Episode 7
Season 3
Panther Labs: Security in the age of cyberwars passes through Athens
Jack Naglieri
Founder & CEO, Panther Labs
"Our goal is to keep systems and data secure from attackers"
About the speaker
Jack Naglieri is the founder and CEO of Panther Labs, a cybersecurity company that helps tech giants detect and repel any suspicious activity in real time. It was founded in 2018 in San Francisco and to date has received over $ 20 million in funding from investors such as S28 and Lightspeed Ventures. He recently started operating an office in Athens, thanks to one of the first engineers of the team who is of Greek origin. Jack talks about the challenges of Cybersecurity and why it affects the development of each sector, and how the right balance in a team is the key to Panther Labs growth.
Show notes
Books: The Trillion Dollar Coach
What makes an entrepreneur outlier?
The why behind everythin. What is the motivatation factor for doing what they do, what’s the reason to become entrepreneur.
Transcript
Intro- Jack Naglieri
It's always hard to tell what success looks like. Insecurity. Because you're, like, “Well, did I secure the company?” I think so. “Well, we're not getting breached. Or at least we haven't seen it.” So, I think we're good, but it's one of those things you could literally work forever and never find. It's weird. It's like ghost hunting.
Intro-Panagiotis Karabinis
Καλώς ήρθατε στην 3η σεζόν του “Outliers” από την Endeavor Greece. Το podcast αφιερωμένο στους επιχειρηματίες που μετασχηματίζουν ολόκληρες αγορές και αλλάζουν το αφήγημα της επιχειρηματικότητας. Κάθε εβδομάδα μιλάμε με τους ανθρώπους πίσω από τις πιο επιτυχημένες start up σε Ελλάδα κι εξωτερικό. Μέσα από το δικό τους ταξίδι και τις ευκαιρίες που βλέπουν στον κλάδο τους ανακαλύπτουμε τι κάνει έναν επιχειρηματία outlier. Είμαι ο Παναγιώτης Καραμπίνης, διευθύνων σύμβουλος της Endeavor Greece. Στο σημερινό επεισόδιο έχουμε μαζί μας τον Jack Naglieri, ιδρυτή και CEO της Panther Labs. H Panther Labs ξεκίνησε το 2018 με έδρα το Σαν Φρανσίσκο. Είναι μία πλατφόρμα Security Analytics που βοηθάει τις ομάδες ασφάλειας σε μεγάλες εταιρείες να εντοπίζουν σε πραγματικό χρόνο και να απαντούν σε παραβιάσεις που συμβαίνουν στα δεδομένα που έχουν στο cloud. O Jack γεννήθηκε και μεγάλωσε στην Γουάσινγκτον και δούλεψε ως υπεύθυνος ασφαλείας σε μεγάλες εταιρείες όπως η Yahoo και η Airbnb στη Silicon Valley όπου και γεννήθηκε η ιδέα της Panther Labs. Μέσα σε μόλις δύο χρόνια έχει λάβει χρηματοδότηση ύψους 15 εκατομμυρίων δολαρίων από κορυφαίους επενδυτές όπως η S28 και η Lightspeed Ventures. Ένας από τους πρώτους μηχανικούς της εταιρείας στην Ισπανία, με ελληνική καταγωγή, είναι και αυτός που είχε την ιδέα να ξεκινήσει την ομάδα της Panther Labs στην Αθήνα. Ο Jack μας μιλάει για τη ραγδαία εξέλιξη του cyber security και τις μεγάλες προκλήσεις που έχουν μπροστά μας. Μιλάμε επίσης για την εμπειρία του έως σήμερα, για τη μεγάλη εξέλιξη της εταιρείας του και τα επόμενα βήματα της Panther Labs στο εξωτερικό και την Ελλάδα.
Panagiotis
Hi, Jack.
Jack
How’s it going?
Panagiotis
I’m great. Thank you for joining us.
Jack
Of course. Thanx for having me.
Panagiotis
Would you like to give us a brief description of what Panther Labs is?
Jack
Sure. So, Panther is a cyber security company based in San Francisco with a mission of detecting and preventing cyber breaches at scale.
Panagiotis
Before going deeper into your business I would love to hear your story. Where did you grow up? Where did you go to school?
Jack
I grew up in the Washington DC area of the United States. Moved out to the Bay Area, the San Francisco Bay area in 2012. Went out to work for Yahoo actually. So, I started at this, you know, very big tech company that no longer exists, but was once very iconic and I learned security, incident response and security engineering and forensics, and a lot of these things. And really, my job was always to build systems to collect data and then try to understand if there was a breach happening and respond to it. So, our whole goal is to keep our systems in our data secure from attackers and that was always my background so. Went at Yahoo for a bit. I was there for about 3 1/2 years and then I got a job at Airbnb. So that was a big shift for me because Yahoo was this very large sort of Silicon Valley giant, right? And then, you know, at one point, they were the most important company on in Silicon Valley, right? And then I went to Airbnb, which was a very different type of company. It was a very mission driven, very different culture and very cloud based, and that was the difference, right? Airbnb had been started in the 2010’s and Yahoo had started in the late 90s.
Panagiotis
Yeah.
Jack
So, the tech was very different, so we had to approach security in a different way as well. So, the whole premise really. I mean like this is stepping way forward to Panther but like the whole premise of the company is that this evolution occurred from, you know we have physical servers in a data warehouse to we're using DBaaS and how do we shift as an industry with that change? And like that's really what my career was, it was going from those big sort of monolithic companies to these very agile hypergrowth startups. And there's been so many of them since then, right? Like Stripe and Coinbase, and we're seeing like more. Robinhood is a great example, right? And it's just the ecosystem has changed so much in that time, so I had the privilege of working in the Silicon Valley companies and getting incredible experience as a practitioner prior to starting Panther.
Panagiotis
And you started developing a new solution in Airbnb before spinning it off to Panther, right?
Jack
Yes. So, I realized there was a lot of problems with doing security at scale at Yahoo. So, it kind of goes back even further than Airbnb, and when I joined Airbnb, we as in the security team were collection of people who had spent our careers in big companies. So, my boss had come from Facebook. One of my coworkers had come from Dropbox and, right, you know, those have been around for a long time, and they were very iconic as well. And we sort of felt a lot of those pains of trying to do this job at scale because there was never really like a purpose built solution that did this. In a way that was designed for cloud-based companies. There were companies like Splunk and Elastic that existed really for a different purpose. I mean, they were really just generalized logging tools, but over time, security people started using them, but they were never built for security. So, we ran into these problems around. We were having difficulty scaling it. It costs a lot of money. We have to pick and choose data that we send, and it really wasn't the right solution. And everyone always felt that.
Panagiotis
Yeah.
Jack
So, when I joined Airbnb and I had these peers, and actually my boss as well, we all had the idea of starting something fresh and being like, OK, we have the opportunity to have a clean slate. Why don't we use the cloud to our advantage? And when we build a system based on cloud technologies to do this, so that was really the inspiration for this project called Stream Alert.
Panagiotis
Yeah.
Jack
Which was an open-source project that we ended up putting out based on a lot of the things I'm talking about. So, it was a serverless framework, meaning you don't, you don't have to manage any servers, it's all, you write the application, it runs it for you. It's very synonymous to like what Kubernetes is now. Like. Think of it as like a more abstracted Kubernetes actually, and it's called StreamAlert. It got pretty popular in the security community, especially in Silicon Valley, but also really all around the world. I realized after I left Airbnb that there were a lot of companies using it. I didn't even realize, which was really, cool. So, we open sourced it. And I started shifting more into management. So, I started helping to build the engineering team within security team working on the tool and just like scaling it and just making it better and then kind of had this idea of, like, you know, this is only a portion of our time. It's not all of our time and this is a really big problem that still needs to get fixed. So it would be really cool to start a company that's, that has the same idea. Then eventually I had that opportunity.
Panagiotis
What's the turning point? Once where you decide, OK, this is more probably a business?
Jack
That was realized when we saw the types of companies using StreamAlert and what they were using it for. So there were a lot of companies replacing those traditional tools that I was talking about with StreamAlert and I was, like, that's really cool. And I've always had the aspiration to build a company since I was young and it just felt like a really natural progression of what I wanted my career to be, and it's the combination of right place, right time as well, so I had an investor reach out to me while I was at Airbnb and it just was the missing puzzle piece that I kind of needed and I never worked on anything Panther related at Airbnb. It was always like all Airbnb focused. I was very intentional about that just for out of respect for Airbnb and just legally, it's just not. It’s unethical to like work on things like that. So it's like I made the decision to wait to quit. And then I started working on it literally the next day. I didn't take a single break. I was just like, alright, I'm going to go like start working on this. And yeah, many years later, here we are in Athens.
Panagiotis
You still have another open source.
Jack
No. So we, so that's an interesting segue, so to talk through, starting the company to open source. We were founded in 2018, in August. I made two hires, and then I made like three or four others in 2019, and one of them was Costas, like one of my early engineers. He had spent many years at Amazon working on similar types of things, as me and he just applied to a job on the Angel list. I think I used the right buzz words in in the and the ad or something and he found it and was like “oh, this looks really cool,” even though we were a company of, like, four people. You know, we were working in this, like, tiny little like room, smaller than the room that we're in in San Francisco. Really like a startup, right? And he was really key in building the tech that became Panther and everyone is obviously, but, like, his experience was so unique and it really meshed well with my experience because we sort of saw the world in the same way. So eventually we built this product and… When you're, when you're trying to go to market for the first time, especially in security, security is really, really hard to break into because it's all about trust, because the CSO is not going to take a chance on you and your new company that's existed for less than a year and you have no customers and you're not really a proving company and with the field that we're in, you really need that trust somehow in order to be a company, because you're going up against public, multibillion dollar companies that have been around for 10 years, and everyone's like, “Oh well, I'm not going to get fired for buying that,” you know, but you know, “this new company. I don't know if I can trust it yet.” So, the idea that came into our head was like, well, what if we open source it? What if we put all the code in a single repo? We have the community edition. We allow engineers to play with it and start using it on their own and build that trust that way from the bottom up, right? And in this age where, in order to be successful at scale, you have to write code, that's one way you can really do it. And there's a lot of other companies that have done that successfully, but now it's kind of flipped, which is why we're not open source anymore. So, we open source in 2020, in January, we got some first initial users and we signed our first customer in June of 2020, and that's the pandemic year as well. So, it's like pandemic started in March in the US, at least like that's when our lockdowns all happened was like mid-March. The 16th I think even, and it was really scary for me at that time, just as obviously a human, but also as an entrepreneur because I'm, like, I just started this company and I'm like pouring everything I have into this. And, like, I don't know if it's going to survive now because we're going into pandemic and I don't know if like anyone's going to want to buy it and all these things and then, like you know, a year and a half later here we are like things were still working and going quite well, but the open source was the 1st sort of chance for us to build that trust and to get those first users. So, it was helpful and I still believe it was the right move at the right time.
Panagiotis
Was it difficult to put the community together? What do you think was critical in that process?
Jack
Yeah, so I think, if I were to do it again, I wouldn't have done it that way.
Panagiotis
Oh, really?
Jack
Because I think in order to truly be commercially successful with open source, the Community has to exist first. I don't think that you can start a company. I mean, even though I did it, but like I wouldn't recommend it, it's very hard to build commercial traction at scale if you don't have that community already. So companies that did it, right, in my opinion, you know, Elastic is one of them, like, they had that open source community first, then they built a company docker same thing, and I guess no one ever built a company out of Kubernetes really. It's just kind of embedded into a lot of like cloud platforms, but I think the order of operations should have a community first, then go commercial. But if you ask me that now, I would say don't even do it. Just go sass all the way because you shouldn't have to force people in 2021 to run software in my opinion. I think as the provider and as the expert of the code base it should be on you and SAS is really the only way that you can build an agile cloud business. That's just the kind of like a hot take that I have, and any founder that I talked to, they're like, “Oh, you know, we have this open-source thing and we have like we allow our customers to run it themselves.” And I'm like, “No, you should really reconsider that because it's going to really hurt you at scale” and you can't control the quality of their experience. And it's just it's just a lose-lose for everybody.
Panagiotis
Yeah.
Jack
So, I think that open source is very helpful for a lot of reasons. But I think if you're trying to build a business around it, it's very tricky.
Panagiotis
You recently published a report about scenes.
Jack
Yeah.
Panagiotis
And it's actually that industry that space that you're transforming, and you're disrupting. What are SIMS and how do you compare with them?
Jack
Sure. So as SIM is an acronym, just stands for Security Information and event Management, and it's just a blanket term used for systems that take security data and allow people to correlate activity across different log types like, for example, like, correlating someone's logins to their SSO system to their network traffic. Or you know trying to detect if they were breached somehow and then connecting all the dots together and saying like, “Oh yeah,” like, someone fished Jack they stole his password and then they did these five things like that's done in a SIM usually. And the biggest difference for Panther is that we fundamentally reinvented it from zero. So, the thing that you always sort of heard about like the 10X rule and things like that when you think about like in technology innovation and if you think about SIMS like the first generation, we're like way back, in the probably late 90’s and they would basically just tell you when things were wrong. You would give it data and be like, this is an alert. Go look at it” and then you go look at it and be like, “No, that's just that's normal. Like that's not an alert.” And then people stopped using them because they just weren't, they weren't customized well enough. They didn't scale very well. They were very hard to use, so we went to the log analytics tools like Splunk, Elastic et cetera, right? That was the 2nd wave and then now we've sort of reached that limit with those tools as well, but we've reached our limit in the last like 6, 6 to 7 years of my opinion. It's been a long time like we've needed a reinvention for a while, which is around the same time I built StreamAlert, right?
Panagiotis
Yeah.
Jack
Like, that also, that all kind of happened at the same time because cloud services was emerging, so we hit our limits there and then now instead of just sort of incrementally building something a little bit better, which I see a lot of companies doing, but I don't see it really taking hold. I don't see it really working, right? People haven't really pulled the market fundamentally from Splunk yet because they just they have such a hold on it. So, the things that we did differently, we completely started from scratch. And we're like all right, we want to build something that is built for this era of cloud modern tech companies because they have a different set of environments requirements scale. Like all, that's very different and the amount of data that that exists in the world is just continually increasing every single day. Companies are like Facebook, for example. You know these massive companies have so many users and so many more people are using it, which is creating a type of data, which means that you have to secure that data somehow, which a lot of people are very nervous about. Because like we don't really, we don't even have the tools to monitor all these things. We want to just fundamentally reinvent things by using cloud native, which is really the basis of where all our systems and things run. Meaning we don't manage any servers, it's all elastically scalable and we rely on the cloud provider to take care of that, right, cloud native is great. And that also means that there's no security operations person who has to like continually scale the thing. It just runs and works. And then the second part is storing the data in a data lake. So, data lakes are very emerging technology in that space to where it decouples the storage and compute elements. So, if you send more data, you don't have to spin more systems up; it just automatically works as well. So, data leaks the other key component there and we work specifically with Snowflake, which is like a very popular cloud data warehouse. They just IPOed this year actually, and they're doing quite well and it's all about, at the end of the day, like, were moving the friction to do this job at scale. Snowflake is very similar to us in that regard where there are cloud provider that takes care of all the data operations for the users. We're doing those same things, but for security. So, cloud native security data lake and then the last thing for us is detections of this code. So more often than not, there's a proprietary language for accessing the data that you have to learn. It's specialized to that system, but we think that those are very rigid and they're very difficult to extend and really apply these more developer-oriented principles to because we want to process data with code. That's just that's what's required at scale, and as security people we've been doing that for a very long time. We've been writing like Python scripts, and we've been doing all these things and having a system that you can natively do that in, is extremely beneficial and we just do a lot of very technically complex things that would take in a security team years to build, but we really, strongly believe that this combination of things is what's required to actually solve the problem, or at least get closer to solving that problem, because security is very grey. It's not like you did it or you didn't do it. You know, it's always about reducing risk and answering the right questions, so it's very interesting when you're building a product around this.
PANSGIOTIS
Yeah.
Jack
This is hard to tell, like. It's always hard to tell what success looks like. Insecurity because you're like, well, “Did I secure the company?” like, “I think so. Well, we're not getting breached. Or at least we haven't seen it.” So, I think we're good, but it's one of those things you could literally work forever and never find. It's weird. It's like ghost hunting. Like, where is it?
Panagiotis
Who are your clients and how you're working with them?
Jack
Yeah, that's a great question. So, we like to represent our customers as modern security teams, so security teams who sort of see the world the same way we do in that they believe that using Python for analysis or using a data lake and having structured data like all of these principles are very important for them to do their jobs. So on our website, Panther.io you can see the logos that we work with. It's some incredible companies like Coinbase and Dropbox and Figma and GitLab and there's a lot, Circle which is another one and, yeah…
Panagiotis
It's amazing.
Jack
It's growing quite rapidly as well and... We've had such a privilege to work with such amazing security teams and their feedback, and their learnings are so helpful for us in their early stages.
Panagiotis
You've also raised about $20 million. With the lead investor on your Series A being Lightspeed Venture.
Jack
Yes.
Panagiotis
How was that process like? I mean, how did it feel and was it tough for a first time founder to fundraise?
Jack
Of course, actually the A wasn’t the hard one. I think that the C was the hardest one, because when you're going out into the market and you don't have customers and you don't really have a great product yet, it's super challenging to be like, “This is my vision. This is what I see needs to happen. I just need capital time and people to do it,” right? And that's what early-stage investing is. It's just risk taking, honestly. It's calculated risk. You're like, “Do I have enough conviction to believe this founder and that can this founder do it at the end of the day? That's really what a lot of these theses are betting on. They're betting on the founder. So, product team and market are the three things, right? “So do you have a product yet?” “Not really.” “Do you have a team?” “Kind of?” “Is there a market?” “Yes.” There's a great market. But are you the product and the team to do it?
Panagiotis
Yeah.
Jack
That's always the question they ask in the early stages, so I got… I remember I went out to founders to see. I got 18 no’s in a row. Imagine that like pitching that many times. I mean, I know other founders do it more than me but like, it was very stressful, and I had a moment where I was like, “I don't think I'm going to get any money. I think the company's going to die.” And thankfully it didn't happen, right. We had one say “yes” and then the rest sort of happened after that. So I got about like 5 yes’s at that point and that was enough for us to close a good round that was like 4 and a half million dollar around 2019 and then the A was pre-emptive so I didn't even really run a process I was having these conversations with investors which, even though you're not running a process, you're still fundraising, which is something I've been saying a lot more recently. It's like any conversation with investors fundraising, in my opinion, it's just a different phase of fundraising. It's like the “get to know you phase”, but if an investor builds enough conviction within that phase, they'll just throw a term sheet at you and be like, “I actually want to do this and I know you're fundraising, but here's an offer. Do you want it?”
Panagiotis
Yeah.
Jack
And I said yes because, in those days, it was still fairly uncertain, you know, we were still just going to market at that point. But we saw the Series A as a way for us to get to where we are today, which is what happened. And you know, we'll announce another thing shortly. Probably in the next couple of weeks, or actually by the time this series would probably be up by then, but it's been very interesting and in fundraising is a very, very difficult thing to do, just in general, and there's a lot of different angles at play that happen when you're fundraising.
Panagiotis
What are the growth plans and what do you think that bet that your investors are taking is? What are you looking ahead?
Jack
Everything starts with the team, right? So, it's like if I don't have a good team, can't build a product and I can't take the product to market. So I need to figure out how to invest in the team, and now that we're remote first. It's really, yeah. So, within certain markets so not completely like in the world. We're here in Athens we have a team here which happened after I had hired Costas. Like we hired Costas and then he had other people and his network that we found and then just sort of grew and we were really blessed to find like incredible talent in Athens and really, really, strong engineers. So we have a lot in the US as well so it's… Obviously this is where I live and this is where all the exec team is like. We're based in the US. So, we have those hubs as well in San Francisco and Denver and the Washington DC area and Ann Arbor. And we're pretty much everywhere there. But I think for me it's an exercise in how do we effectively build a remote team to where people feel motivated and connected, and I take a lot of notes from Sid, who's the founder of GitLab because they obviously were very innovative in building a remote first company and in a lot of ways sort of happened the same way that it did a Panther, where it's like we didn't go out saying like we're going to be remote first company. We just hired people in other areas because it was easier to find people that way. And the thing I've noticed about being remote first is that you open yourself up to such a more diverse set of people that you could be working with. And there’s challenges with it, like everything. But there's challenges with forcing people to go into an office as well, you know. And like the rigidity of that schedule may actually make people less productive because they have to commute. They have to change their whole life around for work versus the other way. Which is, you're flexible, and that's really what remote work is about. And for me it's just an exercise in leadership and figuring out what are the levers that I pull to keep my team happy and successful in shipping and keep the company in the right trajectory. So, investing in the team is something that I'll be doing quite a lot of in the next… I mean, honestly, for the life of the company, it's my job, right? My job is to keep my team successful and happy because if they're successful and happy, then my customers will be successful and happy. And then if my customers are happy, then my investors are happy, right? It's a virtuous cycle.
Panagiotis
You're doing some key hires too, right? You've hired some senior executives.
Jack
Yes, so this year was really building the organization. So, I hired my VP of Engineering, my VP of Product, sales, marketing, customer success, Bizdev and I just made two other executive hires as well and they'll be starting in the next month, so it's pretty much built a whole team and then they've built a team under them as well. So, like customer success and product marketing and like just design and platform engineering and justice everything. It's very different skill set than the early days. Again, you know, it's a very different phase of life.
Panagiotis
And it's an intense exercise, right? I mean…
Jack
Extremely.
Panagiotis
What are your lessons from that process?
Jack
Be structured and intentional about what you're looking for. So, we made a really important change after I hired my VP of product and he was also a founder prior to joining Panther. And I'll always give him credit for his ability to interview people and ask the right questions at the right level of depth. So instead of asking someone like, “How would you mentor your team?” it's more like, “tell me how you mentored your team and tell me how you dealt with this situation. Like tell me what it was like to promote someone. What was that process end to end and give me an example?” And that's a very different type of answer versus theoretical. So, it's like that's a really important lesson that he sort of taught us, but also just in defining those requirements, like, cool you want to hire a VP of product, like? What do you want them to do? What do you need them to do in the next 12 months? Like, can you write that out? You're like, well, I need them to bootstrap a team. I need them to establish really strong product management processes. I need them to establish really great design processes and those kind of sub-requirements. And then from those requirements you build your questions. You're like, alright, cool. How am I going to hit these things when I talk to them? And then how do you structure those conversations. Like you have an intro call, you've a secondary call and then you have a loop and then you have a debrief, like… It's really the hiring process that you have to get right. And if you don't get it right in the early days, you make the wrong hires. If you don't ask the right questions, you misqualify people and you're like, “Oh yeah, they're cool. I have a great conversation with them.” It's, like, but are they going to do the thing that you need them to do? They have the experience you actually need right now? In the early days when things are unstructured and no one tells you how to do this, by the way, like my background is not in… I'm not a founder, or like I'm not a second-time founder. I'm a first-time founder, so it's like I didn't know how to, how legal work they didn't know how benefits work, payroll. I didn't know how hiring works like all these things, you just kind of have to get thrown in and figure it out, right? I didn't know how… I didn't know what “go to market” meant. I didn't know what anything was. I as an engineer, I was, like, I know how to write code and I know what security is. But as a founder, you have to do everything. And you have to have your hands in everything.
Panagiotis
You don't write code anymore.
Jack
No, my team would yell at me if I did that. The only code that I write is in our product itself because we have a Python IDE effectively in the product. So that's really the only extent of the code that I write. I just, yeah, I'm one of those technical founders. Maybe it's a rare or rare thing for technical founder to say, but like I, I just really don't write code anymore. My head is much more like my head space is much more focused on building a team and really like the high-level things that I have to do and think about as a CEO.
Panagiotis
Do you do any mentoring coaching? Do you have any support systems in place?
Jack
In that I'm the coach, or that I reach for support for us?
Panagiotis
For you, but both.
Jack
Yeah. It's actually both. I mean, I like to... I mean one. The thing I'll say is the Silicon Valley network is absolutely incredible and the amount of people and the caliber of people that I've been able to meet this year is just mind blowing. So, I've met a lot of people within that, that have been very helpful mentors for me. My board obviously is… are probably my closest thing to mentors. I have, but also there's just… I have some really amazing advisors as well. Some of them were founders, some are just like very prominent board members in the industry, and some are our other founders who built massively successful public companies and then sort of like when did their own thing. So yeah, there's certainly a lot of people in that network, and I always carefully pick and choose who I want to ask, like what question, and then on the flipside of that, it's like I've had the opportunity now to invest in like some earlier security companies that have similar sort of Montrose to my company. That's the thing that I always found most helpful in their early stages when things are so uncertain. Is having a founder who is like 2 stages ahead of you as an advisor because they can tell you how to avoid like the common problems. And in those two years like things can change quite significantly. Like the market conditions can be different. Like, people are raising like these crazy seed rounds now, like, $7 million and, like, “What?” That was like…
Panagiotis
It's more actually, there wasn't… A Brazilian company announced that thirty million seed round.
Jack
Thirty?
Panagiotis
30 million seed rounds.
Jack
But so I think those things can happen if it's not for first time founder though.
Panagiotis
Yeah.
Jack
Because, like, you see you see second or third time founders doing that all the time.
Panagiotis
Yeah.
Jack
So that's not shocking to me. But, like, a first-time founder doing that much, I'd be like, whoa, that's impressive or very scary. But, you know, the market is just very bullish about SaaS companies right now. And it's not surprising we're kind of in a bubble, in a way. But yeah, who knows what's going to happen?
Panagiotis
What's the future of cyber security? What are the big challenges? It looks, we're going to see a lot of changes, right? I mean that data amount is only going to grow. What do you see as the biggest challenge is and the biggest threats, going forward?
Jack
I think the biggest challenge is just keeping up with the growth that's happening around us, right? And what are the primitives you can put in place now to get ahead of that. And a lot of it is shifting also to engineering and using code to do things. That's a similar shift that happened in DeVos. So, if you recall, like companies like HASHICORP for example, they build a platform for engineers to basically do infrastructure configuration at scale. That's really what they're whole job is. And configuration management was the same thing, and I think now security is going to have that same wave where you're going to have to start writing code to do things because the scales are so high. And the tax services is so high as well. You just you need to get clever and you need to use software for doing this.
Panagiotis
What's the worst thing that can happen in cyber security. Like, what's the worst attack that can happen?
Jack
Oh man, I mean… Data getting stolen. I mean, I think… It doesn't even matter what the data is, it's just the fact that something gets stolen. If it's financial data, that's pretty bad.
Panagiotis
Yeah.
Jack
Someone steals a bunch of credit cards, and the company wasn't encrypting them or whatever, right? It could be personal information. So, imagine, like, Facebook got breached, like, God forbid, right? Like you would hope that that never happens because they have so much data about you. And Google is no different, right? They have so much data about people and that can be used against a lot of people and a lot of very malicious ways so… Yeah, I mean actually, if I were to, if I were to still to distil, the worst thing that could happen, it's like a hospital gets ransomware and people die. That's the worst possible thing that could happen, right? That attackers come in and they shut down the infrastructure of a city. They cut the power in the water, like, the… Those are the worst things that could happen because it actually affects the safety of people.
Panagiotis
True.
Jack
Right? Like you can cost financial damage, you can destabilize a market, but this is like that's like cyber war, to be honest, you know, and this is happening every day, like, and everyone always says, like, you know, it's going from the battlefield into cyber and like into the into computers, right? So those are the worst things that could happen and if we can help with that, like, that makes me really happy as a founder. And I do want to make that shift at some point when the government is ready to use this.
Panagiotis
How did the Athens story came about? You had your engineer who was from Athens? Costas?
Jack
Yeah, Costas. Yeah. He was in Spain at the time actually, funny enough, but yeah, he…
Panagiotis
It was his idea? Like, what did he say to you?
Jack
Well, I was just really impressed by him as an engineer and as a person and I flew him out to the Bay Area a handful of times, and I finally made the jump out here. I went Actually… I planned this whole, like, Europe trip one year. No, I guess Europe and Middle East. I went to Israel. I was in Israel for some days and then I flew to Greece, so I was here for about 9 days and then I flew to Italy to see some family and things like that. So, I spent a lot of time with them and he had found another engineer, a front-end engineer and they were sort of, like, this, like, team here and they were just really excellent people and they were really strong engineers and we just kept hiring and finding more great talent and it just… In a remote world, it just doesn't really matter as much or where people are. And with companies, like, Deal out there now, like facilitating that process, it makes it much easier for me as an entrepreneur to be like, “Oh, yeah, we have people in Athens. Oh, yeah, we have people in the Netherlands,” or I'm just theoretically speaking, right, like, we can hire people effectively anywhere now and, like, remote work and Zoom and a lot of these tools like Slack, like, make that possible. Notion as well as something we've been using heavily lately at Panther. So, yeah, I mean, the Athens story is, we just, we made a couple hires for people that we really liked and trusted and we just kept hiring more people.
Panagiotis
How many people are there now?
Jack
Around 10. It's still fairly small.
Panagiotis
And do you see this growing?
Jack
It can grow. I need to find my leadership out here. That's the only way that remote teams are going to scale. In my opinion, is by finding strong leaders who can be the extension of the, quote unquote, HQ. So, it's very interesting when you think about an American company having sort of offices or satellites or really people in other markets because the cultures are so different and the laws are different and everything's different, right? So, it becomes very challenging if you're not based here or if you're not from here. So, if I was actually Italian, I am Italian, but I'm American, you know. But if I actually was from Italy, it actually would probably help. It probably helped because I actually understand the nuance of European culture and European laws and all these things. So I think for me it's around, like, who are those strong leaders that I can find locally here in Athens and in other countries that we want to be in in Europe eventually. And then going from there and, really, sort of bringing that, like, Silicon Valley energy out here and in other places as well, and making sure that those leaders can speak the culture and can maintain the culture, but also put their own twist on it, right? Because different countries just have different cultural values as well. And it's really interesting in this market, especially in Athens, right?
Panagiotis
Yeah.
Jack
Because, I get this feeling that a lot of the people that work at the company haven't had opportunities like this before, and I think, like, that's something that I see when I talk to them and I spend time with them and it's really interesting and touching and, like, I enjoyed a lot and it's cool that I can give people the opportunity to kind of experience Silicon Valley and not be there because, you know, we're very far away.
Panagiotis
Are you in touch with any other entrepreneurs? What's your take on the Greek ecosystem?
Jack
I don't actually… I'm not connected into it yet. This is your job. Your job is to help me get connected and vice versa, right? It's like, you know, that's the beauty, that's the beauty of the Silicon Valley network and the tech ecosystem is that I get connected with, you know, an organization like Endeavor and, you know, you guys would complement the thing I know, which is the US tech ecosystem. I know that very well.
Panagiotis
Yeah.
Jack
I mean, I've been living in it nonstop for the last 10 years, pretty much, right? But I will say it's very different being an entrepreneur versus working in tech. Those are completely different worlds.
Panagiotis
Absolutely.
Jack
And you kind of see behind the curtain, so to say. You're like, “Oh, this is actually how it works.” It's kind of funny, but it's also incredible and I think, I think there's such a great support system in tech and entrepreneurs are always or most of the time, like 95% of the time, are willing to help others and that's something that I think it is one of the most incredible things about having the opportunity to run a company in Silicon Valley, is seeing that sort system and actually learning from the people who made tech companies a thing and made Silicon Valley a thing. That's insane. That's incredible. The learnings that those people have are priceless. And I've had such incredible opportunities to meet all these people.
Panagiotis
Yeah.
Jack
Because a lot of them have transitioned into VC's. One of my investors put me into a round table with Reid Hoffman, like, 2 days ago.
Panagiotis
Oh, really!
Jack
I think it was two days ago. I don't know. I think the time… Maybe it was yesterday. It was the day or two ago. Yeah, and that's just an opportunity I would have never had otherwise, you know. And the learnings that I can get from spending an hour on the on that call… It's just, it's all about time, right? Like building a great company is about saving time and not making as many mistakes as you could have without that advice?
Panagiotis
Yeah.
Jack
That's at the end of the day what you're trying to do.
Panagiotis
Particularly Reid is an incredible person. He sits on Endeavor’s board as well.
Jack
Oh, that's right. Yeah.
Panagiotis
He's super helpful and super active. We close every interview with one common question.
Jack
Okay.
Panagiotis
What do you think makes an entrepreneur an outlier?
Jack
An outlier. I love this question. I think it goes down to what is their motivating factor for doing what they do? What's the reason that they're an entrepreneur? Like, where do they come from? What is the source of their drive. Like, the why. So read a lot of Simon Sinek and I pay attention to him quite a lot and I've realized that the motivation and the ability to convey that motivation is what makes someone unique. So, he always uses the example of Apple. He's, like, “Apple isn’t a computer company. They’re a company that makes great products and they want to delight their customers. And that's a very big difference from just saying, “Oh, yeah, we make computers.” Because everyone makes computers.
Panagiotis
Yeah.
Jack
But why do you make computers? So that why, the answer to that why, is I think what makes entrepreneurs outliers? It's the set of experiences and mentalities and everything that led into what they're doing today. And that's what I look for as well when I talk to other VCs or entrepreneurs, or even just people. It's like well, why? “Why are you doing what you're doing? Like, why is it? Why does it make you happy, like, why are we in this studio together,” you know?
Panagiotis
Yeah.
Jack
Like, even I could flip the question, but yeah, I mean, I think just going back to answering that “why” ultimately, is it?
Panagiotis
Great answer. Jack, thank you so much for joining us.
Jack
Yes, thank you so much.
Epilogue-Panagiotis Karabinis
Ακούσατε τον Jack Naglieri, ιδρυτή και CEO της Panther Labs. Ευχαριστούμε που ήσασταν μαζί μας σε αυτό το επεισόδιο του “Outliers”. Η παραγωγή έγινε από το The Greek Podcast Project. Για να μη χάσετε κανένα επεισόδιο της σειράς, κάντε εγγραφή μέσα από το site μας στο outliers.gr ή σε όποια άλλη πλατφόρμα ακούτε τα podcasts σας. Είμαι ο Παναγιώτης Καραμπίνης. Τα λέμε στο επόμενο επεισόδιο.
MoneyReview Writing
Imagine a cyber attack that would allow hackers to gain access to your credit card information or the infinite personal data held by Facebook or Google. Worse, imagine a ransomware attack on a hospital that leads to the death of its patients, or a scenario where hackers manage to break into the systems of an entire city and shut down infrastructures such as water or electricity. This is the form of war today, explains Jack Naglieri, founder and CEO of Panther Labs. In the age of the cloud, war is being transferred from the battlefields to computers. That's why Panther Labs, a San Francisco-based startup that also maintains a team of engineers in Athens, helps business security teams detect and prevent such cyberattacks.
