Sanjay Beri: Playing the long game and building Netskope into a public cybersecurity powerhouse

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'll 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.

Today we are thrilled to have Sanjay Berry, co-founder and CEO of Netscope. Having started Netscope over 13 years ago, this cybersecurity company sits at the epicenter of three important vectors: AI, data, and global edge networking. It serves over 4,000 customers, including 30% of the Fortune 100. Has a team of over 3,000 employees spread across 30 countries. To build this giant, Sanjay raised over $1.4 billion across multiple rounds and then took Netskoe public in one of the year's standout IPOs. What makes Sanjay such a compelling CEO? What are some hard-earned lessons and inspirations that founders can draw from his 13-year journey? And most importantly, where does Netscope go next? Let us dive in.

Sanjay, welcome to Inside the Network.

Thanks for having me.

We're going to talk about a whole bunch of different things, but let's start with your early years and the pre-Netscope journey. In those early years, you grew up in Canada and there were some moments in your life that likely shaped your thinking as an entrepreneur. Could you talk a little bit about some of those moments? What were those things that— that really shaped how you kind of build today?

That's a great question. I think one of the core things as an entrepreneur is what kind of culture do you want to live your life in and what kind of culture you want your company to have that feeds the team that you attract and everything. And so I grew up selling door-to-door with my mom, lipsticks and so on. And that taught me the phrase I live by, grit, which is just guts and tenacity and so on. And that's what you need as an entrepreneur because you get punched in the face 100 times. And so anyways, I think that summarizes maybe 25 years because I'm going to keep it brief. But from there it was, you know, figuring out what do I want to do? Like, you know, you got to pick a domain. I love to build. I love to have grit. I want to work with the right people. Eventually that led me to a domain, which was security and networking. And that's where I spent my career creating problems first. And now for the past 20 years, trying to fix them. So that's the Reader's Digest, as we say in Canada.

And talk a little— you mentioned kind of how you ended up picking security, but before you got into cyber, you kind of came out of college, you joined Microsoft, you're working on hypertext display within the browser team in the mid-1990s, just as the first internet wave was getting started. Then after that, you worked on ASIC design, you worked on firmware design, you started a little bit with software security. How did you end up in, in cyber? Like, that's not an obvious kind of path towards cyber.

It's funny, ASIC design is hot now, that's for sure. So I think, like, look, pragmatic reality. I did my master's in electrical and I did ASIC engineering, and after I finished, I went, oh my God, these people are smart. I'm not so sure I'm going to cut it here as an engineer. And it really, for me, I'd seen software, I'd seen firmware, I'd seen hardware, and I found my love at the intersection of really business and some of the largest technological trends. And that led me to software because that's where you could get pace. That's where you can make an impact. And for me, I remember building a chip when I was in university, 2 years, came back, plugged it into an oscilloscope, got a bunch of waves, and I went, okay, I need more than that. So that led me to really software in the industry and, and beyond, but they're all connected. So it gives me a good feel of the whole stack.

Talk to us about the trigger to start your first company, Ingrain Networks. I think at the time you were pretty young, probably 26 or 27. And we know that at that company, you did everything from architecting the products to being the top salesperson and did pretty well because in less than 4 years, the company got acquired by SafeNet. Walk us through these 4 years, walk us through some of the key inflection points and the lessons you learned on that journey.

Yeah, first of all, I was, uh, I won't give you my age, but I was much younger than that. So I have to admit. And, uh, look, I'd worked throughout my school career. Even when I went to undergrad, I worked at a place where I could leave and go work. And, uh, and same thing when I went to my master's and I did it to be very clear. Also, I needed the money to pay for. My college and my university. And so one, it was great, great experience. And I love doing it, but it was also a necessity. And so actually that first company was started with a professor who I happened to just meet again yesterday in my office for 4 hours and out of Stanford. And he was actually my professor. I won't tell you what grade he gave me, by the way. And that's what led me to go, look, I, I tech, I love security. I love building. This gives me product management, engineering, building a company. Learning what not to do and learning what to do. And, uh, and that's how I started. It was sort of this intersection of knowing this professor and loving building. And also I got to pay for my next semester.

So now, uh, post-Engren, uh, you joined a big company, Sanjay, the classical shift from an entrepreneurial journey to a large company. Most founders would dread doing that. Why did you decide to go down that path?

Yeah, it's a good question. And, uh, and it's like I always say with all answers, it's no one answer or one person and there's no right path to anything. And I mean, there's the high integrity path, which you should always follow, but it's, you know, it's a different path in terms of the rest. And so for me, I wanted to broaden my exposure from a go-to-market perspective, from running something at scale. And so the intersection of building, driving from a go-to-market perspective, and building a channel, selling, running the product at the same point. That's really what it allowed me to see. How does that work in a large company that's global, that is not starting, but is more mid to late in their life? And so that's why I went there. It was that combination at that point of innovating and giving me exposure to the rest and, and running a business unit with a P&L. Yeah, it was a great way to do it.

And so you were managing almost 300 people. P&L that was several hundred million dollars. What was the most frustrating part of being in a large company coming from a startup? And then what were some opportunities or advantages that came with it that allowed you to shape your next phase of the journey?

Yeah.

So, you know, when I was at Juniper, I would say like a lot of my business unit, which many of it now are separate companies because they got spun out or it was sort of everything. Like if you remember Juniper time is routing, big router, service provider. So what I was doing was everything that was not core. So, you know, and so you think about that, you got to scrap, right? To get sales attention, to get SE attention, to get dollars, to get channel mindshare when they're trying to sell everything, to make sure that you can innovate, right? At a more rapid pace. So, cause you, it is even behooves you more. You got to win based on how good your platform is. You're not going to get as many shots.

Right?

And so it really taught me when you're an underdog, when you have to be scrappy, when you don't have everything aligned perfectly for you, right? How do you win? And for me, that was a great experience while understanding and seeing all the rest.

And just for context, Juniper was the underdog to Cisco, and that's the battle that you were fighting at the time.

Yeah, even more so, like they were the underdog to Cisco on the routing side, but even within the company, remember we were doing security. And, and so we weren't even doing routing. We were doing like the, at that time, things like the intrusion prevention systems, the NACs, the SLVPNs, even within the company, those were the underdog products because they didn't get all the dollars, right? And so, it was also how do you operate within an environment where you kind of have to own it and drive it and you kind of have to drive your own sales and your own SEs and your own X. And you don't get the benefit of the mothership.

So you spent 7.5 years at Juniper. You became one of its youngest VPs at the time. And let's talk a little bit about the beginnings of Netscope. So it's 2012. You can see the world is changing. Cloud is starting to become an interesting topic of conversation. You could have easily built CASB at Juniper, or maybe you couldn't, and we should talk a little bit about that. But what were some of the non-obvious reasons you chose to go back to being a founder again?

Yeah, so a couple of reasons. One, I have always believed in the phrase innovate or die. And I've always believed in this culture of being open and collaborative, high integrity, so on. And I've always believed that sometimes in the industry, you got to start from a blank whiteboard because porting and moving leads to solutions that aren't meant for the times. And so I left Juniper because I knew that, look, I wanted to do those things, right? And And to do it, I got to start with a blank whiteboard. I saw the massive trends of obviously cloud and mobile and work from anywhere. And this was a unique time where the entire architecture of enterprises and how they dealt with how they secure that new world would change. And so one opportunity, man, inflection points galore. Two, look, this is what I was built for, all of that past experience of gritting and gutting things and building and driving product and go-to-market. I wanted to create my professional legacy. And so I left to do that. And then 3, I knew that culture part was so important to me. And I often feel that large companies sometimes lose their way and from a culture perspective, and it's, you know, it's normal. It's the way it is. And I wanted to build my own culture where I felt that could be an advantage and also mimic the way that I want to live my life. And so, Those are all reasons why I left. It wasn't one. I had to ask my family and my 2-year-old at the time, but she didn't have a way to give me a response. But yeah, she gave me those eyes and I'm like, okay, looks good to me.

So did you, did you leave Juniper not knowing what, that you would build Netscope and CASB, or did you already have the idea and you knew that you were going to go and do this?

No, I left and I took some time. You know, obviously like the core things, I knew what was happening in the world. I spent my life with CXOs. I like to, even today, every day, 2 CXOs a day is my saying. And so I lived in the trenches, but I also had a view of what happens in the clouds, meaning in the industry, right? I feel like you have to have both views. And so I, I had a sense of what was happening, but I took some time to figure it out of what exactly that looked like. And what may surprise you, it wasn't to build a CASB. It, my view was that over time, the internet and users and non-humans would need a new highway, a new on-ramp, right, to the internet. It would take all traffic, doesn't matter what it was, web, cloud, SaaS, now AI, on-prem. How could I build that new secure on-ramp? Now, the reality of why I went after CASB, which many people may not know, is like, look, imagine you walk into some large Fortune 100 and say, hey, by the way, I'm going to replace your core Symantec proxy and I'm going to consolidate 7 things. And they ask you, who are you? And I said, I'm Netscope. And they say, Netscape or Netscope? What? So they don't know who you are. And so you have to build your brand. And the easiest way I felt like with this grander mission was, hey, use the platform we're building first, apply it to cloud because nobody had anything. And that was how CASB was born, but the grander vision was always there. And that's actually how we built in the grander vision in mind. And that's why I think we were successful as many of the other point players fell off was we never were trying to be.

And, you know, on this topic of kind of you, you decide to go and start Netscope. You had already had the experience of being a founder and CEO with Ingrain. You'd had the experience of being at a big hyperscaling company like Juniper, what were the things that you decided to take from one and the other? What were the learnings where you said, hey, I'm going to do X that I took from Ingrain, but I'm not going to do Y, and I'm going to do X that I took from Juniper, but I'm not going to do Y?

Yeah, so, you know, actually to be clear, I'd never been a CEO actually. Like at Ingrain, I was running product and in Juniper, I was a GM of a group. And so this was actually my first real, you know, CEO experience. And when I looked at it, the things I took away were this: being a GM, you touch all parts of the business from finance to legal to go-to-market and sales and channel and distribution to product. And so, and at scale, right? You see that when you're building a company, whether it's like Ingram, and you're just starting from nothing, you see the startup and the funding and the board experience and all of the nuances of the good and bad. From small to the very large. And one of the things that I take away from all of those is you learn as much as from what you or your team or people around you did right as you do from what, you know, they did wrong. And, and I could go on for hours about what I learned, but one of the core things was people, team, talent, culture, nothing to do with tech, how that can build a company and make it or how it can destroy it. And it can destroy it a lot quicker if you make the wrong choice than you can make your company. And so I was very, very particular in building my company on who did I want in that company from a culture perspective, from a board perspective, from an investor perspective, and the expectation we set of going long and building this to last for a long, long time. And so all of those really set, when I start Netscope, set it on the right path.

This is a very, very good way to jump into the next question, which is talking about the people, talking about the who, talking about the people who built Netscope. Right from the very beginning, Netscope had some really, really strong engineering talent with very deep expertise in both networking and threat detection, like from Krishna to Laban, Ravi, Rahul, and a number of others. What did it take to extract these key engineers from very well-paying jobs at global companies to go and work at a startup?

I think like for people, they're all at different stages of their lives and they're all different people with different situations. And so it's not always the same, but I'll tell you like the core pieces. One is they, they, they want, they have to have the fire, right? They have to have the fire. They have to want to know. That, look, I want to build. I know I'm going to get punched in the face 100 times. I got to have the intestinal fortitude. And so for me, one, in the beginning, you got to have those characteristics. Otherwise, you're not going to go try to get those people, right? Because they're not going to survive when you're building. The second is they have to, with those characters, they have to believe. They have to truly believe in what you're building, the problem you're going after, and how you're doing it. Because There's no sense in getting a great person if they don't truly believe in the beginning on what you're doing, and that'll drive them, right? That'll self-motivate them. 3 is culture. I will take a 9 or 10 on culture and a 7 on domain, right? Every day of the week versus the opposite. And if they're not going to be open and collaborative and not, you know, if they're going to promote bureaucracy and BS and politics, they're not going to be here at Netskoe. And so for us, it was a right time of your life. You want to do this. You got the fortitude. You fit the right culture bar. You believe in the mission. And then look, when you're building, who do you hire? You hire architects and engineers who can build, right? And good ones, right? And people who can be flexible. And so that's why. And I think those people, they saw the mission. They wanted to be part of a team with these people, with this culture. And that's why they came and that's why they stayed.

Having done it so well, Sanjay, what advice could you share with founders today who are focused on recruiting and building their very first engineering team and hiring those first key people?

Yeah, so first you said having done it so well, so I'm going to correct you. Like when you're outside, everything looks up and to the right, but when you're inside, you know, come on, like, you know, let's, there's no, nobody, uh, likes to market, it's like a jagged lineup, right? You go through ups and downs and you make mistakes and you learn from them. And that's the life of building a company, right? And so one, I think everybody should know that is normal. Like, don't think there's this beautiful arc. Okay, maybe there is in some, a few companies, but that's just the way it is. And so the advice I give you on people is And everyone makes this mistake. Don't go for the names. Don't go for— when you're picking, and remember, when you pick people, you're picking your investors for one. In your investors, make sure those people believe in what you do, right? You pick a firm, but more so you pick a partner. Make sure they believe in what you do. Make sure the partner has staying power in that firm. They have sway, right? We all know that a bad board member can destroy your company. And so you've got to pick people where you have set expectation on what you're doing. It's okay if they, that's not the expectation they have, then that's not who you want, right? In my case, it was go long, fit this culture. We're not trying to be a small fish in a small pond. And so look, this is, you got to go along with us. And so pick your board and your investors very carefully. Same thing with your people. I'm a believer, don't pick the person who is a 10 on domain and sicks on culture, it'll destroy you. And so it may not— may look good on paper, on a website initially, and you may feel good, but when it comes to actually executing, you won't. So anyways, that's some short advice.

Talking— it was interesting that you mentioned kind of culture and you connected that to board and investors. Talk a little bit about like why is culture with board and investors important, and how, how should a founder even assess this? I know Mahendra has written a book on startup boards, but I'm curious, like your thought process and, you know, picking those board members, like, how did you interview them? How did you decide, hey, this is somebody who's going to work with how I see the world?

Yeah. And so look, everyone may not have this time, but I got to know the people that eventually became my board members well in advance of when I started my company. I got to know them in the industry. I would attend events, you know, with CXOs and with events they were holding. And when I wasn't even, I was not even going to start my company. For a few years, right? And so you want to get to know people well in advance, just like you want to raise money when you don't need it. You want to get to know the people way in advance, build a relationship. So for the way I would think about it is make sure that you are not trying to get a read on someone in one meeting or two meetings or one hour or one week or one month. Like you just, you can't, right? And so longevity. Of the relationship and assessing it and then talking to a lot of people who work with them is key. And, and, you know, it's nothing— it's no rocket science, but, uh, it, it really matters. And look, people want to be on boards with others who are, in my view, of the right culture. If they're open and collaborative, they'll attract other board members who will work well, and you have a highly functioning board. Um, you're not going to walk in and and people are standing up. I would tell my board members, like, please don't come up to a board meeting, stand up and pontificate and say, 20 years ago when I did this, and, uh, oh, you mean when there was no internet? So sorry. And, uh, and we would laugh about that. And the fact that they could very much laugh on it meant that they, you know, were probably going to filter in the right direction. So, so we just want collaborators, open transparency, I text my people, like WhatsApp them or Signal them or call them. And that's the type of relationship I want. And I feel like a good board has that.

And it's fascinating that you had the good fortune of building that relationship with both the team that works with you as well as the board and investors. I would imagine that was the foundation that allowed you to start building product quickly. Start competing. I think SkyHigh was already maybe a few steps ahead of Netscope at the time. So tell us about the journey from going to like this concept to product to a million dollars of ARR.

So one of the things that I mentioned before was go long. And what I meant by that is for us, I had a grander vision in mind. It wasn't CASB. It wasn't It was this kind of what we're sort of trending to now. And so without even our board and investors, I had to set expectation that, look, here's the grand vision. The steps to revenue, if you, you know, could be much shorter, right? If we didn't have that vision and by self-filtering, so they understood that setting expectations, it's, it's a much easier conversation, right? When you come in and you start your second quarter of selling first But in our case, we spent time to build, to build it right, to build some core platform. We got our product out probably a year, I would say a year and a half, year after even brought on the first people. And we hit our million, right? Pretty much in that, well, obviously in the first year. And it was obviously because we were in the bullseye of where the world was going. And for us, we did that by, look, we were selling, right? You know, founder sell and. And we did that and it worked out well. And so it was, yeah, it was a great, you know, first year. I will tell you though, that for many of our board members and many of our team members, because we were very clear that we're going long and building for the long term, there was no expectations that were different in terms of how we were allocating our capital. We were not flooding the market with sales and marketing. We were pouring it into R&D.

And I would imagine that when you are in that phase, as you're setting expectations and playing the long game, it clearly reduces the pressure on the team. But that doesn't mean that the sense of urgency does not exist. Now, for our audience who are founders trying to understand product-market fit, trying to get the first few customers, actually, can you share what— who was the first customer? How did that happen? And what was the the magic you use in attracting them. Obviously you're not called Netscape, you're called Netscope. So what was the magic you use at the time?

Yeah, the magic, like, for attracting our first customers was a very targeted use case. And in this case, it was, you know, how do I secure cloud storage and, you know, and not trying to boil the ocean, even though from a platform and R&D perspective, we were building something broad. Look, it was pragmatic and realistic enough to know that you can't, you don't build in a vacuum. You get customers, you have them deploy, you solve very targeted use cases where you play well with the big players, right? Even though you're going to target the big players. And so we sat beside the Semantics and Trellixes and Paltos and others, and we were complementary at some level, even though we were going to go after that space. And so I think for us, we knew the politics of companies. Do not step on other vendors of those type, the big ones, when you're starting. Pick off a targeted use case, greenfield, win that use case, show value, and then you can reveal the rest of your vision, right? Because politics matters when you sell, and never underestimate how much of your company and your ARR and your revenue has nothing to do with product.

So let's talk a little bit about growth and scaling to that IPO. Every company has different phases of growth. We have early growth, which is the million to $10 million of ARR. Then you have kind of mid-stage, which is going from $10 to $100 million of ARR. And then you have real scale, which is $100 million to a billion and more of ARR. Give us an inside view in your role as CEO, how your thinking around growth changed at each of these three phases. What was the most important thing that you thought about from 1 to 10? From 10 to 100, and then from 100 to billion, which is obviously where you're focused today?

So, you know, first of all, from a go-to-market perspective, it looks very different. And what I mean by that is even think of like your head of sales. Like the reality is that when I hired my head of sales for the 1 to 10, I told this person when they were interviewing, this sounds really bad, by the way, I understand. Um, you may not be, you're probably not going to be my head of sales in, uh, 2 years. And he looked at me and said, that is the worst close I have ever heard. Are you trying to close me or what are you doing? So, and, uh, and I said, well, come on. And, and he actually looked at me and went, okay, I understand. I actually get it. If I can show you I can do that, otherwise I'll run, you know, a region. I get it. Right. And so I think like the reality is at different levels, you have a different level of operational scale. A different level of playbooks, a different level of just repeatability, right? Not ad hocness. And building those processes and that scale, yet keeping the agility and the innovation and the startup mentality, you have to find the balance. Whereas in the beginning, your whole focus is not on the process and the scale, right? It's just you want to earn the right to be able to scale and build a process. And so I think that involves many times different people, different leaders. I flipped, um, some of my core functions along the way at each of those levels. The others still stayed. They just, you know, learned and got mentored and grew. The second is the, the reality is that as you scale, and in our case, um, as we scaled, we went after large customers. And when you think about large customers, other things matter other than your product. Right? It, what matters are your references, your ability to meet certain, could be legal or privacy regulations, could be things unrelated to that around your infrastructure, right? And how it's being tested. And so there's a lot of like what I'd call non-innovative stuff that has to happen when you hit a certain scale to win certain sets of customers. And so we knew that, and so we had to invest in that.. And so it was a long list, but it would say different scale sometimes requires different people. Different scale requires different set of processes and repeatability. But what doesn't change is your culture, right? Innovate or die, be open and collaborative, try to take bureaucracy out and, and politics, right? That needs to live. It's just harder sometimes to keep it.

I, you mentioned a little bit about kind of getting the right people at the right stage. I think for founders, Typically when I spend time with them, founders, when somebody's not working out, it's pretty obvious, you know, oh, this person is not actually delivering. The hardest part actually is when somebody has actually tapped, like they have done a lot of work, a lot of amazing work for the company, but they have tapped out in terms of their capability. How did you figure out to identify that, oh, this person has been amazing for Netscope for the last 3 years, but I don't think they're going to be amazing 3 years from now? Like what are the attributes you look for? And then how do you figure out in your head that despite them being so loyal and so valuable, that now I do need to upscale and I do need to go and find the next great person?

Yeah, and so there's a couple things that are kind of— sometimes you say non-negotiable, like, you know, especially, you know, if you're, um, a leader, which could be an individual contributor who's a technical leader, it could be, you know, an actual leader of a region in sales, like, you do have to have the fire. And if you don't wake up having the fire then it's probably time to talk about moving on. We've had definitely those over the years. Some have retired. And so one is the fire. You've got to have it. The second is ultimately, are you going to be still a growth type of mindset person? And if you get to the point where you're like, look, I know how this works, this is how I do it, and I can't do it another way, then in the world we live in, that doesn't work, right? I mean, the world changes so quick, it's so volatile. It's so like, if you can't be self-aware enough to know that, look, you should always be learning and you should always be looking at changing how you do things, then also that's— you've reached a point maybe that you got to tap out, right? Because you're, you're just not as malleable. And then the third, you know, especially on the technical side, is, uh, think about today's world, right? With people leveraging cloud code and Cursor and so, like, you gotta, you have to be able to invest your time to understand the latest trends, capabilities, and so on. Could be technical, could be sales, could be SDRs, could be whatever. And, uh, and if you're not, you're actually going to decay. You may have been great when you started, but the world moved on and you didn't., right? And so in a similar way, those folks will also quickly realize too that, wait a minute, uh, maybe in this time I'm not actually the right person. And so anyways, I like to have those open conversations. We, um, have them, and that's why a lot of our transitions, you know, been just been great. They've been good, amicable.

You're in, in September of 2025, you formally listed Netscope on the NASDAQ. A huge congratulations to you and the team. And for our listeners, for context, there were only 2 cyber IPOs in 2025. There was SailPoint and there was Netscope. And there were only 11 tech IPOs. So it was a pretty audacious goal to make that decision to go public. You talked a little bit about your competitors. I'm sure there were multiple options to exit along the journey, including, I'm sure, even, you know, closer to the, uh, you know, that IPO stage. How did you, did you always know that you wanted to take the company public? And when did it become clear that the IPO was the right path?

Yeah. You know, I preface this, there's no like right path that I would advise for any entrepreneur, like selling your company, totally fine. You know, doing something else, totally fine. For me, since the beginning, I've always said this is going to be an independent company. It's always going to be in that scope. And going public is kind of going to be our first inning. First inning took a little longer, by the way. So then I thought, you know, because of the markets and the pandemic and all this stuff, you got like, Every year something thrown at you, right? And so anyways, but so it was always my dream and vision to do this, but I also viewed, and this may sound like people really, but yeah, I also viewed going public as, as just the first inning. And, uh, and I know we're just an audio, but you look around, you see a sports fan. And, uh, I felt like for us, we needed the aware— we going public gives us the awareness. It, it boosts who we are. Gets us out there because, you know, we know that we can win if people know about us. And it also brings a lot of other things that maybe you don't want to have to deal with. But for me, that was our goal. Get there, make that the first inning, and then, you know, go on from there. We have a saying, build an iconic, legendary company. And, uh, and that has always been the goal. And so going public would be one signpost on the way.

Let's talk about, uh, making bats, making big bats, uh, in a different area, in the area of technology. You've always believed that public cloud is not optimized for routing efficiency, and you decided to build an edge cloud. Now Netskope has, I believe, over 120 data centers in, in 75 regions worldwide. Building all this out might not have been an easy decision. Why did you choose not to partner with existing players? Why did you decide to go through all of this pain and build your own infrastructure?

Yes, because I like pain. No, just joking.

Sorry.

No, the reality is that I have this philosophy. I always say go long and I've always kind of believed it. And sometimes going long involves much more pain in the beginning and the mid, right? But if you go long and you have the fortitude to do it, you'll end up with something better and you'll end up with a better outcome. And so building our own network, we looked at it and we said, look, the right thing to do from what people care about, performance, resilience, right? Openness, and now sovereignty, is to have your own infrastructure. The public cloud is amazing for apps and for workloads and for, but not as a network, right? As a network, the performance, their whole goal is it's like a casino. They want to get you into. You know, the casino and then hide all the exits. That's kind of the goal. And the reality is in what we do, people access, you know, billions of websites. They have many public clouds. They access tens or hundreds of generative AI apps, thousands of SaaS apps. They're not trying to get to one place. We have to get them everywhere. And so it was very clear. And I hired the person who built and ran AWS's network. So even them, they're like, yeah, you're right. Like, this is what you need to do. Yet the issue, if you were a founder or a startup, was, whoa, wait a minute. If you're going to do that, that's going to cost hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. You're going to have to find and recruit across the world some of the best network architects, infrastructure people. I mean, it's going to cost a lot of money. And, uh, but I had picked a board who I said was, I told them, go long. I will admit that when I had this conversation with them, by the way, I'm going to go spend hundreds of millions of dollars and do this and you'll see it in 5 years. There was a little bit of, Sanjay, what are you doing? But we knew it was the right outcome, the right thing. And it has paid off in spades for us. Now, did it pay off in the first year or the second year or the third? No. Right? But it has paid off in spades. And I really am thankful with both our investors and our board and the people, the 100-plus people in the beginning on the infrastructure side we brought on. These people, they're artists, right? That's the way I view some of these network folks. And our investors believing and listening to kind of what I said in the beginning, that's what made it possible.

How do you go in and position this massive investment to a board? What's the pathway that you go about doing this when you're, you know, one is kind of convincing people to invest in the company. The second is trying to tell your board who are already investors that, hey, this is a good strategy.

So, you know, first of all, you're right. Like having a financial model, which is a multi-year model. And I'm not talking about the model that is, you know, some marketing model. I'm talking about like a real model. Is important to show, A, what does this look like? We have the fortitude and we have the plan and we understand what this is going to do, both from a top line perspective, from bottom line, from a gross margin, everything, right? You've thought this through. Second, you understand how to do this in the right way so that in the end, it actually proves to be both a product advantage and a cost structure advantage, which is compelling. Those are pieces, but you can show that, but all investors see spreadsheets and models all the time. And, you know, I don't know, they probably look at them and go, okay, thanks. You know, whatever. Anybody can put numbers in a spreadsheet. Showing them why it's the right way to do it. Why is this in the end going to lead to a big moat, right? One that is so difficult for anybody ever to cross, right? That is what matters. And that was something we were very clearly able to do and show, to validate with third party, you know, sort of people who eventually, you know, I brought into the company and became part of the company. And in their heart, those people, they believed in it. They're like, you know what, this is the right thing to do. You told me we're going to go long and this is going to lead to a better outcome. Now you better execute. So. So, and it comes down, if it can come down to you just better execute in something like that, then that's great because that means they get it.

So, Sanjay, when, when Netscope started, you know, Skyhigh was probably one of your primary competitors. You know, the world has changed quite a bit today. You know, I was looking at the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrants and, you know, Netscope is very well placed in the top right corner, you know, with with a few others, Palo Alto, Cato, Fortinet. Talk to us about how you see the world evolving, especially when it comes to competition.

So I think if you look at the world in which we play security networking, I've never believed that there is one platform for all of security networking. I don't believe there's 100 either. And when I work with a CIO or CISO or CTO, you know, They don't believe there's one either. That's not what they want. They don't want the best of nothing. Um, yet they don't want 100. So first, my theoretical view has always been, and my pragmatic view on the ground, is there's a few couple core platforms. And, um, you know, EDR and identity and SASE and so on. There's a few. And so one, we're not trying to be everything. We're not trying to be all 4 of them. We're trying to be this massive core platform that converges 20 things. If you start there and then you look at the competitive market, you quickly understand, oh, okay, well, that one, it's not really competitive. You bifurcate it. And then you end up with this set of people who are either trying to be everything, right? And you could put politics in that realm. And then there's the others who maybe are a niche out of 100. And then there's the others like us who are none of them. We believe in a couple core platforms. Right? Not 100, but not 1. And so for us, there'll always be a Venn diagram of intersection where there'll be like many of the niche companies, which, you know, we do all that functionality. And then with the 1 or 2 try to do everything, there'll be overlap, right? And so that's kind of the way I look at it. And so competitively for us, look, we have an over 80% win rate if we get to POC. Um, and so for our nirvana, is that they try what we do. We will consolidate 20 things, converge, but we'll play well in the ecosystem. And I'm a big believer that we have a common enemy in security, and it's not any of our competitors. It's nation-states, it's criminals, it's malicious insiders. And so play well.

And so Sanjay, you know, it's this notion of competition is important to build your muscle, you know, early on. You had SkyHigh that built your muscle. Which are some of the competitors that you look up to or companies that you respect that are out there that are doing good things?

So I'll take it from multiple angles. One, nothing to do with our domain, but if you think about organized companies who have been built and they went long and they adjusted and they kept going and they eventually became successful, the quintessential one of that would probably be NVIDIA, where you go, my God, that was a long journey. Where they, they had so many punched-in-the-face moments and they became what they do. You gotta respect that for a founder who, who just kept going and stayed with it and did what they did. So that kind of culture and that kind of intestinal fortitude, I really look up to that and respect that quite a bit. In addition to that, you look at other large companies who have navigated and adjusted and, you know, maybe went down and then went up and you got to admire people like CEOs like Satya Nadella and others who really just, who did that, right? And, uh, and so yeah, it, those type of people who would, that fortitude, those are the ones I look up to versus like companies to be blunt. I look at, okay, what kind of people, what kind of culture and, uh, who are the, the warriors who know reality is not easy yet, you know, you power through it. And so those are two that I really look up to.

As we get towards the end of this conversation, I want to talk a little bit more about 2026 and beyond. Obviously, you're a public company now. You have a whole bunch of opportunities and challenges. And one of those obviously is dealing with public market investors and having quarterly earnings calls and talking to equity research analysts, as well as thinking about business growth and strategy and how do you scale this business to well over a billion of ARR. 'cause that is something that every investor will care about in the public markets. What's top of mind in your head? How has that thinking changed going from private to public?

Yeah, that's another good question. So a couple things. One, your time changes because as you know, you have this additive time that you need to do, which is spend time with your public market investors. In the first year, education, right? You're almost like a baby. Even though you're like, wait a minute, I'm a baby again? I thought I got past the startup phase. Well, as a public company, you're a new company. And so you got to spend time to educate. You also have certain periods where you can do that. You really are, in many cases, competing against people who've had the ear of these folks for, could be a decade, and you haven't even talked to them, right? And so they heard your story from others, not from you. And so one is the time you have to spend with those folks to make sure you educate them. Those could be analysts, could be investors. Eventually you go to the conferences and just make sure your vision, your story, your concept to go long is out there. And you're almost doing that again. So that's one. The second is the reality is that when you're public, you can lose your culture and what got you here, right? Very quickly. And I've been very clear that I don't look at and manage my company quarter by quarter in terms of how I think about what we're building. Could be on the go-to-market side or could be in R&D. We still go long, right? We invest in things that may not ship for 2, 3 years. We're, and we're not shy about that, right? And that's because, look, I'm going to be here in a decade doing this and we want to capture our TAM. And so don't let. That change you and change what got you here. Obviously, financial profile to go public now is very different. Like when we went public, it was very— that was a much harder time when we went public than it would've been a few years ago. Right? And so obviously our— we focused on our financial profile as well, and we know how important that is, but you can do both, right? You can get that right and go long and innovate or die. So anyways, the biggest thing I focus on, innovate or die, persists everywhere in private or public markets.

So Sanjay, you launched your AI labs, uh, about 7 years ago, well before the current wave of, of GenAI. Today, uh, you have over 150 models. Talk to us about the story. What got it started? How does Netskope plan to enable customers to benefit from this?

Yeah, so the AI Labs was another go-long story because, you know, we've had AI Labs for over 7 years and I have to admit nobody cared for 5, externally at least. Nobody seemed to— I'd show up saying, here's this AI Lab. They're like, yeah, okay, go to the next topic. But, but the reason that we did that was once again, we felt like the best tool to solve the problems we were solving, data protection, threat protection, detecting anomalous network behaviors and accelerating traffic, in many cases, deep learning, not LLMs only, was the right way. And so it was more about the reality and pragmatism of, look, whatever people call it, and whether it's famous or not, if it's the right thing, we're going to do it. And so that's how our AI labs got built. And that's how we started building these models. And then when the market said all they wanted to talk about AI, came out, wait a minute, we are sitting on, you know, it's what we've been doing, 160 models. And so how do we use AI everywhere in our product? Deep learning, you know, statistical modeling, shallow learning, and obviously generative AI. We use it if it's throughout the products because it gives us better efficacy, better performance, and so on. Right? And they're just baked in. You don't buy the models. The second is we secure people's AI usage. Our whole goal is let people use generative AI, but put the guardrails in so they protect their data and their threats. And so it's really two-sided. We use it everywhere because where it's the best tool, we'll use it. And then on the opposite side, our whole platform, one of the big use cases is geared to let others use it in a secure way and protect their data. Um, so those are two big, um, use cases of how, um, we really intersect at our core with AI.

And just on that topic of AI, I'm sure you're seeing a whole bunch of new generation of startups that are being created. Many of them are really trying to go and help enterprises manage agents and the access that those agents have to data. In some ways, this is kind of ancillary to the CASB market that you started off with at Netscope. How do you think about, you know, going after that, that vision, um, and how do you think about broadly agentic identity? Because that's becoming more and more of a core topic.

Yeah, absolutely. So when you look at, um, AI in general and agents and beyond, like I said, how we broke it up, like there's identity and there's your in-path governance, so you can have policy, there's your monitoring, SecOps. So each of these markets, right, which traditionally have formed the core of security networking,, right, have to change and are changing because of AI, how they implement, but also, you know, what they have to deal with. And I've always believed that just like, you know, when IoT and OT came up, there was so much more non-human identities because of that. In the AI agent world, I've always believed that, look, there's gonna be 10+ agents per user, and most of your traffic will be originated from non-human identities. And yet, what are those non-human identities? They assume the user's permissions, right? Or how do you attribute them? How do you know? And so a lot of this comes down to what we often phrase in the term as zero trust, meaning we have to assume that AI agents that are corporate, non-corporate, malicious, they just live within your company. And how do you find them? How do you discover them? How do you guardrail them? And yet, how do you let them do their job? The valid ones do what they're supposed to do. So how do you solve this problem by letting people still unleash the usage of these, right? And that's the core of the security problem. It's not to block things, it's to enable them. And so without getting into all the details of how it changes identity or inline governance or data protection or so on, I think like our goal is enable it. Our goal is weed out what shouldn't be there, zero trust it, and we've had a lot of announcements related to it and a lot more coming.

You know, Sanjay, as we were doing some of the research around this episode, we talked to people like Krishna and Ravi, and Krishna in particular helped me to appreciate your vision. And he sort of said, from day one, Sanjay talked about the importance of networking. The second circle of the Venn diagram is data, and then the third circle of the Venn diagram is cybersecurity. And so when we think about Netscope today, you've set that foundation up so very well. The fact that AI Labs started 7 years ago, 5 of which were not relevant, but then suddenly it becomes very relevant, sets Netscope for a fantastic, we'd call it, second innings ahead. It took 13 years from startup to IPO. You have over 4,000 customers, 2,500 people, 30 countries, and of course, your daily diet of two CIOs and two CISOs. Tell us as we close, what has been the most fun part of the journey and also the toughest? Or maybe you can start with the toughest first, so we end on a positive note.

Yeah, the toughest one. We don't have 10 hours. Look, the toughest part is really that when you're leading a company, in many cases, that you get punched in the face every day. Like you could wake up and something could go wrong. A person you were trying to recruit, a deal you're trying to win, a project that you were— I mean, it's endless, right? And I think like the toughest part to realize is that in addition to what you do at work, all these founders probably listen to this. They have a family. They have a life that is outside and making sure that the, your energy will come from ultimately also that. And so making sure your team and making sure yourself get the time, devote that to their family, bring their family along as much as we can as part of the company. That's often the toughest balance, but it is the thing you have to do and you, and you can't keep it in the back of your mind. Because ultimately you have your professional legacy, but what matters is your life, right? And your life legacy. And that's what matters to people. And so I feel like, you know, making sure sometimes what may seem like the wrong decision to move the company forward, but may in the short term, may be the right one long term, right? Which is do what's right, right? By family and people and so on. So that's one. And I'm pretty adamant about that. And then you asked some of the greatest moments. The greatest moments for me, I'll give you an example. When we went IPO, we brought every single person in the company into the IPO. They told me I could bring 20. I brought 100-plus to the IPO.

Wow.

They said I could have 10 on stage. I brought every single person on stage I could. We brought every single team member livestreamed in, whether it was in office, at home. I had people in Medellín, in Colombia, who who never ever experienced something like that, where they only get their face, you know, on that board. They walk around their town, uh, and they show, look, look at what I've done in my life. And I think like the most proudest moment I have is we know we will change the lives of so, so many people and generations of their families. And that in the end, when you put your head on a pillow, in addition to obviously what we do, which is protect people from the worst people in the world, which is attackers and criminals. That's what we build our platform for. In addition to that, you are changing lives of a lot of people in your team. And that'll live forever, and it's probably your biggest legacy you have, so.

How cool is that? The Madeleine Colombia story is such a fantastic way to share all the joys and the excitement of this journey. Sanjay, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you for joining us Inside the Network.

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