It’s October 24th, 2018, which officially marks my 24-month anniversary at Verodin.

Verodin strong

Working 20-hour days because that’s just what everyone here does; flying at least 200,000 miles a year (sometimes through category 4 hurricanes); conversing with countless security analysts, security leaders, CIOs, CFOs, CEOs, and board members from around the globe; building amazing products that bring real security and business value; making an ever-growing list of customers highly successful; winning awards; sharing your perspectives with industry analysts and the press on a regular basis; writing about, podcasting, and capturing your experiences on video—all while still loving what you’re doing in the morning and coming back for more. That’s Verodin strong.

Sometimes, it sort of feels like this scene from the movie Fury.

On May 26th, 2017 I wrote a Verodin blog titled “Here’s to the Crazy Ones” which was, of course, in reference to Apple’s famous marketing campaign, “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.”

In that blog I discussed all the things that make Verodin unique, from our co-founder and CEO Chris Key to everyone else at Verodin. This includes our hardworking and hard-charging DNA, our infectious commitment to excellence, our unrelenting drive to make our customers successful, and our steadfast belief that the security industry needs to change and we’re just the ones to do it.

Well, now it has been two years and I can honestly say that these early observations have remained core to Verodin as we’ve grown. And wow, have we grown. I often discuss this rapid growth with some of our earliest board members such as Jay Leek, Managing Director at ClearSky Security, Charles Beeler, General Partner at Rally Ventures, and Matt Bigge, Partner at Crosslink Capital. Our global customer base has skyrocketed in 2018 across government, financial services, retail, healthcare, tech, education, critical infrastructure, transportation, and many other business verticals.

In February 2018, we built a newer, larger HQ in Tysons, Virginia. In May 2018, we raised a $21M series B. We are featured consistently in the news across outlets like Bloomberg, Fox, New York Post, Politico, Dark Reading, CSO, Forbes, and many others. And we have a vast library of customer video interviews. Why? Because customers love talking about the value they get from Verodin.

We’ve added a number of security industry heavyweights to our leadership team:

• Major General Earl Matthews, USAF (Ret), Chief Strategy Officer (former Director, Cyber Operations and CISO, USAF)
• Ray Patterson, Vice President WW Customer Success (former VP, Global Services ArcSight/HP)
• Robert Potter, Chief Revenue Officer (former VP Sales, Symantec)‍

…as well as experienced visionaries to our board.

• Mark Hatfield, Founder and General Partner, Ten Eleven Ventures
• Art Coviello, Former Executive Chairman, RSA
• Frank Kim, Former Security Executive, Kaiser Permanente and CISO, SANS
• Jon Pironti, Security Industry Thought Leader and President, IP Architects

So, how would I describe Verodin today?

Enabling customers to get actual value from security

Security is as much a business imperative as anything else and Verodin is helping organizations realize security effectiveness by moving from assumption-based security to evidence-based security. Another way of looking at this is that Verodin has rejected the status quo because 1) it’s not going to keep us secure tomorrow, and 2) it never really kept us secure yesterday.

Creating a category

Verodin isn’t just new, it’s different. We continue to stay original in an industry with thousands of players and its fair share of smoke, mirrors, and snake oil. What the Verodin Security Instrumentation Platform (SIP) does isn’t just a new way of doing things. It’s not the next “next firewall,” vulnerability scanner, SIEM, etc.—SIP is actually different and Verodin is a category creator. There’s a great article about being a category creator in Harvard Business Review, titled “Why It Pays to Be a Category Creator.”

Operating like a band of pirates

Verodin is made up of employees, investors, and advisors that some would call pirates. Why pirates? Because we aren’t satisfied with a slight next-generation, 2.0 improvement for how we do security and we’re not afraid to do things differently, against the grain. We are all passionate and unapologetic about completely changing how you’ll approach security. If there was ever an industry that needed some pirates to approach problems differently, it’s this one.

Driving with a mission

Sure, the Verodin team knows how to build great companies with backgrounds at organizations like ArcSight, Cisco, Imperva, McAfee, RSA, and Symantec. But more importantly, we know the importance of having a shared mission across leadership, engineering, customer success, marketing, and sales. That mission is to make our customers successful by vastly improving the security and business value realized through their security investments.

Thinking differently

As Albert Einstein once said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” I couldn’t wrap a better statement around the security industry that punctuates why we need to approach things differently. A global problem in security across public and private sectors and organizations big and small is simply that security is ineffective. And it’s incredibly hard to manage, measure, improve, and communicate security in order to make it more effective. Wouldn’t it be great if our security tools worked how we wanted, stayed working, and their effectiveness could be measured and proven? Enter SIP.

Building Verodin has been a lot of hard work and a lot of love with some truly amazing people. The Verodin culture is a rare, wonderful, and terrible thing. We love what we do, who we’re doing it with, who we’re doing it for, and why we’re doing it. Verodin’s dramatic growth is fueled by the success of our customers… and we’re just getting warmed up. To end with a quote from Fury, “Best job I ever had.”