Inside the Network

In this episode we have a special guest - Doug Merritt - who has shaped not a unicorn but a decacorn - a company valued at more than $10 billion. As the former CEO of Splunk, he steered this big data company to extraordinary heights. In just six years under Doug's leadership, Splunk's market cap soared past $25 billion, and its annual recurring revenue skyrocketed from $200 million to a staggering $3 billion. At its peak, over 50% of Splunk revenues came from security applications.

Doug's journey began as a coder and developer before transitioning to sales leadership and eventually CEO of a publicly traded company. His entrepreneurial roots trace back to founding a company called Icarian, which was acquired by WorkStream. He then went on to hold senior management positions at tech giants like Cisco, SAP, and PeopleSoft. Today Doug is the Chairman and CEO of Aviatrix, a secure cloud networking leader that has raised over $350 million in venture funding and serves over 500 global customers.

Throughout his time at Splunk, Doug hired, mentored, and promoted well-known executives in the infrastructure and cyber industry, from Haiyan Song to Jason Child to Snehal Antani. In this episode, Doug discusses what he looks for in executives, how he evaluates their ability to succeed, and what founders should keep in mind when building their leadership teams. As the CEO of Splunk, Doug led several acquisitions including SignalFx and Phantom Cyber. On Inside the Network, he shares how founders should think about M&A and what they need to do to achieve successful exits. In our conversation, we'll explore Doug's career evolution, insights from his founder experience, and key lessons learned while scaling Splunk into a decacorn. We'll also discuss his current role at Aviatrix and his vision for the future of cloud technology and generative AI.

Our guest in this episode is Jon Gelsey. Jon was the first CEO of Auth0, a leading identity-as-a-service platform, which grew from 5 to 300 employees during his four years at the helm. Auth0 was acquired by Okta in February 2021 for $6.5B. After Auth0, Jon served as CEO of Xnor, a computer vision and machine learning spinoff of the Allen Institute. The company was acquired by Apple for ~$200M in January 2020. 

When Auth0 first started in 2013, there were already several authentication vendors in the market. Okta, ForgeRock, and OneLogin had all built considerable scale by the time Auth0 launched its product. Not only did Jon and the team build a successful company in a very crowded space, but they also did it their way. While all of Auth0’s competitors were running a top-down GTM motion, Jon made a critical decision to adopt a bottom-up, product-led growth (PLG) strategy. Instead of relying on traditional marketing tactics for demand generation, Auth0 built an extensive content rollout plan to help drive inbound interest in the product. To date, Auth0 is the only PLG company in cybersecurity to achieve a multi-billion dollar exit. On Inside the Network, Jon talks about building go-to-market strategies, identifying the right buyer personas, and establishing success metrics for customer acquisition.  

In addition to his experience as a serial entrepreneur, Jon worked on the M&A and strategy team at Microsoft from 2007 to 2014 where he led several acquisitions for the company. Jon shares the tips and tricks founders need to know to plan, negotiate, and successfully close acquisitions with potential buyers. 

In this episode, we sit down with Marty Roesch, founder of Sourcefire. Sourcefire led the intrusion detection and protection (IDS/IPS) wave, raised four rounds of financing from leading VCs like NEA, Sierra Ventures, and Sequoia, and went public, later to be acquired by Cisco for $2.7 billion.

Founders often believe that their first few customers cannot be large enterprises. Marty took the contrarian path. Sourcefire’s first few customers were all six-figure deals - PWC, Intel, SAIC, and International Paper. In addition to that, Sourcefire was incredibly successful in working with industry research firms like Gartner and organizations like SANS in developing a new category. In this podcast, Marty shares what happened behind the scenes and provides founders with advice on how to work with enterprises and gain the interest of industry analysts.

Almost two decades after starting Sourcefire, Marty has gone back full circle to being the CEO of Netography, a network security startup. Marty shares stories from both his Sourcefire and Netography journeys, discusses how he navigated the M&A landscape and explains where we should be excited about AI in security, and where it’s wise to be cautious.

Few cybersecurity companies have been able to bootstrap their way to success – Tenable stands above the rest in this category. The company raised its first round of funding after 10 years of operations. It had $90M of revenue at the time. In the venture world, “Tenable was the best cybersecurity business that nobody had ever heard of.” Today, it is the leading cyber exposure and vulnerability management company with $800M in revenue and over 44,000 customers globally.

In our second episode of ‘Inside the Network’ we sit down with Ron Gula, co-founder and former CEO of Tenable. We learn about his early beginnings and love for fighter jets and UFOs. We dive into his three successful startup journeys, including his most recent run building Tenable over 14 years. And we talk about lessons learned from his investing career at Gula Tech Adventures with over $100M invested in 50+ startups.

After their successful entrepreneurial journey, Ron and his wife Cyndi’s work has continued with Gula Tech Foundation, working to make the cybersecurity sector more diverse and inclusive. Finally, we touch on Ron’s new-found passion as a YouTube influencer – the Joe Rogan of cybersecurity has now garnered over 150K subscribers!

There are plenty of great startups solving impactful problems in security. Very few, however, ever grow to achieve the scale of CrowdStrike - a company that has rightfully become a household name in the industry. Today, CrowdStrike has a market cap of over $70 billion, making it one of the world's 300 most valuable companies. In the inaugural episode of ‘Inside the Network,’ we sit down with Dmitri Alperovitch, Co-Founder and former CTO of CrowdStrike, to discuss his journey before, during, and after building this iconic company. 

Dmitri walks us through his childhood, immigrating from Russia to the US, and the early days of his entrepreneurship journey. He then opens up about some of the hard decisions CrowdStrike had to make to win. He goes on to share his approach to investing in startups today, and what he looks for when evaluating founders and markets.

In addition to investing and supporting founders, Dmitri has also started the policy think tank Silverado Policy Accelerator and written a new book - 'World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the Twenty-First Century'. In the last part of the episode, he discusses the threat China’s current ruling party poses, why US citizens should care about what happens between China and Taiwan, and how to ensure that the US remains the world’s leading power for decades and centuries to come.