So, I know most people tuning in really know Snyk. You built a tremendous brand out there. Very successful company. But for those who may not know too much, just a 30-second on what is Snyk?
Yeah, Snyk is a developer security company. So, when you think of software development, we try to everybody's trying to go faster and faster in the way they're developing software. And so, what Snyk did is embed security into that software development life cycle. So, all the things that you would think about kind of doing after the fact, we said, 'No, we're going to do that throughout the software development.' So, when you're ready to release a feature, you've already gone through all your security, you found your security vulnerabilities, and you fixed them. So, develop fast, stay secure. Developer loves security trusted. That's been our model.
So, what you have achieved here is absolutely tremendous. And when you joined the company, obviously Guy had done a tremendous job, and he had So, I imagine some sales motion, some revenue, and you saw something here and said, 'Yeah, I can partner with you. We can team up, and I can take it to you just mentioned 350 million,'
you know, your line of sight. So, a few million, I don't know, maybe 2 million, whatever the revenue was at that time to let's say 2 to 350. I mean, that is very hard. Okay, this is not some model company consumption. This is durable revenue. This is enterprise revenue. This is long sales cycles. Most security companies get stuck at the 50 to 100 million, and then it starts stalling.
You took this from a couple of million to now looking at 350 million of ARR. Just let's unpack that. This is very interesting to a lot of founders. What does it take to go from here to there? I know there's a there, but let's unpack that.
Yeah, I think the one thing I would say is it's not like we didn't stop at different points along the way and hit our inflection point. It wasn't like just an even line that went up. It was bumpy. I always say to everybody we were never as good or never as bad as we think we were. We're somewhere in the middle and we stayed humble as we were growing. We knew we could always be doing a better job for our customers. So, the way we started, it was a lot of transitions. We went from a fully PLG bottom-up when nobody thought security can ever be a PLG motion. So, it was PLG, we upsold from PLG, and then we went kind of top-down through security. That was a big journey for us. We started with a single product, then we went to a portfolio of products, then we evolved to a platform. We started kind of going after everybody to starting to go much more aggressive at the enterprise, where we saw this huge opportunity. We started very focused on the US, and then we started to go global. We looked at all these different growth factors as we were evolving, and we tried to take it out a little at a time. We nailed it before we scaled it. We knocked down a segment and then go to the next. So, we're pretty methodical, maybe a little bit too much at times. We made a lot of good bets along the way. Like, we stayed in front. A great example of coming out of COVID, every venture firm out there was telling us to scale back, cut your resources, stop your burn, live for tomorrow. And my gut told me that was not the right thing to do, and we did the opposite. We doubled down, we added sales teams, we added more engineering, we built more product, and it was by far and away the best bet we could have made. As much as you have a lot of people telling you what to do, you ultimately got to trust your gut, and you got to go with what feels right. We made a lot of five really good decisions, we probably have one or two bad decisions along the way that someday I'll look back and I'll say, 'I shouldn't have done that.' But it was a lot. And I think the hardest part on that journey is by far and away the people. Because when you start, you're building you-
Yeah, let me let me, you know, that that requires a lot of organizational speed and execution. So, you're going your sales motion is changing, right? You're going from PLG to PLG upsell to enterprise top-down.
You're going from a single product to a product suite.
So, that, and you're the CEO. I mean, you're relying on others to carry out your vision. So, that requires a lot of getting ahead of the organization, building the organization, upskilling. I mean, can you double click how should founders think about that?
Yeah, yeah. So, it was when you're smaller, I think a lot of times you hire athletes, people who can do a lot of things, right? They can move them around, and they can kind of take four roles. And as you get bigger, roles get narrower, and you get more specialized because you don't need a person doing five things, you need three people doing five things. So roles get narrower as you get bigger, from going from 40 people to 1,000 people, divide things up. Some people is funny. We started with athletes, moved to specialists, and we're kind of getting back to athletes. So, I can touch on that in the AI era. But it was this scaling of people is the challenge. Some people can scale, and when we were going at 100% to 150% year-over-year, you're outgrowing people pretty freaking fast. If they're not growing at 150%, then you're outgrowing them. Amazing people who have helped you get to a certain point, but the business was outgrowing them. Either they took a smaller role, or they left. You had to have these difficult conversations, which is probably the hardest part for founders to do. How to make a call before the crash happens. How to save a person before they're going to crash. That's the hardest thing, to be able to see around a corner where my VP of sales isn't going to get me another two more quarters. So, I need to build a plan of how do I uplevel my CRO, or my engineering leader. You have to have these incredibly painful, difficult conversations with people as you get to this next scale. Because if you don't, the board will be doing that to you. The only way you can scale is you got to scale your team.
And some can. Your job is a CEO to get everybody going around the same pace. Don't be the slowest person. Don't be the reason I can't go fast. If my marketing team is falling behind, or my engineering team is falling behind, you do your best to help them, but at some point they may be tapped out in that role. So you either move them into a different role or you move them out because they want to go do something or they're more of a startup person versus a scaling person. This is the hardest part of the CEO job. It is knowing 6 months ahead of when someone's going to hit a wall and being proactive and talking to them about it. It's like, 'How are you feeling? The pressure's getting. Are you having? Do you feel like you can make this happen?' If you don't, let's talk about it. Let's be proactive. Let's figure out the right way. Doing that proactively is just a better way to handle it. Maybe it's because I've been doing this for so long, you can kind of see the writing on the wall. You can see who's stressing and who's holding things, where the friction's coming, the stress. Getting in front of that is staying in front is really, really hard. So think about how many people you've passed through in 7 years at Snyk, amazing, really good friends of mine. People who you've gone to battle with. Either they opt out or you had to move them out because they just couldn't scale. If you're the CEO and you're looking around and everybody on your team is doing the biggest job they've ever done in their career, then you're in trouble.
