Girish Redekar: How to Leverage Security To Close Faster Enterprise Deals for Your SaaS Company #169

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Hello, hello everyone.

This is your host, Akeel Jabbar, and welcome back to another episode of SaaS District. In today's episode, we'll be talking about how to leverage security to close faster enterprise deals for your SaaS company.

Today we have our guest, Girish Redekar, joining us.

Girish is the, the CEO and co-founder of sprinto.com, which is a company that helps SaaS companies become SOC 2 compliant, close enterprise deals faster, and pass vendor security assessments easily, which we'll talk about today.

He previously built and bootstrapped RecruiterBox to over 2,500 customers and over 50 employees, both in the US and India. The company was then acquired by a PE firm called Turnriver Capital in an all-cash 100% deal. So welcome, Dhiraj, super excited to have you on the SaaS District Show today.

Thanks, Akeel, you know, excited to be here.

So I'd love to start, you know, discussing briefly, you know, what is the, you know, what exactly is cybersecurity for some of the people listening in? or security in general when it comes to SaaS, and why and at what point should maybe SaaS companies think about implementing a program or think about it in their business?

Yeah, so, you know, I'm going to specifically talk about cybersecurity in the context of a SaaS or a cloud-hosted company, and I'll try and keep it fairly simple. Now, you know, SaaS— let's imagine for a moment that you're a SaaS vendor and I'm a customer, and SaaS fundamentally means that my data is on your servers, and it's natural that I have some concerns about whether you're keeping that data safe and secure. So cybersecurity in the context of the SaaS company is quite simply a bunch of practices and processes that you are following to keep, and, uh, you know, keep my data safe and secure. Now, when you're thinking about, uh, you know, uh, factors to consider about when the SaaS company should ideally be looking at implementing a cybersecurity program— but before I jump into that, I think, uh, it helps to spend a little bit of time to understand what's really going on in the world outside of us. So if you look at— if you dial back like about 5 to 7 years ago, cybersecurity concerns were largely asked by fairly large enterprises or, you know, in cases where you're dealing with extremely sensitive data like, you know, health— healthcare data or data related to credit card information, etc. But what's really happened in the last 5 years that these concerns have rapidly diffused out of these very specific pockets. And it's gotten to a point where, you know, you're going to get asked some sort of cybersecurity-related questions in one way or the other if you're starting to do 5-figure ACV deals or larger. So it's gotten to that point and then that ceiling is constantly dropping. So I guess my overall point here is that, you know, founders, the way to think about cybersecurity, especially for younger startups, is from a revenue perspective more than a security perspective. And what that means is that, you know, the point at which you need to start thinking about it is a little bit before it starts becoming a bottleneck to your sales. And those things can change depending on the geography or the industry or the specific nature of your business. But I'm increasingly seeing that, you know, the time to do this is dropping all the time. So unless you are like, you know, just a completely fanatic SMB business who never wants to do, you know, a large deal, you're going to get asked for these things sooner than later.

Right, yeah, it makes sense. And I mean, I think that's kind of become like the minimum now, right? So if you're— even if you're starting off and your, you know, target audience is enterprise, you have to think about that right from day one.

Yes.

And what are you seeing? So I mean, in terms of trends, I'd love to hear, you know, what are some of the most common, you know, cyberattacks or security threats that enterprise companies are thinking about, worried about, and you've seen kind of infiltrate and be a concern, let's say, in the last year or so?

Yeah, that's a great question. So, you know, the thing that I learned about cybersecurity, being in this space and like worked with a few hundreds companies go through this program is the stuff that actually ends up mattering is the boring stuff. You know, we think about cybersecurity and we think about the bleeding-edge places where, you know, where this very unique attack that happened and so on and so forth. But it's, if you really look at the numbers, the 2 most important places where, you know, attacks really happen are A, something related to people processes. So it is, it is dead simple stuff like, you know, simple phishing attacks to your employees in your company or social engineering or simply somebody forgetting to remove access for an employee who has left the company and simple stuff like that. So it's, you know, it's funny how much, how much advantage you get by doing the simple things right, especially related to people and processes around people. And the second one that's, that's interesting and that's, you know, that's happening again in the last couple of years is that It so happens that if you are a SaaS company today, it's likely that you're using a bunch of other SaaS products to run your company. And that's just the natural way most SaaS companies are built today, you know. And what eventually happens is that whatever data you are sort of getting from your customers, you end up sort of sending that data to the bunch of other SaaS tools that you use. You send some of that to the cloud provider, you send some of it to your CRM, and so on and so forth. So the second largest surface attack, surface of attack for cybersecurity are the vendors that you're using. So you might be doing great, keeping your ship tight, and you're doing everything great, but you know, you're still passing on this data to somebody else, and the holes might be there. And there is very little that you can do to sort of control that directly, or you have very little visibility into that. So these are the 2 most common things that happen. And like I said earlier, these seem boring and obvious, and you would imagine that these ought to get plugged. But honestly, this is where, you know, most of the attacks happen.

Yeah, I mean, this is confidential information, their IP. This is, you know, things that run the business and, you know, that are, you know, secret to what makes the company so, you know, so successful. Um, so thinking about from a practical perspective, what are maybe some, you know, first steps as a founder I should take or even think about to prevent this within my SaaS and, you know, from getting hacked or, you know, keeping their information safe?

Yeah, so that's a great question. And, you know, that sort of follows from the 2 most common things that we looked at. You know, the most simple thing that we would do is look at your people processes about how you grant or remove access for people, especially when they join you or when they change teams or when they leave you as a company. These are simple things that are— that you can keep track of and that they sort of give you the most bang for the buck. So this is the first place I would look at, including things like explaining to your employees about, you know, how phishing attacks happen and how to avoid them and or even social engineering. So there is this new trend where especially in smaller SaaS companies, employees often get emails from their founders saying that hey, I need this money and or something of that sort. And this, this started happening in, in Sprinto a few, few days ago. So, so it's interesting how some of these attacks work and just simple things that you could fix without costing you anything, really speaking. So that's the first place I would look at. The second place I'd carefully look at is again, all the other SaaS vendors that you might be using and you didn't, didn't do like an exhaustive list, but it's important to at least look closely at the SaaS vendors where you actually share a lot of Internal data with, and, or share a lot of your customer data with. And that's something that you should look with a little bit more critical eye and try and make sure that, you know, in some way or the other, they are following a certain set of practices. That happens naturally if you're using larger vendors. But especially when your team starts adopting some tools which may not be as matured yet, that's somewhere to look a little bit more closely at. That doesn't mean you need to avoid those things, but, you know, it's good to have some checks and balances around those things. So I would say, again, these are the 2 most important areas to spend most time on. And, you know, the common things that people miss here is something of the sort that you took care of everything. You know, I'm a developer first, so I often worry a lot more about these things where— but, you know, an employee left your company and you took care of everything. You removed their G Suite account, you removed their AWS account. Hey, but there is some SSH key lying somewhere on their laptop using which they can actually access your servers. And that's an attack waiting to happen. So, you know, those are the kind of things that, but simple but important things that you need to take care of.

And what do you suggest there? So for that first one, you know, do you set up some kind of like offboarding process or, you know, I mean, there's things like, you know, LastPass or simple things like that where, you know, everything's kind of managed.

I would say, yeah, you know, most things are solved by checklists. So if you're beginning this today and you're doing this, simply having a checklist somewhere where somebody just goes through those steps is a good starting point.

Okay, yeah, that makes sense. And then, you know, you mentioned something, you know, like a security questionnaire. How does that work? And, you know, when should founders be worried about that? Is that what we talked about or is that something different?

Yeah, yeah. So here's what basically what happens, right? Like, you know, let's go back to that analogy. Like you are a SaaS vendor, I'm a customer, and I need to know whether, you know, you're doing enough things to keep my data safe and secure. Now there are a bunch of ways of doing this, but one of the most common things is like, I'll send you like a security questionnaire. And this is— if you have anybody who has solved or answered a security questionnaire before, you'll dread it quite simply because it runs into hundreds of questions often. And most of the times the questions don't make sense. There's a bunch of jargon there. They seem like they're repetitious or they don't seem relevant to what you're doing, etc. But basically that— if this is basically your sales cycle, answering a security questionnaire is sort of just elongating that by a weeks, you know, by the time you can actually get that back in a reasonable manner. And, you know, there's usually back and forth around it as well. So fundamentally, security questionnaires are a reality, though. And the way I would recommend a bunch of founders today to sort of deal with security questions is to find a way and circumvent as much as possible. And there are actually ways to do that. I think the most important way to look at this is to use security as a sales tool rather than a defensive tactic. So what commonly happens is, you know, you sort of gone into this enterprise sale, you have a champion, you do all the hard work, you navigate the bureaucracy, you got to a point where it's in procurement and now you're just waiting. Hey, this is going to get signed any day and boom, you got like a security question and this is just like elongating the time. So I think what the mistake that I used to do, at least in my previous companies, is to think about security and compliance as a checkbox. that I sort of put forward when, when the question comes to security, and I can— so that I can just allay their fears about security. What I've learned since is that the most modern, mature companies, what they really do is they lead with security. So this is a part of, you know, this is somewhere on your website, it's in part of your sales deck, it's part of your early sales, your customer conversations. So what you're really trying to do is that, hey, rather than using this as a checkbox that you're eventually going to answer, you actually Constantly creating confidence about the fact that you do have a security program. It is— it's better if it's a third-party audited program, and you're creating that confidence upfront, which often leads to, you know, completely circumventing the fact that you get asked for a security questionnaire later down the line. And that's the best way of dealing with this.

So you're kind of leading with that. So I mean, rather than spending a lot of time on features and functionality and demo and product, you know, integrations and whatnot, you're leading with this because you know it's coming. And, you know, that's going to delay things. That's going to, you know, even when you think the deal is done, how long, you know, how much time do you think you're typically saving, you know, when you're looking at closing those deals, when you've seen that switch from leading with that versus, you know, waiting till the end?

That varies. Like, you could save anywhere between, you know, like a week to 6 to 8 weeks. Like, that's the amount of time you're saving in this process, just depending on the deal.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So obviously, you know, everybody, you know, as enterprise clients, you're looking for secure service that we can trust, right? So, you know, being aware that information security is that not only prevents attack but accelerates, you know, the other side, which is the— you know, there's 2 sides that prevent the attack. But most importantly, you know, people listening in want to improve sales, increase revenue. And then any other ways of how you can align, you know, security and compliance while still, you know, avoiding too many costs, right? Because if you do all this work, like you said, this is time, this is energy, this is a lot of work upfront. How do you kind of think about that to align both?

Great question. So I guess, like, I'll answer it in 2 parts and I have a selfish motive in the second part, but I'll try and answer the first question first.

Sure.

I think the most important thing that I urge SaaS companies to do is to look at security as a sales tool. We touched upon that briefly, but like I was saying, is that modern mature SaaS companies are increasingly looking at security, at least in part, as rolling up to their revenue function rather than rolling up to the security function. And they think of this as a customer-facing function. In fact, at Sprinto, we coined this word called RevSecOps, which is fundamentally to think of security as a revenue function. There's a bunch of things that you're really doing in order to accelerate revenue. This really helps internally because this changes the way the company looks at it. People often inside of the company think of security folks as the ones who are always blocking you and stopping you and just elongating what you need to do and asking you for stuff that's not really your job. But rolling it up to revenue and making it— makes it amply clear to everyone in the company that, hey, this is important, this actually affects our top line, and this is extremely, extremely important. I think that internal messaging is important to actually align security and revenue in some manner so that what you call the security team, for example, is important in some way. How to do this while preventing costs? So it so happens that security and compliance is traditionally an extremely expensive affair, not just in terms of the amount of money that you directly spend on this, but also in terms of the amount of resources it's going to suck away from your company. And that's something that actually costs you at the end of the day. Now, so what we do with— I would recommend using a tool like Sprinto, which is why, caveat there, we accelerate this entire journey and we actually save you tons of time when you're going through this process. But The broad idea there being that, you know, you could actually achieve these compliances and a security program with much less effort than it otherwise takes. So that's something to be mindful of, to look at tools like that, which actually helps you get there. But I think the most important, highest order bit is to start thinking of security as something that rolls up to your revenue, and its job is to make you look more formidable and create assurance with your customers rather than just something that you're doing to, you know, add blockages in everything that you're doing.

Yeah, that makes complete sense. Um, and then, you know, there's one keyword that you mentioned which I'm not too familiar with, and maybe you can help, you know, explain a little bit more how that works, which is SoC2 architecture. Uh, can you explain what exactly that architecture— how that works, and maybe what are the advantages of, uh, you know, implementing this, if I must ask?

Great. So I, I'll start from the basics there. See, fundamentally, uh, what really used to happen in the, uh, if you looked at this about a decade ago, is, is, uh, Again, I'll take the example. You're a SaaS vendor, I'm a customer, and I need to know that you're keeping my data safe and secure. And in the olden days, the Fortune 500s would basically conduct an audit on you. So we actually have people, or we engage a third party who's going to actually examine your security practices and make sure whether you're running them to my satisfaction or not. Now, this is obviously not scalable. It's inefficient. You are having to go through an audit with every customer that you work with.

Right.

And I'm going to do this audit for every vendor that I work with. work with. Not— doesn't scale, doesn't work. So what really frameworks such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001 and a bunch of other forms of that really do is it's not very different than what a, you know, like an SAT would do. What you're really doing is instead of me getting examined by this bunch of other things, why don't I get examined by this one certified body and they give me something that I can use across these various places that I am using? So that's quite simply the concept. SOC 2 is governed by a body called AICPA, and there are certified auditors who can actually audit you so that you, instead of you having to go through an audit with each and every customer that you're going through, you go through this one audit. And I as a customer recognize this, this recognizes, and I can actually go through your SOC 2 report and understand that these are the things that you're doing. So that's quite simply what SOC 2 does. And now there are a bunch of nuances over there about, you know, SOC 2 has about 5 criteria related to security, availability, confidentiality, processing integrity, privacy, etc. And most companies only do security and so on and so forth. But that's that detail apart. This is the main important concept, right? It's a way for you to scale how you demonstrate security to an independent third party, to an independent body, and so that I can still trust this. What this really gives me an advantage over is, remember, we were talking about security questionnaires. So when I send you a security questionnaire and in spite of filling out all those hundreds of questions and you send it back to me, the fact is I have no way of verifying whether what you've said is right or not. So I just have to trust your word on it. So inherently there's lesser value in that information than a third-party audit where an independent certifiable trained auditor is actually examining you. And I can trust that report a lot more than what you answer to me in a security questionnaire. So the quality of information is much higher over here.

Makes sense. So you're kind of essentially standardizing the test so that, you know, this is the kind of like you set the bar here that, look, if you pass this, And, you know, everybody should kind of understand that this is the— this is, you know, worth, worth, uh, the piece of paper, right? And, uh, worth looking into. And I guess that's something you include from the beginning, right? Same thing like you said, being kind of proactive with your security, you know, uh, you know, presentation or your demo when you're trying to close the deals. Like, hey, look, we are SOC 2 compliant and, uh, you know, we have the documentation and that kind of gives that confidence as well, right?

Absolutely.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay, awesome. This is great, Dhirish. Um, I want to shift gears a little bit and move towards a little bit on the personal side, understand a little bit, you know, your background. So I know you mentioned, you know, prior to starting Sprinto, uh, you ran another company called RecruiterBox, which was acquired, um, by a PE firm for all cash. So, uh, I love the background you have here. You know, there must have come some of that, a little bit of that exit cash money. Um, tell us, how was that kind of life-changing event? You know, just tell us, and then, you know, how did you decide to say, okay, you know, I've made— I've had an exit, um, you know, have, you know, had some level of success in entrepreneur journey, what made you decide to then shift to start Sprinto and build to what led to discovery of launching a SaaS again?

So honestly, you know, RecruiterBox was running really well. It was, to put it very bluntly, it was a bit of a cash cow. It was going quite comfortably and I guess the important thing that us founders decided at a point was we had startup in us and we were a little bit more ambitious than the nature of the business of RecruiterBox was allowing us to be. So the point there was to, you know, to look at this as an opportunity cost of the time that you're spending here. And so we made a seemingly risky decision of sort of giving out a cash cow and then, you know, trying your hand. So the idea was that we always knew that we were going to do another startup. So that's my point. It wasn't like, hey, you know, this happened and then now I'm on vacation and it's so incidental It just coincidentally happened that we started another startup. So the idea always while, you know, exiting RecruiterBox was that, you know, we'll give ourselves maybe a little bit of a break, but, you know, back, maybe back on the saddle after that.

That break doesn't usually last that long, right? And were you guys proactive in reaching out and saying, hey guys, like, this is for sale, let's see if somebody's interested? Or does it just come your way and somebody says, hey, like, are you interested? And, you know, you kind of entertain the conversation, said, okay, this is kind of good timing to consider it.

Honestly, it was somewhere in between. It was neither, I would say, in the sense that, you know, once you grow to a certain size as a SaaS business, you always tend to have a bunch of inbound interest of that sort. It's just that we were keeping them at bay and we weren't really engaging as much. And once we sort of made that mental decision, it's just that we started talking to these folks a little bit more. And then, you know, some of them, one of them sort of just actually fructified.

And how was that experience for you and your founders? Did you end up, you know, taking that cash and reinvesting it into Sprinto, or what was— how did that go?

Uh, no, so Sprinto is a, you know, venture-funded company from the get-go, uh, so yeah, we didn't reinvest the cash.

Okay, and how did you decide on Sprinto, like this, you know, security, uh, you know, SaaS? How did you guys realize— I know, you know, you wanted to build something else, um, how did you narrow down and figure out the idea here?

That's a great question. So, uh, funnily, uh, you know, the seeds of Sprinto were, uh, somehow in RecruiterBox, and it's funny how these things sort of you know, you can join the dots going backwards. But the thing is that it was during running RecruiterBox that we had to become SOC 2 compliant. We had a few customers who were asking for these things. And, you know, thanks to that, we got a front row seat to what these things really mean, what the gotchas are, where they become painful. So we hired like a consultant, you know, spent, I think, about 4 to 6 months on this process. It cannibalized a bunch of engineering projects in the company. And at the end of the whole thing, we weren't getting anywhere. So, you know, like I would say, we didn't have a very pleasant experience with it. And at the time it felt like a huge waste of time and money. But, you know, that experience was one of the things that we could carry on when we were thinking about, you know, ideas about what to build next. And to be honest, we looked at about half a dozen ideas and this sort of, you know, jumped out because we felt a personal pain about it. And, you know, we did some research and it turned out that, you know, we are not alone in that journey. So that was one of the starting points.

Yeah, that's generally what I always recommend. You know, people come to me and ask, you know, what are some ideas, what do you recommend? It's like, you know, look at your own personal pain points. And, you know, your situation was like, this was during our experience. In this case, you were running the company, but, you know, if you're working at a company, there's a ton of pain points that people are seeing and, you know, you'll realize within. So, you know, that's a great point to jump off of.

Yeah.

Yeah. All right, Jareesh, we're shifting gears. We're going to go towards the rapid-fire questions. So these will be, you know, one-line questions, but, you know, you can take your time, you know, 1 to 2 minutes Uh, to respond. So you ready to do it?

Yeah, let's go.

All right. Uh, Girish, what's one activity you enjoy outside of work that gets you into flow state?

Um, I'm, I'm a relatively boring person. Uh, listening to music is one activity. Uh, I'm a, I'm a Creedence Clearwater Revival fan, so I listen to a lot of that.

Nice. And that gets you, gets your mind going and gets you in the calm flow state?

Yeah. Love it.

Um, what's one piece of advice you wish you had known and would tell your 25-year-old self? I can't tell, I can't guess your age. You look pretty young. So, um, you know, somewhere between 20 and 25.

No, no, I'm, I'm 41, by the way.

Oh, wow.

You look, you look younger than me. Okay. That's, that's—

So it's been a while. So I'm actually, yeah. So I'm thinking, uh, 25. Um, I guess, uh, what I'll tell myself is, uh, 25 or 20s in general was a pretty, uh, intense time in general. So I guess the thing that I'd like to tell myself is whatever it is, and especially the more intense it is, it'll pass.

Yeah, that's tough. It's easy to say, right? But it's tough to actually do and process and implement.

It'll pass.

Yes, just give it time. Love it. What are some of the biggest challenges or pain points that you're currently facing in order to continue to grow Sprinto? Meaning, what's keeping you up at night these days?

Oh, wow. That's unequivocally hiring. We are growing fast. I cannot hire fast enough. You know, that's one thing I worry about and I think about all the time. So, so yeah, that's it.

That's a good problem. So what are you guys looking to hire for? So people listening in, maybe looking to join the company, what kind of roles are you looking for?

Oh, so we are hiring across the board. So, you know, we're hiring at sales and marketing, engineering, product, and customer support all across the board. So, you know, it doesn't matter if you've done some SaaS before. Do write in to me. I'm giri@splitter.com. I would love to talk to you.

Okay, awesome. Should they check out their website for all that? Uh, jiri— uh, sprinto.com and careers? Is that where—

Yeah, yeah, sure. There is a careers page there as well, so please help yourself.

Yeah, awesome. Thank you. We'll add those, uh, that link to the show notes if you guys want to, want to reach out to Jireesh. Um, who or what are the best 3, uh, resources— this can be books, it could be people, mentors, or people you follow in the space— who've been the most instrumental to your success over, over the last few years?

All right, that's a tough one to pick 3. One of the books that I really liked, and it was really useful for me, especially between the 2 startups, you know, when I was trying to decide what to do next and validate, you know, what really makes sense, is this book called The Mom Test. Have you come across it?

No, tell me.

It's a really small book. I think it just runs to barely 100 pages or so, but it's an interesting book, especially it's— I think it's written by an engineer. So I could relate to it a little bit more. And it's fundamentally about how do you validate any customer hypothesis that you might have. So, you know, it's fairly easy as engineers to get very excited about an idea. And the first thing you want to do is, hey, let's go build this. And, you know, before actually truly validating whether the market needs this or what exactly is the pain point and whether it's going to be useful or not. And I think with this book, the reason it's called The Mom Test is that a lot A lot of people, when you are doing these interviews, and if you don't do them carefully, they try to be encouraging, right? So they're kind of like your mom when you're trying to explain an idea to her, and then she's going to be as encouraging as possible, which doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to get an accurate or honest, blunt truth about whether this actually does make sense or not. And the book is primarily about how to conduct these interviews in a manner that you actually learn the real deal, and that you can actually go about this in a lot more deliberate manner rather than, you know, you thinking that you're already in a zone where you think it's a great idea. Now you're just trying to reinforce the fact that, yes, it is a great idea. And you're just trying to see whether other people think so as well. So I think it was a very interesting book. I would recommend it to people especially who are looking to think about what they want to work on next as founders. So that's one of the books that I think is really useful. useful. There's another book that I read called Atomic Habits. I think that's quite a popular one.

James Clear.

I think that's— yeah, that book, I feel, you know, just the fact that little small things that you do repeatedly make a much bigger impact to your life than the large things that we often fuss about, etc. I think that changed my perspective about, you know, how to go about certain and things. I, I really recommend that book, and I, I really loved reading it. Um, and the third one, I guess, is, uh, is a book by Frank Slootman. Uh, it's just recently come out. Uh, he wrote an essay about this. Uh, so Frank Slootman is the CEO of Snowflake, I think, most recently, and he's taken a bunch of companies public and grown them rapidly. Uh, and this book is called Amp It Up. Uh, and he, uh, basically, uh, I'm not sure if I'm paraphrasing it correctly, but, but fundamentally what he tries to say in this book is that Often organizations have a bunch of inefficiencies in them, and the simplest way to actually, you know, sort of make your organization more performant and you sort of, you know, do well is to, rather than again worrying about these bleeding-edge things, is to do the boring stuff right. Like there is— you just make sure that you run your organization in a manner that you're actually going after performance, really speaking. And there's specific ways that he talks about doing that. But I think that's very critical. I guess most of my education and in my 20s and my 30s, I've thought of the one big idea thing, like, hey, this thing is going to change everything and that sort of a thing. And what I guess I've learned over the process is that the things that really make a difference is a large number of small things. And I guess that's a common thread across the 3 books that I—

now that I look back, I was just gonna mention that, like, if you think about the 2 things you both mentioned, that, uh, that, that really sticks is that it's those small things that matter, right? It's not the big things. And that's what generally we go for, the big swing. Um, but generally to hit the big swing, it's a lot of those little swings that you hit and you miss, right? And I've seen the same thing, you know, when it comes to growth, you know, growth experiments with, with product, with anything, right? You think you set up for, for 10 or 20 of them, uh, you know, 8 or 9 will fail, but that, you know, you have to keep doing those 10 to get those 1 or 2 or 3 that work. work and just continuously do that. But it's not just, yeah, hey, I'm gonna do this one thing and it's gonna, it's gonna be it, right? It's like, okay, let's keep doing this, keep doing it small every day, and eventually you're like, wait, look at me, I'm actually, uh, I'm actually looking good. And you know, it's the same thing. The other day I was at the gym, then they're like, oh wow, I actually have muscles. I'm like, what happened? It's like, oh, this didn't happen overnight. This is like years of just like being like boring, going to the gym every day and just lifting. And it's like, oh look, I actually have muscles now. Like, you know, it doesn't come in a week, right? It takes years. So yeah, it's kind of the same thing in everything in life, you know, save your bank accounts, whatever you can call Right. Slow compound interest.

Yeah.

Cool. Uh, those are, those are all great, um, you know, books. Um, haven't, haven't read 2 of them, so we'll add those in the show notes if people want to, want to check them out as well. Um, Dhirish, so you've had, you know, great exit, um, with your first company, you know, now doing well with your company, obviously growing really fast, as you mentioned. Um, what does success mean to you today? How do you define it for yourself, whether personally, business, financial life? There's no right answer.

That's a tough one. I guess what you're asking is, you know, how do I think about success? Honestly, I try not to think about it too much. You know, yeah, I guess the simplest way I would talk about it is that I think of it as a game, no pressure. You know, if it really starts becoming extremely stressful, then it's probably not worth it.

So you gauge your own kind of stress and emotional kind of, uh, feeling around that at the moment?

Yeah, I'm not sure if I do that very consciously, but yeah, I, I, I, I, I try not to take too much stress about it.

Yeah, I guess, you know, there's good stress and there's bad stress, right? Like you're working, you're stressing, that's good. But when, but when it's, uh, an anxiety stress, when it's that gut or your spider senses, right? You call them the spider senses or your gut telling you something, you probably, you should probably listen, right?

Yeah. So, so yeah, absolutely. So, so just so that I, uh, you know, uh, you made a great point that stress, uh, you know, like it needs to Anything that you want to do that's even remotely challenging is going to instill a certain amount of stress. And the fact is overcoming that is actually what gives you the kick out of the whole thing. So zero stress is obviously not what I mean, but there's a kind of spidey sense about the kind of bad stress where, you know, this isn't actually helping you or you don't wake up wanting to do this anymore. That's the one I would not recommend and not worry about too much.

Yeah, yeah, not aligned with what you truly want to do.

Yeah, makes sense.

Awesome. Girish, this has been a great episode. Lots of good insights for people listening in. Where can founders or anybody listening in get in touch with you, learn more about you and Sprinto as well?

So at Sprinto, we're just at sprinto.com. Please feel free to check it out. I'm always on email at girish@sprinto.com. Please feel free to reach me for any questions, especially around cybersecurity or compliance. Happy to answer them. You know, I've been in this field for a while, helped a few hundred companies in the process. So, so, you know, happy to share those experiences and share my notes.

Awesome, awesome. Thank you. Thank you so much, Jarees, for joining us. This has been great.

Really appreciate it. Same here, Akhil. Thanks for having me.

All right.

Cheers.

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