Keep Doing What You’re Doing!

by Andrew Peterson on July 23, 2019

I got this follow up text from a CISO I had dinner with last night and it’s a fitting message to our company and team as we celebrate a milestone in the company’s history: our five year anniversary. Like every start-up, we’ve had a unique path over the last five years to get to where we are today and I wanted to take a step back to recognize just how far we’ve come.

“Keep doing what you’re doing!”

So what is it exactly that we have been doing?

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For five years we have been reimagining and reinventing how to protection web sites, mobile sites, APIs and microservices. Web application protection tools like Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) have been around for over 20 years and websites have been around much longer than that! In an industry that seems to be captivated by the newest exploits and cutting edge buzz words, we chose the far less glamorous path of taking a stale, pre-existing technology that has been written off by most as an ineffective compliance checkbox and making it actually work.

Why? Because we believe protecting web apps is the security industry’s most pressing and potentially its most challenging problem and we couldn’t be more passionate about our role in pushing the ball forward.

Did you know that web apps have been the #1 source of successful breaches for the better part of the last decade? Take a gander at the last five Data Breach reports from Verizon. And while you’re at it, make sure not to miss the fact that Verizon has taken out all the reports of automated web breaches in the last two years’ reports because if they left those breaches in, the numbers would be so staggeringly weighted towards web app breaches that every graph in the report would get distorted!

This is a massive problem and it’s getting more challenging as web app technology has been evolving.

Gone are the days of the static marketing website.

Gone are the days of a simple LAMP stack.

Gone are the days of hosting everything in your own data center.

We’re now in the age of cloud and hybrid cloud where we have to protect hardware and software at the same time. Web apps are now a series of APIs and microservices built into containers and service mesh environments that enable new functionality that WAFs were never intended to protect. We’re in a devops and agile world where our development teams have to move at an ever-increasing pace to win at business and security is fighting to keep up.

And now all these new developments are all being targeted by attackers who appear to be way ahead of the defenders in securing these new apps…for now.

We started Signal Sciences because we faced these challenges as practitioners 10 years ago and saw the writing on the wall of an industry that was unprepared for these coming changes. And we’ve been building technology to help our customers solve these problems ever since.

The Building Blocks of Trust

Five years in, we’re now the fastest-growing web application security company on the planet and that’s 100% because of our dogged focus on solving these massive problems for and with our customers. We’re not solving these problems with marketing buzzwords but with the practical, methodical, and proven technology built on hard work and trust.

Here are just a few of the pieces that have gone into our success thus far:

Hiring the right team: As our team grows, we’ve consistently brought on capable, knowledgeable experts while building a culture of collaboration and accountability.
Focusing on the customer: Every aspect of our service has been designed purposefully to help our customers–not just our technology, but how we handle the sales cycle, how we respond to customer support requests, and how we partner through incidents.
Product efficacy: We stop web attacks in production so our customers can focus on innovation and building their businesses.

Successful execution as a company cannot happen without a clear plan of action informed by expertise and knowledge to reach our end goals of growing our business and protecting our customers. So it’s with great pride that I reflect upon these past five years knowing where we’ve been and where we’re going as we look to build on and expand each of these areas.

Additionally, I wanted to share a few key recent stats and milestones that we’ve celebrated as a team:

We protect over 25,000 web applications
We protect over a trillion production requests per month.
Increased our revenue by 100%+ year-over-year with 98% customer retention.
Closed Series C funding of $35M from Lead Edge Capital. Added industry veteran and leader Lorrie Norrington to our Board of Directors.
Expanded our leadership team with VP of Marketing, Sharon Thompson, and VP of People, Jessica Carroll.
Doubled our employee headcount and expanded our L.A. Headquarters with close to 10,000 square feet of new, high tech office space to accommodate our growing team.

Lastly, something we’ve said often over the years at Signal Sciences is “We Win as a Team.” So I wanted to say thank you to so many key folks who have worked together to get us where we are today.

We thank our investors for both the necessary capital to expand operations and their guidance and support; our employees for their dedication on the frontlines daily, all ultimately serving our customers; and our customers for placing their trust in us on this shared journey to protect their most valuable digital assets.

Call me crazy, but I’m optimistic for the next five years. We’ve seen the changes we’ve been able to make with our customers to protect their web apps and how they’ve been achieving new standards for both securing and driving their businesses forward. We can’t wait to continue supporting you all as we work together to forge the future of infosec.

Learn more in our announcement.

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