps to architecting ecosystems that protect users at population scale through telcos, ISPs, and insurance providers.

Razvan starts with what it actually takes to move from millions of users to hundreds of millions: ecosystems, not sales acceleration. He draws a clean line between channel and strategic partnerships based on who owns the end customer. When Bitdefender owns the customer, it's channel; when the partner does, it becomes a strategic alliance where both companies co-create value inside the partner's portfolio. That shift changes the conversation entirely. The negotiation stops being about margin and becomes about direction, priorities, and where both organizations want to be three to five years from now.

Scale also makes the product stronger. The more customers Bitdefender protects, the more threats it sees, and the faster it can cluster patterns like the California bridge toll scam that adapts its message by geography. Razvan also reframes the old debate between brand equity and partner-led distribution as two sides of the same success story. Strong brand makes signing new partners easier; big partners make the product sharper and lift recognition. The board-level question becomes how to maximize both together.

On AI and deepfakes, Razvan is thoughtful: detecting that something is fake matters less than understanding the intent behind it. Cats dancing on Snoop Dogg and a fake Elon Musk stock tip are technically identical. The future of consumer cyber security is guaranteeing trust and authenticity.

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Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we dive deep into the mysteries and the secrets of partnerships and the channel. I'm your host, Michel Toul. I'm head of marketing at Chanext, and I'm joined today by Razvan Todor, VP Strategic Partnerships and Alliances for CSG at BitDefender. Razvan, how's your week been so far?

SPEAKER_00 0:24

Hi, Michel. Not bad. It's a good week. I think, well, spring is here, so everything is great now.

From Product Manager To Alliances

SPEAKER_01 0:31

I couldn't agree more. I feel so much better having a little bit of sun on my face. It's really great to have you here. Hey, to kick off with, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?

Hardware Nostalgia And What It Taught

SPEAKER_00 0:41

Sure. Right now I do strategic partnerships and alliances at Big Defender. Big Defender is a global cybersecurity company. And my focus is on how do we bring cybersecurity at scale, which is not only through selling directly to our customers, but mainly through large ecosystems like telcos, ISPs, I don't know, financial players, insurance providers, and so on. If you want my my background, I started in cybersecurity more than 10 years ago as a product manager. My first product was luckily a hardware product. And I say luckily because it's um it's very nice to build something that you can hold in your hand. I think us in software, we usually don't have this experience. It was uh it was a really cool product to build, and it taught me a lot. And funnily enough, it was the only time in my career that I got the chance to apply what I studied in college, which was electronics. Mainly as a product manager, and I'm I'm telling you this to kind of underline the differences. I focused a lot on aspects like feature set, product market fit, roadmap, uh deliveries, user experience, retention, things like this, you know? And at some point we started asking ourselves, okay, how can we scale from millions of users protected to hundreds of millions? And the answer to that is not by accelerating your sales effort, is it's ecosystems, is being able to distribute at an infrastructure level. So now my my focus is much, much less on features and product itself. And it's mostly on architecting ecosystems that bring shared values to the partners and long-term durability. And I think this is the mind shift, it was a very important mind shift that I had to make when we started the strategic partnerships direction.

SPEAKER_01 2:33

Yeah, I can imagine. I think there's a couple of things I would want to touch on. First of all, the hardware aspect of things, just from my perspective, people can't see this, but behind me I have a little closet and I have some old cell phones like mobile phones. I have a Nokia 8890, and simply holding that in your hand gives such an incredibly different experience than looking at an app through your phone where everything is software-based. So, yeah, remembering those times where industrial design was important, feeling things with your hands, I think it's a valuable experience for everyone.

SPEAKER_00 3:06

And since you mentioned phones, you know what I keep in my desk is my old BlackBerry. I don't remember the number. It was the one with the letter backside. And the small and the small wheel or the small sphere. It was like a button.

Losing Control And Gaining Leverage

SPEAKER_01 3:20

It was very I literally have one of those still there just to feel the keyboard. It's incredible. After this podcast is over, I can tell you a little bit more. There's some mechanical keyboard stuff that's coming out now that's really great. Anyway, sorry, audience. This is uh a bit of a hobby of mine. I'm glad to find uh another hardware hobbyist here. But uh, let's talk a little bit about the transition you made. You mentioned that you came up in product management and then you moved from basically B2C product leadership into B2B2C strategic alliances, which is a pretty serious transition. So besides that scale problem, what what surprised you most when you moved from owning products to owning partnerships?

SPEAKER_00 4:00

I think there were two surprises, two big surprises. And one of them came very fast. It was a nasty lesson to learn, which was uh you cannot imagine the lack of control that you want that you all of a sudden start to have. I mean, it's not like you're not in control, but compared to when you're driving product or portfolio and everything is in-house and you discuss, you prioritize, you put it on the roadmap, maybe you change your mind at some point and then you release, more about influencing and aligning roadmaps and aligning priorities, aligning capital allocation, and it's more it's really more a lot about influencing rather than and making sure that we both win, both both our visions are respected, and and so on. So it's a it's a lot about alignment. And the other lesson which came a bit later, but it was a pleasant lesson to learn, was how much leverage you can you can build with uh with a partnerships. So those are the the two surprises that and two very important lessons too that we had to carry on with us in order to be successful in this area.

SPEAKER_01 5:02

Yeah, I think coming into the channel that really is a hard lesson to learn. And it's kind of the value and the challenge of having multiple degrees of separation, right? If you're responsible for a product, like you said, you are responsible. When you're when you're responsible for partnerships, you need to have partners and an ecosystem that you can trust that trusts you, where the communication is super strong because there's more points of failure. But I think the flip side of that is that having these strong relationships becomes a force multiplier because they can give you opportunities that you never like thought could even exist directly, right?

SPEAKER_00 5:40

Exactly. So it's it's much more than than a channel where you, I don't know, you use your partner's sales force to grow your sales, to grow your revenue, which is not something bad about channels. It's it's an it's incredible, it's an incredible mechanism. But when you go towards strategic partnerships, you realize that now you're building something, you you co-create value in the other partner's portfolio, and and you build something with a much bigger value than just the two products put together. And to do that, you need to be completely aligned with your partner. And you know, it's it's always a negotiation, but it's not a margin negotiation, it's more of a priorities and a direction negotiation of where we're going together.

SPEAKER_01 6:23

Yeah, it's it's almost like a cyclical, like one plus one is three idea. That's the ideal scenario.

SPEAKER_00 6:28

Something like that, yes.

Strategic Versus Channel Customer Ownership

SPEAKER_01 6:29

Yeah, I love it. I I think looking at what you were explaining about the strategic partnership concept as opposed to channel partners or other domains. I talk with people on this podcast a lot about partner tiers and segmentation. When we were having a prep call for this for this recording, you said something really interesting. You said that if BitDefender itself owns the end customer, it's considered channel. But if the partner owns the end customer, it's considered strategic. And I thought about that for quite a while. It's it's a really simple and powerful way of looking at segmentation. But what would you say is like the biggest difference between these two go-to-market strategies, direct and strategic?

SPEAKER_00 7:08

I think it's it's about, as you said, customer ownership and value creation. Because if we own the customer and we're using a partner to distribute our product, we create the value and we're totally in control. But in the end, we're um we're distributing our product and our market positioning remains the same. Whereas in a strategic partnership, if the partner owns the customer, this means that, as I said before, we're co-creating value inside their portfolio. And by doing this, both partners slightly adjust their market positioning. They're enhancing their market positioning, they're accessing areas where they were not able to be before the partnership. So I think it's a much bigger value that can be offered. And it's a lot about strategic positioning and in the end, creating some sort of defensibility for the future because now you're creating something foundational, something solid rather than just a distribution channel.

SPEAKER_01 8:08

Yeah, absolutely. It it goes so far beyond the product as well. There's there's so many additional layers to a strategic partnership like that, where you also have to trust that their end customer is a match for your solution set and that this ecosystem is an effective play, right?

SPEAKER_00 8:23

I think uh it's very interesting that you said this because I was I was thinking about how in such a partnership, both parties gain something that it's beyond financial gain. Us as a cybersecurity company, we understand a customer segment that we were not exposed to before. That's not our own. So we become a better cybersecurity provider because we're able to cater to segments that we would not maybe normally target. And the other party gains a lot of knowledge in cyber threats and knowledge in how to position themselves as trusted providers to their customers. So their positioning strengthens as well.

SPEAKER_01 9:03

Yeah, that that makes a lot of sense. I think it's a mutual lift basically for both organizations, right? And and diving into these new markets, these blue oceans is actually a fascinating perspective. You mentioned at the beginning that you work with these telcos, with insurance providers. And I think you then move beyond BitDefender being a part of a bundle, so to speak, right? Uh you're embedding at an API and SDK level, you're influencing the goat market, like you just mentioned, you co-invest in growth. Besides this one plus one is three approach, what made you actually decide to dive into these telcos and insurance providers to create this force multiplier?

SPEAKER_00 9:43

That's a tricky question because the immediate answer would be to be able to scale much faster, to accelerate your growth. But um the other side of this answer is to be able to grow your intelligence network because scale in cybersecurity is also product strength. The more people you're able to protect, the more threats you see, the faster you are to identify new threats or new scams. So scale actually brings you a lot of product power. And then also to be able to build the kind of solid collaboration, solid partnerships that allow you to have visibility into the future. Because this kind of partnerships, when you start doing this kind of partnerships, you kind of shift your mindset and you don't think like a product owner anymore or portfolio manager anymore. And maybe you think a bit more like a general manager in a sense, because you start, you stop thinking from quarter to quarter, and you think on longer time spans, like three years, five years, and then you envision this partnership going forward. And you bring your partner along in this vision. And this actually allows you to co-invest together with your partner in more meaningful, in more meaningful things. So you develop much more courageously in a way, because you trust this relation now.

SPEAKER_01 11:04

Yeah, I love that answer. I think it also touches on something I keep hearing, and that is a shift from short-term, almost tactical partnerships to more long-term plays, really thinking about how we can build a repeatable motion with these large strategic partnerships where we make a larger investment up front and we put more effort in up front, but we actually build out this relationship to be focused on longevity as opposed to just like quick revenue, right?

SPEAKER_00 11:33

I think it's it's what you have to do, especially in today when everything changes so fast. Like, you know, we may be discussing about an AI model today, and then next week something better comes along, and then so it's it's it's everything changes so fast. In order to kind of position yourself safely, but also courageously for the future, you need to build strong relationships that that allow you to have a strong positioning in the market that's not only dependable on a technology or today's product, you know.

Brand Equity Versus White Label Growth

SPEAKER_01 12:04

Yeah, I think there is an additional challenge that comes in when you're talking about these longer-term ecosystem plays. And it's something that I hear echoing through the cybersecurity space specifically, and that's that you build these really, really strong strategic relationships and you become part of an ecosystem that is presented to the end customer. But oftentimes your solution is almost hidden within this ecosystem. The the value is there, but the brand dissipates sometimes because it's white labeled, sometimes because it's just not clearly visible to the end customer. Do you have any thoughts on this? Like how do you how do you look at that strategic trade-off between your brand equity and the success of these partnerships and distribution?

SPEAKER_00 12:45

I think it's a problem that's been going on for years and years. And it's it's I I hear about it and I I've been discussing it for a long time. And I think both, I mean, partnerships like this, they bring um accelerated growth. So on the revenue side, they're a good thing. On the other hand, brand equity is very important. Visibility is very important, long-term visibility is very important. But I don't see this as an either-or situation. I see this as two sides of the same success story. Because I think one even leverages the other. They've seen you in the market. On the other hand, the bigger partners you have, the stronger your product's product gets. So the stronger your brand brand recognition gets if you do this right. And I think it's it all comes down to segmentation, both user segmentation and also kind of a product segmentation, if I can name it like this, even though it's not segmentation, but the way the product behaves. Because the same product can be a completely frictionless activation with a very easy interface, very simple, everything streamlined for mass uh consumers that uh uh that is addressed through a partnership, and then a more sophisticated interface with more added features, advanced features for your own sophisticated users that know what to choose. Because it's also a question of cybersecurity at least, of how do people buy cybersecurity. And to be honest, people don't care about cybersecurity. They don't, most of them, they don't want cybersecurity. They just want to be safe. And they want the easiest way to achieve that safety. So it's it's it's very much about segmenting your your customers and know how to address each c each each segment to better respond to their needs.

SPEAKER_01 14:54

Yeah, I really appreciate that response. It's almost as if you have very specific tailored value propositions to each of these go-to-market models. And I think that is exactly the way to go. Sometimes, even as someone who's in marketing, I sometimes have to wonder: like, is brand the most important thing or is value the most important thing? And if we can forecast accurately as businesses, we can find out that balance, like where we need to make sure that we have this brand awareness and brand equity versus where we have strong partnerships and a sell-through model or an ecosystem play that actually drives revenue, drives results, and also drives these longer-term relationships.

SPEAKER_00 15:33

And I think just one more thing, because for a long time this discussion was a commercial discussion in a way. But I think this discussion is actually a board-level discussion, a strategic discussion, because it boils down to how do we maximize brand equity and revenue growth in something that it's long-term and it positions us in a meaningful way for the for the future, you know?

AI Scams Deepfakes And New Needs

SPEAKER_01 15:57

Yeah. Yeah, and it's a really important discussion. And I think some of it is also, to your point, about that things are changing every day. Some of it is also just being open to see where the market goes and where it's headed, and whether or not this ecosystem play, the strategic alliances play is going to drive massive growth, or whether the a direct-to-consumer model is going to grow as the concept of cybersecurity becomes more clear to people, just consumers in general, because I agree with you, right? I I'm also not busy with what cybersecurity tool I use. I just want my stuff to be secure. But as threats increase and become more almost newsworthy, like you hear about breaches so often, I think there will be a shift in perception in how people acquire cybersecurity products, or at least what they expect from their cybersecurity vendors. What do you think of that?

SPEAKER_00 16:50

Uh I I I think, and now we're getting very specific to cybersecurity, not necessarily partnerships, but the spectrum of consumer cybersecurity is is broad. It's not just uh a solution, you know. So, and I think today we talk a lot about scamps because since they they became AI powered, they uh they gain a lot of traction. One one very interesting thing is um, you know, um the the total amount of of money lost to scamps grows each year, and it grew significantly in the last year, which would suggest that uh the volume of scamps grows. And it's not necessarily true. I mean the volume grows, but it doesn't grow as much. What grows is the conversion of the scams.

SPEAKER_01 17:40

Really?

SPEAKER_00 17:41

They're better made, so they convert in a way more people, you know. So now this is very visible, and you know, the whole the whole part with uh deep fakes and narrative attacks and fake news and all that, again, very visible. So you would say that this is consumer cybersecurity, which it's is, but it's just the visible part. Because everything else that we've been talking about for the past 10 years viruses, attacks, uh ransomware, all that, they're just not in the news anymore. Yeah, they're still there, you know. So I think in a way, um cyber, consumer cybersecurity kind of segments between the commoditized cybersecurity, which is sell, which is sold through channels and partnerships, and is the basic cybersecurity that everybody needs, and we make it as easy as possible to cover as much people as possible. And then there's this new layer that addresses the really conscient people, the really, I don't know, security conscient people like yourself, which will say, okay, but I need something to protect myself from, I don't know, deep fakes or to understand when it's fake news, or to, you know, something that will filter scams at some point. Even scams, there are multiple levels there, because it can be a scam that takes you to a link and it's very easy to spot it, so it's a malicious link. But now we have a lot of distributed scams. You see an ad, then you get a text message, then you get a call. Each one of these are not necessarily malicious per se, but just when put together, they start to paint the picture of a scam. But my point is that I think cybersecurity is a consumer cybersecurity at least, is a is is a range of products that is sold both in partnerships and also direct, and they do not compete with each other because they will in the near future serve different needs.

Threat Intelligence At Massive Volume

SPEAKER_01 19:36

Yeah, that that makes sense. But that does actually connect to a point you made earlier that scale is helping you to not just increase revenue, but also increase your threat intelligence. So, what specifically are you looking at at the moment where like the the data that you get from 10 million users versus 100 million users, how are you using that volume to increase uh basically the quality and security of your own products? I find that a fascinating phenomenon.

SPEAKER_00 20:04

Well, cybersecurity is all about threat intelligence. So the more you know, the better you're able to protect. So your product um is has one level of viability if it protects a million customers, and it has a completely different level of viability if it protects like 500 million customers or a billion. And this is why I think most of the players in in cybersecurity are looking at these kind of high volume partnerships, not only from a revenue perspective, but also from building their own intelligence platform to be able to make their products more viable, to detect newer threats faster, to understand scam patterns faster, to understand, for example, being able to cluster threats. And by clustering I mean, let's say, and it it's not just let's say, because it happened to me as well. I was in California and I got a text message about the fact that I didn't pay some uh bridge talk in California. And these are customized per location. So when you're in France, you get a different message. When you're in, I don't know, Egypt, you get a totally different message. And if you as a cybersecurity provider are able to clusterize this, you're able to protect your customers in a very specific way. For example, you, Michelle, can get um can get a notification from BitDefender saying, hey, you're in California, this is what's happening right now. If you get a text message saying this and that, don't fall for it. And this is more of a proactive protection that lets you know before something happens to you. And this is something that could not have been done unless there is a lot of threat intel available to be able to go through all the data. And this is where volume comes into play.

SPEAKER_01 21:50

I think that's really, really interesting. And I can also imagine that then working with telcos in their ecosystem, you can actually boost that threat intelligence using information.

Privacy Rules Inside Telco Ecosystems

SPEAKER_00 22:00

information that you didn't have before and and even communication Yeah but it's it's not it's not necessarily like that because partners like telcos are very very specific about their privacy roles. That makes sense so we're not able to see anything other than the specific threats that go through their networks. That's it. So um we're we can't see anything other than we than we wouldn't see in a normal way. We just see more of that. It seems sounds simple but it's super super uh valuable for us.

SPEAKER_01 22:34

Yeah 100% and I think that really comes back to the security versus privacy debate. Like to have increased security sometimes you have to give up some privacy but where do you draw the line? So I totally understand what you're saying about those telcos.

SPEAKER_00 22:47

And if you think about it privacy is a pillar of cybersecurity. So yeah it's a it's a never-ending debate there and I think what our customers value more is privacy in the end. You'd rather be uh you'd rather have your privacy than anything else.

SPEAKER_01 23:02

Aaron Ross Powell Yeah and and I think what you're talking about with AI augmenting in deep fakes, that's something that really touches the heart of a lot of people that they feel personal affront. Like when they get messages that are so tailored to them specifically and they find out that they're fake, that that really does harm your trust.

Authenticity Depends On Intent Not Pixels

SPEAKER_00 23:19

So I think specifically for cybersecurity vendors and partners these days, like establishing and rebuilding that trust and putting the walls in place to protect people from these kinds of attacks is is more and more I think it's going to be one of the main objectives of consumer cybersecurity at least but of cybersecurity in the future is to be able to guarantee authenticity or to guarantee trust. I think that's that's going that's where we're going in the end. And one um again uh maybe an interesting thing is with the deep fakes to be able to validate something it's not only to be able to say whether it's a fake or not is to be able to understand the intention. Because um I don't know Elon Musk advising you to buy some stocks is a deep fake but also three cats dancing dancing on Snoop Dogg is also a deep fake. It's just that only one of them is malicious the other one is just for fun. So from a cybersecurity point of view it's vital to be able to understand the intention behind these things.

SPEAKER_01 24:25

Wow that's a really fascinating perspective yeah because it it's all about how these things are used. They can be funny or they can be malicious but it's a pretty fine line between them.

SPEAKER_00 24:35

Yeah and they're both fakes. Yeah so from a technical point of view you can't separate them.

Next Guest Nomination And Closing

SPEAKER_01 24:40

Yeah yeah you can't just do data analysis of like hey this is this has been altered because that's not necessarily a problem that's not enough. Wow yeah it's it's just you need to know that you have to be protected from Brad Pitt asking you out on a date. That's actually what Exactly yes no that's fascinating. Hey I think that's a really interesting point to end this segment on we always ask our guests to nominate the next guest on the podcast. Is there someone specific you have in mind who we should have next?

SPEAKER_00 25:08

Yes I've been I've been thinking about this from from the first time that we we talked and I think a a nice way to follow this discussion would be with my colleague Mirta Flora who's the director for partner success management at BitDefender. And I think it would be a complimentary discussion because where I have a more strategic high level view of the partnerships and I think more in architecting ecosystems and how do we build something that brings value to both of us and so on. Mircha and and his team they are very focused on the day-to-day job of how do we make these partnerships work. Very tactical very what do we do tomorrow what do we do next week and and so on. So I think it would be a very interesting point of view that he would have yeah I appreciate it. I think they're both very very important kind of sides of the same coin right they're very different but they're they're very different intrinsically linked yes exactly exactly amazing so to wrap this up do you have any final insights tips or tricks that you'd like to share with me with the audience I think I'm very happy to see that there's a lot of players these days these days other than just cybersecurity players that are very interested in protecting their customers. And that's that's great news for all of us in in cybersecurity. And um yeah I'm I'm really happy with the trend.

SPEAKER_01 26:34

Yeah no I agree I think we we all need to understand that we need to work together to create that layer of protection and just to call back to what you mentioned before, right? That volume is what makes the difference in threat intelligence. And we do that direct we do that through channels we do that through ecosystems strategic partnerships. So I think all those things play together into just creating a safer more secure world. Yep yep amazing so thanks so much for sharing your thoughts and taking the time to speak with me and you dear listeners thanks for tuning in and see you in the next episode. Thanks Razon thank you for inviting