Hello everyone. I'm here with the one and only Dave DeWalt. Dave is famous on many fronts. He's a world-class tech executive, which we're going to talk about all the things he's done, but he knows a ton about security. I first met him when I was at VMware, and Joe Tucci couldn't stop talking about you there. He was like, "This guy is amazing. He'll make a mountain out of a molehill. You were just so good at sales and marketing." Obviously, he had experience with you from Documentum, I think it was, where you first met, and inside the EMC sort of mafia, so to speak. Dave was a legend. But then he went on to do what did you do after EMC? A co-McAfee, which was a lot of fun, the growing stack company, and selling it to Intel right around the corner here in Santa Clara. And then I was CEO at FireEye and Mandiant.
Yeah. And then we know Kevin Mandia in common. So that's great. Tell us a little bit about, okay, you're doing document management, how did you get interested in security? Were you always interested in security?
Well, first of all, thank you for having me. It's so good to see you, and likewise, I want to give you all the praise back as well. It's such an honor. We'll have a little fun, let's have a little chat. I got my first kind of taste of security when I was at Oracle Corporation way back when, when we started to have database security. And I sort of fell in love with it a bit. I went to a company called Quest Software that did database security, and from there I went, okay, that's really interesting, what about document and unstructured data security? Documentum did document management but also had a lot of document security around it as well. So I fell in love with it a little bit more. Then when I was done with the EMC time, they acquired RSA during my time frame, then I fell in love with security a little more. And then I said, that's it, I'm going security. Became CEO of McAfee and learned all about antivirus and network security, cloud security, and then ultimately, I'm going to do this again. So let's find a startup called FireEye. And now 25 years later, I'm still doing security.
I want to pick on one part of that which I thought, I mean many of those moves are brilliant. But the FireEye-Mandiant move was incredible because people have heard about Kevin Mandia, but marrying technology with services and getting a world-class incident response was a brilliant move. How did that come about? Were clients telling you that, or how did you make that part of your vision at FireEye?
Yeah, it's a really important conversation because not only was FireEye cutting-edge technology that was discovering threats, very complex threats at the time, what they call multi-vector, multi-stage threats, where particularly the Chinese at the time were implementing attacks in stages. They'd send some binaries today, some next month, some the next month after that. And they were doing them across vectors like web and email and other places. And FireEye was able to assemble all that. But what was powerful was Mandiant was figuring out what vectors and stages were coming in. So the combination was pretty powerful. The services and managed services that Mandiant delivered accompanied with FireEye really created a powerful combination, not just going to market with services and managed services with the product, but also so close to the edge of the threat and the threat actor. And that's a shout-out to Kevin Mandia and the team because no one kind of did it like Mandiant did it. So we grew it from about 10 million in revenue to a billion in revenue, and a lot of those good people ended up at Google, and that has become the tech and services of Google threat intelligence.
Absolutely, you guys deserve a lot of credit for that move. Okay, so now let's fast forward to Night Dragon. How did you decide, okay, you've been a great operator, you want to start both helping companies but investing in companies? How did Night Dragon start?
When I was thinking about what to do next after FireEye, I did 17 years and 68 public company quarters, so you know what this is like, right? It's like dog years. I was like, what am I going to do next? I love this world of security, and I really wanted to found my own company. So I was thinking about it like, okay, instead of being a CEO, maybe I'm going to be better at telling CEOs what to do, and it's a lot easier job. So this is it. We'll take the advice. I built an investment and advisory platform and started to raise capital. A couple billion dollars later, we've been growing and growing. The funny part is the name Night Dragon. There were three attacks back when I was CEO of McAfee, and George Kurtz, who was the founder of CrowdStrike, and Dmitri Alperovitch named all three of them. The first one was called Operation Aurora, which was the famous Google attack. The second one was called Night Dragon, which was on the oil and gas industry. And the third one was ShadyRAT for remote access. So when I was going to name my company later, ShadyRAT didn't sound so good. Aurora, Night Dragon, Night Dragon sounds cooler.
It's great. And many of the companies you're involved with, we want to work with, which we were talking about even before we began this dialogue. So we're great. I'm very happy. The thing that I like about Dave, when I called him, of course, I've had tremendous respect for him to get involved to chair our security advisory board at Cohesity, we have people like Kevin and then Aximos and many others who are qualified people. He didn't take very long, like within a day or two, and he's been enormously helpful to us. Whenever I call him, he's available, which is amazing. We've been talking about things we could do. We both share a passion to keep the world safe, right? Both the enterprise and government. Talk a little bit about why that's important. We're so honored to be in this country, citizens of the United States, but we want to keep the country and company safe. Why is that important?
Yeah, Sanjay, my motto at Night Dragon is called "Secure our world for tomorrow," and that's what I really believe in because the threat landscape has been elevating and we can all watch the headlines every day. But it isn't just in the world of cyber, it's everything. Every domain from space to air to maritime to land, physical, cyber, AI, quantum threats and risks are coming. So it's really important to secure the world. And the reason why I really love working with you is because I think Cohesity is becoming one of the most important companies in the world, because where's the data? What do the bad guys want? The data. So building a data security fabric layer across everything that's happening in AI, everything that's happening with these attacks like ransomware, I think becomes one of the most important companies in the world of security and the world of data and the world of AI. And with your great leadership, this is where it's going. So what an honor.
