How Vanta’s founder bet big on startup security and found product-market fit — Christina Cacioppo

Todd Jackson is back on the mic to guest host another product-focused episode this week with Christina Cacioppo, the co-founder and CEO of Vanta. 

Vanta is the leading automated security and compliance platform, with thousands of businesses relying on the product to get compliant (and to stay that way).  

After toying with some initial ideas, like a voice assistant for biologists, Christina started building Vanta to solve a problem that didn’t really exist at the time. The company started out in 2018 by trying to get SOC-2 security compliance for startups — but at the time, startups didn’t even really need to have SOC-2s. 

But Christina and her team saw the writing on the wall and that security was going to shoot up on the priority list for even the earliest-stage companies, and kept building even when plenty of smart people told them it was a bad idea.

It’s a gamble that paid off. After going through Y Combinator, the team nabbed some truly incredible early customers, including Segment, Front and Lattice. Christina tells us exactly how she went from zero selling experience to pulling off big-time deals. 

She also pulls back the curtain on some of Vanta’s more unconventional moves, like waiting until they acquired hundreds of customers to build a proper website and instead relying almost exclusively on word-of-mouth to grow the business. Christina also shares her thinking behind the fundraising strategy, in which Vanta operated at cash flow break-even for years before going out to raise its Series A.