The Founder Formula
Every passing moment, a tech startup disrupts life as it was. In humanity’s pursuit of faster, better, and higher capacity, fresh companies are tackling old problems and modern complexities, all while pushing the bounds of the future.
The Founder Formula brings you in—behind the curtains and inside the minds of executives at Start-ups that have traditionally only been found in Silicon Valley—and the Venture Capital Firms that fund them.
The Founder Formula
Andrew Rubin - Founder of Illumio
Celebrating a massive milestone - $225 million in Series F funding for Illumio - our guest today is startup guru and network security expert, Andrew Rubin. Illumio is at the bleeding edge of the cybersecurity maelstrom with their groundbreaking work in Zero Trust Segmentation.
Andrew offers up his entertaining insights on cyber security, his history as a successful entrepreneur and fashion investor, and paying it forward by mentoring up-and-coming founders.
Listen to this and all of The Founder Formula episodes through your favorite podcast platform or Trace3.com.
Everybody who's on this journey has somebody who helped them along the way. And those people remember that. They value it enormously. And they absolutely love even the prospect, even the potential of paying it forward and doing it for somebody else.
Todd Gallina:The founder formula brings you in behind the curtains and inside the minds of today's brave executives at the most future-leaning startups. Each interview will feature a transformative leader who's behind the wheel at a fast-paced and innovative tech firm. They'll give you an insider's look at how companies are envisioned, created, and scaled. We hope you're ready. Let's get into the show. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the show. My name is Todd Galena, and with me is the Chief Technical Officer at Trace3. Tony Olzak. Tony, welcome back to the show. Hey, Todd. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me. You bet. Today, Tony, we have somebody on the podcast that is not only an entrepreneur, but was also a seed investor. And he was a seed investor in a company called Tory Burch. Have you heard of them? Oh, my wife is very excited right now.
Tony Olzak:I can hear her in the next room. She heard that.
Todd Gallina:Immediately ran into the purse closet, took a quick audit. No, it's funny. When we were researching him, I was a bit surprised because normally we have people with a huge tech background. So that was a surprise. But it got me thinking about brands, big brands, big fashion brands, automotive brands. And I'll tell you right now, just like your wife, Tory Burch is a big one to my wife, but I think the listeners want to know, Tony, what are the big brands in your life? Oh, you know, I'm going
Tony Olzak:to flip the script on you, Todd, for just a second, because you're always interviewing me. This must be a loaded question. What are the brands in your life? Oh,
Todd Gallina:that's not, okay. Well, I will tell you anyone who, anyone who knows me knows I'm, I can be pretty frugal when it comes to clothing. Like for example, today, I think I'm wearing some, Up top, it's Old Navy, and down low, it's Costco. But I will tell you, I am a bit of a fan of Lululemon shorts and Lululemon pants. So I hate to admit it in front of everybody, but I'm a little into the whole Lululemon thing. So go ahead, judge me. I'm not judging.
Tony Olzak:Are they actually like yoga pants and yoga shorts?
Todd Gallina:No.
Tony Olzak:The way you would think of like Lululemon, you know, the
Todd Gallina:yoga pants? No, no, no, no. They're just like... Now I'm super self-conscious about this. No, they're just shorts and long pants. They're super comfy. I was given a pair as a gift and I was like, no way, that logo looks like a woman's head. But then next thing you know, like I'm wearing them all the time. No, just regular pants and shorts.
Tony Olzak:Well, congratulations. Actually, I had no idea they didn't make just yoga attire. I think I'm completely out of date with that brand. Yeah, on the brand side, I'm actually, I don't know that I'm necessarily tied to a brand or two. I've got this mentality ever since I was a kid to where I hate wasting money. And so I will either buy the cheapest brand or the most expensive brand. And I try not to buy anything that's in the middle because I feel like I could have just spent a little bit less and save some money or spent a little bit more and had the best. And so the middle is just kind of like a big wasteful place for me. And so you'll find some radically different things inside my house or inside my closet where the cheapest things you can find and then a few pieces that I'm pretty proud of.
Todd Gallina:Oh, that's smart. So you'll be walking through the mall and you'll be like middle high end and you'll roll in there. Yeah,
Tony Olzak:or the reverse. Maybe it's something that is very inexpensive and I'm just fine with that. I don't like paying a premium into that middle range for things that could be had for less. Maybe in the same way with cars. If you make... three different versions of a car that's the same model. Think of a Ford F-150. You can get a Ford F-150 brand new for low 20s, bare bones. You can get the same F-150 decked out all the way to $90,000 if you're talking about Raptor and now the new Lightning is coming out and all that kind of stuff. But that's way too much range. It's like, well, okay, I could have the same truck for 20 grand. I don't know what's the difference, but something in my head, I can't get past the fact that I don't want to spend, you know, $50,000 on a truck that I could have for 20 grand. It's like, hmm, you should name it something different.
Todd Gallina:You're right. That's totally true. Because if two F-150s go side by side, and like you said, somebody's got the 20K model and somebody's got the 90K model, they both look at each other and they go like, hey, you're driving an F-150.
Tony Olzak:Yeah. I mean, that's
Todd Gallina:what I think.
Tony Olzak:Yeah. Maybe there's some truck snobs out there who feel differently and more power to you if you love the nuance and you feel amazing with what you got out of the 50 grand version. I find myself operating at the ends of the extremes and maybe I'm just an extreme person, but that's just the way I think about it. I
Todd Gallina:think that's smart. I like it. I didn't realize it at the time, but I think I've adopted it with the whole old Navy Lululemon thing. Yeah. Okay. That was... I think we should just get to the guy that invested in Tory Burch. What do you think? Let's do it. Okay, our guest is a sought-after advisor of startup funding strategy who has a strong expertise in network security and compliance management. He is a founder and CEO of Illumio, a cloud security company specializing in zero-trust segmentation, and they're located in Sunnyvale, California. Just last week, his company raised $225 million in Series F funding. Please welcome to the show, Andrew Rubin. Welcome, Andrew. Thanks so much for having
Tony Olzak:me, Todd. Andrew, great to have you. Before we get this thing started, just congratulations on the round.
Andrew Rubin:Thank you, Tony. I really appreciate it. It was really exciting news for the team, our customers, obviously our channel partners all over the world. And we're excited to put our head down and keep building the company and put the money to good work.
Tony Olzak:Yeah, it was exciting news when we read it. And Todd and I were taking a look at that and some of the press that had followed your previous funding round. And we were kind of curious, when you look at this late round of funding, it's a tremendous amount of money. Todd, I know you had a question around the Series E. You want to just lead in with that and we can get started there?
Todd Gallina:Yeah, no, absolutely, Tony. Good idea. So There's some press around your Series E when you guys raised $65 million. And at the time, you said that that was going to be going towards marketing and getting the brand out there. Can you share with us how that worked out for you? What are some of the levers you pulled to make the best use of that Series E?
Andrew Rubin:Yeah. Interestingly, at the time we raised the E, which was now a couple of years ago, we were in a mode of really transitioning from what I always thought about as our early selling motion to the very beginnings of a more mature and more sort of normalized selling motion. And what I mean by that is we were going after a more diverse group of customers by industry, by size and certainly by geography. I think at that time, for the first time, in a very meaningful way, the channel in all forms was becoming part of our go-to-market motion. Prior to that, it had been a lot of early direct enterprise selling. And so in a lot of ways, this Series E, not the dollars themselves, but just where we were as a company at the time, was really about transitioning from early selling and moving into the beginnings of a more mature and, as I said, a more normalized selling model. Obviously, that was a couple of years ago now. And all of those things that we started doing have become very much our selling motion today. The company is deeply engaged with channel partners in all forms, literally all over the world. We're selling to a much more diverse group of customers today than we were even a year and a is to really step on all of those gas pedals and try and accelerate all of those things, including in some cases, opening up in countries or geographies that even today we're still not in. And so I think the Series F is a continuation, but really a very large acceleration of what the Series E round started a couple of years ago.
Tony Olzak:Wow, that's pretty spectacular. This comes right on the tail end of some pretty... newsworthy cybersecurity events. Does that kind of thing help at all with timing? Like when you kind of get free advertising for the industry when we just had the energy event that just happened and it seems like every week there's something big that happens that keeps cybersecurity top of mind.
Andrew Rubin:Yeah, it's obviously a subject and a topic that's very near and dear to my heart and something that I'm very passionate about and the team at Illumio is equally passionate about. I want to take one step back. I think the answer to your question, Tom, Tony, is yes, when you see these events, when you see this on the news day after day, in some sense, it does help business to the extent that it gets a lot of people talking about security. But I do want to push us back one step because there's a question that we should all be asking, which is cyber spending is at an all time high. There's obviously no shortage of cyber vendors, both private and public out there. for customers to go buy things from. So there is this sort of very obvious question, which is how is it in a world in 2021, where we're spending more money on more things to protect ourselves, our outcomes are getting worse. And when we miss the outcome is more catastrophic. And honestly, that's a question that a lot of people don't want to ask. They just want to go buy more stuff and hope to be safe. And so one of the things that I know we'll get into this at some point in the conversation when we dig in on Illumio a little bit more, but one of the things that we were very determined to do when we started the company was not build another layer of detection and promise customers we're here to find and stop bad things. There are a lot of great companies that do that already. It's an important part of the cyber framework. But if you want to say it openly, honestly, and bluntly, Our track record recently has not been very good or very successful at stopping bad things. And when they happen, the outcomes seem to be more and more catastrophic each time. Obviously, Colonial and JBS taking us to a whole new place where what was essentially a cyber event resulted in a physical world outcome for the first time. And so it's a very interesting time. It's a very interesting space. And it's obviously critical that Yeah, no doubt.
Tony Olzak:You know, it's very interesting when those events happen, you know, for those of us who are in the security field, you see the experts hop on the media outlets and they're discussing, you know, the state of things and the complexity of things and, you know, When you're on the consulting end of it, which I've spent the bulk of my career in, what you end up finding is that it's usually very basic things that are exposing all our environments to things that keep getting us in trouble. And we keep talking about complexities, but if we can simplify even the way that we think about some of the basics and the core elements of managing risk and how we alleviate some of the security concerns, I would love to use that as an opportunity to dig into Illumio because I feel like the company that you founded and the ideas that you guys had around this are pretty game-changing and invaluable for how we start thinking about foundationally up, how we think about securing environments and getting to a place where this stuff can die down a little bit.
Andrew Rubin:Yeah, I mean, I think it actually... starts with your frame of mind. And I'm going to use that as a bridge to talk just for a quick minute. And I promise only a quick minute, but about what I think is one of the most important topics in cyber today, which is this notion of zero trust. And I know that it's very buzzy right now. And I know a lot of people don't really understand or know what they should take it to mean. But the funny part about it is it shouldn't be ambiguous and it really shouldn't be vague. Zero trust is not a product. It's not a vendor, including Illumio. It's not a single security control or a single security layer. Zero trust is a strategy that starts with two words, two very simple words, assume breach. Now, those two words have not been part of our cyber strategy for the last 30 or so years. We've assumed that we can keep ourselves safe. Unfortunately, the last 90 or so days, we've proven again and again, you can make an argument the last 10 or so years, that assuming breach is a lot better assumption than assuming being safe. And so what I think gets people confused is two things. One, there's this question around, well, if I assume breach all the time, does that mean that I shouldn't bother trying to stop breaches? And of course, the answer to that is no. Invest in detection. Try and find things that are coming at you that don't belong coming at you or things that are malicious and stop them every time you can. But what Zero Trust reminds you is that even if you are incredibly good at that, let's put a number on it. Let's say you stop 99.99999% of the things that try and get into your environment that don't belong there. That's not 100%, which means eventually something's going to get in. And what Zero Trust asks you to do is acknowledge that math And then have a cyber strategy for dealing with what happens when you're breached. And obviously for Illumio, we're one piece. We're not the whole puzzle. We're one piece of the puzzle. But segmentation is a very core piece of a zero trust puzzle. Because all segmentation really means is taking an environment, big or small, cloud or data center, endpoint or workload, it doesn't matter. It's taking an environment and it's dividing it up and segmenting it or compartmentalizing it into smaller environments. So if one part of the environment gets sick, it doesn't infect and get everything else in the environment sick along with it. And sometimes that can mean a single application. Sometimes it can mean a set of workloads running in the cloud. But the point is zero trust gets you to acknowledge something bad can happen, probably will happen. And I have a strategy for dealing with that, just like I have a strategy for trying to prevent the incident in the first place. And I think what's happened over the last 90 to 180 days, including not just the breaches, but the president's executive order, certainly the White House memo that was published a couple of weeks ago, imploring corporate America to take this seriously. I think we're finally at a tipping point where people are saying, I have two cyber strategies, trying to prevent something bad from happening, ensure that when something bad happens, it's not automatically a catastrophe. And Illumio and segmentation's job is really to help with that second part.
Tony Olzak:Yes, maybe that's a good segue into Illumio itself. I mean, very well said. And I think it is a point that does need to be cleaned up. And judging by the number of times I find myself getting approached by someone asking if they can buy Zero Trust, there's still a lot of mystery to be resolved. So I appreciate you taking the time to give us that explanation and very well said. So then we started thinking about Illumio Let's dive into Illumio for a second. To your point, there's a lot of solutions out there. What does Illumio do and why did you guys start it?
Andrew Rubin:Yeah, so I'll answer to what we do first. So we are a zero-trust segmentation company. We built a software platform that now, and I say now only because... Originally, our software was really targeted at the workload space, meaning either data center or cloud workloads or both. Many of our customers run very heterogeneous infrastructure environments where they've got things in data centers that they've been running for years, but they equally have things in AWS and Azure and maybe Google Cloud as well. And our architecture allows us to segment workloads in all those places or across all those places. More recently, we extended the platform out to now run on endpoint estates as well, literally laptops, desktops, the things that people like you and I work on every day. But ultimately, this is about where I started, which is we wanted to build a software platform that allows our customers to be able to deliver real zero-trust segmentation. And the mission, the goal, the value proposition is very simple. In the event that one asset, a laptop, an endpoint, a workload were to be compromised, we want to make sure that the attack surface is not every other asset in the environment. And so obviously, in the most extreme version of segmentation, you would essentially segment everything off from everything else. Obviously, security and operations are always going to have to find ways to work with one another. And perfect security is probably not achievable because it would get or make operations so difficult that you wouldn't want to go there. At the same time, we don't want to be so agile and move so quickly that nothing's secure. So what we've done is we've built a software platform that allows our customers to segment in a way that significantly reduces risk, allows them to isolate or segment or compartmentalize their most valuable or riskiest assets, but do it in a way that's agile do it in a way that works across their cloud data center and endpoint estates through literally a single pane of glass, but also do it in a way that doesn't get in the way of their operations. And finding that balance is what we've been working with our customers and our partners on for now six and a half years in market. And as a result of that, we've got what we believe to be some of, if not the largest segmentation deployments in the world. We run on, in a number of customers, well over 100,000 workloads across data center and cloud estates. And so our job is to be able to walk into a customer, whether they've got 20 workloads or 200,000 workloads, and be able to say, we can help you to quickly and efficiently reduce risk through zero trust segmentation and do it without bringing your operations to a crawl or having to rebuild your entire infrastructure and operating model to get there.
Todd Gallina:Andrew, that's great. You really paint a vivid picture around the segmentation piece. And I got to thank you because your two words that describe zero trust as assume breach. As a marketing guy, I haven't heard that one. And we've been, Trace3 has been asked to describe that quite a bit. Tony mentioned, how do you buy it? But well said and well described. Hey, let's step away from the company. You've done a great job talking about the industry and the company that you started here. And if you don't mind, I'd love to talk a little bit about you. Can you maybe share with our listeners what in your background made you think you could get into this whole entrepreneurial thing around advising folks on funding companies and then, geez, starting a company on your own?
Andrew Rubin:Yeah, you know, it's not a straight line. In other words, I think one of the things about being an entrepreneur is that there's something that's sort of There's something inside of you that just convinces you that this is something that you need to do, that you want to do. But there's a word, and I know it often comes up in any conversation about entrepreneurship in any setting, which is something that you're passionate about. And I always, at least my compass, what guided me was always trying to remember that passion matters. is non-negotiable. In other words, you really do have to be passionate in particular about being an entrepreneur and certainly about starting a company. There is a but to that though, which is passion doesn't carry you through everything. You still need to understand the market you're going to operate in. You have to understand why your product is unique and better than your competition. You need to understand if you have product market fit. And as passionate as I am about cybersecurity and certainly about Illumio, I also want to balance that with data and I want to analyze that data and I want to learn from it. And when we do things well, we want to figure that out and we want to step on the gas and do it faster and do more of it. And equally, when we do something and it doesn't work, we want to understand very quickly what was the assumption that led us astray and what do we do to go fix that and get it right or do it better next time. And so there's some balance between being incredibly passionate that drives you but then also being very data-driven and very much willing to confront reality and be realistic about the wins and the losses and what's working and what's broken. And I think somehow when you blend those things together, you end up with a very powerful result. And the best way I've heard it said, and I definitely believe that it's a fair description for me, is there's a difference in being an optimist and being an optimistic realist And I think really incredible entrepreneurs somehow are more optimistic realists than they are purely optimists. And I try and remind myself of that. And that's the balance that I've tried to achieve. And I think it goes all the way back to the beginning of Illumia. Obviously, there was a real recognition that there was an opportunity to build a different cyber company, but there was also enough desire to understand the reality of what we were walking into for PJ and I, that it wasn't just, hey, we're really passionate and excited. Let's go do something. It was what's really going on. Where is the hole in cybersecurity? Why has it not been filled? If we try and fill it, can we do it? Will it work? Can the product really scale? What is our competitive landscape going to look like? And that's all the realism that I think you have to have along the way to actually execute and build the company.
Tony Olzak:Andrew, you've had experience as a fundraising or a startup consultant as well. Did that give you the insight into successes and pivots or even failures maybe that you've seen over the years in order to make it easier to found something like Illumio and then ultimately even secure your first round of funding?
Andrew Rubin:Yeah. I mean, I think that You know, if you put on the advisor hat as opposed to the CEO hat or the founder CEO hat, I think in a lot of ways you're leaning on those exact same disciplines. In other words, the companies that I'm lucky enough to spend time with, we're advising them. And a lot of times it is around sort of all the things that I've been living through at Illumio. And maybe I'm just a step or two ahead of the CEO that I'm spending time with, not 10 or 20 or 50 steps ahead. But even just a step or two ahead means that I have a little bit of perspective that they don't have yet. And a lot of times when it comes to fundraising, the same conversations I'm having with them are the ones that I had with my mentors and advisors where I was asking questions like, well, how do we position the company? And how do we understand the market that we're in? And Are we being realistic about the assumptions in the plan? Because anybody can sort of throw a bunch of things in slides, but then you got to get up and you got to talk to it. You have to defend it when people who are, quite frankly, very smart and very, very experienced at going through this. In other words, the investors on the other side of the table, like what happens when they start asking questions, not even based on your slides, but on the hundreds of companies they've been involved with and the pattern recognition they're able to do as a result. have we really thought through our assumptions? And have we essentially turned the table on ourself before walking in the room in order to try and poke holes in our own story? And so a lot of times when I'm having those conversations wearing my advisor hat, all I'm doing is reminding them of the things I've gone through and really passing down information and knowledge that I collected from mentors who did it for me along the way as well. And the same is true, by the way, we talk about it in the context of fundraising. But you can imagine that when I'm having a CEO to CEO conversation, we're a lot of times living the same things. We're talking about fundraising. We're talking about hiring an executive team. We're talking about culture. There's a set of things that we're obviously all spending a lot of time on. And it doesn't matter if the company is 40 people where we were a number of years ago, 400 or so people where we are today. And you can imagine I'm leaning on my mentors saying, look, what do I need to be thinking about when we're a thousand people or twenty five hundred people, hopefully a couple of years from now? And so in a lot of ways, I sort of think about it in the exact same context as an advisor.
Todd Gallina:It sounds like, you know, you walked in there and you handed them the pitch and then they read it over and they looked at each other and said, he's thought of everything. Let's just give him all the money he wants.
Andrew Rubin:That is the exact antithesis of how it really happens. I'm sure there is an entrepreneur somewhere that you're going to have on this podcast that's going to tell you, no, that's exactly what happened to me. It's just not going to be me today.
Todd Gallina:It's funny. We kind of had one like that. But double-clicking on this a little bit about your exposure beforehand, we're going to be having Amir from Menlo. And you were involved with them early in advising their company, Does this give you a leg up on potentially finding the right people to build your founding team?
Andrew Rubin:Yeah, you know, first of all, I'm thrilled to find out that you're going to be talking to Amir and Menlo. It's an amazing company. And quite honestly, I remember chatting with Amir and picking his brain very early on in Illumio's life because he's a repeat entrepreneur. and a repeat successful entrepreneur. And he's got an incredible team as well. And I'm lucky enough to have spent some time with some of them as well. I think that that is the perfect example of sharing in all directions. And the reason I say that is I'm obviously going to share anything I can with them that helps them to build Menlo. And I'm equally going to ask Amir and some of the folks on his team that I know well, Hey, what about this? I heard you guys are working with this particular customer. Not can you introduce me to them? Those are easy questions. But what do I need to know about the nuance of what they care about? Talk to me about how you got this channel partner excited about your story. Because my story is different. So I have to go do the same thing. But you know them and I don't. And there's all this little nuance and context that we have the ability to share back and forth. And I think it's wonderful. And so it happens to be a story I know and a team that I've been lucky enough to spend time with, but it happens all the time. I think you find that CEOs and entrepreneurs are constantly trading notes and constantly asking each other for advice. And sometimes it's on very big and important things. And quite honestly, a lot of times it's just, hey, I want to pick your brain on this for five minutes. It's one of my favorite parts of my job is that I've got a network and hopefully I'm part of other people's network where we can sort of help each other out along the way.
Tony Olzak:Hey, Andrew, on that note, you know, we've had different people on the podcast who have, you know, come from different backgrounds and are in different stages of where they are today. How early in your journey, because we've heard a lot of people say, you know, something effective like, hey, you should go out there and try to do as much as possible before you seek funding. And, you know, before you do X, Y, and Z, like, get your idea out there, go do testing. How early in that process should someone seek out advice from someone like yourself or an advisor or someone like yourself? And then if they're early stage and they haven't necessarily developed a mature network, what's the best way to go about doing it?
Andrew Rubin:So two separate questions there, and I'm going to pull them apart, hopefully to answer both. So first of all, in terms of when, it's literally never too early. There's obviously different ways to do this. And if you're asking the specific question around, well, when is the right time to form an advisory board? When is the right time to put together a more formal group? Maybe that's a little bit later on. You may not need to do that on day one. But if you're asking the question, when is the right time to go ask people who are smarter than you, more experienced than you, who have been through what you're trying to go through? When is the right time to ask them for advice, help? just to talk to them, it is literally never too early. I'm a huge believer in it. I have a mentor network that I've spent now years building, and some of whom I talk to literally weekly or even daily in some cases, maybe not every day, but that type of cadence. Others who I may check in with once a quarter or even less frequently. But there was never a moment where I said, the company is now this size, this stage, this scale. Now I should go ask people for help or advice. I think you could start before day one and it's to your benefit to do it. So I think that's sort of the mindset that you adopt. And the other question around, well, how do you do it? You know, it sounds funny, but there's a really simple answer to it. Talk to everybody, talk to people. In other words, if you're a founder, CEO, and you're lucky enough to be able to raise money from, let's say, a venture capital firm, You've already got a network built. You just haven't accessed it yet because that venture capital firm has funded lots of other companies, all of whom have a founder and a CEO, sometimes a founder CEO. But there's a network of people there, some of whom are probably further along in the journey than you are. Go ask. Go ask the VC. Go ask the venture capitalists and say, hey, can you connect me to a couple of CEOs? I'd love to get to know them. Obviously, pre-COVID, a lot of this happened much more organically because there would be conferences and events that tended to pull all of us together. And it seems like that's starting to happen again. I certainly know my calendar for the back half of this year is starting to look very different than my calendar for the past year. But even over Zoom and over WebEx and over Teams for the last year plus now, I've still stayed in touch with all my mentors. I've still managed to get online and spend time with them. So Find a way to do it. But the answer is don't put a lot of work into figuring out how to do it. Just go talk to people. And the one thing I will tell you, and I believe this very, very deeply, I certainly have been lucky enough to live it myself. If you're hesitant or you're worried that the person that you reach out to and say, hey, I'd love to say hello. I'd love to pick your brain. You're a few steps ahead of me in my journey. If you're worried that their answer is going to be, no, I don't have time, I can't promise you that that won't happen to you, but I can certainly tell you that it will be the minority of the responses, not the majority, because everybody who's on this journey has somebody who helped them along the way, and those people remember that, they value it enormously, and they absolutely love even the prospect, even the potential of of paying it forward and doing it for somebody else. And so I know it sounds really easy and I know it's probably a bit of a surprise that the best answer I have is just go talk to people. But that truly is my answer is just pick up the phone, get online or meet somebody for a cup of coffee. And I think you'd be very surprised at how it all works.
Todd Gallina:It sounds like mostly people just got to get over their fear of reaching out to others because I think you're right. I think inherently... People want to help one another. And as you said, pay it forward. You just got to be able to push that button. That's great advice.
Tony Olzak:Yeah, a rapper, when I was living in LA, a rapper friend of mine once summed it up by saying, a closed mouth don't get fed. So don't be afraid to ask.
Andrew Rubin:That is definitely a much more elegant and eloquent way of saying it, but I couldn't agree more with the sentiment.
Todd Gallina:That's just Tony's way of saying his network is filled with rappers. He's trying to impress everybody here. Hey, Andrew, tell us a little bit about developing culture at Illumio. How do you guys do it? What's important to you?
Andrew Rubin:Yeah, I mean, I think that a lot of times, you know, people talk about culture as if it is this thing unto itself. In other words, that somehow there's culture. And then there's everything else. I don't believe that. I think that these things are all intertwined. The company has a mission, which is to help our customers to realize the future without high profile breaches. Notice again, back to our earlier conversation, we don't say that our mission is to stop breaches. We don't say that our mission is to prevent all bad things from happening. We believe in a zero trust world that the first step is acknowledging that these things are going to happen. So there's lots of great companies out there trying to minimize the number of times that they happen, our job is to prevent them from becoming catastrophes. And so the only reason why I start there, even though the question is about culture, is I think when you share a mission, if you get 400 people together, as we have, all of whom are rowing in the same direction, passionate about a mission, in our case, to help our customers to be safer and more secure, I think that the culture in a lot of ways almost becomes embedded in that, right? There's this shared mission. There's a shared set of goals for sure. And then there's obviously very much alignment around what do we need to do to get there? What do we need to do to build a sustainable, durable, successful, valuable company? But all of it's only going to ultimately come from one thing, which is let's make our customers really successful and help to keep them safer than they otherwise would be if we didn't exist. And so certainly we make a real investment in culture. Our people team does an incredible job of making sure, especially through the pandemic, that people felt very much connected and in touch, that despite all being at home now for, I don't know, about 16 months, that we kept the community of Illumio together. But ultimately, I don't think that culture is this thing in a box off to the side by itself. I've never believed that it's about the meals that we provide or the t-shirts that we may or may not give out. It really is sort of about why are we all doing this? And why are we on this journey together? And what is it that we really want to build together? And so if you start with a mission that everybody cares deeply about, if you're realistic about the goals necessary to achieve that mission, I think very quickly the culture becomes not a byproduct of it, but it becomes a part of that. And so now the company is eight and a half years old. We've been in market for about six and a half years. I still think we're an infant, but let's just say that we're an infant that's growing up. I think that our culture is very much a reflection of what we care about and why we get up in the morning and do this every day. And I guess the one thing I would say is that certainly the CEO's job, but really the entire leadership team's job is just to make sure that we remind everybody of these things, that we make sure that they remain at the forefront. But also equally, or maybe even more importantly, as people join the company, especially as it scales, it becomes more globally distributed, that the people who are joining understand why we all feel the way we do, why we're so passionate, what our mission is. And the best way to really make sure that the culture is part of the company is to make sure that as you build the company and new people join the company, that you share it openly and that people understand where the company is coming from and how it got here. and why it's important for us to do this going forward. And obviously during the pandemic, we've had to work a lot harder to make sure that those communications and those stories and that passion can be seen through because we're not all in a building together or a few buildings together around the world. We're really very much sitting at home disconnected in a lot of ways. But I think we've all learned that it can be done and it's a critical part of the company's success.
Tony Olzak:Yeah, great advice. I was just talking to a gentleman the other day who... did a stint at a very well-known tech company. And the comment he made was, we were losing hundreds of millions of dollars, but we sure had some great clothing, branded t-shirts and jackets. And I think sometimes it does get lost on people that this isn't just something that just happens in a box on the side. It has to be intertwined into the business and what you believe and the kind of people you recruit right out of the gate.
Andrew Rubin:Yeah, I mean, and that's one of the reasons why I made the comment I did about, you know, there's so many pieces of the puzzle that get put together to build a company. And I don't want to in any way, shape or form sort of say, here's the list and these things are important and these things are not. Because first of all, they're different for every company and every organization. But I think when we talk about our mission, when we talk about the culture of the company, it's just those things that you mentioned are not really on the list. In other words, They may be on a different list. And by the way, they may be important on a different list. But when we talk about our mission, our mission is to protect our customers. We want to be really clear about those things because I think that's what gets people, quite frankly, to sign up for the journey. I think it's what gets them passionate and excited to be on the journey. It's what keeps them on the journey. And so I think it's just incredibly important to be very clear about all these things, right? And that's why I don't in any way, shape or form look at it through the lens of there's only one right answer for any of these questions. Every company finds a way to navigate their own journey. But I do think when you talk about things like mission, there should be no confusion, right? Our mission is not to raise a series F round. Our mission is not about how many employees we have. These are all artifacts of us doing what's important, which is let's build great software and make the customers successful using it. And if we really nail it, then what's going to happen is we're going to protect our customers and keep people and companies safe as a result. And if we get that right, all these other things become very important artifacts along the way of us building a successful company.
Tony Olzak:Yeah, it's a great mission too. I mean, one that's critical to the health of the economy and the health of the world and securing people's lives in general. So I applaud you guys for having a great one. When you think about that space, Andrew, we've been tracking out of our research and innovation teams, hundreds of startups that do different kinds of things. You talked earlier about market fits. Do you track your competition at all? Do you even feel like you have competition in what you guys are trying to do?
Andrew Rubin:Yeah, absolutely. There's no doubt about it. One of the things that we talk a lot about nowadays at Illumio is the fact that our competitive landscape has changed very dramatically, even over the last year or so. You know, one of the things about being a zero trust segmentation company is that eight and a half years ago when we started the company, the word zero trust barely existed and certainly were not buzzy the way they are today. And segmentation literally didn't exist. I mean, nobody used the word. Firewall was the closest thing that you could find. Obviously, firewalls haven't been around for a long time. But segmentation as a concept and certainly segmentation delivered in software really was not in existence. And so one of the things that I used to say often to the team is, we know we're early. We're probably even earlier than we realized in the market. But don't ever think that because you don't have competition, that means that somehow you figured out something really great. And that that's going to last. And the reason I say that is every real market, every important market, and certainly every market of size and scale has competition. There's a reason why there's lots of different auto manufacturers. There's a reason why there's lots of different EDR companies, by the way, if you want to bring it closer to home. Segmentation didn't have a really robust competitive landscape. Because segmentation was a very, very early market when we got there. Perhaps it was even in formation. I don't know if I could differentiate that literally, but it was certainly very early. And so over the last couple of years, really, literally, and I say a couple, not generically, over the last one to three years, we've seen a very dramatic change in the competitive landscape. And although there is a list and I could go through them one by one and certainly do comparison contrasts on all of them, I'm sure that's not necessarily the best use of the podcast time. What I will tell you is this. It is very, very, in a very, what may seem like a very strange way, it's very, very good in my eyes to see a robust competitive landscape. Sure, it makes our job harder day in and day out in that we now have to go out and we have to compete in order to win business. Sure, it means that within the channel partner community, we have to work that much harder now to make sure that they understand why our solution is the best for their customers, including some very large incumbents that they may have very large businesses built with already in other areas besides zero trust and segmentation. But the reason why it's such a great thing to see the competitive landscape heat up so much is not because of Illumio, not because of our competitors, and not even because of our channel partners. It's because what it means is that customers are now vocalizing their need for zero trust segmentation. Companies don't decide to enter a market just because they wake up in the morning and say, let's go do it. It'll be interesting. They do it, especially when they have an existing business that's not in that market. They do it predominantly because their customers say, I need this and I need you to do it for me. And so for Illumia, we started the company to do this. This was our clean sheet of paper. We built the entire company around zero trust segmentation. It is essentially our mission. It is also our bet. For some of our competitors, they've been in business for years, and in some cases, decades, doing many other things very successfully. But they're hearing from their customers what we're hearing from ours, which is we need this and we need it now. And so I actually think the fact that the competitive landscape has gotten much more real, that it's gone from a couple of competitors to a robust list of Although, as I said, it makes the day-to-day job a little bit tougher. It's an enormous validation of the need for zero trust segmentation. It's a good thing for us. It's a good thing for our competitors. But most importantly, it's a good thing for the customers.
Tony Olzak:Well said. Awesome. Well, Andrew, looking out beyond, what comes for you next? When you think about the future and other ideas or things you'd like to do later in life, we heard that you were an investor even in women's fashion. Tell us more about Tory Burch.
Andrew Rubin:Yeah, I know you can't see me right now, but I'm smiling as you said that because just hearing the words, you were an investor in women's fashion, immediately makes me sort of smile. And to be honest, makes me laugh because it implies I know anything at all about women's fashion. And I assure you, I don't. But I do think that it's a really great anecdote about investing because When I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to invest in Tory Burch, it was truly, literally two people in what we would all sort of call a garage. In this case, it was an apartment in New York City. So the founders of the company were Chris and Tory Burch, and I was lucky enough to know both of them way back when they started the company. And I am very serious when I say I know absolutely nothing about women's fashion. It's been about 15 years. I've learned a tiny, minuscule little bit. I think we could still call it nothing. But what I did was I took a bet on people. Chris had had a background in fashion and had been in the business for a long time. Tori equally had been in the business, albeit a different part of it. But they're two spectacular entrepreneurs. And it was just obvious that they were passionate about what they were starting. They were excited about the space they were in. They were knowledgeable about the space they were in. And so for me, as a potential investor, You could say I truly took the bet on Tory Burch, but the reality is I took the bet on Chris and Tory as entrepreneurs. And it was the first investment I ever made like that, you know, in truly an early stage, or in this case, it really was a true startup. We were all incredibly lucky to be a part of the Tory Burch ride. They've built an incredible global brand and company. But it was also a real reminder about at the end of the day, all of this falls down to betting on people. That's really what it is. Whether you're manufacturing women's clothes or you're building cybersecurity software, ultimately at the end of the day, it's a team that gets up every day. They're passionate about what they do. They go to work. It helps if they're experienced. It really helps if they're the best in the business that they're in. But there's no doubt about it that it does start with the people and it ends with the people. And so I feel so fortunate that I was able to invest in the company. that I was able to go for the ride and be on the journey with them. And I still speak to them today. And I can't tell you how proud I am of what they built. It's incredible.
Todd Gallina:It's a great bookend to this whole conversation because it goes back to you investing in people, but people who have a ton of passion. And you mentioned earlier, passion is non-negotiable, but doesn't carry you through everything. And it sounds like the Tory Burch experience is another example of that.
Andrew Rubin:It definitely is. I'll just pile on for one quick second and say I literally remember sitting with them as they were putting together the beginnings of the company. And of course, a little bit of funding they raised to get it off the ground. The passion was obvious. But, you know, the comment around having the expertise, you know, the realism, as I described it. that combination was truly, I mean, it was the secret sauce. And so, you know, that may be part of the reason why I'm so passionate about that point of view is because I was lucky enough to see it many years ago in what Chris and Tori did and how they brought the right perspective, experience, and resources to the table, and then narrow it up with a desire to go out and completely change the fashion world. And here we are 15 years later, or a little bit more than that, and we can all see what happens when you get it right.
Todd Gallina:Oh, for sure. Huge brand. Tory Burch is so nice and a very high-end brand that I went big and bought my wife some Tory Burch flip-flops for Christmas. That's the type of guy I am.
Andrew Rubin:Well, I'll say thank you on behalf of the company for doing it. I actually remember standing in their store in Nolita in New York, which was the very first store they opened on Elizabeth Street, if I remember correctly. And I remember walking in for the first time after the store opened, and believe it or not, the very first item I picked up was a pair of flip-flops. And it was a long time ago, but I remember it as if it was yesterday, because obviously... You know, some of these moments get sort of indelibly imprinted on you when you look back and realize what that moment was at the time was so incidental. But look at what was built as a result of that. And so I remember standing there with the flip-flops in my hand.
Tony Olzak:And for anyone out there listening, wondering about flip-flops for Christmas and Todd's story, flip-flops for Christmas is a very SoCal thing to do. So congratulations, Todd.
Todd Gallina:It also kept me from having to buy a purse. They're expensive. But anyways, hey, Andrew, this has been incredible. Is there anything else that we didn't cover that you'd like to share with our audience?
Andrew Rubin:You know, there's only one last thing, and I'd be remiss if I didn't do my day job for at least a quick second. You gave me the window, so I am going to take the opportunity. I was actually speaking to a group a couple of weeks ago, and at the very end of the conversation, somebody asked the question, not an unusual one, actually, around cybersecurity. But they asked the question very specifically, what is our biggest cyber challenge today? And just given the conversation that we had had, which was really focused on cyber and zero trust, it wasn't really about entrepreneurship or company building. I think that the expectation was that my answer was going to be something around, we need a different technology platform, customers need to segment more. And that was not where my answer went. And to be honest, it wasn't a prepped question. So I really had sort of the knee-jerk answer. And my knee-jerk answer at the time over the last couple of weeks, I've decided to adopt it as what I really believe to be the single biggest challenge cyber faces today, which is we need to change our mindset. And the only reason why I bring that up at the conclusion is because, like I said, it is part of my day job, but it's equally something that I'm very passionate about. We are living our entire lives connected, and it's not changing. If anything, we're going to find ways to connect even more than we are today because And I know that seems impossible, but trust me, give us time, we'll figure it out. We've essentially created the largest attack surface in the history of humankind. And I think the minute that we wake up and we say, we're going to really work hard to protect it, but we're equally going to acknowledge that at times it will be taken advantage of. I think that shift in mindset is as important or more important than any product that gets built or any product that gets bought to protect ourselves. And so I'm just really imploring everybody from a CIO to a CISO to a board member to an individual who goes to work every day to just say, look, accept the reality that breaches happen. Don't be happy about it, but accept it because it's real and it's not going to stop ever again. And let's build a cyber strategy that protects us in every way that's required in that world. And that requires us to do something that people are terrible at doing, which is acknowledging that sometimes we fail. We talked a lot about entrepreneurship today. One of the most important qualities of an entrepreneur is acknowledging failure. As a matter of fact, not only acknowledging it, but just being comfortable with it. Well, in cyber, it's time that we acknowledge that we're going to fail. We are going to miss, there are going to be breaches and we have to be okay with that. And our job is to protect ourselves in all ways. And so I just feel very strongly about that being a thread. And just given the conversation around entrepreneurship, I actually think the two are a lot more related than people realize.
Tony Olzak:So well said. Thanks for the message, Andrew. I think it's needed. Your advice is great. Appreciate you sharing with us today. You've been amazing to have on the show. Congrats again on the Series F funding and wish you guys tremendous luck for the future. Very excited to see where you go next and what happens with Illumio.
Andrew Rubin:Really appreciate you guys having me. It was such a pleasure to do it. And thank you again. Thanks, Andrew.
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