Carolyn, we are here today with Christina Cacioppo at the Y Combinator Founder Mode Retreat. Hi Christina.
I love doing these in person. It's fun talking face to face.
Now Christina, we have in the hopper, we have already taped your long-form regular Social Radars interview that's going to be launching pretty soon, which was awesome. Don't you think, Caroline? But so today we're just really going to focus on talking about Founder Mode stuff and get your thoughts on it. But first, will you tell our listeners about Vanta?
Yeah, we help companies build out and demonstrate trust to their customers. So practically that looks like compliance certification, security questionnaires, trust centers, security programs. I remember being super obsessed with all of this stuff when we were — I was like, I never thought I'd be so interested in it. But it's the kind of thing that was very unsexy, right? That companies didn't really want to spend the time or money or energy, but they had to.
So tell us a little bit how you got started on this.
Yeah. I've heard someone call these schle businesses.
Schle. That's a good business to be in.
Yes, which actually I do think it's like Vanta sits at this intersection of your customers or your industry will make you go through various compliance certifications, and so it's necessary to like build the business, but it tends not to be what gets a lot of founders or folks out of bed in the morning.
Exactly. And so you're kind of at this intersection of people have to do it, but they don't want to. And I think one of the really striking things is people were really appreciative about our early product, which was terrible, but they liked it so much more than they should have because again, it just did this thing they didn't want to do themselves.
You have to tell the story about Segment and the spreadsheets and stuff.
Yeah. So in the early days, no one had kind of built a product like this, and when you went and talked to people in the industry, they said you couldn't, in order not to believe them. And so we decided to try to build an early version of the product without code, like in a spreadsheet, for Segment, the YC company where we had some friends who were kind enough to let us sort of hang out in their office and interview their engineers and try to build this prototype. And I think they were both kind enough and they needed a SOC 2 and didn't know how to get it anyway. And so we spent two weeks in their office reading a bunch of SOC 2 reports and trying to standardize them, and then interviewing their team and kind of making them a roadmap to here's how you would go do that. And that was like the very first version of the product. And then for the second version, we took that spreadsheet literally to another YC company, Front, and sort of gave them Segment's spreadsheet but changed just a little bit to see if it worked for them. And that's how we tested if we could standardize what had previously been kind of an ad hoc process, and it mostly worked.
And were you super psyched when that happened?
Yeah, kind of. Because it was — you kind of didn't know whether it would work. You sort of like slide the — you like slide the link across the table and like it's awesome, right? You know.
And now you're huge. Tell us how big you are. You're huge. Come on.
It's a little — yeah, we are 12,000 customers. We have a thousand people who work at Vanta around the world. A thousand people.
Wow. Okay. That's just so many people. It's wild. And between now and when we taped for the Social Radars episode, you've raised a round or you announced a round.
Yes, we announced a round. We raised our Series D. Valuation was 4.15 billion.
Get out. Oh, Christina, that's amazing. So exciting. I'm so excited for you.
Okay. So you have gone from sliding that Excel spreadsheet across the table to raising your Series D. Tell us things you've learned, how you've grown as a manager, and maybe what your experience with Founder Mode is. What does it mean to you?
For me, I think at the highest level, Founder Mode is almost a like permission to run the company the way you want to run it. And I think that's in part because the journey is very long. Even when things work, they're very hard. And so if you kind of don't enjoy it along the way, you just like — it will not work, or it will not work for many people, probably myself included. So you kind of have to like enjoy the journey or make the journey something you're — you like jump out of bed for. And to me, Founder Mode, it's like you should figure that out for yourself and not do what you know, like Sand Hill Road VCs tell you to do, which again may or may not work, but if it doesn't work for you, it's like not going to work for your company.
Yeah. Did you ever have something that Sand Hill Road people told you to do? Oh, absolutely. Like, can you give us an example?
Yeah. Let me try to think of a good one. I mean, we had — so we, for various reasons, I think we talked on the podcast, waited until we had $10 million of revenue to raise a Series A.
Yeah, I remember the story.
And that was just weird. And I think not just weird, but folks interpreted it as like a lack of ambition or like, oh, they don't want to build a venture-backed company, clearly.
Oh, they're — yeah, exactly. They're a lifestyle company. And you're like, oh, no, no, no, I'm going to build a big one. So they were approaching you, and when you said no, we're not raising right now.
We're like too busy. We're set. Thank you.
