Guy Podjarney is the founder of Snyk, a leading security company building developer first security tools to help organizations develop fast & stay secure. On today’s episode, Jon Sakoda speaks with Guy about the problem-solving approach he still carries with him from his time in the IDF and the threat of playing it too safe for first-time founders.
Guy Podjarney is the founder of Snyk, a leading security company building developer first security tools to help organizations develop fast & stay secure. On today’s episode, Jon Sakoda speaks with Guy about the problem-solving approach he still carries with him from his time in the IDF and the threat of playing it too safe for first-time founders.
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Guy Podjarny: I remember one specific conversation with a founder of a very successful dev tooling company that told us, “Hey, I think you’re fucked.” And I remember kind of coming back mad from that San Francisco trip, spending the weekend kind of fuming and figuring out like, are we? Did we sort of—are we getting it wrong?
Jon Sakoda: Welcome to the Decibel podcast. I am excited to welcome Guy Podjarny, founder of Snyk, to our show. Snyk is a company that really needs no introduction if you are in the security industry. The company helps many thousands of developers and engineering teams write and build safer software. Guy is a serial successful entrepreneur and is an advisor and investor in many startups. It is a privilege to have him here today.
Guy, welcome to the show, and thanks for being here.
Guy Podjarny: Oh, thanks for having me. It’s always good to sort of pass on to others some of the learnings. I definitely have benefited from a lot of those when I started my own companies.
Jon Sakoda: I remember when I invited you to come on to the show, I mentioned that I really wanted to focus on your founding stories. I would love to spend most of our time talking about the very early days of both of your startups, and also the early years of your life, so people can really understand where you came from. If you don’t mind, could we start at the very beginning? Where did you grow up? And tell us what life was like growing up in your house.
Guy Podjarny: Sure. I was born and raised in Israel to two Argentinian parents who kind of immigrated about six years prior to Israel. Kind of grew up in this little suburban city next to Tel Aviv called Kfar Saba. I was a geeky child. I played Dungeons and Dragons from like fourth grade kind of all the way through most of high school, and was very much kind of into computers once they started. I think I had my kind of first computer maybe when I was in sort of that third or fourth grade. And I’ve always kind of been quite enamored with playing around with it. Probably my first programming language was some Logo, some tiny bit of Basic, but really Pascal.
Jon Sakoda: I think you’ve mentioned to me in the past that your family was very driven and accomplished. What did your parents do? And tell us a little more about your family.
Guy Podjarny: I’ve had super supportive parents. And my dad’s a doctor, a medical doctor, and my mom’s a psychologist. My dad was a hard worker, not home that much, sort of during the day. These frequent 6:00 AM departures and sort of 10:00 PM back home in many of the days. He was probably the one who sort of pushed me a lot on sort of intellectual curiosity and drive, and sort of figuring out riddles. He himself finished high school at 16 and was a doctor by 21, and still had a chip on his shoulder for the fact that his brother, who is a physicist and is a professor in like three universities, and was kind of the award-winner in the Weizmann Institute on it. So my dad, who’s brilliant, felt almost like he’s underachieving as compared to his brother.
Jon Sakoda: Right, right, right. Hasn’t gotten the Nobel Prize yet.
Guy Podjarny: Yeah, basically. While my mom is this—everybody loves my mom. She’s a developmental psychologist. She’s super highly empathetic, super supportive and such. And so, I think my parents were very accommodating of me finding kind of my skills. My sister was more and has remained more of a political activist. She sort of was more of the social creature. I was a bit more of the
geek. But it was just the four of us, just sort of of with the two kids, very intellectual house. And always biased in favor of experiences and passions. So we probably went abroad more than most. But my parents would sort of struggle with this one kind of crappy car, although they would sort of alternate between the two of them. So always much more about experiences than about possessions. And a lot of—a very intellectual household.
Jon Sakoda: A lot of founders who end up becoming cybersecurity founders often say they were rule breakers, hackers, or troublemakers earlier in life. Do you have similar stories as a kid?
Guy Podjarny: I don’t think I was a troublemaker, but I was a very good diplomat. I guess as a kid, I was a pretty good liar, and I got along with everybody. And so, I could create a fable and kind of run around, which I mostly, mostly used to duck out of school, to sort of not be in places. As we advanced through the years, actually, in sort of of 11th and 12th grade, you get subpoenaed to a lot of filtering exercises for the army. And I kind of over-leveraged. I kind of called out to sort of do a lot of it, so you miss a day of school. And at some point, the school kind of trusted me to just not need to provide kind of the demonstration of it, so I magnified in the number of times that I would get called out to do it. And with my parents, my parents were just very, very supportive. So I think in some cases, they truly didn’t know. In some cases, they just didn’t feel like that was the important aspect of their relationship.
Jon Sakoda: Yeah.
Guy Podjarny: So if I didn’t want to go to school, and I told my mom, I probably just didn’t need to go. I didn’t do that so much that it became an issue. And mostly, in the school, I made sure that the teachers like me.
Jon Sakoda: So you were a diplomat, and you are fairly good at navigating around the rules. You eventually join the army, the IDF, and find your way into the cybersecurity industry. Tell us about that experience.
Guy Podjarny: So, in Israel, just for context, everybody gets enlisted into the army at 18. And typically, it’s between 16 and 18 years old, you go through a bit of screening exercises for a variety, especially for military intelligence, but also, it’s the same for elite sort of field units and the likes. So I was in a lot of these military intelligence type filters. My health profile wasn’t enough to qualify to anything physical of importance. And so, they escalate. They start from your marks and your school, basically schoolteacher at stations on who’s promising. And then they continue on to aptitude tests in all sorts of things. Some of them might be around teamwork. Some of them might be around sort of solving riddles and puzzles. Some of them are on physics and math. I failed the physics ones miserably.
And at the end of all of those, you kind of get curated into groups in the army that are especially good at the things, the skills that they are seeking. And so, I got into one of those groups, which started with this six-month course, about 60 people studying between 8:00 AM and midnight every day. Very intense, with people of sort of high caliber. And that was an amazing experience. First of all, amazing, amazing people. Somewhat homogenic, but just the level of discourse with people and affinity - half men, half women.
And on the learning side, it was a very humbling experience. It was this, you come in top of your class, not needing to work hard, and then suddenly, right away, I got classified into the second level, not the first level. And then the teacher explained something, and I didn’t get it. I had to raise my hand and sort
of ask for it again, which was new to me. It was an experience that was new to me. And I feel like for me, it was exhilarating. It was humbling, but it was also—I think I learned more during those six months about myself and academically, everything. And then that continued. So that filter, that sort of course, happened to get into the world of cyber, which I knew of before, and I fiddled with some hacking and such before. But I never, never saw it as an identity.
And it continued into—I guess people know about the 8200 unit. There are some subdivisions within it. So within that group, people have different biases. I think I was kind of well-positioned as a programmer, as a developer. And then, yeah, I spent the next kind of four-and-a-half years in the army. I feel like I met incredible people.
But two strong things I took away from that period are, one is just appreciation for high caliber of individuals. When you work with people who are high caliber, who are sort of great, professional are aligned with you, sort of culturally, you grow as an individual that much faster. And so, I feel my pace of learning, my pace of growth, was incredible. And the second is, especially this part of the army really explicitly instills the sentiment that everything is possible.
The problem is this, and it needs to be solved. Can you solve it? And so, you might get stuck on that problem and you might work on solving it for a much longer period of time, because you can’t just opt into another problem. And it might be hard. It might be very hard. You might be stuck on ti for a very long time. But it’s possible. You just haven’t figured it out yet. And I think that stayed with me, and I think it’s a repeat trait for a lot of people coming out of that path, which I think has been super, super important for my entrepreneurial journey. And I went on to be a guide in this course and sort of teach it to others. So I feel like I truly kind of internalized it.
Jon Sakoda: There are a lot of examples of successful entrepreneurs that have come out of the IDF. I think you’ve done a really great job of explaining why that experience prepares you to be a great founder. Take us on that journey. What eventually led you to start your first company?
Guy Podjarny: So, coming out of the army, I worked for an Israeli startup that got acquired by a Canadian startup. And I moved to Ottawa, Canada in the process. And that company got acquired by IBM later on. I’ll get back to that.
The move to Canada was interesting. When the Canadian company acquired the Israeli company I was working at, I couldn’t place Ottawa on a map. I couldn’t really know where it was. But we knew, my girlfriend at the time and I, that we want to relocate at some point. I’ve always favored experiences and life experiences.
Jon Sakoda: Right, right, right.
Guy Podjarny: And I knew that I wanted to try living abroad, not knowing whether I will want to come back to Israel or not. And so, when the opportunity came out, and there was a bit of a bait and switch. There was some conversation of California and Boston, which I did know the place.
Jon Sakoda: Wait a minute, are you trying to tell me that Ottawa isn’t just like Tel Aviv?
Guy Podjarny: Yeah, just like Tel Aviv, except, you know, the exact opposite in so many ways. Different pace, different temperatures. So I think leaning into it, throughout my kind of career, I leaped
on opportunities. I like, there’s a Mark Andreessen quote says, “Swap career planning for strategic opportunity taking.” And I very much live by it. I did before I knew of the quote. And this was a great opportunity. So we jumped on it, and we moved to Canada. And I think that exposed me. In Israel, you get exposed a lot to sort of the tech innovations of startups, but oftentimes in R&D, you’re not as exposed to the business. Moving to Ottawa with a team that was much more closer to the business, and I learned a lot, and I think just getting exposed to a different lens on the world.
I went from development job to product job. And that company was acquired by IBM at some point. And so, that was also a bit of an experience with a larger company, realizing that’s not what I want to do. And somewhere along that journey, I decided that I want to be a CTO. And I asked our head of product if he thinks that being a product manager is a good step on the journey to CTO. And he said that the best way to become a CTO is to open a company and call yourself a CTO. And that sort of sentence sort of stayed with me in my mind.
And so eventually, after IBM, and when I decided to leave, I decided to do that. And I think for me, seeing the excitement of the startup, seeing the first startup and then moving and seeing some of the other startup, and then contrasting that with what I felt was a low impact environment in the large company of IBM, I think it was pretty clear to me a little bit into IBM that I am going to found a company. And by the time I decided to do it, my decision was, I will found a company. Before I had any idea, I said, I want to go be a founder. I want to found my own company.
Jon Sakoda: Now, if I recall, you started your first company, Blaze, at an unusual time. This was in the late 2000s in the financial crisis, right? Take us back to that moment. Was this a good time to start a company? I suspect it wasn’t. And what did your wife think, and how did you guys build the confidence to move ahead?
Guy Podjarny: So, the IBM acquisition of Watchfire, of the previous company, gave me a little bit of financial backing, but not quite independence. And I just had a child born, my first child. And I decided, of course consulting with my wife, that, ironically, this was actually the time to do it. I was kind of semi-depressed that sort of IBM because I felt like I wasn’t making an impact, despite having a great job on paper. And she saw me being kind of upset. And she was actually the one pushing me to not wait and do something about it, trusting my judgment that we’re okay to do so. And in Canada, you could take parental leave that doesn’t pay, but keeps your job. So I felt like that safety net was enough.
And so, I took officially nine months of parental leave when my son was three months old, and basically spent the next sort of three, four months exploring ideas. And I anchored in what I knew. And so, I eventually landed on performance and decided to build a company, which is what I did, that makes websites faster as a bit of almost like an inline compiler of web pages, filling the competency around I had around knowing how to analyze web pages, analyze kind of websites automatically, was one that I could bring into another space.
Jon Sakoda: So your wife was really behind you. That’s amazing. And the idea for Blaze eventually became to accelerate websites on the fly. But I think you said you wanted to start a company in the very beginning, but didn’t initially have an idea. So how did you eventually come up with this idea?
Guy Podjarny: Probably for about three months, I was sort of seeking ideas. And I talked about the idea that I honed in on, but before, I looked at all sorts of silly things, like project management sort of tools for professors, because I was frustrated by seeing my wife doing her master’s and how inefficient the
project management is over there. The key takeaway there was like, a lot of these ideas, they may or may not have been good ideas, but they weren’t right for me. As someone without a degree, for instance, going and working with sort of master’s and sort of PhDs and professors wasn’t right. And so, I do think it’s important to find the idea that is right for you.
And so, I kind of landed on this, and I got excited by it. And I was consulting with friends, and notably with the founder of Watchfire, who’d kind of become a bit of a mentor as my last boss at IBM. And once I landed on that idea, for about two or three months, I was like the nerd I his cave. I kind of came into my room. I was kind of coding all night. I wrote huge amount of code in sort of that period of time. Very productive. A bit dispiriting, because you’re sort of working with yourself, consulting with friends from past jobs remotely to just sort of have some camaraderie. And I built a system that increasingly kind of looked compelling.
And then once I had something I felt I had right technologically, then I started trying to hire. And I failed. I kind of crashed and burned so many times. I was in Ottawa, having moved from Israel. And so, my network in Ottawa was fairly light. And just, I think I talked to anyone who I kind of valued as sort of good developers. And it was just a very, very hard journey. And then eventually, I talked to the person who became—I was initially just looking for developers. Said, “Well, I need a leader.” And I hired my VP Engineering, who was someone who I worked with in Watchfire, Craig Conboy. We had deep conversations. We talked about it. It was an opportunity for him to be a VP Engineering. So there was a reason for him. And then he was much better than I was at actually hiring. With his vote of confidence and not just sort of me and trust me, it really kind of helped hire a bunch of people. And a couple of months later, Mike, that I mentioned before, Watchfire, he joined me as cofounder and as CEO. And I was CTO, as I kind of called myself.
Jon Sakoda: Congratulations.
Guy Podjarny: It was fun. Actually, I did it later with Snyk and called myself CEO. It’s a very easy journey. So, it was really around kind of getting it off the ground, building the tech. So the tech wasn’t the unknown. Probably the interesting things that we did about the journey at Blaze that we were selling right away. So right away, we put, for instance, on the homepage, two text boxes, where you could put your email and your website. And we would kick it off to a back office system that would basically run your website through our system and would create a video that showed you a before and after of how much faster your website would be.
Jon Sakoda: Oh, very cool.
Guy Podjarny: And it was super effective. It created this visceral response of people seeing the website that was fast.
Jon Sakoda: So today, Guy, I think we would call all of this growth hacking, right? Guy Podjarny: That’s probably true.
Jon Sakoda: I mean, these are 10 years ahead of their time, right?
Guy Podjarny: We didn’t call it that. We didn’t have the term. And also, I think what we didn’t have is we didn’t have the product-led approach of actually having the system capture the interest. So when
someone landed on the website, they could book a demo with a salesperson, but that’s it. That’s basically all they could. So it’s growth hacking, but it sort of lacks a little bit of that sort of later stage of the funnel.
Jon Sakoda: Now, you had seen what it was like to be acquired by IBM and maybe had an allergy to work at big companies again. How did this acquisition with Akamai come about, and what was your thought process there?
Guy Podjarny: So, I think at that time, we had the realization, and it was some interesting conversations with my co-founder back then. You had to kind of think long and hard about, is this a feature or is this a company, right? Is this really the right foundation for something that is long-term? And, while I started the company, I would have kind of pitched more of sort of the big one, I think in those points in time, it became a bit harder to sort of see it. And I think a good test for that is to think, how big a deal would it be if a bunch of key players in the system would’ve acquired these other—are you pretty much dead in the water? And it felt like that would be indeed the case.
And so, Akamai was actually always at the top of our list. At various points, we thought it might be unlikely, so we didn’t have all our cards in kind of that basket. But when they approached us, we were pretty excited to sort of have that because we felt like it was the right home for the technology and the team. The whole journey was about two years, two years and a bit, so it was pretty quick, especially in terms of time to market. And what we haven’t really properly had, and this might come back to sort of the Snyk journey, is we didn’t really get to commercialize. We had a little bit of business traction, but we never really kind of got to the point.
Jon Sakoda: You proved that it was a great technology and a great product, but you hadn’t built the commercial engine.
Guy Podjarny: Yeah. We built a feature. We didn’t really build a business. We built a great feature. We built a great kind of small nascent organization that became a disruptor and a force within Akamai. But we didn’t get to the stage of building a business.
Jon Sakoda: This probably sets the stage, then, your latest company, Snyk. But before you get there, so you now have had two successful acquisitions under your belt. You decided to stay at Akamai for a few years. What was that experience like in comparison to IBM? And then what eventually led you to leave and start Snyk?
Guy Podjarny: So Akamai was actually a great experience for me. So I came in with the company and pretty quickly became the CTO for the web performance business, so about half of Akamai. And I think it was my first experience being an exec at a company. It was a $700 million a year business. And thinking about things at larger scale, building business cases for potential acquisitions. So Akamai was great at exposing me to other execs, to sort of collaborations in the exec sessions over there, and to the complexities of strategic decisions that are of a magnitude that I have not sort of dealt with. A lot of great people and great learning; a lot of baggage. A lot of baggage. And I think there’s a lot that I learned in Akamai. I really didn’t feel like I was just doing my time. I felt like I learned. My pace of learning at Akamai was actually very, very high. And in parallel, it showed me a lot of things that I became kind of fearful of. Each step on the journey, I took a bunch of things that I should do and a bunch of things that I was very kind of keen not to repeat.
One of the key learnings that I sort of saw in Akamai was around DevOps. And you saw the likes of Fast.ly, and it was a CDN that I perceived—still, I think, at the time—was not as fast, not as secure, not as reliable. And yet, some teams were just swearing by it. And so, I wanted to understand, why? Why is that happening? And kind of build a bit of an appreciation of, well, it was because they were working the way teams wanted to work. It was basically attuned to sort of that DevOps reality. So I took a lot of that learning and kind of fed it into Snyk.
But eventually, the decision to found another company like before was actually first and foremost the decision to found another company. So I got the itch. I moved to London with Akamai in 2014 after a decade in Ottawa. And it was an opportunity, and then after about six or sort of nine months, my wife and I decided personal life-wise that we wanted to stay in London, and I got the itch to build up a startup. And so, the decision was, again, to resign from Akamai, to take a year off. I left Akamai July 1st, and I incorporated July 9th. So, I wasn’t very good at taking the time off.
And really, what I wanted to do is two things. So my co-founder at Blaze was great, Mike, and he remains a great friend. And I think part of it was, I wanted to prove to myself. I felt like I started that previous company and we worked together as a team, but I felt like I wanted to prove myself that I can do it, that it wasn’t just because he was already sort of second time founder and successful—that it wasn’t a fluke. Which is unusual for me. My confidence has always been high. But I felt like I really needed to demonstrate to myself that I can do it.
Related to that was that I wanted to try and run the business. I had a bunch of these opinions. And I’ve learned a lot, especially through Akamai, about business. And I wanted to be the CEO.
Jon Sakoda: Right. The fastest way to be a CTO is to start a company and call yourself a CTO. And the fastest way to become a CEO is to found a company and call yourself a CEO.
Guy Podjarny: Exactly. And I felt—after the Akamai experience, I felt I was equipped to maybe do that, and interested. Before that, I basically wasn’t as interested in the business aspects of it. And then lastly, I kind of wanted to make a bigger dent in the universe. So it was very important to me with the next idea to be something that is truly—could be high risk, but needs to be high reward.
Jon Sakoda: Well, a lot of people know the Snyk journey from the moment of its success, right? But I know that you maybe feel like there were these years where you were trying to find the idea and land on product-market fit. So let’s start at the very beginning. So you resign, you get going. You maybe don’t have a fully formed idea yet. How did you eventually land on this idea, and what were the first couple of years of finding product-market fit like?
Guy Podjarny: So first of all, just like in Blaze, when I was exploring ideas, I started off exploring ideas that were way off my skill set. And I looked at building a digital wardrobe. And if you know me, you’d know that my sense of fashion is nonexistent. I thought about a freelancer management system. So a bunch of these things felt interesting to me because of the learning curve in them. But eventually, none of them felt right. And I actually engaged with Ed Sim at boldstart. He was one of the small investors in Blaze.
Jon Sakoda: Amazing guy. An amazing seed investor.
Guy Podjarny: Yeah. I’m a big fan. Thanks for kind of echoing that. And so, I spoke to him. And I remember him—I’m probably paraphrasing a little bit—but pretty much sort of saying, “Look, if you do one of these other two ideas, then I’ll invest $100k or $200k. But if you do this third one, which was sort of the Snyk, the developer security idea, I’ll put in a million dollars.” It was a conversation that was roughly along those lines. But it was sort of the realization that it needs to be something I want.
The idea itself quite literally kind of came to me in the shower. I kind of thought about it in a moment of quiet. But I think it’s a combination of my journeys. I think the decade or so that I spent in the world of AppSec trying to get developers to sort of build, in Sanctum and Watchfire and IBM, get developers to sort of embrace security tools, kind of put into the idea, but failing, really, in hindsight, trying to kind of shove an auditor product down their throat versus building them a dev tool. And then my learnings during the performance years of DevOps and how it changed, and even that comparison to Fast.ly and contrasting it to Akamai—all of those felt like a natural conclusion for them was to take the DevOps learnings and performance learnings and to bring them into the world of security. What we need to do is we need to build a developer tooling company that tackles security.
Jon Sakoda: Guy, I’ve always wanted to ask this question. Having come from Watchfire and Blaze, you grew up building the first generation of application security products. You knew that it is incredibly difficult to convince engineering teams to build safe software. It’s not that they don’t want to. It’s just hard to focus on speed and security at the same time. I think conventional wisdom says that founders really only tackle something super hard if they are naive enough about the problem. If they knew how hard it was to tackle the problem, they wouldn’t try. And in your case, you knew exactly how hard this was, and yet you still had the courage to go at it one more time.
Taking you back to that moment, did you look at other ideas first, maybe some easier ideas? And what inspired you take on something you knew was a very, very difficult problem?
Guy Podjarny: To me, kind of few things are more inspiring than someone saying, “You can’t do it. Always can’t be done.” And so, the conviction that I had started with the fundamental belief that it must happen. So, although the appetite in the market was limited, to me, it felt crystal clear that there is no other option—that whether it is me or another, security needs to follow in the footsteps of DevOps, and it must be embedded into software development because nothing else scales. The only alternative to that is to not build security software, not have security software.
Once you kind of accept that, now the question is, well, okay, so how do we do it, versus can it be done? It must be done.
Jon Sakoda: This sounds a lot like the mindset you shared earlier that you learned in the IDF. You sometimes don’t get to pick the problem you’re working on, and there is always a solution to a problem if you work hard enough at it.
Guy Podjarny: Well, I think in this case, I could choose whether I will tackle it or not. But it felt like it is clear the problem is solvable. The question is, am I going to figure out the right things to do about it? And that’s really where I felt like the experience, the unfair advantage that I have, is this combined knowledge and understanding of developers and sort of the DevOps world from my performance days and of security from my sort of AppSec days. And I feel this unique lens that you might have as a founder on the market is very, very important, because when you go into a brand new space, it could be that you’re just sort of being naive. But for me, that depth actually gave me clarity about what is the
contrarian view. And I actually loved that it was not obvious to individuals because I was trying to make something that mattered.
And I always said that the worst case scenario isn’t to crash and burn, but rather to get stuck. And that the worst case scenario for me was, get to a few million ARRs and just have growth seize and be stuck in that time. And if it crashes and burns, then it would have been a learning journey in the process.
Jon Sakoda: Where did this mindset of being willing to crash and burn come from? This, “Hey, I’d rather crash and burn than stagnate?”
Guy Podjarny: I think a lot of it anchors in this view that I prefer experiences to possessions. And so, to me, the most precious asset that I have, that anybody has in life, is time. And I get bored and dissatisfied when I feel like I’m stepping in place. And to an extent, it means I’m never comfortable. But I also believe that if you’re comfortable, you’re not growing. It’s really literally a continuum. The more comfortable you are, it means the less new things you are trying, and the less you are growing and learning.
So I think if you prioritize time, then you want to make sure that you work on problems that matter, you want to try different things and new things, and that crashing and burning just doesn’t feel that daunting. I also feel that people overestimate how risky it is for a technologist to found a company and fail. I think founding a company is one of the best growth journeys you could have. You learn more in a year as a founder than you would as an employee anywhere. And it’s a different type of learning. So oftentimes, you do need to learn within companies. But I think if I founded the company and had to shut it down two or three years later, I would be that much better, I think, either to start another company or to get an executive job, than had I stayed the course for another two or three years.
Jon Sakoda: Yeah. You can always play it safe later.
Guy Podjarny: And it’s a much easier statement to make when you have a success behind you. In part, it’s easier for you and for investors to believe that you can do it, but also just financially, it doesn’t have that element of, “But can you feed your kids?” It doesn’t really have that component. And so, it’s important. But to be honest, I never really thought it would fail. I don’t know if that’s delusion. There were moments during that I did. But when I started it, it felt crystal clear to me that this is the way to make it happen.
Jon Sakoda: Let’s talk about the early years. What were some of the key ingredients to the founding story of Snyk?
Guy Podjarny: Yeah. So first of all, I’m going to start with the people, because I think it’s very important. So when I decided to start the company, I could have founded it by myself. But I feel that founding a company and kind of running it is a very kind of emotional journey. And I think doing it alone is very hard. And so, I wanted co-founders. I always wanted to tap into my network in Israel, where I knew some amazing people. And then to do that, I needed a leader in the space.
And so, I went out and I sought out a co-founder in Israel. And through my kind of past networks, I found Danny Grander, who I’ve sort of served with in the army. And him and Assaf Hefetz were about to found their own thing. And I didn’t know Assaf before, but I started talking to them. I went to Israel, kind of visited and spent time, and then we all decided to kind of take the leap, and they would drop
their thing that was already funded or already had committed funding. So they sort of joined me, and they kind of built the team in Israel. And I think it’s very important to sort of have partners for the journey.
And I think what ensued was that we worked together to build a company that was bringing together Tel Aviv and London, and specifically, they kind of represented security and disruption with sort of dev experience and process. And so, in London, I had a network of people from my conference kind of speaking circles from the performance days that understood the dev experience, that understood modern DevOps product practices. And in Israel, had people with security dev and with this fearlessness of anything is possible, and with a bit of a kind of get stuff done kind of a mindset, and not fearing startups. Because in London, seven years ago, there was still sort of fear of startups. A little bit less of today.
And what was key for me is to bring the two together, especially from the Watchfire days. I moved from Israel to Ottawa, and there were these two amazing teams in Ottawa and in Tel Aviv. And they really didn’t get along. They really kind of hated each other. And it was such a shame. And I was in the middle because I was the person that moved and connected them. And it had a lot of that us versus them kind of mentality for a long period of time. And I was really afraid of that. And so, we instilled this rule that was very important in the shaping of Snyk, which is, no team will be co-located. So while we started the company in both places, the teams were always divided between location.
Jon Sakoda: Right.
Guy Podjarny: And that really worked. I feel like your natural affinity is to the people that are physically next to you and the people that are kind of in your unit at work with you. And so, by doing that cross geos and mixing it, it created a very bonded team. And that brought together these different skills, this diverse set of skills. And I think it’s a lot of the core of who Snyk is today and sort of the uniqueness of what we brought in.
Jon Sakoda: So you have a great team. You are passionate about the idea. We all know looking back that this was a very hard problem to solve. For those that are less familiar with Snyk, what was the initial vision, and how did you go about building your first product in open source security?
Guy Podjarny: So, Snyk’s core has always been around this sort of developer security product. And as such, it was always something that I imagined being a multi-product company. And even the name Snyk was inspired by the idea that says, well, we will kind of instrument applications and we will sneak data out and understand if it’s secure or not secure and engage with developers. And runtime security felt like a really key space. And so, that was the idea.
But we said, it’s a very high bar to get people to embrace an instrumentation tool into the system. And I’ve sort of seen a bunch of those failures. And so, instead of starting there, we thought about something that would engage open source. It was also a part of the philosophy of sort of being a dev tooling company was to be product led and to be bottom up, and we wanted something that open source projects can use. And we totally thought it’s an easy problem. And the seed deck has three products. And the first one was Stranger, which was the Snyk open source proposition. And it was basically designed as, we’ll start with JavaScript because it’s deep, and then three months later, we’ll extend to another language. And after six months, it’s going to be basically done, and we’ll sort of go to the next product. And it was just amazing how wrong we were. When you think about just the number of
companies in the world that have it, who uses open source? Everybody. Who should care about security? Everybody. And so, the problem fundamentally of sort of securing your open source is just like a fundamentally bigger problem than we thought.
And second is that it’s harder. And I think we sort of built an appreciation over time of this complexity of depth and breadth, of this fact that in every single ecosystem for developer tools, you have to go deep. I have this bit of a phrase that I use. If you’re a JavaScript developer, you couldn’t care less if a solution supports PHP or not. And it’s not a cynical comment. It’s just because it doesn’t affect them. But it better be amazing for JavaScript, so it needs to be really good at that setup because you have all the choices, the tools around you. And so, you have to build something that’s very deep for that ecosystem. And that depth is expensive. And if you don’t built the depth, developers don’t love it. And so, it’s just very, very hard.
So over the course of the next two, maybe three years, even, a regular probably quarterly conversation between me and my co-founders was, okay, is it time to expand to runtime or are we going to build runtime as well? Not yet. Not yet. Let’s sort of give it another quarter before we kind of get distracted. And yeah, I mean, just for those tracking Snyk, we don’t actually kind of yet have a runtime security app. So if it’s a real problem and it’s worth solving, and it’s one that sort of is broadly applicable to a lot of customers, it’s probably bigger than you think, and it’s probably more complicated than you think.
Jon Sakoda: I think when this happens in a startup, a lot of founders feel a tension in the product road map along the way. Perhaps as a technologist, you always wanted to solve the runtime security challenge, but the market seemed to keep asking you to shift even further left. How did you guys resolve that at Snyk?
Guy Podjarny: Yeah. It’s important to have a vision and to stick to the vision, unless there’s sort of core data that sort of changed your view about it. But the journey towards it is something you should be more adaptable in. And so, my vision has always been developer security. The market opportunity has always been this multiple of developer region security spend. And what you need is you need a big vision and small steps. So what you need to figure out is a sequence of steps that would sort of directionally get you towards that big vision.
And I don’t think anybody’s able to actually chart all these steps towards it. So what you should focus on is what is the destination and what is your immediate step, and maybe a little bit of what do you think is the step after to some murkiness. But try to pick a step that if you end up getting stuck in it, and sort of for three years versus three months, you don’t regret having chosen too. It’s that you feel like it is advancing you in the right direction. And I think you get smarter as time goes on. And so, it never occurred to me—the container security product, which was the second product that we launched, wasn’t on that seed deck list at all, because I didn’t know enough about the space.
So, talk about growth journey. You’ll learn so much about it. But runtime, the key reason we haven’t gone there is that it didn’t feel, as we dug into the space, as the right way to advance developer security. So fundamentally, I think you have to be adaptable in the journey to it, sometimes because you understand the vision and the need better, and sometimes because of the sequence of steps that is necessary. Because if the step is too big, you’re going to fall in between. But if you took the right step, then that becomes a great foundation to take the subsequent.
Jon Sakoda: So, walk us through the early chapters of the Snyk book.
Guy Podjarny: Yeah. So, it didn’t go that smoothly. So we launched a crappy little beta product in the Velocity Conference in Amsterdam. And it was free and online. And we managed to get good initial developer love. So people downloaded it, they tweeted about it well. And we engaged with the community a lot and generally saw a little bit of the download kind of count growing and things like that. We had a bunch of product learnings about it. I believe that you need to put a product out there so you can see when it’s sort of failing, and you can put yourself in a position to get that feedback.
And indeed, we learned a bunch of things. For instance, we saw that people would download the product that would use it, they would be successful. They would find vulnerabilities, maybe even fix them. But they wouldn’t put it in the build. And because that was a bigger step, it was a bit concerning. And a lot of that type of learning evolved us into building the GitHub integration and creating an even easier next, next, next experience with Git to break those out. And so, that was great, and I’d say a very positive trajectory of how it should be.
And this is late October 2015, we launch the product. We evolve the CLI. We build GitHub. Late June of 2016, something like that, we GA. We launched the GitHub integration with GA. And at that point, we had thousands, maybe tens of thousands of sort of developers that have used the product, a smaller number that engaged. And we fully expect that it will kind of open the floodgates and people would purchase. So we did that, and nobody bought. And when I mean nobody bought, I mean nobody bought. And it was really only about September that we sort of were acknowledging that something is not happening as we did.
And the subsequent year was a grind. There were sort of a few things that had to happen during that time. One is the sort of constant discovery of why people are not engaging. So we learned that we supported GitHub.com but not GitHub Enterprise. And lo and behold, the people that care about security the most, they had GitHub Enterprise. And so how is it that we sort of can’t support GitHub Enterprise? So it was a lot of learning over there, which was a bit dispiriting, because many of these things were big undertakings, so it didn’t feel like within two weeks, you could kind of get them done. And they require some creativity.
And also, because we constantly got told that it’s just not the right approach. The advice we got from the dev tooling side sort of told us, hey, this is classic dev tool pitfall. You build a product, developers love it, but there’s no business in it. And the security people are saying, “Yeah, yeah, you want to say developer first,” but it’s not developer first. It’s security is the one that sort of calls the shots. And you’re just, you’re not very good at the sort of security side and the needs of the security team.
And so, it was really dispiriting. I had—I remember one specific conversation with a founder of a very successful sort of dev tooling company that told us, “Hey, I think you’re fucked.” And I remember kind of coming back mad from that sort of San Francisco trip, spending the weekend kind of fuming and figuring out like, “Are we? Did we sort of—is it wrong? Should we sort of switch, do what everybody else does?” And I think—so that’s the other aspect. So one of it was the learning, and the other is just this reaffirming conviction around we would rather crash and burn. And I say “we” because my co- founders had to be in agreement here, right? We are succeeding in what we felt was the most important aspect, which is getting developers to use a security tool. We are already probably the security tool that is most widely used by developers. We need to keep at it. And fortunately, we also had support from the investors.
So Ed at boldstart was great at the time, and he topped us up on good terms. It’s a whole story on its own here that if you want, we can do it. But because of our external traction, there was a lot of VC interest in potentially preempting our subsequent round. And I learned into it, and I engaged with a bunch of these top tier VCs, all the sort of top names. And pretty much all of them came in, looked behind the scenes, saw there was no revenue associated with it, and backed out. It was a very, very dispiriting moment.
To top that, my father-in-law passed away really midway. Literally in the morning, I got an offer that wasn’t the offer I wanted for a raise. And in the evening, we got news in London that in Israel, my father-in-law passed away. And we got on the plane and we fly over. And I’m like there in this shiva, in the sitting of seven days after someone passes, and trying to think, should I take these calls that I had booked with the VCs while the super, super emotional time, and probably the lowest point kind of for me personally. And then during that time, Ed at boldstart stepped out and says, “Ah, just get that out of your mind. Stick to the vision. You still believe in it. There’s three more million dollars on these good terms, like the best terms that I got, but not a full round. And we stayed the course.
And then it took another six, seven months of grind. I remember sort of in March, we closed our first $30k deal. In May, we closed the $50k deal. Come August, we were still at $100,000 annual recurring revenue. This is about two years into the company. It’s not great. Millions of dollars are already invested. And then from there, it really kind of broke through. So I think there was the seminal deal of about $80k in August 2017. And then I remember getting to $650 by the end of that year, and then $7X the year after, and sort of so on and so forth.
Jon Sakoda: That’s just an amazing story. I mean, I think a lot of founders feel like Snyk was an overnight success, and it sounds like you guys had years of really trying to find what minimum viable product was for your paid product.
Guy Podjarny: And it’s really hard to know whether you’re just bashing your head against the wall or whether you really have something, right? For me, what helped was the conviction that the most important problem I was setting out to do was to get developers to embrace security, and that we were actually being successful at that. And that now, we’re basically on the next problem, which is also getting people to buy it. Today I can say more crisply that when you embrace product-led growth, especially with freemium, revenue is a second order variable. You need to build a great product, and then need it to get great users, and then you need to get people to buy. And that’s a longer journey versus building great product and then getting people to buy it. And so, that requires conviction. It requires the right investors. It requires the right KPIs and tracking. And it doesn’t mean you’re necessarily successful. But you just need to make sure that you are tracking the right things.
Jon Sakoda: Snyk is now a runaway success. You have raised hundreds of millions of dollars. You are valued well into the billions. I know you made a lot of key decisions along the way, but I think a lot of our listeners who are founders would love to hear about one really important decision you made. And that was to bring in a new CEO in the middle of this amazing hyper-growth period.
Guy Podjarny: Yeah, for sure. So, just for context, Snyk went from 23 people to 84 people to 250 people to 450 people in these sort of annual increments. That’s been sort of the growth journey. And as we went from 23 to 84, and then we were sort of on that pace, and we’re already at 150 or so, people— I kind of had a bit of a moment of realization. I realized we had a bunch of market changes. We launched a new product. We had a new competitor. We were sort of working through it. And there was
a need for product strategy strength. There was a need to sort of sit down and assess, how are we handling these kind of market condition changes? What does it mean for us? What should we be doing? And the best person to do that was me. Except I didn’t have time. And my time was entirely consumed by scaling the company.
And also, during that time, I think I was doing a good job. I mean, the company was doing well. We were hiring great people. We were sort of doing a bunch of these things. But I also saw all sorts of mistakes that I was making, kind of being a first time CEO. And then on top of all of those, I actually remember this sort of moment, being on a work trip, sort of watching some movie with—I think there was like a Will Smith or something kind of walking up onstage and some sort of a leader of a company and getting applause and all of that. And all I could think of is, wow, I don’t want to be that person. I don’t want to be in that position. And it kind of got me thinking about like, Snyk is now growing. We’re doing well. We’re sort of past the product-market fit. As we think about long-term company, generation company, do I want to be a public company CEO if I sort of chart there?
And it was pretty clear to me the answer was no. And that made the whole conversation a “when,” not “if.” Unless I sell the company, which is legit, but wasn’t what I was seeking out to do, do I want to continue being CEO? And so, alongside that, I had a bit of an unfair opportunity. I had this sort of great board member who was already my board member in Blaze, and he was the CEO of Watchfire before, Peter McKay. And I’ve known him for many years. And I knew that he was one of those people that, when I ask him a question, he approaches it from a totally different lens, which was the reason I wanted him on my board in the first place. I knew that we have skills the complement one another. And there was this window of time in which he was available. He had just finished a CEO tenure.
And so, I started this conversation with him. I probably started it in February of 2017, and then in May, it kind of got serious, and in July, he replaced me. And I think kind of the key takeaways—some of these things are obvious about how you can apply them to you—was, one, you need to decide what is it that you want to be kind of at the destination. Because the company would keep growing. And I think as a founder, you get the privilege of trying that role. And that’s the founder privilege, is you’re allowed to take a crack at that role. But you need to decide whether that is indeed where you want to grow. The second is, you need to think and factor in what is the thing your company most needs from you. I think for me, what I have to give the company that is most important, that is most valuable, is my kind of visionary skills and my ability to kind of understand the market and the product and where it’s going. And I felt like while I was doing a good job as CEO, I felt I could do better. I felt like I could get a better CEO for it. And that was important.
And then maybe the last thing is that just because something is good doesn’t mean it can’t be better. And it was even a consideration, hey, would people think Snyk is not doing well because you’re replacing CEO, which is typically done at the point of failure. I think we always, and I always and the company always seeks to do things better than they were before. And if you exclude yourself from kind of that equation and your role, then you’re just kind of being hypocritical.
So, all of those are drivers for it. It wasn’t an easy decision. It wasn’t an easy adjustment once Peter has joined. It took us months, even with our sort of past relationship, to form the methodologies where I’m not stepping on his toes and he kind of knows when to engage me. And I think we have a great, great partnership today. But it’s not easy. But I think it is a mistake not to even consider it, to yourself and with the people that you trust, at these inflection points of size.
Jon Sakoda: I usually ask as we wrap up what your highest highs and lowest lows were along the way. I think you mentioned some of your lowest lows were when you failed to get a Series A raised a few years ago. I’m so glad that you came through that. But looking back, what have been some of the highs for you personally?
Guy Podjarny: I think there were a lot of high moments in Snyk’s history. I think probably my favorite moments are the all hands on the company. So, we would always get the company together from the different locations at a frequency that matched our planning horizon. So at the beginning, it was every three months, every four months, every six months, then every year until the pandemic. And those moments were always great to take stock of what happened, to bond—we did workshops. And those were all great. But it was always these moments of these milestones, because everybody came together, of looking a little bit at your creation. And I would always, when we started doing this, sort of the parties and the event, always take a moment to sit in a corner, have a glass of wine, and just sort of watch over the party for a few minutes. And those are amazing moments for me. And it’s just because you are so much in it during the journey. And I think fundamentally, you’re a group of people kind of working together, and I think that camaraderie and that fun is great. I think the people are really the best part.
Jon Sakoda: Yeah. Has your vision for Snyk changed at all?
Guy Podjarny: Snyk’s core vision hasn’t changed. Fundamentally, we need to build security into the fabric of software development. And the market opportunity, the TAM, simply put, is again, that sort of of developer reach multiplied by security spend. And the criticality of it has never diminished. And I think that world is massive. I think what has definitely evolved is what is involved in successfully doing that. Some of the core elements stay true. Some learnings, we’ve already had, like for instance, the importance of cloud. So the tactics, even large-scale tactics, have changed, but the vision and the destination, I think, keeps on growing. But it stays under the same title of developer security.
Jon Sakoda: Guy, in our last few moments, any quick lessons for your younger self?
Guy Podjarny: I believe that we, individuals and companies, are the sum of all of our experiences, the good ones and the bad ones, the things we got right and the things that are mistakes. And I think if you kind of mess up with that sort of time continuum, if you will, and you change things, then you’re different. You’re not necessarily going to get the same result. So I think general advice is mostly around the emotional state. It’s mostly around if you believe something is right, sort of stick to it. And I’d say one thing that I wish my younger self was better at or older self, for that matter, is to sort of beat yourself up a little bit less about failures.
Jon Sakoda: Guy, you have been a fantastic guest. So much great wisdom has been shared for everyone this afternoon. I have a feeling we are far from the end of the Snyk journey. I’m hopeful that we’ll have you back on the show to share even more wisdom with our founders. And thank you again for being here.
Guy Podjarny: My pleasure. Thanks for having me on, and hopefully some of these lessons help some founders here build some great things.