🎧Vanta CEO Christina Cacioppo Live at Newcomer's Breaking The Bank Summit: Turning Compliance Into a Competitive Advantage and Learnings From $0 to $100M ARR

May 22, 2025

Christina Cacioppo, Co-Founder & CEO of Vanta, shares her inspiring journey from tech enthusiasm to leading a compliance-focused startup that skyrocketed to $100M ARR. She dives into how Vanta helps companies streamline compliance while also enhancing security and revenue growth. Christina emphasizes the importance of rapid shipping in tech, the friendly collaboration with auditors, and the unique company culture symbolized by a llama. Along the way, she offers advice for founders navigating hypergrowth and discusses the impact of AI on their operations.

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ANECDOTE

Founding Vanta From Dropbox Pain

Christina Cacioppo founded Vanta after facing compliance hurdles at Dropbox while launching Dropbox Paper.
She saw the outdated audit process as a problem ripe for technological innovation and decided to solve it.

INSIGHT

Compliance Needs Observability Tools

Compliance lacks real-time observability like engineering systems have for performance.
Vanta provides a dashboard to track security controls live instead of relying on outdated manual screenshots.

INSIGHT

Compliance Drives Business Revenue

Compliance is often misunderstood as a box-checking cost center but can be a strong revenue driver.
Linking compliance work to new business revenue helps secure investment in security efforts.

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In today's episode, Ryan Zauk is joined by Christina Cacioppo, Co-Founder & CEO of Vanta.

Ryan and Christina recorded this episode live at Newcomer's Breaking the Bank Summit in San Francisco. The Summit was an invite-only, one-day summit for fintech founders, builders, and investors to explore the future of finance and technology.

Breaking the Bank was a phenomenal event, with speakers including Jackie Reses, Zach Perret, Eric Glyman, Matt Harris, Josh Reeves, William Hockey, Annie Lamont, and many more.

And if you're looking for more fintech events, check out Stablecon in NYC coming May 29th.

Now back to the episode...

Vanta has been a "center of the valley" company for years now, becoming one of the fastest companies to hit $100M ARR.

Christina is at the heart of this great success story and was a phenomenal guest. She shared a lot of insight (and laughs) talking through lessons scaling from $0 to $100M ARR as well as how Vanta helps companies turn compliance into a competitive advantage.

In this episode, Christina and Ryan discuss:

0:58 - What sparked her journey to technology and startups
4:03 - What exactly Vanta does, how it serves startups, and how they can quote a 526% ROI over 3 years for clients
10:13 - Why auditors, consultants, and lawyers can be friends instead of foe for Vanta
11:33 - Vanta's differentiation in a hot market
14:12 - Why shipping quickly is critical to staying relevant in software and the AI wave
16:43 - Vanta's in-house AI use and what her engineers love (and really don't love)
18:06 - Her top advice for founders facing hypergrowth and her views on Silicon Valley hyperscale lore
21:30 - The forever 'human' aspect of selling (and buying) software
22:38 - Hiring their first "Founder in Residence" and why it may be the new hottest job in the AI era
24:42 - Where differentiation will still exist in the AI era
26:45 - Raising from Sequoia and her advice to founders on how to vet your VCs (and why it's so critical to diligence them back) + the one thing founders really want from VCs at the early stage. It's simple, but not easy!
30:44 - A fun rapid fire round including the origin of the Vanta llama, favorites of her Ohio roots, their craziest marketing stunt attempt, her favorite books, a startup she's most excited about, and much more.

Enjoy the show.

Vanta is the leading trust management platform backed by Sequoia, Craft, YC and Crowdstrike Ventures. Over 10,000 companies, including Atlassian, Omni Hotels, Quora and ZoomInfo rely on Vanta to build, maintain and demonstrate their trust—all in a way that's real-time and transparent.

Christina Cacioppo is the Co-Founder & CEO of Vanta. Prior to founding Vanta, Christina led product management for Dropbox Paper and was a member of the investment team for Union Square Ventures. Christina received her B.A. in Economics and M.S. in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University.

Ryan Zauk is the Host of the This Month in Fintech Podcast and Bay Area lead for the broader This Week in Fintech platform. In his day job, Ryan is an investor at OMERS Ventures, the direct investing arm of one of the world’s largest pension plans with over $130Bn in net assets. Prior to OMERS, he worked in Morgan Stanley’s Tech Investment Banking team focused on M&A and capital markets. He is based in the Bay Area. You can find him on Linkedin or Twitter