Kyle Hanslovan: Building Huntress into a $3B+ unicorn by securing the 99%

Welcome to Inside the Network. I'm Sid Trivedi.

I am Ross Halladuke.

And I am Mahendra Ramasinghani. We have spent decades building, investing, and researching cybersecurity companies.

On this podcast, we invite you to join us inside the network where we bring the best founders, operators, and investors building the future of cyber.

We will talk about the hard parts of the founder journey, launching companies, getting to product-market fit, raising capital, and scaling to an exit.

And yes, we will also be talking about epic failures.

But Mahendra, we're here to make the founder journey easier.

That is correct, Sid, but we cannot make it too much easier because startups are hard. And of course, you already knew that.

All right, you two, enough. Let's get started with this week's episode.

Our guest today is Kyle Hansloven, co-founder and CEO of Huntress Labs. Kyle grew up, in his own words, as pretty darn broke. No money for games meant hacking the DRM to play them. No money for internet meant cracking AOL, the internet service provider, to stay on it. That scrappiness was part necessity, became an obsession, and sent him into the US Air Force at 17, where he spent years running classified offensive cyber operations at the NSA, fondly known as No Such Agency. When he left the NSA, he saw something most of the industry was ignoring. The hackers were not. Hackers weren't just going after governments and Fortune 500 companies. They were going after the small businesses, the law firms, the dental offices, the mom-and-pop shops, businesses like his mother's salon, the ones with no security teams, no fancy budgets, and no one looking out for them. So Kyle and his co-founders built Huntress. VCs said no 30 times. The market is too small. The deal sizes are too small. The churn is too high, but Kyle and his co-founders kept going anyway. Customers were paying, and that was all the proof they needed. 10 years later, Huntress is approaching $500 million in revenues. It has 250,000 customers, a unicorn valuation, and the best part, the team has not moved upmarket once. The average contract values are still $20,000. How did Kyle, a pretty darn broke kid, pull this off? Welcome to Inside the Network.

Hey Kyle, welcome to Inside the Network.

What's going on, Sid?

Well, we're going to talk about a whole bunch of different things and we'll get to Huntress. But before we do that, we wanted to chat about your early life and your military service. Let's start right from the beginning. You grew up, in your own words, pretty darn broke. And we've heard stories that you would pirate your own first video games, you were hacking into AOL chat rooms. Tell us a little bit about this early life.

All right, so you've clearly done some of your work. I appreciate that as, you know, a fellow Intel guy. Uh, yeah, I did. Uh, pretty darn broke is probably the literal exact words I used. And with that, you know, you don't have access to as many things. So you can imagine abusing those free, I think they were AOL floppies in the early days. There wasn't a ton of validation of who you actually were till they caught on later. I think by the time AOL rolled the free CDs where your time on the internet was measured in minutes to get really creative. And so to be very frank, my earliest days and my only access to video games was, could I pull apart a video game? Could I figure out how its DRM, you know, the digital rights management software work? And how could I generate a valid CD key that would allow me to play these offline games? So there was a lot of reverse engineering that kind of quickly teed me up on that like hard pivot into, you know, real offensive cyber when I joined the service at 17. So I actually give a lot of credit to like adversity kind of motivated a lot of my skills. Thankfully they were never anything too shady and really teed me up to get into that reverse engineering malware thinking like an ethical hacker.

Did you catch up with and did you meet any interesting folks during those early days? I mean, we've heard about several hacking groups that have been pretty important later on in life. Doug Song in the past has talked a little bit about some of the things he did and the folks he met as a result.

So what's funny is Doug and I, he's probably one of my closest early-stage mentors I could get, Doug Song and Jono over at Duo. And so we didn't meet on bulletin boards, but when you're cut from that same fabric, when you later meet in life, it's crazy how unifying it is. So yeah, the early days of like, I really missed, kind of came in at the tail end of bulletin board systems. My whole life was on IRC and part of being IRC, this is where the hacker handles and the cool names came from. I was never that cool. I always just went by Kyle or some silly handle like that. But between that and learning how to, like, if you remember back in the day, you know, you were on less than 56K. So even things like writing my own software to download large movies, and to download large video games and resume that type of software, like that whole environment of meeting other people too that were like, oh, you're running into this, here's how you can adjust this, or here's how to write your own software, kind of fueled a whole like group of founders that later stage in my career helped mentor me to leaving the service. So I can't say that like anyone was like, oh man, I was part of this really cool hacking group that we did things. But I will say that whole community of like problem solving. Absolutely like changed my career.

Kyle, you served in the US Air Force doing offensive cyber operations work, work that is by the very definition described and classified as mission-driven with the kind of resources and the kind of access that most of the people in the private sector will never see. But at the same time, unlike in countries like Israel, service members in the US don't often take that leap to go and build their own business. At the very least, not to build a venture-backed company in cybersecurity space. Plus, I don't think DC at the time was known as the very big and established entrepreneurial hub either. What was it that gave you that belief and conviction that you can and should start a company?

And that's actually a really good observation because you're right. Most of the friends that I know who really crush it in that world tend to pivot more to like defense contracting. And it's not that defense contracting, you know, you can make good money there, but that you are right. There is something different. I think that one of the biggest differences between kind of like, uh, you know, TAO, CNO, US, you know, intelligence services versus like 8200 style Israeli services. There's a little bit of a culture difference of like showmanship too. And to be very frank, that was something that I always enjoyed. Like I used to be a technical trainer. So even like, I wasn't very good at speaking in the earlier days of Huntress, but I was good at like technical education, speaking at Black Hat, B-Sides, training at DEF CON, stuff along those lines. And so I think for me, because I had that edge and I spent time with other people who had both technical chops and some of that prowess, some of that showmanship, you're right. I guess I did. I broke that kind of a little bit of that mold. And although there's others like Ron Gula, was both Air Force and NSA, and he did tenable. So it's not unique, but you are right. There is something there. I'm not 100% sure if any one single moment for me— I think my biggest one was that mission commitment. I had such a crazy obsession with— since my mom had helped us grow out of poverty and she had a small business of her own, I just couldn't shake this idea that, like, my mom would never be able to afford my talent. And so while I actually think the service gave me a lot of my technical skills, working at, you know, no such agency where PR was always a thing we frowned on. It was, you know, no comment was the standard thing we did. I probably had to have that external pull. And it was this idea of a bigger mission, not just national security, but like, what about everybody else that falls below the Fortune 500? And how could I do that? And I think that's what pushed me out because I did, you know, I dabbled in defense contracting for about a year, but we pivoted from Huntress immediately into you know, pure commercial product instead of government services.

Kyle, your sense of mission is clearly one of the things that is sort of common thread in some of our guests here. Even Rob Lee talks about the importance of protecting critical infrastructure, and that has been his mission from day one. Two questions that come up. One is, tell us a little bit about, more about how your mom's entrepreneurial journey and what business was she in? And then the second question is how your shift occurred around the qualities that the no such agency gave you that applied to the startup world?

No, that's cool. I, I actually, I don't think anybody's ever asked me this question, so this would be cool to kind of get out there. So my mom was really big at like, just because you have a skill doesn't have to define you. And like, for instance, she was a, an accountant and she was an accountant at University Systems, so very low level. But what she learned is through an accountant, what makes businesses work, what makes businesses not work. And she actually took the opportunity when we later moved to Florida that she could create a salon. She saw demand, but she knew and had heard of a lot of salons, for instance, delivered value, but they weren't necessarily the best operationally run. And so for her, she didn't practice hair or nails or tanning or any of the other spa services that were there. She was purely an accountant, but she saw kind of a need and I, as a 14, 15-year-old boy, just liked hanging out at my mom's salon for all the perks that came with, you know, we're talking about haircut services and stuff like that, right guys? That, that, no, but the, I'm being somewhat serious here of my mom saw an opportunity that her skills could provide rigor to an industry that didn't necessarily have the right rigor. And that actually broke us out of like, mm, you know, I won't call it like poverty, but we'll talk about free lunch and usually hand-me-down used clothes into what I would call a real middle-class life. You know, this salon ended up blowing up to like 5,000 square feet after I joined the service. So she really found a niche. And I don't think I considered that at this time. Like, as I'm like later in life and I'm now doing like therapy to help understand why I am the way I am, as I'm trying to like figure out how to keep sprinting a marathon without burning out. And so as I think about NSA, that whole time in like commitment to just finding like an opportunity to be something part of bigger, I think I missed a little bit of that. Like, I was in like junior ROTC as a kid. I really like community service. And so that was part of the bigger reason for me to join the service, but it was also opportunity. And so when I had the opportunity to go from a basic communications expert into like true offensive cybersecurity, I jumped all over that. And NSA's mission was like a dopamine hit, you know, when you have access to all of the data. And I think people underestimate just how large all of the data could be. It gave me experience into like data science. You know, a lot of good data science is actually classifying and categorizing data, and that starts with what data to throw away. And I think all of those became like really interesting attributes of like, when you work as a small compartmented team and you have ungodly amounts of data, you have to use crazy amounts of automation to be able to sift through it. Like, it's too much that any one human in the loop is too slow. It's, you know, you need humans, but they need to be more in the lead. And when you did your job right in the counterterrorism world, you know, people went home safely. And when you messed up, it wasn't like my mom's salon where if you mess up on somebody's hair, they have a bad hair day, but hair grows back. You know, you have sometimes like loss of life. And I think those, as I'm thinking about that transition from a punk 17-year-old kid to a Young 30s, you know, kind of more grown-up kid, young man. I, I don't think I fully started like, uh, maturing till that. I think all those played into that decision that I was like, you know what, come 2015, I'm not going to do the full 20 years of retirement. I'm going to go and use these skills and try to do what my mom did is take a group of skills that were unique and service a market in a way that just hadn't been serviced before.

Let's talk a little bit about Huntress. You, you kind of mentioned some of the areas and, and the things that got you excited. You co-founded Huntress with Chris and Jon, two people that you'd worked alongside in the Intel community. Tell us about the founding dynamics back then between the three of you. What sparked the origin story for, you know, going and building this company? And then how did you just divide responsibilities? And I think that the amazing thing for the founders and operators listening in today is that the three of you have worked together for a decade on this company through all the ups and downs, and we'll talk a little bit about that, but it's, it's pretty amazing that, that you've stayed, you know, kind of intact and as a founding unit.

Yeah. Are you guys cool with me telling maybe more of the, like, the private side of the story?

Please.

Like, you know, you can always pitch, like, the what went extremely well. Like, knowing and dating somebody before you marry them, that's an obvious decision. We know that's important. But, like, founder life, I don't know how certain founders just decide, I'm gonna work with that person, like, and, you know, mesh up together. You know, Jon, Chris, and there was actually a fourth founder in the very, very beginning named Mark. We had all worked in the intelligence world. We had been through very high highs. We'd also shared a number of really low lows. Both— some of it was like post-Edward Snowden. There were some things we were disappointed about, like the US didn't do the greatest job telling that story honestly. They allowed— when you don't establish a narrative, one will be filled in for you. And so there was a lot of like disenfranchisement we had at this time that we wanted to kind of like You know, we needed to change things up anyways. And what's funny is Chris Bisnett, my CTO, and he's the guy that in a world full of 10x engineers, Chris will say, hold my beer and show you what a 100x engineer looks like. He didn't want to get on board. He was actually the last one. And he said like, you guys are crazy. If this problem was this easy, like we were doing offense. We were seeing people actually like when people don't think about this, when you're gathering intelligence, sometimes other hackers or other nation states share the same infrastructure with you, meaning you're on the same victim and they don't necessarily know if you're there and you don't necessarily know if they know you're there. It's a really interesting, you know, situation. And so we had really good evidence that we were like, those are terrible criminals or those are terrible nation states. We really could catch them a lot better. But Chris wasn't on board. And even though like him and I had been teaching a fuzzing for vulnerabilities, a zero-day finding class at Black Hat for years at this point, We had a real deep relationship, but being able to fight both at work and fight in that end, I, I think it's very similar to folks. I respect people who choose not to move in with each other until they marry them. But to be very frank, I think it's much better to get that conflict out of the way. What's really interesting is we went and we founded Huntress with 4 of us, but one of the founders actually did not want to fully pivot. He couldn't leave defense contracting. So to Ross's question earlier, This was a guy that it just, it wasn't his fit. And to be very frank, you know, it kind of was one of those situations where like, this isn't working. You need to go back to what's working and like firing a founder or moving away from a founder isn't easy, but like we would've ruined things if we would've ruined our cap table, there would've been more dysfunction. So like knowing how to handle conflict is like, I would argue even more important in the earlier stages than getting along. You, you both are important, but. The reason I'm sharing it this way is, you know, it wasn't until somebody else, like for instance, my very first $50,000 check, that's what it took for my co-founder Chris, who is the other board member, other common board member with me, Jon, my, my third co-founder, he's the only smart one. He, uh, he hired his own boss like 3 years into it and has been able to live like a deeply technical life that's happy in the company and he's still with us. But the point that I'm getting is the guy that's still on the executive team, still making a huge difference on the board. Practically didn't want to join Huntress because he thought the problem wasn't actually different. And it took somebody else writing a $50,000 check and he's like, okay, maybe I'm missing something. And he corrected. So I just hope that helps founders who are thinking about their own dynamic that like externally we sell a very unified story that everything was always perfect. But I just said in the same like pitch, one founder had to more or less leave and one founder almost wasn't a founder until somebody else wrote the first check. And then he's been a huge. Part of our, like, growth and innovation story. So I hope that helps motivate people that most of the time it's, it's not as pretty as the press releases sound.

It's an amazing story. And I'm curious, did you know the responsibilities between the different founders? Like, was it obvious that you were CEO? Was it obvious that Chris wanted to be CTO? Were those things obvious, or was that something you needed to debate and decide on?

You are cracking me up. I'm literally writing a CEO inflection document right now. I just opened this document. I started this about 3 months ago, and I'm almost done. I do these memos about every 3 years that give direction. I'm going to go in here, and this is titled What Gives Me Energy. And so I'm reading verbatim right now. It says, in the earliest days of Huntress, founders had to choose titles. Neither Jon, Mark, or I debated Chris was the obvious choice for delivering scalable innovation as our CTO. Mark enjoyed running operations, so naturally he landed a COO title. Considering Jon's quiet demeanor, I, needless to say, had to land the CEO position while he led threat operations. Oddly enough, we never revisited this. I have no clue how I fell into the CEO position. Like, that is as real as it gets. Like, I never chose to be CEO, and in hindsight, I wish I would have known. It's like the loneliest job on the planet. So like, Jon, you know, he just— he's, he's like the smartest guy in the room who doesn't say a lot of words. So like, that's not going to work in the CEO role. So If you can't tell, like, I'm currently working through this 10 years later of like, why didn't we reassess? And the reason for this is like, I'm not going anywhere as the CEO. I'm now realizing after 10 years of doing this, I need to be adapting to my biggest strengths and what puts wind in my sails, which means I'm always complementing myself with a different style of executive. We don't have a COO today, but as I'm preparing for like the future of about half billion dollars in revenue, I will probably make that COO hiring right before we cross that next year. So like, it's just a really interesting scenario of like, no, we, that's how we did it. Jon, you don't speak, so you're the threat operations guy. Mark wants to be COO. Chris, you're the obvious CTO. I guess I'm CEO. And that's, that's no joke. That was the process.

Super cool. Kyle, let's, let's talk a bit about the the focus of the company. So the vast majority of the cybersecurity startups start by targeting the enterprise buyer. You, on the other hand, were very intentional and focused Huntress on the SMB and the mid-market customer, building and bringing the enterprise-grade cybersecurity capabilities for everyone and not just the 1%. Looking at your success today, many people would assume that it was obvious that the SMBs will need somebody to take care of them. Well, SMBs will need somebody to fully focus on them. But I am sure it wasn't at all obvious to you. It wasn't at all— or maybe it was obvious to you, but it wasn't at all obvious to the industry. It wasn't at all obvious to the investors at the time when you started. And I would assume that many people bet against you. What did it take to prove them wrong?

So I have always anchored to like when you know a truth, not when you believe a truth, but when you have like empirical evidence that can take you through a lot of things, even, you know, because that's ultimately what it takes to be able to prove somebody wrong is you believe or ideally know something. Something is a fact and you can push through it. So my ultimate benefit is I had been watching hacking changing for years, right? In the— I joined the service in 2003, so hacking had changed a lot since 2003 till even 2013. And so I had started to see the early phases, even in nation-state hacking, becoming more commercialized. And at the very end of my NSA time, I was actually a contractor, meaning I had left government service. I'd still wore what we call a green badge, and I had been a contractor. So I watched my own role as a government, you know, call it offensive operations expert, move to the commercial world. And it was so clear and obvious to me that this hacking business was going to move from just steal the things that matter from a nation-state perspective, secrets perspective, into steal the things you can make money. So I believed in the capitalism. I had seen that firsthand. I had also seen so many really sloppy groups. You know, sometimes cybercriminals would just stumble on, sometimes they would be script kiddies and they had no idea the computer they landed on has like world powers also sitting on it. So like I had that confidence that, and most people just didn't realize that a lot of these nation states sometimes start with very small enterprises and swim their way upwards because coming in the front gates is sometimes very well fortified. And so like, I didn't care that the investors didn't believe me. I did care though, if customers wouldn't give me a dollar, right? Because none of the stuff I could have the greatest software in the world. I could do all the things that I promise. But if people aren't willing to separate a dollar from their pocket, like that would kill my business. And so I just focused there. I said, all right, the market's not here yet. There wasn't a quadrant. Investors aren't here, but I'm solving something that somebody's willing to pay me for in a recurring revenue model over and over. And so I ultimately just kept growing revenue. I was like, you know what? I wanted to pour more fuel onto the fire to grow revenue faster. But part of what got me through that and allowed me to just hear so many of the nos over and over and over was like, well, I'm making money and I'm bootstrapping. And so we did go slow. The first 3 years of Huntress were really bootstrapped. But I think that's a really key point. If you are not growing revenue, but you still have this crazy conviction, you have to ask yourself, how long are you going to put yourself through the grueling punishment? But since I was making money and it was a flywheel, I could go pour this much gas get this many leads that could convert to this many trials that could convert to this much revenue. And I could do that like a flywheel. I was like, well, I'll just prove them wrong. And I outlasted them, Ross. So I don't know. I don't, I think it's because I had so much proof and I think I just realized like there was nothing that would stop me as a cyber criminal from like pillaging my mom's business that I was like, okay, this is going to catch on. And thankfully being a first mover that way was hard, but boy, once people started catching on. And once automation picked up and now all of a sudden it went from attacks are targeted to now you're targets of opportunity because, you know, anyone can now be hacked. Dang, it was a good place to be in because I got to ride that momentum. So I hope that's me saying like, I don't envy people who have to come and help make a market because it's a really bad idea. But if people are willing to pay you money for it, especially predictable amounts of money and aren't churning, like what better indicator do you need? They're spending dollars.

I remember talking with Rick Gordon, who used to run Mach 37, and he told me that he was always absolutely sure that you guys will succeed. I'm curious, what do you think you did differently early on in those early days when I'm sure it was just a lot of messy trying to figure things out? What did you do at the time that allowed you to win later on?

It was that obsession on the dollar. I think a lot of it. There was also a lot of like, you know, you got to be relentless. But because I had worked so much in the government, like I'm gonna speak on behalf of my co-founder, Jon. When you work in a compartmented facility and you can't have a, a phone, you can't have a smartwatch, you can't really be on the internet. That's not the greatest of happy working conditions. So like we had a really big motivation not to go back into the SCIF, right? Not to go back to the government. So for Jon, he was like, I don't like to take a whole lot of risk in my life, but if I don't have to work in the SCIF, I guess I'll take more risk. So. The point that I guess I'm going through is Rick had seen, one, we didn't want to go back. Two, we had deep domain knowledge. I actually think people underestimate how important domain knowledge is. And our domain knowledge could be applied to a model where people wanted to pay. They weren't willing to pay a lot. Definitely not like enterprise. You know, there are no, even today at Huntress, our average deal size is like $20,000 annually. So there's very few million-dollar deals in the Huntress book of revenue. But I showed a model of failing that, like, if I could get to a low-touch, high-velocity, and Rick was all about that. Rick was like, wait, guys, if you could figure out a channel that you're not knocking door-to-door on small businesses, but a one-to-many model with this technology, he just believed from the beginning that if you could do that, you could create the largest cybersecurity business in the world. Not because we were so great, but everybody underestimates how large the world is below the even Global 2000. It's, it's ungodly large. And so for Rick, I think he just had faith in those 3 things. One, we didn't want to go back to the government. Two, we had deep domain expertise and were willing to pivot. And three, as long as you could figure out the cost of acquisition to lifetime value and be able to acquire customers fast enough and small enough to be able to build predictable revenue, you were probably going to win. So he is right. I mean, and Rick, Rick was the guy who wrote that $50,000 check that convinced my co-founder Chris to come on board, by the way.

So just to build up on that, Kyle, you know, as you look at the SMB market, some of the obvious questions that have been prevailing in the industry is there's a lot of churn. $20K ACV is not attractive enough. How do you go one-to-many? Can you just expand on how you were describing that dynamic and what did Huntress do specifically when it comes to go-to-market?

Yeah, the one thing, the service, this is, this is a real head nod to the military side is you learn a lot of discipline and I was not a very disciplined teen. So like I kind of needed that. But when you go to the SMB, you need to know very clearly who you are and who you are not. And so for instance, one of the things that the SMB tends to work on are these things that are like pay as you go. So think about non-contracted revenue. Hey, however much you consume, I'm going to charge you that much. But no commitment on a month to month and no committed minimum. And I will tell you that one of the first things I started learning about why so many businesses kind of from small enterprise all the way down to small business were failing is businesses sometimes aren't very disciplined. But if you went to go look at like Verizon, who is selling cell phone service to small business, those businesses were actually thriving. And if you remember the earliest models of cell phone service to business, they would tell them, each person, you have this number of minutes, you can pool all the minutes together, but if you go over those number of minutes, I'm charging you per minute. And for instance, while I will let you have a month-by-month contract, I'm going to charge you substantially higher for that. Or if we can commit to each other a predictable revenue stream where you just commit to me 12 months, I will only charge you the flat given rate and any overages we agree. It turns out there's a lot of really savvy business owners that are like, I'd rather take the much cheaper fee. And so as much as I want to say it's because I was the super hacker, I convinced all these businesses, they knew hackers were on their door. I just built a really respectful business model that said, you have a pain point, you have a very limited budget. I'm going to add a lot of pressure to you if you want this month by month. No-contracted, you know, unlimited overage world. But if you're willing to commit to me for 12 months and you're willing to commit that anything you do has to be this minimum, even if you drop below this minimum, one, that makes Huntress an actual pretty healthy business. But two, it weeds out the people who are the most likely to go out of business. It weeds out the people who are most likely to be late. And have like quality of earnings. It also weeds out a lot of the people that are just going to like— in the S&P, one of the biggest reasons for churn that no many— not, not many people talk about is actually consolidation and acquisitions. And so by me having this really strong upfront contracted revenue model, I didn't even know it at the time, but I was weeding out like the vast majority of the businesses that weren't going to be in business 12 months later anyway. So like I wish I could take credit for this. This was just part of having discipline. But now that I can look in hindsight, some of the biggest decisions I chose early on was it's actually really important who you say no to in the SMB, because they're probably not going to be around in 12 months anyways.

Oh, so it's a very fascinating insight. I think one of the first times we're sort of listening to this kind of a perspective when it comes to SMB. And now if we wear our investor hat. Kyle, SMB is not sexy to any of the VCs. You got a lot of rejections. I mean, talk to us about raising your first round, all the challenges you went through, the times you got rejected, and most importantly, how did you keep yourself going?

So I did a lot wrong, but for like the right reasons. What I mean by this is when you come from a world where if I overinflated what I could do at NSA, You know, national security could be at risk. And in counterterrorism mission, it was the most palatable. It's why I use this example. Like if I said, oh, we could protect these people and save these people and no, there's not going to be a bomb. And now all of a sudden people blow up. You can imagine there is almost like a world that I came from that would punish you if you overstated what you could do. I did not realize for a very long time that everybody takes what a founder says and automatically discounts this anyways, because founders are like, they're able to see something that they Nobody else can see, but they also have to right-size it that this probably isn't gonna go the way that the founder says. And here I am giving like the most accurate myopic pitch. Like I was not telling a big vision. I wasn't telling what it could be. I was only telling it what I could guarantee. And it turns out not many people got excited about that. I had also not figured out my whole business model when I first started getting my rejections. Like for instance, I went to a lot of direct small businesses and I had not figured out the ultimate thing that not only would help minimize my churn, but also accelerate my growth was partnership. For businesses that were under 250 employees, I didn't figure out that partners were my one-to-many solution. That came much later. And so for VC, I pitched a lot of time people who had never done a channel first go-to-market model. And so in many times, a lot of my rejections were my fault for not pitching aggressively enough. I obviously didn't know, I wasn't being more lofty, more visionary. Thankfully, some really good VC beat my ass privately on like on the side. They really, they were not, they didn't say nice words, but they said it in a nice way of how bad my pitch was. One time was over tacos and I'm I'm saying this because like, if it wasn't for that feedback loop, I would have just kept going with a bad pitch for as long. Like I didn't know, I didn't have the feedback telling me. And the reason I'm saying this is once I had both learned the partnership model, and then I realized that some VC, even with a better pitch, we're never going to get on board because they didn't like SMB and they didn't understand partnerships. That's actually how I found ForgePoint. ForgePoint had just invested successfully in AlienVault. AlienVault didn't partner with MSPs but further upmarket with the MSSPs who are also like the outside outsourced security help. And so as soon as I started finding VC who I had a better pitch, I could tell them more lofty, I could share what I wanted to do. At this point, AlienVault, I think, was just acquired by AT&T. The team at ForgePoint is like, I've seen an exit, I know this could work. And so they were actually the right partner. So if you can't tell, it wasn't just VC being mean to me. It was me not being very realistic on you have to find the right partner. And that for me, actually, I turned down later stage because I had got to the point where I was now in $5 million of recurring revenue. It was retaining 90+% of the time, and I was landing, adopting, expanding, meaning my net dollar retention was actually growing faster than any normal industry averages. I got good term sheets, but I still went with ForgePoint, who necessarily wasn't the sexiest per se. But they were by far the best partner and they, we, we crushed it together. So, uh, you know, I, I guess that's my long way of saying I'm thankful that we were able to keep the company afloat cuz I did have good finances and good fi, uh, financial fundamentals. But much of my failure and what kept me going was I knew again, I was making the right money. I just had to find the right partner. And that came, Series A didn't come for, A long time, 5 years after we started, but it eventually came.

Well, we're in 2026, and we're 30 minutes into this conversation. We haven't yet mentioned AI. So let's get into at least that topic. That feels like an important conversation to talk about. Obviously, the AI wave has completely changed every submarket, including cybersecurity and the threat landscape more broadly. We're certainly seeing the creation of very highly capable models from Mythos to GPT-5.5 to whatever Google launches at I/O given its I/O day today. How has Huntress started to evolve to both take advantage of this new AI tooling, but also manage the heightened risk that it creates?

Yeah, so I'm gonna start first with like, I think it's very important to like define what AI means to a company. And so for me, we never use the term internally AI. It was always like, it's data science, it's automation, it's workflows. And so pre— let's call it pre-2022— the level at Huntress was, for every one single human in the lead of our automation, we could manage 140,000 endpoints. So we already had extreme automation. And this goes all the way back to— I actually think I gave an homage to it earlier. At NSA, you have so much data that if you're not automating your way out of it, it's impossible. So small human teams leading ungodly amounts of automation, data science workflows, and then being able to deliver an actual valuable outcome. So I had already leaned in pretty heavy to the— I guess you would call that like pre-agentic side of automation. But LLMs, right, where I was using some of my AI at the time, more like machine learning. I wasn't using it for the non-deterministic problems like QA and feedback loops. And so in 2022, we started looking at AI and going, we're not sure if these LLMs are ever going to get to the point where they can do detection engineering for me. But we started tinkering more and more with like, I'd call this AI pessimist in '22 to '23. By '24, we had done enough tinkering that we all of a sudden had become, I would call it like AI curious, right? We were not fully in AI. And to be very frank, we just continued saying, let's automate workflows as best as possible. I would really say more of the company's DNA was if AI was a solution for better automation, so be it. But we are not, we would never call ourselves an AI native company. We're a diehard research lab that creates an ungodly amount of automation, but we were not an AI-native company. But that kind of changed in, I would say, the investments we made in very late '24 set '25 up where we were like, listen, these models still have a lot of issues. They are still very non-deterministic, but you could start building scaffolding around these systems that maybe not giving you the most predictable outcome. And the first place we actually started is we started moving into what we now call an AI-centric company. That's just being realistic that AI native has a place, but every company I know that is started AI native is now bringing a very thin layer of humans into the loop to lead that automation. That's why I use that word AI-centric. And so for me, I started looking at this as a multi-product solution. I started realizing I had all these individual products that were plumbed together on the same platform, but it was very rigid. If this condition happens, let, let, let's make it more relatable to the audience. If an end user runs a piece of software that gets their credential stolen, automatically make an integration into Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. Nullify that credential, reset it, and simultaneously queue them up the appropriate awareness training to help mitigate this from happening in the future. That's very rigid. And so the change we started making in that '25 time period, we started realizing, wait, AI is non-deterministic. And so it might be able to help with some of the waiting and some of the routing decisions. And we had pretty okay success with that. We also had pretty good failure. Fast forward to '26 though, the models have gotten, I would call it, notably better. And places where Huntress used to say, "AI will never play a role in detection engineering." We really thought it was too unpredictable. You could run the same malware sample 10 times, or more importantly, 10,000 times through a model, and having a 70% consistency rate means 30% of your base is really angry at you. So we couldn't trust a lot of that technology. But what we ended up learning was as the models got to a more accurate situation and we started running a lot of like AI, kind of like now how people do coding where they'll say, hey, Claude, build me a plan here. Let's start with the test cases. Now build me software to achieve this plan. And it will kick off a workflow that says Claude builds, it runs through a CI/CD pipeline. The software passes or fails. If it fails, it goes back to Claude. Claude inspects the failure, it rewrites the code, and it goes in that circle, that, that process till you get a predictable outcome. We've learned that instead of just making Iron Man suits that make our humans better, we could actually build systems engineering just like that code example around detection engineering. Human or some indicator found something malicious. Let's throw it to Claude or whatever your AI du jour is, build a system that says, okay, I think this is how we're going to detect it, run it against today's data, yesterday's data, the last week of data, the last month of data. Oops, it had false positives. Rejigger the detection engineering. And we're actually very close to the point right now where I would call us definitely not fully autonomous, but much closer to a high autonomy capability that certain of our detectors don't need a human in the loop and are more like Terminators than Iron Man and their Iron Man suits. So I hope that, guys, gives you guys a— like, we have really failed our way through AI. Like, we are not in a grand solution where it's all sudden, like, we just knew AI was going to change the world. And we've been very selective on finding the right problems and the right systems engineering to use AI correctly, which means sometimes you want to embrace non-deterministic outcomes. Like I mentioned, the decision-making between many products. And sometimes you can build scaffolding around non-deterministic workflows in AI and actually get a very predictable, solid quality result that doesn't need humans. So guys, I hope that you can go anywhere we want on this question, but I'm an open book here. If it's not clear, Huntress did not start AI native. And to be very frank, we still got a lot to learn because, you know, we also bring debt. You know, that's a second mover advantage though also happens, which allows me to I've got a lot of the human workflows there. Now, how do I marry those together?

So, Kyle, the Huntress website has, I think, around 17 battle cards laid out against multiple categories: EDR, SIEM, awareness, training, and many more. You can— well, I could see Huntress against CrowdStrike versus SentinelOne, Proofpoint, Sophos. That sounds like a lot of competition. Uh, which of all of your competitors keep you up at night?

Yeah, so, uh, when I'm internally presenting to the company, we live in a world where Microsoft and CrowdStrike own the Fortune 500. We don't actually try to wedge ourselves in there. Sometimes CrowdStrike moves down from Fortune 500 and they've had some success moving to the Global 2000, but we really look at those teams, even though we don't go head-to-head in sales against both those teams, They have the researcher DNA. They have that offensive commitment to mission. They have the ability to keep up. And so even though I don't go toe-to-toe against CrowdStrike very often, we look at them as that is real competition because they come from the same DNA that we have. They'll be able to elevate their technology to whatever new innovation comes. Today's AI, maybe tomorrow will be AGI that we're now having to adopt and leverage. Right. Or Quantum, like both of our teams have to be able to stay at that like razor's edge of performance. And so that's who I actually internally, like we as a company look at both of those companies. That doesn't mean there's not tons of like people that are protecting customers that we believe we could do a better job at. Like, for instance, there's a whole legacy world of like, I still don't fully understand if you look at who's leading the edge of research I'm not big on like talking trash about certain companies, but there's a reason so many companies are starting to get acquired or struggling to maintain growth. Let's just talk about this, and so I don't be trashy, like CrowdStrike is growing 30% year over year on $5.5 billion in revenue. Why are some companies struggling to grow more than 30% revenue on a billion or a sub-billion? That means there's something wrong there. That also means that Some of it is just as Microsoft and CrowdStrike have dominated the Fortune 500 and trying to come down, and Huntress really figured out the sub-250-employee company and below, and Huntress has rapidly moved up. I think it's gonna be very hard to exist between Microsoft, CrowdStrike, and Huntress. It's again, two purpose-built vehicles. CrowdStrike and Microsoft have kind of hit their own where they won't be able to successfully come down. Huntress coming up, and this brings room for new disruptors. I mean, Ross, folks like, you know, folks that are creating like awesome new AI native technology, we actually hope to see more of that competition because there's a lot of legacy, maybe ones that I don't feel comfortable or that I do feel comfortable maybe like throwing some shade, like how is McAfee and Symantec still relevant in 2026. Like, that, that's a very legacy business model. And because of their sales motions, they have some deep access, but we're talking, they're sitting on hundreds of millions of revenue and protecting businesses that if you look, the researcher DNA isn't the same thing that you would see at a CrowdStrike, at a Microsoft, at a Huntress. So for me, competitors, it doesn't surprise— I didn't know we had 17 battle cards., but I have a feeling those are very targeted at either one of two things, keeping those enterprise players up in there where they belong in the Fortune 500 while simultaneously kind of making our, uh, very aggressive mood on any move on anybody who's below the Fortune 500. So that'd be my guess of what the team strategy is. But if you can't tell, I actually think DNA is the biggest indicator of who's actually competition. And I don't look at most of those companies that I have battle cards as actual competition. They're kind of in the way right now.

Speaking of researcher DNA, Kyle, you know, this is something very unique to the cybersecurity sector, generally speaking. You know, rarely do you see these kinds of researcher DNAs being exhibited front and center in other verticals. Imagine you're talking to Wall Street. Imagine you're talking to a group of business executives who don't understand the nuances or the importance of publishing the kind of work you do. On one side, it sounds like intellectual showmanship or braggadocio, like, look how smart we are. But there is really a kernel of importance in what you're describing. Tell us more about it. And secondly, how does AI change all that?

So Mahendra, you're actually nailing it. I don't know why this topic, like, think about real industry champions. Like, think of a Frank Slootman, somebody who not only won once at ServiceNow, turned around and won again at Snowflake, right? I am not so sure in the post-AI era the Frank Slootmans will be able to keep up with top quartile and top decile innovation anymore. So I, Wall Street definitely hasn't. I was just last night, I was at JP Morgan's Global Tech Conference and I listened to a whole bunch of different verticals and it didn't matter which industry you were in. The companies who are separating with themselves are finding ways to innovate on their own. And I, I, I like, I listened to a company that, uh, for instance, GrubMarket presented yesterday and without sharing anything that's like proprietary about them, their innovation was just taking a world that was very much distribution of food and bringing a much needed breath of technology into that. And it required a founder. That wanted to start from the ground up, who had deep domain knowledge, that realized what got us here isn't going to get us there, and this whole world needs to be overhauled. And that also means part of what allowed that company to separate themselves— like, last I checked, I think they have like a $4 billion valuation. They're not a small company doing $2 billion of like transactions on their platform. And as I was listening to this founder talk he just ruthlessly put it in a certain way that folks who used to just like, I'm gonna cobble together independent systems, call it a platform, and try to cross-sell 1, 2, 3 at a time in the old school private equity playbook, that doesn't work when the industry now demands everything must be on a platform. I don't wanna settle for individual best of breed, and every product must talk to each other simultaneously. And collaborate natively, very much in that agentic world where autonomy is the default. And when humans are in any loop, it's too slow. And I'm not talking about just cybercrime. I mean, in the world of automation and AI, that is the new standard. I'm not so sure the different style execs, like the person who runs, you know, Chevron Oil or ServiceNow-style DNA, I don't know if they will have the same fit when they come tend to be more of the like go-to-market sales type leader. I actually think this could be the reemergence of you must be a diehard tech founder to be able to survive. But that also means you have to be a founder that has to change. Like you can imagine I didn't present like this in 2015. I had to learn, to be honest, I had to get my ass kicked in finance and learn operations real quick. So I also had to change. You can't just be a nerd, right? There's a reason Jobs took over, not Wozniak, even though Wozniak was really the big innovator. So I think that's actually DNA that I don't know if I've ever heard another podcast ask that question, but personally, as me as a founder, I think we're on the cusp of what it looks like to be a CEO in a post-AI era. I think it's already passed. I just don't think the industry has recognized yet that that has changed.

Kyle, as we are Coming to the, the last part of the podcast, let's talk about the strategy. So you guys have completed what I believe is your second acquisition, Insight Agent, quite recently to target the identity security posture management market and signed a deal with AccruSure to provide cyber insurance.

Yeah.

Tell us more about your growth strategy and the motivation for the acquisitions.

Yeah, I'll start on there. So we've technically done 3 tuck-ins, and that's what we consider them. Um, as 3 software engineer, data science, technical founders, you can imagine we have a hard bias to building. And now where my old 10 to 100x engineer co-founder, CTO Chris, is now closer to that 100 to 1000x engineer powered by AI, we have a hard bias that if I'm going to go to market I'd rather just build the technology I need. However, I've done 3 tuck-ins. The tuck-ins that Huntress does is all about brilliant technical founders who might have the ability to build the innovation, but either can't, or to be very frank, just doesn't want to, uh, own the go-to-market. They don't want to own the fit. They don't wanna own all the terrible stuff. I mean, Ross, you know what this is like. I mean, we all know what this is like. That means if you talk to enough founders, you have to deal with legal, you have to deal with HR, you have to deal with finance. And so almost all of my Tuckins are really brilliant technologists that can come. I can give them an environment like— but a lot of people forget we're not Huntress. We are Huntress Labs. It is a research lab. And when you have an environment that thrives on research, going back to that second part of the question that was, uh, you know, I glossed over earlier, if you cannot produce off your own data, your own innovation, your own technologies, et cetera, you will not keep up in this world. And so for me, I will continue as many times as I can find brilliant founders who are ready to say, I want to take a little bit of the risk off, I want to make a little bit of money today. I usually do cash outs that are like 50/50. I'll pay you 50% cash, 50% Huntress Equity, that in case, you know, Huntress Equity's monopoly money and it never becomes real, they still have something to take care of themselves. But the upside is every founder that I've done these small tuck-ins has taken— like, for instance, the team at ID Agent came in and they said by the end of 2028 We believe we could have 2,000 total businesses and partners using our software. We gave them 2,000 businesses using their software in the first month. And you can imagine that has accelerated their data pipeline, which has helped shape their new innovation, which has helped put a lot of fuel in there. And that's really cool when you can do that. I'm not saying it works for every founder, but that's the way Huntress will continue doing. Very small, diehard R&D-focused technical founders that want to go make a difference at a much larger scale faster. That's what works for us. Otherwise, we just build it ourselves. However, how you do distribution. So for me, the biggest part of when you say I'm going to secure the 99% of businesses that don't fall under the Fortune 500, like people don't realize that in the US alone, that means there's 33 million businesses and globally there's over 300 million. So like today, Huntress has 250,000 of those businesses protected. I am nowhere close to done. Like, I'm not even done in the US standard, let alone international. So, um, the thing that we're trying to do at Huntress is, I think, very similar to Anthropic. You're going to see them focus on their model and improve their models and then have other people take care of the last mile. Huntress isn't going to get out of the sales game, but we're going to focus on R&D. We're going to focus on building the greatest products, and you're going to see us use a lot of distribution partners to help us reach businesses faster than cybercrime can reach them. And I don't think people realize that Huntress's competition, if you're not talking about vendors, it is brilliant, organized cybercriminals who run their companies like AI-native startups, who their cost of acquisition is much cheaper than mine because they don't have to ask permission if they're going to take the money. They just take it, right? And so until I can do, you know, unless the world's going to allow me to do illegal stuff to protect people, which I'm not endorsing that at all. I have to get very creative of how do I outpace cyber criminals who can just unleash Mythos-like capabilities for gaining initial access, or unleash the, you know, kind of commercialization of buying credentials into businesses to extort them. And the problem with that is they're paying $20 a lead to buy somebody's stolen credentials. I'm paying $10,000 a lead And so as a result, I have to find very creative ways. So you can imagine global distributors, major partnerships with like known brands, things that are like insurance. Thankfully, a lot of those folks are coming to us because there is a win-win. They can move our product, we can share in the profit and help them grow their business while also helping me achieve my mission. Because to be very frank, I don't wake up more, you know, every morning saying I need to make more money. I wake up saying, How do I protect more of the 99%? And if they can allow me to not have to do as much of the salesy, go out there, and I could focus on just education, focus on cool R&D, that's a really good win for me. So you're going to see a lot of distribution. It'll also act as a moat. And Ross, this is worth like you thinking about as you, you know, move from stealth. Companies that are AI native and are coming out in the world, people like me are trying to box companies like that out of distribution. I'm trying to be so successful that when there is 999 other AI-native solutions out there, because you can vibe code so quick and build great technology, people like me are trying to use my size to slow folks like you down in distribution. So, you know, it's just worth any entrepreneur thinking about that. That's how I'm trying to have my cake and eat it too. And you need to consider that as an entrepreneur.

We've talked a lot about outpacing and speed. One of the things that I learned as we were preparing for this conversation from multiple folks, from Ernie, from Ron Gula, from Alberto, was your passion for racing. And I've been a big Formula One fan for 25 years, so this was very exciting for me personally. I'm curious, what got you into motorsport? Tell us a little bit about which different competitions do you follow? What are your favorite drivers? How do you connect that to cybersecurity?

I usually have my Lando Norris hat on. I always, I like, you know, Huntress doesn't do a ton of motorsport. We have sponsored like Lamborghini and there's an actual, like a real brand reason that we don't do Formula 1. But what's wild about it, I'll start with the first question, which is what drew me in here. I've got a 21-year-old son who he's not as huge into golfing. He wanted to do karting and stuff like that. And so I started like with him, we started going to races now, like the whole family. You know, from me, you know, my partner in crime, the kid's mom, eh, you know, I, we all kind of do this as a family and it turns out there's a lot of things that if you're an entrepreneur, I think attracts like Toby from Shopify, he drives. George from CrowdStrike is a phenomenal driver. People actually underestimate how good he is. And there's several others in the community that also do this, but it turns out to drive one, it's a team sport. Like a lot of people think it's just the driver. I can't even go to the track without 4 people supporting the car. That's, that's a real thing. So I think we tend to be obsessed with that. Like, it takes more than just yourself to get something done. It's also extremely data-driven, not just like lap time, pressures, oil, temperature of the surface, temperature of the air. And it becomes a little bit addicting, just like how I love to do research at Huntress Against Tradecraft and Malware. I think there's a huge component of that. Plus you need, as a founder, like 10 years in, I was sprinting a marathon. I came really close to crashing out as a founder. And if you burn out, you can't finish the marathon. And like our industry needs us to keep going. And so part of your pace in going fast is also knowing when to go slow. I just, for me, driving, like as a hobby, I don't compete in large scale. I do, you know, I gave that example, even though I'm a big fan of Formula 1. I respect Max Verstappen a lot. I think he is possibly the best. You'll never see me wearing a Max Verstappen hat because I do root for other teammates, for instance, that, that compete with the best of the best. And I think some of this comes down to Huntress's narrative too. When you're a Fortune 500 company, you can put your logo, like, look at the awesome logos that are on that McLaren, you know, shirt that you're wearing right there. You see people like MasterCard, you see all kinds of other great Dell that's on there. The things that people forget is those are the largest businesses in the world that can sponsor something like that. That's actually very similar to Microsoft and CrowdStrike. They can sponsor the Fortune 500 that the Fortune 500 businesses will go to. But if you think about this as an analogy against cybercrime, you don't have to be in a Formula One car to outpace cybercrime. It turns out you can actually outpace cybercrime in a really fast Lamborghini as well.. And some of the market are gonna demand the relentless performance of a Max Verstappen, and they're gonna have a budget to pay him $60 million a year, plus a car that's tens of millions a year, plus all the automation and infrastructure and team. But it turns out you can still outpace cybercrime for the price of a Lamborghini and a team and the data and the driver. And it's a fraction of the cost of Max Verstappen, that is what Huntress actually built. I didn't mean to make that so much about Huntress, but there is something weird about that world that has pulled me in. And it's cool of an understanding that I'm never going to be a Formula One driver, but everybody would love to have a ride in a Lamborghini around the track. And for me, the combination of that challenge, it's simultaneously allowing me to just chill in life and not like, you know, jump back into daily therapy and stuff that I was required to go kind of go through in my life if I was going to make it this long term. It's just allowed me to pair many things together. Passion, competitiveness. It's fun. It's cool for customers and partners that want to get exposure to this type of stuff. And oh, by the way, it has a perfect analogy that Huntress is the right solution for most of the world. While technically there are places a Formula 1 car will go faster and certain places that it'll go slower, most people don't even have the option of hiring Max Verstappen, let alone the whole Red Bull team. And as a result, they're not settling when they choose Huntress. They're still outpacing cybercrime. And I think that's, I don't know, just kind of weird how passion and business form this way. So you are right. You did a good job on your intel. And, uh, yeah, I'm a bit of a Motorhead nut. I, I just, I love it.

I think the amazing thing about, and you mentioned this about team in Formula 1 is so important in that you can have an amazing driver like a Max Verstappen, but if the team is underperforming, there's something wrong with the aerodynamics. There's something wrong with the engine. We're seeing that here. This year, that results in an amazing driver not winning the Grand Prix consistently. And I think that—

Perfect example.

It's just so interconnected that there are over 1,000 people who help to create these teams and help to provide that driver with the machinery that hopefully they can go and win a Grand Prix.

And this is what's so impressive about AI, right? The team, often hiring humans and building a team is really hard. The best minds want to go work in F1. So if you're gonna compete on a race, like a lot of the lower race series are using a ton of automation because you might not be able to hire an aerospace engineer who just came from NASA. You don't have that budget, but AI now can democratize a lot of what these can do. I actually saw a team, a, a, a fellow Lamborghini team had a 9-year-old that made a wind tunnel and was using AI to model the actual effectiveness of the aero. That is crazy. Obviously an outlandish story, but this is actually documented. It's a public documentary on this, that with the right technology and the right background, AI is allowing people to make these differences that are giving Formula 1-like performance at a budget that's accessible to the rest of the world. And this is part of the reason why, like, as much as Huntress could start as a non-AI company, we have to be AI-centric or we'll just fall behind the adversary who will be.

Kyle, that was your moment to say, I feel the need for speed, but clearly, we'll make a hat and send it to you. One question I'm sure a lot of our listeners are playing with in their minds is that as you listen to your life story, you grew up in these extremely challenging circumstances, pretty darn broke. Book. And here you are, you know, the size and scale of the company that you build, the protection that you're offering to, you know, 250,000 small businesses. And as you think about the trajectory, as so many things could have gone wrong, like it literally takes one switch for a hacker to go on the dark side. So in closing, the last question we'd ask is, what has anchored you to become who you are?

Well, that's heavy. I'll give you a vulnerable answer. I actually think to be a founder, to reach this scale, you probably have to have something wrong with you. And I say that like both smiling but also like honest. You're probably making up for some inadequacy you felt. And if you're not, you're probably not going to be able to keep up with the rigor of being a founder. Like, it is the single loneliest, hardest job I've ever done in my entire life. And if I didn't come from that background of adversity, of trying to prove myself, that always felt like I was more than I had opportunity, I don't think I would make it. I don't think this story is actually very novel. It doesn't matter what industry, like I was with founders yesterday, as I told earlier, and we as founders were sharing, especially founder-led, you know, founder-led CEOs. Every one of us agreed that if it wasn't for both our own dysfunction and our own just oblivious of how hard this was going to be, none of us would have done it. Like there was 100% consensus. Nobody in the room would actually have founded their company if they would have known how hard it was going to be. So maybe just worth like ending on probably like a really like important note for audience members that are thinking about founding. Like it costs a lot. It costs more than you'd understand. And some of it, is actually part of your own healing journey. I'm not saying like Huntress has improved me as a person and as a man, a dad, all these things a lot. But to be very frank, it's come at great cost too. And now 10 years in, I can celebrate. But I can also say 10 years in that like it hasn't been without costs. Some of that's my kids. Some of that's just my own personal happiness. It's complaining as a guy who just said it gets to drive a Lamborghini race car. So like Understand this is a very small violin I'm playing here, but I do think that there is some level of like, not enough founders tell the cost of their story. And you get all this bias of you get to see every positive announcement and fundraise and what we've done, but it doesn't come at the cost of like, to the kids, to your spouse, to your personal life, not having friends. And I just don't think many people consider that during the founder journey, You can actually build a really successful lifestyle or a tuck-in company that you don't have to go the distance. And that's not just like a pitch for me to come say, hey, sell your company to Huntress. But I actually don't think many people consider early on how fast and how hard am I going to go at this? Does it have to be a billion-dollar unicorn to have success? Absolutely not. And I just wish that more people like normalized that part of the conversation because like, if I would have known, I would have done things different. Yeah, I mean, in a world of AI, it's the humans that separate us, right? AI is the commodity. It's what can humans do with the data that make the big difference. So I agree, you got to be human.

Thank you, Kyle. Thank you for joining us Inside the Network.

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