Secure Ventures with Kyle McNulty

While episodes so far focused on the stories of founders, in this episode I interview the hosts of the Extreme Uncertainty podcast, Mike Ravenscroft and Mike Leffer, who are prominent venture capitalists in the security space. The episode includes a glimpse into the untraditional routes into VC as well as several tips for founders looking for funding and idiosyncrasies of the security market when looking at potential investments. This is one of my favorite episodes so far, as it provides additional background as to the struggles of every founder I have interviewed on the show. Their podcast can be found by searching "Extreme Uncertainty" wherever you listen to Secure Ventures, or on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/extreme-uncertainty/.

Explore Vladi Sandler's cybersecurity journey from military to LightSpin, emphasizing cloud defense, team culture, and balancing work, education, and transitioning. Discover the challenges of entrepreneurship, building a diverse team, and the importance of transparency in the cybersecurity industry.

Sam is the youngest guest to join the show so far, having started his company Kasada while he was still a teenager. After experience working in the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) in high school, basically the NSA of Australia, Sam decided to forgo college ("university" for the Australians) in favor of going directly into the security world. Shortly after, he founded Kasada, which is built around a bot deterrence platform that presents complex quantitative challenges that cost attackers thousands in compute resources. Kasada has seen explosive growth, as it received funding from the CIA's venture group in its 2019 Series A, received a Series B in 2020, and now has over 50 employees.

After an early stint in the Air Force Reserves and then as an Algorithm Engineer, Guy's career then transformed after business school. He transitioned into Business Development, where he led the APAC expansion for Runcom Technologies and later Algosec. He was mentoring in an Australian cyber security accelerator, CyRise, when we was recruited by one of his mentees and now his Co-Founder. After a successful pivot, SecureStack is focusing on its product CloudBuilder, which enables secure templates for cloud deployments so the application attack surface can be rapidly reduced. SecureStack was recently named one of the top 20 cybersecurity firms to watch in 2021 by Forbes. 

After starting his career in the music industry including the creation of his own music festival, Festivus, Dean has woven a fascinating career out of his deep marketing expertise. With the new privacy regulation across the globe over the last several years, marketing efforts have become reliant on privacy compliance for effectiveness. Invisit is streamlining privacy compliance to ensure companies maximize the value of their marketing campaigns.

After a tongue-twisting liberal arts degree with two majors and two minors, Chrissa went on to pursue her dream of becoming a doctor. After a series of stints in healthcare, she found a passion for healthcare technology where she could influence a much wider landscape within healthcare. Her company, Patientory, is providing secure storage and access to consumer healthcare data through a mobile application so individuals can take ownership of their medical records.

From an early start in material sciences to serial product lead and strategist to trusted adviser in healthcare, Balaji has developed a fascinating career tackling each of his interests. While the healthcare industry is receiving more attention than ever, his company MedStack is simplifying healthcare security by providing an automated platform for deployment and infrastructure management.

In the wake of the recent SolarWinds incident, never has Karim Hijazi been so busy. Karim started his career in photography and then quickly transitioned into starting his own security consultancy. Since then, he has had numerous interesting events including a public battle with Lulzsec in 2011. Now, his company Prevailion is in the spotlight more than ever due to its novel approach to supplier security.

Ari Jacoby went to college thinking he would enter politics, but he soon found the entrepreneurial itch. Many years later, he has now led four successful exits as he embarks on his first venture into security, Deduce. Deduce is democratizing account takeover detection and prevention capabilities, such as notifications after logins from a new location, so smaller businesses can leverage similar functionality to that at major technology companies such as Apple, Facebook, and Google.