The Founder Formula

Mohit Tiwari - Co-founder of Symmetry Systems

• Trace3 • Episode 37

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Identity and data are intrinsically linked. In fact, our guest in this episode tells us 10 years from now the only things that will mater in cloud computing and cybersecurity will be people and data. The rest is just details.

In this episode, co-hosts Todd Gallina and Sandy Salty of Trace3 interview Mohit Tiwari Co-Founder & CEO at Symmetry Systems. Mohit tells us all about his transition from teaching in academia to becoming a tech founder, unpacks what a good culture fit really is, and discusses some of the ethical challenges the cybersecurity space is facing currently.

Listen to this and all of The Founder Formula episodes through your favorite podcast platform or Trace3.com.

Outro:

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 to the show. Sandy, big red letter day for us at the Founder Formula podcast because two things are happening. Obviously, we're in our brand new spanking offices. Yes,

Sandy Salty:

very exciting. Woohoo!

Todd Gallina:

Yeah, they're very nice, very cool. Yeah. We invite people to come and visit.

Sandy Salty:

Great change of scenery. We needed it. It

Todd Gallina:

was good. Yeah, yeah. A lot of people showing up, which is very cool. And the office you might have been working from home previously. Totally. I

Sandy Salty:

think they're curious. Hopefully, you know, they stick around. Yeah,

Todd Gallina:

yes, because we love them. collaboration. But the second reason that this is a big Red Letter Day is we are doing the podcast for the first time ever. We've done over 35 episodes and for the first time ever we have our guest

Sandy Salty:

in

Todd Gallina:

the recording room with us.

Sandy Salty:

I love that. I'm vibing already. It's a very different experience when you can be right next to the person.

Todd Gallina:

Yeah, we can finally look at facial reactions like, oh my gosh, I hate that question. How dare you put me on the spot? We talked about this beforehand. Okay, so let's get to our guest. Joining us today is an entrepreneur and cybersecurity expert. Before launching his own company, he was a professor at the University of Texas, Austin, where he founded the Spark Lab with funding from DARPA and National Science Foundation and collaborating with teams at General Dynamics Lockheed Martin, Intel, ARM, Google, and others. Pretty impressive.

Sandy Salty:

Very impressive.

Todd Gallina:

Currently, he's the CEO and co-founder of Symmetry Systems. They're located in San Mateo, California. Welcome to the show, Mohit Tiwari. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Mohit Tiwari:

You

Todd Gallina:

got that perfectly right. Good.

Sandy Salty:

Well, Mohit, we're going to jump right in.

Todd Gallina:

Can you tell us a little bit about Symmetry Systems and why you founded it?

Mohit Tiwari:

Yeah, Symmetry Systems, so just a back story on the team that co-founded it. My co-founders are Kason Hunger. He used to be an undergrad student, then a grad student, and then we are colleagues together at Symmetry. Both of us were just extremely keen on this really fundamental area called information flow. We all want to know, hey, how is my data being treated? You know, once I give up my data to all sorts of orgs, what happens to it? As an org, I want to know, hey, I have a ton of customers' data. handling them handling all the data well right so very fundamentally it has been around for 50 years and we were just looking for how is it possible that this things so obviously valuable is not out and used and deployed everywhere why is it not just like every system has it and turned out there were very good reasons but around 2015-16 things just started aligning so that sort of you know data became a layer that is separate from compute, and people really began asking for it. You can see GDPR, CCPA, every state now has people voting to say, hey, we would like to know, like, how is my data being treated? Like, you want a second chance, you want privacy, all these things. So I feel like there's a bunch of tailwinds that started aligning, and then we were like, hey, we tried a bunch of experiments while we were at Texas at Austin. And at some point we were like, all right, this feels right, 2019, we've all spun out together.

Sandy Salty:

And would you describe Symmetry as a data security company or a cloud security company? Because the cloud security plays super strong, right?

Mohit Tiwari:

Right, so that's the other tailwind that I would say that the company's moving to the cloud and that just really means that things are not siloed in a basement where you have stack and rack servers, everything's on an API. So I think cloud security, cloud is really what unlocked this. I mean, when I look forward, let's say 10 years, what would really matter are people and data. And everything else, like which machine things runs on, what app process the data, all that stuff is just details. So to me, cloud security is data security. It just got siloed into some marketing corners, the word data security, but I think it's going to break free and we will have good controls around identity. Alice is Alice, right? And great controls around data, which means it doesn't matter which path she takes, right? She's the right person to be working with the data she's working with. I think this has to be. Just like with Okta now and Auth0, we have single sign-on. Can't even imagine signing into hundreds of apps.

Sandy Salty:

Totally. I mean, just as why I was going to ask you whether you would even classify it as an identity company, right? Ultimately.

Mohit Tiwari:

Right, right. You know, this is the thing that I've been running into the most and I've found a great place to actually say this is if you look at like 50-year-old security textbooks, they're all like, hey, Alice, Bob, Charlie, Eve, and then accessing data, file one, file two. This is like literally 101 step zero different. So it almost doesn't even make sense for me to say, hey, I only care about the rows and I only care about the columns. You care about this table. So identity and data are inextricably linked. That's what you want. So to me, it's like, Yeah, we have a little bit of time where identity security and data security will sort of evolve in parallel, but this has to link. Now, what format it takes, we'll find

Sandy Salty:

out. So I just have to ask this because I've seen some of the output and the analysis that one gets out of Symmetry. It is probably the most aesthetically pleasing output of any technology I've ever seen in my career. The UI is super cool. It really is. Was that... Is that something that you were actually...

Mohit Tiwari:

Aiming

Sandy Salty:

for? Yeah, was it deliberate?

Mohit Tiwari:

It was, it was. We were inspired by several, I would say like two kind of bins. One is, this is a really hard problem. You have to move organizations from where they are and really give them an incentive to move. And there's no budget line item attached yet and so on, right? So we were thinking... The way to move this is through attracting folks. And making concepts that have this really large identity data graphs be beautiful. And what does your organization look like? And it's so rewarding. Even for us, when we land cold into a large company, we're like, okay, let's see. Oh, wow, there's this business unit. There's that business unit. Oh, they organized it this way because 2016... AWS permissions were like, it's just so fast. It's like going and doing this sort of archaeologist type work or geologist type work, looking through all the layers of.

Sandy Salty:

And it's also like from a marketer's perspective, like we can appreciate that because it's its own sort of marketing tactic in a way, right? You're providing them with these beautiful sort of ways to look at what's happening in their business from a security perspective.

Mohit Tiwari:

Absolutely. I mean, I do notice that the best marketers seem to be natural storytellers and pictures sort of give a great backdrop. to tell the story rather than, hey, look at this table. So I fully agree

Sandy Salty:

with that. So Mohit, before you were a founder, you were a professor. And many would say that the world of academia and the world of business are wildly different. Have you found commonality? Is there anything that you've been able to take out of the academic world and translate into the business world?

Mohit Tiwari:

So this is so fresh that I don't know if I have really deep, well-considered retrospective on it, but I would say I have actually found it to be very similar because the goal of academics is to see, hey, what could be a better future, right? And the whole definition of when I came to UT, my department chair is like, well, great job coming here. Your job is have impact. There's no day-to-day to-do items or KPIs or anything. And how do you measure impact? We'll ask the best people in the field every two years, three years, hey, is this guy having impact or not? So you know it when you see it, but there's no defined. So I feel like startup was just like, we came out, we're like, hey, we want to redefine data security. It makes no sense to have it be DLP or any of this niche. It is the most important thing. So then the rest of it was just figuring it out, right? Like not holding on too strong to, oh, we are a container company or we are a, you know, we are a hammer or a screwdriver company kind of thing, right? Really focusing on what would make impact, work back from there. I mean, I found it to be very, very similar, actually. Yeah. Just a lot more. I mean, in academia, I would say you have the option to back away from working with people and just kind of focus on the problem alone. But I think in business, at least, what we are finding is people are the biggest thing to care about. And then the problem, and then the product sort of

Sandy Salty:

follows. That's an interesting perspective. You're kind of viewing the world from two different lenses, both very important, but the lenses are different.

Mohit Tiwari:

That said, I wouldn't say I'm like... 101 level undergrad at business. So everything I might be doing might be all wrong. No,

Sandy Salty:

well,

Todd Gallina:

time will tell. You had mentioned one of your co-founders was an undergrad student in the program. Incredible guy. Yeah, so at one point you guys are all, here we are, we're solving problems. We have found a need that hasn't been filled. let's start a company i mean how that must have been a pretty significant transition i mean you had to consider everything from you know raising funds meeting some people maybe hadn't been introduced to so what what tell us about that next step going from the university to founding the company

Mohit Tiwari:

so we we knew this was going to be really challenging to just figure out how to extract the minimum solvable while valuable problem, right? Like make a real business. So we actually were in no hurry. We started this process, we committed in 2015. Kaysen, me, and then we were like, hey, let's call. So my brother in India was like, we don't have to raise money yet, but we can call friends and family into the company. So it was the three of us that basically committed in 2015 to figuring this out. And from 2015, we met a hospital where there was a complex care clinic for children. They needed to do health care with social workers, nurses, and school nurses, and family members, all sorts of stuff outside of the hospital. And they were stuck with, hey, we need a HIPAA compliant Slack effectively, right? So that everyone can collaborate. And we talked to them. We were like, hey, this is easy. We have the research. We can make a platform. You can write in a port any messaging app. And HIPAA is like a very low bar that we could blow out of the water. So that's kind of how we started just experimenting while at UT. So we went 2015 through 2019 just doing different experiments with HIPAA. Yeah, we have the research. There's a long, you know, kind of trail of folks whose shoulders we stand on to be like, hey, they tried a different type of really deep tech company and so on. And we sort of focused, okay, what's the workflow for the people, right? That's what we wanted to discover. So we worked with hospitals. The doctors are amazing. They took us all the way to the Ascension Hospital, and they were like, which banks use you? And we should have just read the book Crossing the Chasm. We skipped on that one, and that was two years down the lesson learning pipe. Then we were like, okay, let's talk to banks, and we just noticed that everyone there was from the defense. So we overcorrected, and we started working with NSA, Lockheed, and there's like top secret, secret, all this sort of stuff, which we were like, this is a little too niche. for the broad audience. We can't really translate that just yet. And then we ran into CenturyLink, the cloud provider, and they sort of gave us a really great question, essentially. They're like, hey, we would like, can you think of putting a safeguard around MongoDB? Because we have a whole bunch of this. And that was when the light really went off, when we were like, data is a persistent layer. We don't need to build a platform for apps, because now you have to convince developers and security people. That's too hard, right? This way, if you are plugged into the data layer, you can see all the data flows by and large anyways, because applications talk through data stores. So you're like, hey, this is a really great, simple insertion point. You get most of the value prop, if not all of it, but most of it, and you have enough to move forward. And that was the click for us where When we pitched that, a bunch of companies were like, commission you to build something that we would pay for and so on. So then we committed. So me and my co-founder and both co-founders, we spent a lot of time together just sort of quote unquote nights and weekends just thinking through how would we translate this research into

Todd Gallina:

practice. Is the hospital which you originally launched this in, are they currently, are they now a client of yours or are they just like the University of Texas is still servicing them? Are they still using the platform

Mohit Tiwari:

No, no, no. So I think, I mean, we learned this early adopter versus not lesson really well. So we're going through the early adopters. I think we have sort of the early majority. I mean, Gartner now defined a space around us. That was awesome. So now there's like, you know, even for forward leaning folks, there is like an easy way to be like, hey, guys, this is a new space. you know, category, we need this. It makes first principle sense, but sometimes that's not enough, right, to bring the whole org together. So we're sort of working through the second batch of kind of early adopters, right, people who can move, but they need a little bit of, like, you know, evidence in the market. And a ton of new companies have jumped in right now. That's great. Congratulations. Yeah,

Sandy Salty:

yeah. That's always the hardest part, right? It's getting... The

Mohit Tiwari:

market to move. That's right. Just in the last three months, we can feel it. Everyone either is POCing stuff or are queuing later. That's exciting.

Sandy Salty:

In 2019, at that point, you decided to pursue venture dollars. Absolutely. Well, I guess why at that point? And then tell us about that experience. What was it like... going out and raising capital?

Mohit Tiwari:

So two questions. So the first one, I think, for us, it just felt that we had tried out enough experiments on our own. to really scale it, you have to build the product out enough that we actually committed to one thing, which is that we are not going to go bottom up because small companies and things have other reasons that they might die, let alone protecting data of their customers and such. So we were like, okay, we are way better equipped, our specific team, to talk to really sharp experts in big companies and then get them convinced and move down. So we sort of committed to this top down model, which means you have to have a minimum viable product and you have to have a team and then having folks who are deeply steeped in the industry who can. So we ended up with a couple of investors that we picked where one of them is a deep security focused investor. They essentially have a really big community of lifelong security aficionados. That was like our lab of pitching ideas, tweaking the product, getting it just right. So that's Will Lin at ForgePoint. And our other investor, they have a lot of experiences working with teams out of universities, MIT, Stanford, and now UT, and helping kind of fill out all our blind spots. We know the quote unquote tech part a little bit, but we just didn't know anything right about business. So they really helped fill out the gaps there, put a lot of advisors around us. So that was the reason why we went out. We were like, okay, to build a pro-grade company, let's work with people who build pro-grade companies for it. Totally.

Sandy Salty:

It feels like it's the other pieces just outside of capital that are just as valuable, frankly, as the capital itself.

Mohit Tiwari:

One of the best things we did is to pick these exact two teams in lieu of a larger valuation or a larger dollar raise or anything like that.

Sandy Salty:

Yeah.

Mohit Tiwari:

They have been incredible over the last three years. That's great.

Sandy Salty:

to hear. and um let's switch gears for a minute now and talk about your your founding team well we actually talked about one yeah from undergrad um your undergrad program but that was a course that you were teaching correct he was in your in your class

Mohit Tiwari:

yeah yeah so he started off as an undergrad then he became i mean we worked together on research when he was an undergrad casein um and then when casein wanted to do phd he was like ah you know i could go elsewhere but you know we have a working relationship so luckily he continued for grad school so He was there as a grad student from 13 through 19, or 14 through 19, something like that. He can always get his PhD. Well, he has the most, you know, awesome PhD in the world at this point. Oh, so he

Todd Gallina:

did end up getting his PhD is what you're telling us.

Mohit Tiwari:

He hasn't filed, right. Oh, okay. I think like taking all these ideas, he has a couple of like top, top, top shelf papers. Yeah. Taking those papers into the field and like, you know, making it meet, you know, real world deployments. I mean, I think he can finish it pretty much whenever he wants. Okay, all right. He's in good shape. Impressive.

Sandy Salty:

And what about the rest of the team?

Mohit Tiwari:

Yeah, so we, so the third person who started in 2015 early on was Puneet. He was my brother. He is my brother. And he sort of had a lot of industry experience building software. So the three of us worked together from 15 through 19. But when we spun out for reals, we, I mean, our model was how can we build a really sort of filled out set of terms. So Tomas, who also was a PhD student at UT, collaborated with us. He joined us. He leads up our infra. Mikhail, who is a robot from the future, is basically... Finally, we have a robot co-founder. We need to interview him. He's awesome at machine learning. So he's done work at machine level, like instructions, but also machine learning, like at math. So he's just really great at traversing. So... Just trying to cover ourselves from different sides. We lost a couple of other great people that I thought we would be able to recruit and go just due to extraneous reasons. I'm sure

Sandy Salty:

they regret it now. If they're listening,

Mohit Tiwari:

let's chat.

Todd Gallina:

It's not too late. Yeah, they're out on their own. They're all sad.

Mohit Tiwari:

Yes. So, I mean, so we were six people. Oh, and the visuals that you really, really liked, I was just Googling around for math and art, and I lucked up on this website, and I was like, man, I just sent this guy a fan mail. Like, your work is incredible. Like, you know, there are algorithms I've worked with that I've never seen with my eyes before, and it looks so beautiful. And he replied, and he's like, yeah, I just quit my job to go freelance doing math art full-time. I'm like, I don't know you. Math

Todd Gallina:

art. Math art.

Mohit Tiwari:

Yeah.

Sandy Salty:

Serendipitous.

Mohit Tiwari:

Yeah, exactly that. Timing just worked, and I'm like, okay, how about you now go freelance and come work with us? And luckily, he sort of made matters work, Marcus, in a few months. That's amazing.

Todd Gallina:

And so he came in as a founder as well?

Mohit Tiwari:

He was part of our early, early seed stage kind of founding team where we were just experimenting with things before the product really was even fully baked. So I would say he's played a key role in the company.

Todd Gallina:

So you have a math artist. This is a term that I'm not familiar with and obviously must be a growing industry. I hope so. Tell us a little bit about him and the importance, I guess, of UI, UX, and aesthetics when it comes to a product like yours.

Mohit Tiwari:

Yeah, I think it's, so, you know, security products have a big UX component where I think, like, you know, when you have a big incident, right, Some contractor has been breached and now you have to figure out like, hey, what customer data has impacted? Or you have log4j all over. So there's the UX component where sometimes I think correctness and time to insight is the most important thing. So we spend a ton of time on the UX side of things. But there's this other kind of motion where you're proactively, you want to understand things. what does my organization look like? What is this big organism, right? And how do I move it? What's the way to move this towards being this more resilient off the bat? I think that second motion proactive security, that's where I think really visual, right? A lot of people like look down on visualization as being not equal to visibility, which is true. Like you could have visibility through just a bunch of checks that are always running and fire an alert, like the classic stuff. But I think, Visualization gives you ideas, gives you new perspectives, puts you in a position to see. So we land, for example, at really large customers. We don't even know what we're gonna find. And the first thing, before I go into all the more scalable, programmable workflows, I just wanna eyeball. I just want to look through different lenses. How does it look from the identity side, from the data side? This guy, he's worked on this really interesting, like turned us into a Google Maps. Oh, yeah. Quite literally, like it's a logical Google Maps. We can sort of start out wide and see who is close to what and how is the information flowing. Then there's this other information highway type of, where he just bundles all the data flows into tight. So you can see big flows go from here to here in my org, and these are our clients. It's a bunch of dormant data that's piling up, and you can just see it. And when you send these things out, actually you don't have to write a giant paragraph to be like, hey guys, let's... It tells a

Sandy Salty:

story. It tells a story, and I think it makes it more palpable. you know it makes it makes any level of exposure a little bit more real right and perhaps encourages the client to act right a little bit faster a

Mohit Tiwari:

hundred percent hundred percent i mean we've you know sometimes we do this accelerated two-week assessments

Sandy Salty:

yeah

Mohit Tiwari:

and people start fixing stuff in the middle of it and it's because like now it's there it's not something that you even want to, you know, wipe under the rug. It's like, oh, I have 99 problems and this one is not one.

Sandy Salty:

You know, I read an article that featured you, Mohit, and you said something in that article, like, something that actually really caught my attention around, like, for every one security engineer, there's 200 product developers, which is like... That seems to be sort of like a glaring oversight, I would say, within organizations. When I think about what Symmetry does, especially back to your point about visualization, it's almost like it's that type of motion that will encourage... organizations to sort of right-size that very lopsided ratio,

Mohit Tiwari:

you know? So that, I mean, I'm glad you brought that up. And thanks for actually... Look, I'm usually speaking into the void, so I... Here, I know there are two sides of it, right? Like increasing the count from one to more, right? Increase the number of security engineers. The other side is making it more intuitive for the other hundred regular folks who are building things to more intuitively feel like what they can do yes right and we've had this case where our whole mission is how can we put the few security folks you have whose job it is to imagine attacks and look at corner cases but how do you make them be like product people where they just go in and be like guys check this out right here here here here's the problem if you do this one thing it's very tangible it's not least privilege or zero trust it's Your finance data set, if you change these permissions this way on your process that way, look, this whole thing is gone. Look how beautiful the graph looks after the fact.

Sandy Salty:

Well said. So it's like instead of hiring more security professionals, allow those that you have to scale up, essentially.

Mohit Tiwari:

Exactly. How do you just remove arcane concepts like crazy permissions? I mean, people and data. We work with a major manufacturing company here that you all know very well. I mean, their security, IAM lead, you can show him data and he's like, yeah, this is this business unit, this is that business unit, these are these people. I mean, he knows. People and data, they know.

Sandy Salty:

Yeah.

Mohit Tiwari:

Right? And if you give them the tools to zap out the grunge in the middle, they can act way faster than if they have to go into GCP and take these 100 permissions off and make an alert over there. I mean, that's just grunge. I mean, we love it, so we should do it. But, you know, ideally, our users don't need to worry about it.

Sandy Salty:

Yeah. Yeah.

Todd Gallina:

Okay, I'm just going to give you a, it's one or the other question. Okay. Okay. What's more important, a culture fit or a talent fit? It's

Sandy Salty:

such a tricky question. We knew it would be a stumper.

Mohit Tiwari:

Yeah, this is a tricky one. One of the things that I'm really internalizing is it's almost, I know this is one or the other, so I want to answer that one, right? But like culture is not one attribute, right? there are many columns to the culture, right? So if someone is an egregious, like which column of the culture are they not a fit at? Right, sometimes I found like folks would get written off for like, oh, they're not friendly enough, but friendly has some definition that people want others to conform. Right, and are not as smooth at talking or making you feel comfortable, but they're actually really productive. And in doing really great work, they actually make you feel good that, oh, your team is winning. Like, I would just double click into what aspects of culture do we really, really stand behind. So if you're a jerk, if you take credit for other people's work and not sort of kind and generous, I mean, then, okay, that's off, right? Yeah. That's off. But I've also found, like, there's a big envelope of behaviors that feel like not culture fit, but actually I'm pretty fine with, like, we... We worked with people who love binging, who love 9-to-5-ing, and like I said, robots from the future versus the most gregarious person going. All of this is, to me, great diversity. It's great. Off-culture is fun. In this regard, not even just classic definitions of culture.

Todd Gallina:

No, no, I think you've broadened culture quite a bit, and I think it makes a lot of sense. When I think of culture, the first thing I think of ultimately is... Do I look forward to working with that person? You know, sometimes people will get slotted. You'll get grouped into a project with somebody and you'll be like, oh my gosh, I'm so happy Blank is on that project because I love working with Blank. And then sometimes it's the complete opposite. Oh, Blank's on this project. Like, oh my gosh.

Sandy Salty:

Not Blank.

Todd Gallina:

Whoever Blank is. To me, I think that's a strong component to culture. I don't know what your thoughts are.

Sandy Salty:

No, actually, that's really well said. I mean, I think, so, Mohit, I think, like, I've never really thought about it that way. It's sort of like, I think our definition of culture can be a bit superficial. It's like, oh, are they gregarious enough or are they fun enough or peppy enough? But the truth is, like, to your point, like, we've had a lot of Um, we've had a lot of people in the business over the years that haven't been gregarious at all. They've been super quiet. If you describe trace three as a whole, you'd say it's a super dynamic kind of very kind of, um, gregarious company if you were to humanize it. Right. But the truth is that a lot of our, um, like best culture fits over the years are actually probably like people on the quiet side, you know? So no, I love, I love how you, you're sort of, holistic view

Mohit Tiwari:

of what culture means. I think you have, the bottom line is what you said. Taking all of the above in, if you feel like, yeah, I trust this person, the team is better for them being in it, and I'm looking for, I mean, that sort of summarizing Netflix calls this like the keeper test or something, right? I feel like that is the final sort of litmus test, so I agree. But I would say that if folks are not getting stuff done, then Yeah. That by itself is not a concept. No, of course not. It drags everyone down.

Todd Gallina:

That guy is great to talk about sports with, but

Sandy Salty:

they never get

Todd Gallina:

their

Sandy Salty:

work done. But Blank never gets his work

Todd Gallina:

done. Stupid Blank.

Sandy Salty:

Darn Blank.

Todd Gallina:

Blanks need not apply.

Sandy Salty:

Yeah.

Todd Gallina:

Okay, this is my favorite part of the podcast. Before we started recording, you had mentioned a term called oxygen, right? When your customers love you and your investors love you, there's plenty of oxygen. in the room and when maybe it's the opposite you're you're you're out of oxygen and then sandy astutely said you know you know good customer feedback breathes oxygen into the business so do you have an example of a great customer testimonial or great customer feedback

Mohit Tiwari:

oh we have so many I'm like this is which ones do we choose I don't think this represents symmetry this represents my personal take I do think I mean, I love security. I just love all aspects of it. And with security, one of the fun parts of it is that you actually do get to meet attacks, right? People who want to try to break the defenses you're building. So one of our customers, Chris Costaldo, he's at CrossBeam. He has a very similar background. He's like, yeah, I'm going to deploy a bunch of innovative tech, this, that, but I'm going to put it to the test. brings in this attack team to do what's called a purple team, red team, blue

Sandy Salty:

team.

Mohit Tiwari:

Someone attacking the defenses and I thought that was really awesome. Everything can fail, but just trying to be really intentional about it. Let's stress test the defenses. You have creative people trying out different, and it's not really a win or lose. It's like everyone learns. Crossbeam learns what works, what doesn't, what they need to improve. We learn how a really sharp person coming in what do they see, how do they move, right? It just improves everyone's game and it's so much fun. So, I personally really, really like that and we try to move all our customers into like, hey, you're doing pen tests as part of compliance, let's make it fun with a capital F and really get into it. And, you know, let's do a purple team engagement and let's stress all the defenses and everyone wakes up because it's clear, actionable feedback.

Sandy Salty:

What an awesome perspective from a founder and leader. The fact that you have an appetite for your prospects to almost challenge what you're putting in front of them, that's super refreshing. I think that's not something we've ever really heard before. Yeah, it's true. Thanks. Yeah. Appreciate it. Okay, so I'm going to ask you now, off the record, I'm going to ask you a question that you don't have to answer. It just depends on your preference. So sometimes we like to ask, like, if you've established criteria for an exit or an acquisition. I'm discussing that. Really? Yeah. Okay. I mean, these

Mohit Tiwari:

are all...

Sandy Salty:

Yeah.

Mohit Tiwari:

We don't have established criteria. I mean, the real answer is going to be that... You know, we can see there's a long range plan. Of course, everyone thinks long range, right? But there's also like clear things that we need to hit to get the privilege of moving to the next phase of the game, right? Yeah. You know, if we, you know, Federer also loses matches. So it's fine if we sometimes lose a match and stuff. So if things happen and we get acquired, blah, blah, blah, it's fine. If not, we aim to keep executing. Awesome.

Sandy Salty:

Okay. So Mohit, if you'll indulge us, do you have a criteria for an exit, be it an acquisition or otherwise?

Mohit Tiwari:

That's a good question. We get asked that quite a bit, especially starting off from academia as well. The way I think about it is we are not designing for acquisition. Nothing in our company is planned to be like, hey, just build a bunch of IP, get a bunch of smart people and try to find a buyer. We are building a legit company. We focus on the customers, getting them successful. For us, the badge of honor really is if customers renew and for longer term and they're willing to give testimonials and things like that. like this. So I wouldn't say we have, but yeah, if things go south in however we choose to execute and we have to move up, I mean, it has happened to better companies than us, and we'll see how that plays out. But we're building for a long term. Yeah. Thank you. Tartan we had talked about before, we built even our cap table in a ways that when we bring on board employees and colleagues, It is structured so that everyone wins big if we go

Todd Gallina:

along. Yeah, you described your company as having 35 Founders, I think, was the term that we talked about.

Mohit Tiwari:

Absolutely. This problem is so big and so enmeshed. We have like five little teams. We ship into the customer's cloud. It's a huge headache. So our infra team is lifting a mountain that just lets us even have a chance for all the pretty stuff to even land. Then there's a whole bunch of folks who are really trying to understand completely different clouds. There are very few companies, even startups, that are only on one cloud. They want to figure out, where is my big risk And sometimes it's on Azure or GCP. So we have to build a really broad permissions, cloud permissions team. And then there's an ML team. There's a security team that attacks our product internally and protects it. So even within 30 people, there's like three, four, five people, sub teams that are all lifting a mountain. So our problem has a very big surface area. How do you kind of redefine data security, right? So I think if any one of us stops thinking like, you know, they're a founder looking out at a giant problem, I mean, we are dead. We should pack up. Wow.

Todd Gallina:

Yeah.

Mohit Tiwari:

Well said.

Todd Gallina:

So we're getting close to the end. And one of the things we were talking about before we turn the mic on is the world of technology and ethics converging. Perhaps you can share your thoughts on that with our listeners.

Mohit Tiwari:

Yeah, I mean, the context really was, you know, what are the hardest problems that we, at least I've been facing, and I think, I just wish, like, we were taught a lot more about ethics and making these kind of fuzzy choices versus, you know, geometry or trigonometry, right? We, my take is that a lot of the questions around what problems we solve, how we build the business, who we recruit versus not. They all seem to me to be ethics-driven problems. I mean, for security, as you mentioned, if you're getting attacked, one of the response moves, can you attack back, is that we discover attacks all the time. And sometimes it just seems to make technical sense to do that as a deterrence, but there's gonna be collateral damage and that's bad. And all the way down to, you know, if you're building a product, you know you can get away with sort of checkbox compliance, right, and not really solve the problem, right? You can get the budget line item without solving it, should you do it, right? And you lay it on like, oh, you have a whole bunch of people that you're responsible for, and maybe this is a slope that you can slide down. I mean, you can consider all these questions and trying to just figure a path out. Like, what is the most sort of long-term kind of treating people and treating our problem with respect? Like, how do you make those choices? That has been, I would say, the most recurring theme of problems we face. Super interesting. Interesting, yeah.

Sandy Salty:

Well, so Mohit, now we're going to lighten things up a little bit and ask you some fun questions in what we call a lightning round. Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. Lightning round.

Todd Gallina:

Sorry, I tried to create a theme for lightning round.

Sandy Salty:

We just lost the audience. So I'll go with the first question. If you're going on stage... Is there a specific song, is there an entrance theme song that you want played? Or is it that sound that Todd just made?

Mohit Tiwari:

I don't have a really great answer off the top.

Sandy Salty:

Can I ask you a different question then? Yeah. This is a topic that I think about quite a bit. It's food. Oh, yeah. If you could eat one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be?

Mohit Tiwari:

Oh, that's easy. I grew up in South India. They have this fermented pancake idli with lentils. I'll sign up for that. All day, every day. Pretty much, yeah. We'll have to try that. Yeah, I've never had that. Is there a place we can get it out here? Yeah, pretty much any South Indian restaurant.

Todd Gallina:

Okay. Did you

Mohit Tiwari:

say it's called Italy? Yeah, I-D-L-Y. It's like sitting idly by, but idly. Oh,

Todd Gallina:

got

Mohit Tiwari:

it, got it,

Todd Gallina:

okay. Spelled. All right, we'll give it a go. What is something on your desk, a nearby wall, or out the window that cheers you up

Mohit Tiwari:

during the day? It is a tie between my notebook. This is my outsourced brain and my dog. So, you know, in COVID, our dog has been just He just curls up all the time. Oh, that's awesome.

Sandy Salty:

Okay, so is he a COVID purchase?

Mohit Tiwari:

No, no. Oh, okay, so you had him before COVID. Oh, we're dog fans. Big time. What kind of dog is it? Vizsla. His name is Mojo. Oh, Vizsla. Great dog. Mojo? Yeah. Mojo Rising. Yeah. His full name is Mr. Mojo Rising.

Todd Gallina:

And maybe that's your entrance song. Mr. Mojo Rising. Doors. Okay, over to you for your next one. Yes, yes, okay.

Sandy Salty:

So if you're setting off to Mars and could take only one luxury item with you, what would it be? You

Mohit Tiwari:

know, like this... A Mars-compliant mummy? Like, clothes. I just need, like, great clothes. I just need, like, wrapped. Just wrapped end-to-end.

Todd Gallina:

You mean, like, fashion-forward wrapped clothes, or just, like, protection from the, like... I think protection, yeah, protection is a great start. Okay, all right. Because I thought it would just be, like, looking cool, you know? Hey, man.

Sandy Salty:

Yeah, that's, like, yeah, that's very Alan Mode on Mars, but nowhere else.

Todd Gallina:

Oh my gosh. Okay. Well, it's been great having you as our first like in-person live podcast guest. Thanks so much for coming.

Sandy Salty:

It was such a treat. Thank you. You have a beautiful mind and wonderful presence. Thank you so much.

Mohit Tiwari:

I really appreciate it. Thanks for everything you do. Thanks, man. Okay.

Todd Gallina:

Okay. We are back for what I would call an outro portion of this episode.

Sandy Salty:

Yeah. Very exciting. Um, It's going to be a different type of outro.

Todd Gallina:

So for those of you who just listened to the entire episode, and gosh, we hope you did, we found out that Mohit's favorite food is something called idli.

Sandy Salty:

Idli. Yeah. So, you know, we do this like fun lightning round of questions. You know, my favorite question is like, if you had to pick one food for the rest of your life to eat, right, what would it be? And he responded with idli, which of course... I

Todd Gallina:

had never heard of, but you are far more of a global eater. And when you hadn't heard of it, I was pretty stunned.

Sandy Salty:

Well, yeah, I hadn't heard of it. And it's interesting because, you know, Indian food is one of my favorite, if not my favorite type of food. So I decided I wanted to challenge Todd and see if you would be up for a foodie adventure with me. Yeah. And ran over to our local Indian restaurant and picked up some idli for us to try.

Todd Gallina:

All right. So there's some right here right now.

Sandy Salty:

Yeah. Right here right now. And it's going to ruin your carb quota. Is that okay, Todd Galena? Of

Todd Gallina:

course. In the service of the podcast, I must be willing to take risks.

Sandy Salty:

Sacrifice your carb quota for the day. For those of you who don't know, Todd is exceptionally fit.

Todd Gallina:

I'm just more of a disciplinator than some people, I would say.

Sandy Salty:

What? Actually, I did some research on idli, and it sounds like it's got a nice amount of protein and fiber. Oh, okay. So we may not actually be deviating from your diet. Who knows? This might be your new favorite dish going forward.

Todd Gallina:

I hope so. It's Mohit's. So, I mean, like this was the only food he could– he said this would be the only food he would eat if he could only choose one the rest of his life.

Sandy Salty:

Right? Okay. Okay. Well, should we try it? Yes. Okay, so here we are. It's just getting set up.

Todd Gallina:

Okay, so she's pulling out some what appear to be side portions. Yeah, these are sauces.

Sandy Salty:

Yeah, these are basically chutneys. Okay. And this is the idli here. What we're looking at is what looks essentially like a white, fluffy pancake. Yes. It's actually... What I've learned is fermented lentil and rice. And that's what makes it super helpful is I think maybe the lentil part of it.

Todd Gallina:

Yes. If I was to make pancakes and I put too much into one center glob and then pulled it off of the skillet too soon.

Sandy Salty:

It looks like an incredibly thick and satisfying pancake.

Todd Gallina:

Yes. Okay. So we have three, four sauces. These two are the same?

Sandy Salty:

I think these two are the same. We have what looks like an orange chutney and then another green chutney. Okay. And now we're going to pick up this pancake and proceed to try it.

Todd Gallina:

And then we're going to dip it. You're dipping it. So mine is orange. Okay, I'll try this. You're saying it's chutney.

Sandy Salty:

And I'm going to try the green right now.

Todd Gallina:

Very good.

Sandy Salty:

You like it?

Todd Gallina:

Yeah, I do. Oh. Heck yeah.

Sandy Salty:

Mm-hmm.

Todd Gallina:

It's got a bit of... This is terrible. I'm not a food critic. I don't know how to describe it. The first word I would use to describe it is cakey.

Sandy Salty:

Oh, yeah, yeah. It's... Yeah, well, and frankly, I picked up this idli about two hours ago, so maybe the texture has changed. It's slightly cold idli.

Outro:

Yeah. But still...

Sandy Salty:

Very

Outro:

tasty.

Sandy Salty:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the green sauce is actually really good. I've

Todd Gallina:

got to try that. There's some legit curry in the first sauce. It's yummy.

Sandy Salty:

Yeah. Very good.

Todd Gallina:

Totally different. Come on. You're an excellent cook.

Sandy Salty:

What is the base for that green one?

Todd Gallina:

Yes, please. I taste a hint of almond.

Sandy Salty:

I'll tell you what it is. There's definitely coconut. This was like a coconut chutney, for sure. Oh, okay. So you were close. You were on the nut train, but the wrong nut. It was the wrong nut.

Todd Gallina:

I was on the nut train, but I was heading in the wrong direction. Well, thank you for grabbing this.

Sandy Salty:

Yeah, this was fun. We should eat more often on these podcasts.

Todd Gallina:

That's what people want to hear. Well, Mohit, excellent choice.

Sandy Salty:

Yeah, Mohit, thank you for that tidbit. And to our audience, definitely get out there and try some idli. You should get a chance. Very good.

Todd Gallina:

Thanks, Sandy. Awesome.

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. You've been listening to The Founder Formula, the podcast for all things startup from Silicon Valley to innovators across the country. If you wanna know what it takes to lead tomorrow's tech companies, subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time.