One of the places where AI is entering the enterprise the fastest is coding. Speed of development went far faster than the ability of security teams to catch up. We sped up security to go at the pace of development. If we don't do this, we're screwed. It's so much easier moving faster when it's life-threatening. I call it staying ahead of the boogeyman. That's Anthropic. That's OpenAI. That's Google. They're coming after everybody. In order for me to help the company transform, I had to transform.
Meet Peter McKay, CEO of the leading DevSecOps and AI security company, Snyk. In this interview, we unpack some of the biggest opportunities and hardest challenges facing CEOs in the age of AI. From how to reinvent yourself first before you can reinvent your company to growing your team in order to run fast to raising money and ultimately creating value for all your stakeholders.
There's nobody who's pushing harder on AI than I am. Still have $365 million sitting in the bank. We made 13 acquisitions, mostly team and tech. Always know who the top five or 10 companies that would acquire you. Develop fast, stay secure.
Welcome, Peter. Super excited to have you.
It's good to be here. Thanks for having me.
Absolutely. Well, I'm looking at we are both in Boston for this recording and I'm looking out of my window and it's a beautiful blue sky.
Do you get any time at all to get out on your bike?
I don't, you know. Well, I don't think it's as much time. The weather, as you know, the winter in Boston, this one especially, has been very, very cold. So, no, I wait till the temperature gets up and the sand on the roads get taken away, then I'll get out on my bike. But, I'm looking forward to it.
Excellent. Excellent. You know, I'm so stoked to have this conversation with you today. Right before this conversation, I sent a little note out to some founders and they were super excited that you're on this show and I know they will be listening very eagerly to this super exciting journey that you have led at Snyk.
No pressure, Peter. No pressure. So, I know most people tuning in really know Snyk. You've built a tremendous brand out there, a 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, you know, 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 you're seeing the life cycle all the way from dev sec to ops. Yes. So, you're actually in the eye of the AI adoption storm, right? Because one of the places where AI is entering the enterprise the fastest is coding and that's behind the growth of Anthropic, OpenAI trying to capture fast. So you're seeing extremely up close how quickly this adoption is happening. So just sort of tell us a little bit more what is the state of the enterprise? Are CIOs, CISOs eager to adopt it? What is the desire and what are the impediments?
Yeah, so you're right and we've followed the evolution of really the speed of software development. From years ago it used to be every 6, 9, 12 months you'd release some software. Before it went into production it'd go to a security team and they'd scan it, find issues, send it back and it goes back and forth. And then they had the digital transformation and everybody was building apps. They wanted to go faster and more agile development. Then COVID happened and then it accelerated it even more. And so security was always trying to play catch-up. They're always trying to keep pace and the speed of development went far faster than the ability of security teams to catch up. And that was kind of how what Snyk did is we sped up security to go at the pace of development. And then post-COVID, you know, really that was the dawn of Copilot and Gemini and Cursor and so now you had organizations producing code at a much faster pace. And so how do you handle that from a security team? And so this is where we've been following this evolution of this software development life cycle that is now completely being modernized again to this AI era. It's not just around coding assistance but they're using it for every part of the organization now. So to answer your question around what is the enterprise really doing, you know, I think it started with kind of this general awareness of AI providing some teams with some tools. They started to build, you know, developers as you said were like the first place to get, we just need more productivity out of our developers. So go fast. And then it became building some agents for internal productivity. And you're starting to see, you know, moving from more internal optimization, more agent applications for internal use cases for internal productivity to start using it externally. Still very early stages. They're like ready to bring one or two applications into the external world. And if you can imagine that opens up security issues far greater when you're exposing the agents and these new applications into the wild. And so this is kind of where they are now. Smaller companies are moving much faster. You know they're taking more risks. They're generating more applications because they can move faster where banks and insurance companies are taking more of a slower approach. So I'd say shifting from internal adoption, internal apps, internal agent development now it's starting to do external applications and connecting up with customers and help desk and some of the other things that they're doing.
Yeah. I mean if I play that back so you're saying at the large enterprise rightly so they have to be a lot more cautious before they can sort of start deploying applications built partly through AI generated code or including AI agents. But younger companies are going faster. I mean if you look at the time scope I mean that's all under two years so that's a very rapid embracing of this technology if you think about it, right?
Yeah, you know sometimes it's so much easier to move faster when you envision a gun to your head. Like if we don't do this, we're screwed. And so that was in 2024 when we started to see a lot of the developers using Copilot and Cursor and Claude and Gemini and all the tools. It was like, look, if we don't get in front of this, it's gonna be a headwind versus a tailwind. And so we saw it in 2024 and just said like this is, if we don't do it, we're dead. So it's so much easier moving faster when it's life-threatening. And it's glad we did. We put us in a really good spot now, but it was out of necessity to be honest.
Well, you actually took my next question. I should have known the answer to you. Knowing you, Peter, this you're a third time successful CEO at least or maybe fourth. I forget. I've known you five times. You've done five of these. So, if anyone sees a wave coming from far and gets ahead of it, that would be a leader like you and an organization that you've built like Snyk. So, you saw it all coming in '24 and you guys were like racing. If we don't get ahead of this, someone else will. And so you did. And so that requires, you know, this is massive adoption of a new technology that requires a lot of organizational speed internally. Can you sort of maybe double click what did that actually mean organizationally internally at Snyk? What did you have to do to get everyone on board?
Yeah. We really took a step back and thought about what are the different aspects of our business that needed to change. So we kind of divided it up into three segments. The first is around internal optimization like our use of AI internally. You know it's hard for you to secure something if you're not using it yourself. So first thing is let's get our own adoption. Let's look at it and I can talk about that one. The second one was all around how do we infuse AI into our products to make it solving problems better. You know how do we leverage the LLMs, how do we leverage more autonomous security into our platform so that's putting AI into Snyk. The third is how do we take Snyk and secure AI. So internal use, infusing it into our products and then how do we use our products to secure AI. And so each one was a separate track that we were moving on. So where we focused on for internal one was really around just upskilling our team, enablement, making sure they had the tools, education. We did that. We also moved from there to really taking a step back on certain workflows. We took three workflows. We took an R&D workflow. We took a go-to-market workflow and then we did a customer journey workflow and we took a step back and said we designed these workflows two, three, five years ago when tools were different. We're spending a lot of money on a stack that is now there's so much better. So there's a lot of different ways of solving these problems and so we redid all the workflows using AI. And so it really took three, like for go-to-market we took like a lead and the flow of a lead all the way through to qual scoring and qualification and routing to an SDR, all of that we automated that with a whole new set of tools and all the way through automating the notes going to the customers and all it became a completely different workflow. So we started overall awareness, three workflows and everybody learned along that journey and now everybody's building agents now it's going crazy but you know now we got to corral it a little bit but that was how we got the DNA into the company and part of it is we got to make sure we're doing it in a secure way. So that was the journey.
That is very, very instructive. I mean to be able to do that is very hard, right? So you're doing all of this simultaneously. You're upskilling your own team with something that's changing rapidly. You're probably brought in some additional new DNA into the company. And you managed to evolve three workflows that are critical to any company all at the same time. You're changing your product workflow, you're changing your customer engagement workflow, your go-to-market workflow, and your go-to-market like your sales and marketing workflow. So yes, in a way if you could pull it off, you are actually touching all the AI tooling that's available in the market at the same time.
And the big part of the company is part of the journey. You know what I mean? It's the learning of going through it and redesigning a workflow. Not taking new tools to old workflow and an old process. It's redesigning the process and then applying new technology that's available today that wasn't available a year ago that now you can bring to a much more efficient process and eliminating a lot of costs and old subscriptions and licenses that you had of these tools that you don't need anymore.
So you were a market leader, you still are, that saw what was coming and chose to reinvent itself, you know, before anyone could challenge your leadership position. So that is a very note to self and note to all the founders listening here. That is tremendous.
I would say it's one step before it. I had to reinvent myself before I can reinvent the company. Like I had to learn this. I wasn't the deep technologist, right? I've run businesses. I've scaled businesses. I know go-to-market. I've learned technology over the years. I had to learn and I spent a massive amount of time reading and understanding and talking to customers who were at the tip of the spear like the ones who are doing the most. You listen to podcasts, you're reading books. It's like in order for me to help the company transform, I had to transform. Like I had to know what's possible because I had to paint a vision of a journey. If I didn't know what the journey was, how am I gonna inspire a company on its journey? You had to learn it. I had to reinvent myself to be, I wouldn't say I'm an AI expert, but there's nobody who's pushing harder on AI than I am. And it's because I have invested a massive amount of time to teach and learn and talk to people in the industry. I talked to the people at Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor, Google. I mean, I am in the front row seat of all these conversations today. I had to educate myself to even get into the room to have these conversations. So, that would be the message to any CEO out there. If you want your company to change, you got to lead it.
Yeah, that is not just a message to every startup founder obviously but to every SaaS, public company SaaS CEO that is struggling with this. Right. So reinvent yourself fast and then or get out of the way.
Or get out of the way. That's right. That's right.
Or get out of the way. Right.
And so for me because I've, you know, we've talked about the succession planning of me here and I really believe the company, you know, when I started seven years ago we're at 2 million and we're going to be 340, 350. So it's been a great journey. We've made a massive pivot from 2024 to 2025 and we're well positioned to this next phase which will take years because the opportunity is massive, you know, securing all the agents that are built, all the applications. I really believe that I've been able to from a business perspective help guide this company to this opportunity in front of us but I really believe the skill sets that will take it the next step is someone who's more product technology-driven because the winners in this next era are going to be the ones who can accelerate the pace of innovation. It's product-led innovation and staying ahead of the, I call it staying ahead of the boogeyman. That's Anthropic, that's OpenAI, that's Google. They're coming after everybody. And so if you can't innovate faster than they can, then they're going to come up and they're gonna gobble every business that they can. And so for every business out there, if you're not running as fast as they are, they're going to catch you at some point in time. And so I need help. And I wanted to make sure that I was bringing, I could over time bring in the right leader in here that could take what I've done and bring it to the next level.
And I think the time is right for that to happen. It takes a lot of self-confidence, self-awareness, and humility, Peter, to do what you did, right? So, and you've already set the stage up for the next leader to come in. You've taken the company through the transformation and you're saying, 'Hey, it's now going to be another race, a different race, and I'm going to help bring in the leader who is going to now take the company from the 350 million that you've built us to the next, you know, billion plus dollars.' But I would say, I give a lot of credit to the founders of Snyk too, right? Because you know many, I was a board member when I started. I was an investor.
Let's unpack that. That's a big one. Let's unpack that. I remember we were on a board together and then you were serving on the board of a company and you come in one day to a board meeting and say I'm doing it again and like this company what is this lucky company that's getting you? And the story here is very interesting. I mean, you knew the founders, right? Tell us more.
It is. I've always, so I've been CEO of five companies and pretty much almost all of them it was founder. And I came in to partner with the founder, collaborate with the founder, work really well with the founder and we built the business. From eCredit to Desk to Watchfire to Snyk, it's just you give a lot of credit. Guy Pani who was the CEO at the time, we just said, 'Look, I can take this so far, but I need help.' And I wanted to bring in someone. He knew me. We worked together at Watchfire. And he said, 'Can you come in and take this to the next level?' So, I give him a lot of credit because he did it to me.
