Episode 3
Billion-Dollar B2B: Dmitri Alperovitch on Disrupting the Cybersecurity Market, Via the Cloud
In this episode of our “Billion-Dollar” B2B podcast, Battery’s Dharmesh Thakker talks with Dmitri Alperovitch, the co-founder and former CTO of endpoint-security pioneer CrowdStrike, about that firm’s evolution from a small startup to a global, cloud-native enterprise with more than a billion dollars in annual recurring revenue. How did CrowdStrike do it? According to Alperovitch, there were a number of factors that helped the company scale.
Take a listen.
Jump straight into:
00:20 - To the US from Russia: Dmitri Alperovitch’s early interest in cybersecurity - “I ended up going to college at Georgia Tech, where I was the first graduate out of their master's program then called Information Security.”
04:52 - How CrowdStrike was born: On solving a worldwide cybersecurity problem - “There are only two types of companies: Those that know that they've been hacked, and those that don't yet know.”
10:41 - Differentiation & success: Some of CrowdStrike’s key decisions - “Ultimately the way you win is to have the best team on your side, the best humans that are able to leverage tools very effectively.”
16:17 - From endpoints to the cloud: Is the cloud an attack vector? - “We took a lot of internal lessons learned from how do we protect CrowdStrike to how do we adapt that to protect the others?”
18:23 - The right moment to diversify: When did CrowdStrike introduce new products - “One of the keys to our philosophies was understanding adversaries and understanding what they're trying to do.”
22:13 - Enterprise sales & pricing: CrowdStrike’s sales strategy: “Our market is whoever is going to buy the product. If it's going to be a retail shop, we'll sell it to them. If it's going to be a bank, we'll sell it to them.”
30:01 - A distributed worldwide model: Building the team that led the company to success - “I knew that building something of this complexity would be super hard and we needed to find literally the best people in the world to do it.”
33:21 - Running a public company: The most important inflection points in Dimitri’s career - “We ran the company from day one as if it were a public company, it was really important for us not to miss quarters and to execute flawlessly.”
36:29 - Dimitri’s last piece of advice: Talent, culture, and problem-solving - “Talent is everything. Hire the best people you possibly can. Don't ever, ever settle.”
Resources:
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