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
Chris Kirsch - Co-Founder of runZero
This Founder has some surprising additional talents outside of founding a company that’s raised $20 million in VC funding to hunt for networked devices. After helping several start-up brands market their solutions, Chris Kirsch joined the founding team of runZero and is currently the company’s CEO.
In addition to a fun round of “fact or fiction,” The Founder Formula co-hosts Todd Gallina and Sandy Salty talked with Chris about, the evolution of a winning name for a company, developing a culture, mindful growth, and celebrating client wins.
Listen to this and all of The Founder Formula episodes through your favorite podcast platform or Trace3.com.
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.
Todd Gallina:Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. My name is Todd Galena and with me is the Chief Marketing Officer at Trace3, Sandy Salty.
Sandy Salty:Hey Todd, how are you?
Todd Gallina:Doing great, doing great. We've reached the end of the year. This is our final podcast for the year and you've been riding shotgun here for the last bunch of episodes. Does co-hosting suit you?
Sandy Salty:I think it's so much fun and love, love partnering with you on this. You're like the best co-host ever. I would say the only thing that's a bit cringy is just having to hear my voice. Like when we, when I play it back, you know, sort of like seeing a video of yourself or like hearing, hearing your voice back is always a little bit uncomfortable.
Todd Gallina:Yeah. Like in your head, you're like, Oh, my question was so great. Or my response was so well thought. And then you, you listen to it and you're like, Oh my gosh, all I did was like stumble over my own words for five minutes.
Sandy Salty:Am I even speaking English? I don't know.
Todd Gallina:You sound like, Exactly the same when I'm listening to the podcast as you do here in the recording
Sandy Salty:studio. Well, thank you and I apologize at the same time. I'm glad I'm not catfishing anybody.
Todd Gallina:That's funny. Okay. So this next guest that we're having on, this fellow talks about some crazy stuff. He talks about seeing a psychic.
Sandy Salty:Totally.
Todd Gallina:He talks about pickpocketing. So I have a question for you.
Sandy Salty:Sure.
Todd Gallina:Have you ever seen a psychic?
Sandy Salty:I have not. Have you?
Todd Gallina:No, no. I'm scared of them. They're scary people. Like they got like the little thing on their head and like the ball in front of them. Right? That's what they do. I
Sandy Salty:mean, yeah. The whole concept's a little scary, like being able to kind of, I mean, whether it's real or not, but like seeing into the future is a little scary. But the funny thing about this episode, Todd, is that like those topics like psychic and pickpocketing feel very, very far away from technology to me. Like on one end of the spectrum, you have like technology and science. And on the other end of the spectrum, you have science. Psychics.
Todd Gallina:Yeah. Psychics. Magic. Yeah. Exactly. In a science fiction movie, it's like for crazy things to happen, you either need like a ton of science or a ton of magic.
Sandy Salty:Totally. And what makes this founder so much fun is that he is well-rounded. Like, he's an incredible technology mind and, frankly, an incredible marketing mind as well, we've learned. Yeah. But also, like, a super fun conversationalist. Like, he's the kind of guy you want to invite to a party, to a dinner.
Todd Gallina:Yeah. I mean, if you're sitting... Standing around people and you're like, hey man, so I just got back from seeing a psychic. Everyone's going to want to hear what you say next, right?
Sandy Salty:Or I spent months learning the art of pickpocketing. Everyone wants to hear that story. He was a lot of fun.
Todd Gallina:Yeah, he was great. So are you ready to get into
Sandy Salty:it? Yeah, let's roll.
Todd Gallina:Okay. Okay, our guest has a passion for social engineering and open source intelligence tools. He earned the black badge for winning the social engineering capture the flag competition at DEF CON, the world's largest hacker conference. As a product marketeer, he made stops at PGP, Rapid7, and Veracode. Most recently, he co-founded RunZero, a company built to help enterprises solve their asset inventory challenges. I'd like to give a warm Founder Formula welcome to Chris Kirsch. Chris, welcome.
Chris Kirsch:Thank you for having me. And I'm honored to be a marketeer and not a marketer. It sounds
Sandy Salty:much more fancy. I'm glad you were the one to point that out, Robbie. So, Chris, we'll start with the most important thing first. Please tell us about Run Zero and why you started it.
Chris Kirsch:Sure. So RunZero is a cyber asset management company. So those are fancy words. Essentially, what we do is we help people understand what's connected to the network. So asset inventory, IT, OT, so operational technology, anything from IoT devices to manufacturing environments to healthcare, biomedical devices. We do that on premise, in the cloud, working from home and so on. So just giving you a really good overview of what's connected. And the reason that's important is because you can't really start building a security program before you have inventoried, before you know what you have, right? So a lot of our customers just start with that and then build their security program or they're much further along actually in most cases and then realize, oh, you know, we're missing a lot of stuff on our network and it's hurting us.
Unknown:Yeah.
Sandy Salty:Sure. How do you know? You can't know how to protect something if you don't know that it's there.
Chris Kirsch:Yeah, correct. Yeah. Yeah. And so this is actually a problem that's been around for such a long time. My co-founder is HD Moore. He's the creator of Metasploit. And we met a few years ago, quite a few years ago at Rapid7. It was probably about 2010, maybe. And he had just been acquired with the Metasploit project to join Rapid7 They wanted somebody to take care of the go-to-market. It was the second product that the Rapid7 brought to market after Nexpo's, the vulnerability scanner. And so we started working together and so on, really liked each other. And one of the things we kept hearing from customers was, you know, all of these products you have are great products. but we don't even know what we have on our network, right? And that was true then, and it's still true today. And so after we went separate ways, HD and I, I went to Veracode, did product marketing for them, and he went off and did some pen testing and some other things. And this really stuck in both of our minds. And he then actually sat down and said, all right, how do we solve this problem? Because it's still unsolved today. When you think about it, when you talk to customers, then they have an asset inventory. It's not that they have nothing, but the asset inventory they have is all their managed devices. It's the stuff that they get through their EDR agents or maybe through a vulnerability scan and so on. But number one, these kind of approaches aren't made for asset inventory. They don't give you the right data. And number two, they only tell you about your managed devices. So devices that you can either install an agent on or log onto. And when you ask practitioners why they're worried about their asset inventory, it's the unmanaged devices, the stuff that they don't know about, that they don't have credentials for, that they might not even be able to log on to, like some logic controller on a floor or something else, the HVAC system, whatever it is, somewhere in the corner. Those are the things that keep them up at night. So HD took his expertise that he had from building Metasploit where he, and for, you know, I'm not going to assume that everybody in your audience knows Metasploit, so maybe I should just talk about that. So Metasploit is a network penetration testing tool. It's an open source tool that pretty much every network penetration tester out there probably has in their tool set. And so when you pen test a network, you need to first figure out what's there, like where devices are on the network, and then you need to fingerprint those devices so you know what they are, and then you can start attacking them. So HD took that expertise of enumerating a network and then fingerprinting devices and applied that expertise to asset inventory. So he doesn't, you know, in the same sense that a pen tester knows nothing about the network and doesn't have credentials, Run Zero also starts out that way. And so this is the... the active scan that we started out with, and then now we're layering a lot more stuff on top of that. So integrations with your volume scanners, with your EDR, with your Active Directory, with your Google Suite and so on, Google Workspace, it's now called. And all of that gives you a really rich inventory of all the stuff that you have everywhere.
Sandy Salty:That's an awesome overview. Thank you so much. We want to switch gears with you, Chris, and we ask you to indulge us in a little game of fact or fiction. Are you up for the challenge?
Chris Kirsch:I think I'm here now, so I guess I
Sandy Salty:am. Okay, Todd, do you want to pick it up?
Todd Gallina:I would love to. Okay, so fact or fiction... Chris, Run Zero was not always called Run Zero.
Chris Kirsch:That is correct. That is fact, yes. We started out with the name Rumble. And so this is a founder podcast, so I'll go back to the roots. So basically, actually... Before Rumble, it was called Critical Research Corporation was the company name. Whoa,
Todd Gallina:what's wrong with
Chris Kirsch:that? Yeah, right? And then HD said, yeah, we need a better marketing name. And I found a name, Rumble. It means to search. And it's kind of a good way to allude to the fact that we do active scanning and so on. And I'm able to get Rumble.run, but not Rumble.com. That's a different company. But they have nothing to do with what we do. And the trademarks are clear. And so I'm like, oh, Naming is really hard. Rumble is really good to remember. And this other site was a video hosting site. And I'm like, okay, there is no room for confusion there, so that's fine. There's other things that share the same trademark, like Dove ice cream and Dove soap, and people don't confuse them, or hopefully they don't, because they would be in for a surprise. And so I said, you know, go ahead, and that was my first error in judgment. And then this other website gained more and more attraction to the point that they decided that they were going to go public on the NASDAQ. And I thought, ooh, now... And that's not good because, you know, founder's dream is always like, hey, maybe we'll be on the NASDAQ one day. And, you know, chances of that are usually pretty slim if you look at the stats. But still, if another company is public on the NASDAQ, it's a tech company and so on, then you have a big, a much bigger gap. chance of confusion so we wanted to sidestep that problem and so we went out and looked for a new name um that was a a hard road to go down on because we wanted a dot com so we don't have the same problem again we want to clean trademarks and so on we also didn't want to spend too much money so actually we should put this in the show notes i wrote up a four-part blog post yes on on exactly like how we did it and and the the pitfalls and some of the tools and some of the you know techniques and so on. So not light reading, but if you are trying to name your company, that's why I put it together. That's why I put together the blog series. If you're trying to name a company as a founder or if you have to rebrand, I think there hopefully might be some good tips for you in there.
Todd Gallina:That's fascinating. So the four-part blog is specifically around the efforts you guys put into a new name for your company.
Chris Kirsch:Yes, yes. It walks you through exactly like the methodology, all the dead ends we went into and troubles that we had and so on. It was very, very painful. It was very painful. We're very happy with the new name now, but I don't want to do this again.
Todd Gallina:Yeah, no. Well, you had to do it in almost a two-year window, if I'm accurate, right? You launched in 18 and then, okay, got it. Wow.
Sandy Salty:I feel like we just gave... rumble.com free advertising.
Todd Gallina:Yes.
Sandy Salty:I don't know how I feel about
Todd Gallina:that. Do you need video hosting?
Chris Kirsch:Yeah. So our company is Run Zero, not Rumble, right? Just for clarity.
Sandy Salty:Thank you for clarifying that. And what's the significance of Run Zero, Chris, if you could?
Chris Kirsch:Sure. Yeah. So, you know, we had started out with active scanning and we we had added more dimensions to the asset inventory because people now also have, you know, for a while they've had workloads in the cloud and they're working from home and like all of these things. And so if you want to get after those kinds of assets, then integrations with cloud providers and integrations with security tooling and so on is really important. And so we felt that, you know, a, a, brand name that is just a connotation for search is no longer like, you know, it's where we come from. It's a big differentiation, but it's not really the essence of what we do anymore. And so we wanted to talk about how easy it is to get it up and running, how fast you get results and so on. So Run Zero kind of embodies that feeling. And yeah, if you, for example, if you had started to, you know, signed up for the trial, that we have on our website and started to scan your home network, which is where a lot of companies actually start, like an individual downloads it and tries it out on their home network, then brings it to work. If you'd started that at the top of the podcast, you probably would already have an idea of what's on their network right now because it's that quick and easy to set up. So we wanted to embody that in the name as well.
Sandy Salty:Very cool. Well, I am about to ask you another fact or fiction, and I can assure you that I have never asked a previous founder this question, and I suspect I will never ask this question again. Fact or fiction, you have a fascination with con artistry and even studied pickpocketing at some point.
Chris Kirsch:That is correct. Yeah, so I'm trying to pick up all of the skills that you might see in your average heist movie. It's kind of like a weird side hobby. And the pickpocketing, that started when my dad got pickpocketed next to me on the metro in Paris. And I was there and I kind of had an idea of who it was. But I didn't know, like, how are you supposed to react after that? How can you prove it? And then how do you prevent it? And that was quite interesting, but it's actually surprisingly hard. And then I got into another thing, which was much more interesting, which is how do you actually pickpocket? And so I went down that route. And I found some resources, but not a ton. And I thought, hey, this would make a really fun talk for a security conference. So I signed up. I submitted an abstract to the Layer 8 conference, which is social engineers and OSINT and so on. It's a fun bunch of people, not only the talks, but also to hang out with them over a beer and hear the stories. And I decided I'd give a talk on pickpocketing because I'd researched enough for a theoretical talk. And this was the morning of RSA conference. I was flying in from the East Coast and I got up early, wrote the abstract and then went to the conference. And I was walking up and down the aisles and there was a magician. And I'm like, oh, I've got a couple of minutes. I'm going to stop and watch that magician. And he started to pickpocket me. I'm like, oh, this is cool. So afterwards, I asked him when his show was over. And I'm like, hey, I have a weird question. And you might not be comfortable answering this, but can you show me some resources on where I can learn this stuff? And he's like, oh, well, you know, there's this and that and so on. But he was giving me like Joe Navarro body language kind of advice. And so I'm like, I've read those, but they're not really about pickpocketing. So like, give me the real stuff. And he's like, well, and then I asked him, do you want to go out for dinner tonight? I'll pay you for dinner. I'll pay you drinks, whatever you like, wherever you like. I would just love to chat. And he's like, well, I can't give out my name because of my agent. I told him like, but you're Rory from Dallas and you're a magician, right? And he said, yes. And I said, okay, I'll text you. And I just went around the corner and I found his number, texted him. He texted back. We went out for dinner that night. It was a very cheap date. We went to the mall, to the food court at the mall, his choice. And he gave me all of these resources to research. And yeah, I actually ended up giving the talk at Layer 8 conference. I pickpocketed people live up on stage, which was a lot of fun, explained the different techniques. If you want to watch that one, That is a YouTube video. So I think if you search for Kirsch pickpocketing, you'll probably find it. Wow.
Todd Gallina:Does everyone's wallet in their back pocket? Is that a commonality?
Chris Kirsch:No, no. Back pocket is actually, I find it a little bit hard. For the back pocket, you can't just pull it out. You need to do it while people are moving. And so the easiest is if you just touch the corners on the side, and then Well, I actually cover it in that video. It's a little bit hard in an audio medium to portray that, to explain it. But essentially you're touching somebody on the shoulder with your left hand and your right hand goes into the back pocket and you're kind of like almost like gently nudging them aside. So the shoulder is the primary sensation that they feel. And when they start moving, that, you know, frees up the wallet a little bit and you pull it out in the same move. And what they feel is, you know, like, almost like you're brushing up against them as you're walking past. And you have less friction than if they're just standing there and you try to pull it out. Oh my gosh.
Sandy Salty:I might type that on you later.
Chris Kirsch:It's hard. You know, I practiced for six months and never did it again. And it's also very hard to practice. So at the conference, what we did is I handed out like a hundred fake wallets. Like they were all bright green and so on. And people could wear them and put on a sticker that says, I consent to being pickpocketed. And then people went to town and actually did it for the entire day. It was pretty good fun.
Sandy Salty:I mean, the interesting thing is when you think about the roots of the security space and some of the most interesting security experts in this world, you realize there is sort of a theme between it's not really dark arts is not the right way to describe it. It's really more of like the breaching, you know, the world, the world of breaching and the world of security are obviously very tangential. Like you hear about some of the smartest security minds being former hackers.
Chris Kirsch:Yeah.
Sandy Salty:There's a theme there for sure.
Chris Kirsch:You know, most, most stories of like security issues that were found, it's just somebody sees something and they pull on a thread, you know, like the same way that, I was standing next to my dad and he got pickpocketed. I could have just let it be, but I couldn't. I just pulled on that. For example, my co-founder, when he started fingerprinting all of these devices, how do you get your hands on these devices? I think he actually has a scrapper's license for medical devices. He can directly buy all of the IT from... He has a license to buy IT from hospitals at scrap value, all of the biomedical devices and sanitize them and all that stuff. And he just uses that for fingerprinting them. So it's just a creative way of getting after the problem. But we... We've scaled that up a lot more through all of the data that we gather from our free version. We've got a free version for under 250 devices. You can use it for free. And so people scan all sorts of random stuff, and that feeds into our database, trains our... We don't use machine learning, but we use it for accurate fingerprinting and for making sure that we don't have false positives and so on. It just gives us a really good data set that we could never build in a lab.
Todd Gallina:Wow. Fascinating. Yeah. So we've been on the podcast here for just a little bit, and I already have a three-part blog to read. And a video to watch. And a video to watch. And
Chris Kirsch:it's four parts. It's four parts. I'm very prolific.
Todd Gallina:Okay. Fact or fiction, you never in your wildest dreams thought you would be a founder.
Chris Kirsch:I didn't really, yeah. I mean, I played with the thought, but I always, yeah. It was, yeah, I played with the thought, but it was never really on my absolute bucket list that I have to do this. I was early in a company back in Germany where I was number three and so on. So like, joining their... What
Todd Gallina:do you mean? Third employee?
Chris Kirsch:Third employee, yeah. It's essentially like a founder position in the sense that you're so early that you're helping to build. But, yeah.
Sandy Salty:Yeah. The founder that you always knew or you always didn't know you're going to or you never thought you'd be a founder. It's such an interesting question because, you know, I always wonder, like, are founders born or are they made? And there's always a story in the background. There's always a story of either, you know, I have parents who are founders or what are some common views we've learned, Todd? Like, there's always... We've noticed there is a pattern with... this concept of like turning crisis into opportunity.
Chris Kirsch:Yeah. Having
Sandy Salty:a hard sort of youth that has transpired into like incredible ambition, amounts of ambition, you know?
Todd Gallina:Sometimes it comes from a place where there's a product market fit. They know it better than anybody else. So why not me? Why not me? I'll just do this. I'll grab somebody
Sandy Salty:who's. You're like, sometimes it's not that deep. No,
Todd Gallina:I'm giving another example though. You're right though.
Unknown:Yeah.
Chris Kirsch:Yeah, and I mean, in our case, HD, we were actually both there at the same time. There were a few other people like Gordon. He's also known as Fyodor the... creator of Nmap. We were all around the pool on DEF CON Sunday a few years ago, and that's where HD had the idea to build this. And he actually went off and started building it by himself, and I advised him a little bit from the sidelines, but I wasn't in the operational business. And I advised him mostly on things like marketing and pricing and those kind of things. And then when he had... a number of customers and he had a product that was really getting traction and so on. That's when I joined operationally because my background is marketing, majoring in product marketing and so on. So I understand the marketing side a little better, the sales side and so on. So I was managing that side of the business. And HD is very much on the technical side. and really robust there, builds really good products that people love and that perform well. And he is very passionate about getting our support response stats are insane. And I don't know how he does it in terms of how quickly he gets back to customers. It's something that keeps coming up in customer conversations that they just, yeah, don't know how he turns support cases around this quickly.
Todd Gallina:Well, it's, it's often, you know, complimentary personalities that really, really make this work. So you're advising him, you know, he's starting something. You're advising him mostly on marketing. Is he like, hey, man, you got to leave what you're doing and join me? Or were you like, hey, HD, I've shared so much. I feel like I'm invested in this. I'd love to join you.
Chris Kirsch:Yeah. So it was a little softer than that. I didn't assume that he wanted me in there. Yeah. we were friends and friendly, right? And so I'd given him some feedback and advice and so on from the sidelines. But it was really when I was at Veracode and we'd gotten acquired for the third time. And it's like, I was getting a little bit tired and this, you know, doing the same job for a number of years. After a while, there's only so many ways you can frame that and phrase that as a product marketer. So I thought I needed something new. And my husband very kindly reminded me that I promised him to take three to six months off before the next gig. So I said, all right, you know, I guess I have to quit cold and then find a job in a few months. And I texted HD because he'd taken a sabbatical while at Rapid7. And I said, hey, HD, I'm going to take six months off. I'm going to take a page out of your book. And he said, hey, do you want to come join Rumble at the time? And I'm like, well... That sounds really good, but can you give me three months? So three months later, I joined, and he graciously still gave me the co-founder title, and then we started building the company. You already had a good book of business, and... Good customers, solid product, but no marketing, nothing. A website, but we even had to build the CRM from scratch. It was all in spreadsheets and emails and so on. And so I built up the sales team, built up the marketing team, and we hired people and promoted some of them to titles and so on. So yeah, it was really good. This was beginning of last year, and we're now at 70-something people.
Todd Gallina:Wow.
Sandy Salty:It's exciting.
Todd Gallina:Yeah, we're going to ask you a little bit more about hiring and culture here in a minute, but I think Sandy has one more fact or fiction for you.
Sandy Salty:And maybe even marketeering. So this will be the last fact or fiction, and then we'll stop torturing you, Chris. Fact or fiction, you have proven and verified that Psychic powers.
Chris Kirsch:That is arguably true. That is arguably true. Again, one of my life goals was to become an intern for a fortune teller. And I didn't quite get that because I would have loved to just spend a month or two in a fortune teller's den just listening in and understanding how they do things. And just to be perfectly clear, I do not believe that you can see the future or speak to people that have passed on and so on. But I did the second best thing. I thought, okay, I'm... going to study the art of cold reading. So this is a technique that some psychics use to kind of, you know, seemingly know things that they couldn't know and so on and predict things and so on and make it very believable. And I did that at Veracode. They did a hackathon twice a year for three days. And the rules were you had to either learn something new or interact with people that you don't usually interact with. I'm like, bingo, this is two of them. I'm learning something new. I'm interacting with people. So I put, I put out my table in the cafeteria and I said, Hey, I'm giving a psychic readings. And, um, did that and tried out the different techniques. In the beginning, I was a little rusty, and then it got a little better. And some people didn't believe me at all. Some people full on believed me. I debriefed everybody to tell them that I was indeed didn't have psychic powers. One person actually told me like, oh, no, no, no, you might not know it, but you have psychic intuition. She was very much into the psychic world. And yeah, that was eye-opening. And afterwards, I gave a talk at DEF CON in the social engineering village on how you can apply these same techniques in social engineering. So that was, that was fun. That's, I think that's also up on YouTube. So you can also not, now you
Sandy Salty:have more homework. So, so psychic intuition. Okay. Going back to that. Is that something you're born with or is that it? So is that something, a technique that you learn or is that something?
Chris Kirsch:No, it's not. No, you, you there's a, what is it called? Something Cold Reading by Ian Rowland, I think it is. It's a book. You can buy it on Amazon or the bookstore of your choice. And it gives you a number of techniques on how you can make statements that... to the person sound like you got it spot on but you actually were just fishing right so you can say let me think oh god this this talk is a few years ago and i'm not doing this as a party trick so bear with me but um you can say oh i'm there there's somebody who's connected to you and i'm i'm uh it's a it's a woman and uh my mom the name yes right and then you You start out, you know, like it's somebody with a J, like a Jen or a Jess or Jennifer or Jessica. Does that, does that ring a bell? Right. And so what you do is you're clearly fishing. You are, I looked at the, you know, most people at the company were within certain age brackets. Right. And then you look up the most common names by age. birth year per decade and you learn those and Jessica and Jennifer for the I think people born in the 80s was super common and so almost everybody knows and I always pick the name of the same gender because people usually have more friends of the same gender and so on so it's that makes it a little bit easier and it could be somebody you work with somebody you you know former schoolmate family whatever and so on and And if they say like, no, never, don't know any Jess, don't know any Jen, you must be wrong. He's like, oh, no, no, no. Maybe this person hasn't come along yet, but they're going to be really important to you and make sure you look out for them. So there's lots of ways to pivot when something doesn't work out. And then you can also do stats on like, oh, I see a house with a number two in the number. And, you know, like something like that. And you, again, you play with probabilities because most streets are a little bit short, you know, are shorter rather than longer. And, you know, there are, and it doesn't have to be this house that you live in right now. It could be where you grew up or our friends or something like that. Right. Yeah. in
Sandy Salty:my mom's house
Chris Kirsch:yeah right
Sandy Salty:we don't need to do much fishing with
Todd Gallina:todd oh yeah i'll just tell you yeah i'll fall right now it's funny because here he is like you know taking you know basically educated guesses to fish yeah and and one of the people he's doing this parlor trick with it says you know you actually have psychic intuition to which i have to ask you is that like were you Oh my gosh. Like, was that a compliment or was it kind of like a put down? You're like, Oh no, no, no. This is all, this is all math actually. You know,
Chris Kirsch:it wasn't, it wasn't a put down. I was a little, I thought like if, if I flat out told her I, I, I was being dishonest and she still doesn't believe me. Like I, I don't think I can, you know, I, what other arguments do I have? So I gave up, right? And one thing that I just want to stress is I don't like to make fun of people who visit psychics because that would be, you know, number one, that's victim shaming and I don't think that's a good thing. Number two, many people who go to psychics do so because they've lost a loved one or they're in something's going on in their life that's not quite going right. And so I think it's the psychics that are exploiting these kind of feelings and vulnerabilities for their own financial gain and that's what I criticize. So I just wanted to be very clear about that.
Todd Gallina:No, you're absolutely right. The one person I do know who did visit a psychic was a very, very religious person but visited a psychic after a death very close to them. It's funny you said that.
Chris Kirsch:There is a fascinating podcast for the podcast listeners out there. I think it's by the BBC, and it's called Fake Psychic. It's a multi-series, multi-episode podcast that goes deep on some psychics, I think in the 80s. 60s, 70s, 80s, something like that. I don't remember. But it's really good and it's really interesting.
Sandy Salty:Todd has filled out a page of...
Chris Kirsch:Your productivity this week is going to go down.
Todd Gallina:Just to close out on the psychic thing. There's a terrific movie on this. I'm sure you've seen it. Nightmare Alley, which came out recently. Bradley Cooper. Guillermo del Toro directed it. You would love it, Chris. Sandy, not so much. Something for
Sandy Salty:you to
Chris Kirsch:watch. Is it a horror movie? Because I don't like those.
Todd Gallina:It's not a horror movie. Not a horror movie. It might have some scary stuff. It might be some gross things. But anyways, do your own research on it.
Chris Kirsch:Okay. Okay.
Sandy Salty:Well, good news. Fact or Fiction segment...
Chris Kirsch:It's over. It's
Sandy Salty:officially concluded. It's
Chris Kirsch:concluded. Okay. Phew.
Sandy Salty:We still have some questions for you, Seth. Okay. So let's talk about funding. When we look at your investor list, which by the way, you can find on your website, it's super impressive. I see individuals from ServiceNow, from Menlo Security from Palo Alto, networks from Duo Security, et cetera, et cetera, and so on and so forth. What was your path to funding? Did you take the traditional route? and pitched to a bunch of VCs? Did you pursue Angel? Walk us through that.
Chris Kirsch:Yeah, yeah. So around the time when I decided to join HD and the company, he didn't have funding at the time. He started out, gave a loan to the company, got some for his customers, paid himself back. was cash flow neutral. But because he has just a really good name in the industry, he had a lot of VCs knocking on his door. Because they also heard about Rumble, it's very quick and easy to try. So people tried it out and liked it and were kind of knocking on his door. And we knew that if we wanted to grow and wanted to grow a little bit faster, we needed working capital. So that basically... a little bit of a buffer in the bank so that we would be able to take more risks, hire a little bit faster, hire a little bit ahead of the curve and so on. And so we went with one of the people that knocked on his door. And I know for some founders, it's super hard. And I always feel bad because for us, it was... It was much easier. I mean, you still need to go through all the due diligence and all of those things. But it was, yeah. John Sakota from Decibel, he was the person that we liked the most out of the VC set. And so we decided to go with him. Very cool, calm, and collected. Very reasonable. been a founder himself. I think that helps, right? So he's been there and he's been in those shoes. And so we added a few angel investors to fill in the round. Decibel would have taken most of it, but we wanted to bring in a few of our people. I think Karun Mir, for example, the founder of Thinks Canary. Some folks in the audience might be familiar with that. He was one of the investors and some others. And then for the second round, we basically said, all right, we were still cashflow neutral at the time, but we were growing and we said like, okay, we actually need a little bit more working capital just to protect for the future. And we decided to go with Decibel again and did part of the round with them, but they would have taken the whole round, but we wanted to bring in very specific expertise. We wanted to bring in people that had a product-led growth experience, for example, right? Because we're a product-led growth. So Guy Poggiarni, who was on your on your podcast, I think last time, right? Last episode. He's an investor. And so he's a great guy. I don't think he's actually on our website. And then we included David Schneider, who's the former president of ServiceNow, because we saw a lot of our customers wanting to import the findings from Rumble, the asset inventory into ServiceNow to make it more more accurate. We have people in there. Of course, John Oberheide. He is the co-founder and CTO of Duo Security.
Todd Gallina:He's also been a guest on the show. Yeah.
Chris Kirsch:All right. Okay, great. Yeah. He's fantastic. And he built Duo Security from the start all the way to the acquisition by Cisco.
Unknown:Yeah.
Chris Kirsch:And he's actually our external board member. And I love talking to him because he'll have a good perspective on any challenge that we might be facing. And so it's really good to have these advisors. Gordon Lyon, the creator of Nmap, is an investor and so on. So we just selected people that bring us certain expertise, either technical expertise or industry expertise. Chris Nickerson kind of... famous pen tester and overall really good, fun guy. He does a lot of operational technology, pen testing, like oil and gas and those kind of things, and telcos and so on. So we brought some industry expertise, but also we brought in some people that provide us with certain functional expertise. So we have two CFOs in the mix, David Eckstein from Menlo Security, and Paul DiMarzo, formerly Duro Security, because we didn't want to hire a CFO out of a out of the gate. We still don't have a CFO. We have a director of finance and accounting who does a lot of great work, the day-to-day stuff, making sure that the trains run on time. But every now and then, we need a strategic perspective on something in finance, and then we tap those folks. Or Jim Sibb, who was the CRO at Duo Security, who can advise us on some strategic things with sales and so on. So we tap into those angel investors as advisors. And because they have a skin in the game, we get a callback.
Sandy Salty:That's tapping into a lot of intelligence.
Chris Kirsch:Yeah. Yeah. We're very lucky.
Sandy Salty:Yeah. It's like a network and a group of investors that any company would dream up, frankly, who's who. We're going to switch gears and venture into a topic that's a little bit softer in nature. But an important topic, particularly in the tech space, because you and I have spoken and we've touched on this sort of misperception that tech companies tend to be a little bit more focused on the product and the business performance, etc., And less so on culture, but that's certainly not the case. So we want to tap into your wisdom when it comes to developing a good culture. What do you think the keys are to developing that great culture?
Chris Kirsch:All right. Very interesting question. And culture is so hard to define. You know, I struggled with that before. quite a lot and I sometimes still do because it's very hard to define everybody knows what a good culture is but it's very hard to describe and everybody knows what a bad culture is but how do you build a good culture and how do you define it I think culture needs probably starts with the founders because top down has a lot of influence but when we had about 10-15 people we talked to our folks and we said, hey, everybody said we really like the culture here. We don't want that to change when we get larger and so on. And I thought, oh, I agree, but we haven't actually defined what our culture is. And if we haven't defined it, then we can't screen people on whether they're a cultural fit for us. And if we don't do that, then we're going to get a culture, but we might not get the culture we want. So we set out to figure out what culture we wanted in the company or what our culture was and to define that. And in previous companies, I had seen cultural values, but I was never at the table when they were created. And I thought, hey, I think it would really suck if HD&I wrote something down and then... handed it to people because it seems a little fake and a little superficial. And so my idea was to sit down with a handful of people from the company different backgrounds and genders and functions and seniorities and so on. HD actually said like, hey, Chris, don't include me in that group because you and I agree on that stuff. Like you want to have other opinions there as well. So it was me and five other people. And I scheduled two two-hour meetings and basically went into those meetings with a bunch of very open questions. So the questions were like, what do you like about Run Zero Culture? Why did you join the company from a cultural perspective? What did you like about a previous company that you worked for? Which company do you purchase from, like where you're a customer? Why do you like their culture? And what can we learn from that? And I ended up with, I think it was 18 pages of notes. And I was very deliberate that it was a Zoom call. We're 100% remote. So it was a Zoom call. And I asked everybody to take a moment, think about the question and write a short answer in the Zoom chat. And then when everybody had submitted something, we went in the order of submission and discussed their answers. And I wanted to do that specifically because when you have these group discussions, the loud voices drown out the quiet ones, and I want the quiet ones to have a voice there as well. So by everybody typing out their answer first and then us discussing it, I made sure that everybody was getting heard. And then I... sat down and looked through those 18 pages and condensed them into a single page, five values. They're actually up on our website. You can have a look at them, runzero.com, and then look at company, our values. And the first one is we're kind and fair. It's really important, being kinder than necessary, always assuming good intentions, being respectful to customers, to candidates, even when you turn them down and so on. The second one is transparency. We are very transparent inside the company, but also with our customers. I think inside the company, if you think about my position, I'm CEO, and let's say I didn't give people any information about the company. Now, that means that they can't make good decisions. They have to escalate all decisions and I have to make them. That would be exhausting, right? And it doesn't scale very well. But if you are transparent throughout the company and give people a lot of information, then they can actually make... information with the, make decisions with the best information in hand. And so that's why I think transparency is also really important. It's not just a good thing to do and makes people feel good, but it actually enables you to scale because you can have people make decisions further down and empower them to make the right decision. Then the third one is focusing on customers. I believe that if you focus on customers and make sure that you deliver a good product, good service, and they're happy, then most of the other things sort themselves out. Because essentially, as a CEO, you have these three constituents. You have the customers, you have the employees, and you have the investors that you need to keep equally happy. If you have happy customers, usually the employees are happier, the investors are happier, you're good, right? Mm-hmm. And I also believe that I did a lot of competitive intelligence in my days as a product marketer. And if you overemphasize on the competition and what features they have, I don't think you are going to create the best product. Because if you're just copying, you can't innovate. And if you are copying features from the competitors, you don't actually know if the customers like those, right? The competitor might have gotten it wrong. They developed something maybe because... an industry analyst told them, or maybe because it's what they thought was a clever idea technology-wise. And I've seen that in my own companies as well, where we built features that nobody needed. But if you focus on the customers, I think you go down the right path. Then making sound decisions. So that means try to have data to make the decision. There are a lot of companies that make gut decisions. Um, and sometimes that's the only way you can do it, but much better is if you have facts and you can, you can, uh, back those up. So, uh, I think both of you are marketers. So, you know, run a B tests on what performs better on a website rather than saying, Oh, I like this copy better, you know, those kinds of things. And then the last one is fostering mindful growth. And so this has a few different aspects. It means that we have a culture of learning. It also means that we empower everybody to give feedback. And that goes from the CEO to the intern and from the intern to the CEO in all directions. And it also means that a lot of startups, I see a lot of companies that are struggling now in this economy, they have overinflated expectations because of a high valuation. And they're trying to grow according to what's possible on the spreadsheet. But companies need time to absorb new people, to build new processes, to build new systems, all of these things. And so that's what I mean by mindful growth. So you need to actually make sure that the organization can catch up with that growth. And you also need to anticipate future growth steps. Sometimes you get ahead of something to avoid an issue, right? And so that's what we cover under the mindful growth category.
Sandy Salty:Awesome. I mean, clearly a very strong focus on culture, which is... Really fun to see.
Todd Gallina:Yeah, mentioning the mindful growth thing and talking about valuations, that's all been put on its ear. Valuation, market cap over the last eight months. So it's really strong that that's your fifth one and a great area of focus. Yeah, thank you. Okay, so now we're going to give you a chance to talk about a gratifying customer experience. with us, Chris. Have you had a customer walk up to you and talk to you about your company, talk to you about your product?
Chris Kirsch:Oh yeah, all the time. All the time, yeah. But I wanted to actually give an example that involves Trace3 because we've been working with you for a while and there was one deal that you brought to us that I think shows some of the value. It's not like You know, it's one use case, but I think it's a really interesting and powerful one. This was, you came to us, one of your people, and said, hey, I've got this company, and they got a letter, they're a public company, they got a letter from the SEC saying, that they need to report whether they're exposed to the SolarWinds backdoor, or whatever you want to call it, if they have any SolarWinds on their network. And they were trying to figure it out with their vulnerability scanner, couldn't do it with that. They were trying to do it all sorts of ways, and they couldn't figure it out. And I think they were already over the... deadline set by the SEC. So we're really kind of like hair on fire kind of thing. And so they came to us on a Thursday, I believe. And we helped them deploy a proof of concept of Run Zero in their network. We worked with them all through the weekend. And I think by Monday or Tuesday, we'd completed a complete inventory of their network. They're a big multinational company with several brands. So this is not a simple network. Wow. Many, many retail locations. Wow. we found a lot of SolarWinds boxes that they didn't know they had, right? And so I think it only took like a week longer and we had the PO. So that was like a great, great success story and something where we really showed value in addition to what the customer already had, right? So I like that story. Not every deal is that fast, right? By all means. But I thought if you wanted me to pull one out that... That was gratifying. I really liked that one.
Todd Gallina:Yeah, pull out one of ours. That's great. Yeah.
Sandy Salty:Yeah. Well, Chris, is there anything that we did not cover that you'd like to share with our audience?
Chris Kirsch:Yeah, I guess if what we're doing here at Run Zero sounds interesting, What I would encourage you to do is just to go to runzero.com, check out the trial, and do it on your home network. And even if you're not planning to buy a license for your company, you can use our starter edition for free. It doesn't expire. And you can just scan your home network. Most people, especially if you're a little bit technically inclined and like to tinker, most people will find a ton of stuff that they didn't even know they had connected to their network anymore. And it just shows you that even in a small, you know, very simple network, like your home network, where you're just a handful of people, it's very hard to keep track of what you have. And so if you want to do that, that would be great. If you want to then recommend us to your peers at the company and you you know, try a rollout at your company. Our biggest customer is a fortune five. So we scale all the way up. Then that would be fantastic. And I really love that. And you can also do that through trace three because they're one of our partners. That's
Todd Gallina:great.
Chris Kirsch:Isn't that a nice way to end it?
Todd Gallina:Oh, it's a perfect way because you know, the people who listen to our podcast are tinkers are exactly the type of people that could go ahead and grab run zero and run it on their home network. I think that's, that's a great idea.
Sandy Salty:Yeah. Yeah. Well, Chris, we want to thank you. We talked about asset inventory and network visibility. We talked about psychic powers. We talked about pickpocketing. You did your research,
Chris Kirsch:I have to say.
Sandy Salty:The makings of a great podcast. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure to have you.
Chris Kirsch:All right. Okay. Thank you so much. All right. Have a great day. Thanks, Chris.
Outro:Trace3 is hyper-focused on helping IT leaders deliver business outcomes by providing a wide variety of data center solutions and consulting services. If you're looking for emerging technology to solve tried and true business problems, Trace3 is here to help. We believe all possibilities live in technology. You can learn more at trace3.com slash podcast. That's trace the number three dot com slash podcast.
Intro:Until next time.