The Provocative Statement That Built Knox - Irina Denisenko - Knox Systems - #EP113

Our tagline is FedRAMP in 90 days for 90% off. And it's very provocative. It's a very small club of companies that reach this standard.

Today's guest is Irina Denisenko. Her company, Knox Systems, solves maybe the most painful process in enterprise software, becoming FedRAMP certified. Knox Systems gets you FedRAMP certified in 90 days. It's a managed, pre-authorized cloud environment that software companies move into instead of building from scratch. 2 years in, they've raised north of $30 million and have customers like Adobe, Armis, OutSystems, and many more. They actually just crossed 100 customers. Where did you get your first 10 customers from?

In Knox's case, we are a TAM expander for our customers. We enable our customers to now serve an entire market that they previously either were completely shut out of or it was very, very challenging for them to get into. I'm going to unlock something for you that is a whole new revenue stream for you. I'd say the biggest objection that we heard was, who Who cares about this market? Like, who cares about the US government?

Today's guest is Irina Denisenko. Her company, Knox Systems, solves maybe the most painful process in enterprise software, becoming FedRAMP certified. Before starting Knox, she was the COO of Class Technologies, a business that scaled very quickly raised over $100 million, and is now doing over $100 million in revenue. Along the way, they needed FedRAMP authorization to sell to the federal government. It was so slow, so expensive, and so opaque that they ended up acquiring an already authorized company just to get through it. Most founders file that away as a war story. She turned it into a business. Knox Systems gets you FedRAMP certified in 90 days. It's a managed, pre-authorized cloud environment that software companies move into instead of building from scratch. 2 years in, they've raised north of $30 million and have customers like Adobe, Armis, OutSystems, and many more. They actually just crossed 100 customers. Irina Denisenko, welcome to Not Another CEO Podcast.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

I'm very excited to do this, and thank you for doing it in person. I was— Yes.

Oh my God. Me too. Me too.

All right. First question. What is the one thing that you've done, big or small, at Knox System that's had the biggest impact that you would do again if you're CEO of another company in the future?

Yeah. Well, if I may, I'll give you 2. I'll give you a more kind of tactical one and then a more strategic one. So, so tactically, our tagline is FedRAMP in 90 days for 90% off. And it's very provocative. FedRAMP, for those who are listening who don't know, is the very, very intense and, and, and high level of cybersecurity that you need to meet and compliance that you need to meet as a technology company in order to serve the US government, the Pentagon, et cetera. It's very hard to do. There's only a few hundred apps that have it. Now, 100 more because Knox exists. But the point is, it's a very small club of companies that reach this standard. And so—

And a very painful—

I mean, having to— And it's a multi-year process, multi-millions of dollars. And it's a pretty low rate of success. Folks embark on this—

Oh, really?

Mount Everest, and many don't finish because either the project runs out of funding, they can't find a federal sponsor, sponsor or a Pentagon sponsor, lots of things go wrong. So, for me to come out to the market and say FedRAMP in 90 days, when, you know, again, typically any CISO, any CEO worth their salt knows it should actually take 3 years at least, you know, it sounds insane. It's very provocative. It sounds insane. It sounds not just too good to be true, it's almost like insulting their intelligence of like, but what could you, how could you possibly do that? And I got a lot of pushback initially from advisors and investors to, you know, to make that our leading pitch, if you will, whether you put it up on a, on a billboard, you put it up at a trade show as the, you know, the big signage and, and even just in kind of outbound that I was doing because I was the sales team for a while. And long story short, the feedback was That's too niche. Yes, it's provocative, but it's too niche. And like, you should, you know, and oh, by the way, the whole world is talking about AI. There's no AI in that statement. You gotta be doing something different. And I said, listen, I know my market. I've lived this problem. As you said, I got into this world because I actually literally had to get my prior company FedRAMPed and ended up acquiring a business in order to do it. I know exactly the problem I'm solving. If you trust me for anything, you should trust that if I'm running this company, I probably know the— hopefully I know the problem solving, I understand the pain point, I understand why my solution is valuable, and I know it's gonna resonate. And long story short, the results speak for themselves. It has been a very, very, almost like a growth hack to be able to come out to the market and just say it, and say it in a, In a very direct way. And it's almost like a magic statement because immediately folks are either qualified in or qualified out. If you don't know what FedRAMP is, it's probably not an issue for you, so we probably shouldn't be talking anyway. And if you know what it is, you know how hard it is, you're at least intrigued. You might be insulted by how bold of a claim it is. You know, now 100 customers later, we've proven it over and over and over again. So, it's— You know, not, not, uh, not something that, um, is, uh, unbelievable anymore. But long story short, sticking to my guns and just saying, no, I know this market, I, I know what's gonna resonate, uh, was very helpful.

You're probably one of the only people that didn't include AI in—

I know, it was wild.

Seriously.

They were, people were like, but, but you have to. And I, you know, whether, and by the way, that was to all audiences, you know, it obviously you need to know your audience. And so, you know, when you're, out in the market talking to CEOs and CTOs and CISOs, you want to have one message. And if I'm speaking to investors, you know, you obviously have a different one. But, but I think it was a, or, you know, relevant to that audience message. But at the end of the day, I think it's important to, you know, keep things simple and just say what it is, say what you're doing in any context. So that would be my, you know, tactical thing that I did. It ended up being quite strategic, but it was very tactical and it was You know, not a lot of people were on board with it. But again, it's almost like a barometer of, you know, do you know your market or not?

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah.

And if you know your market, then you should know how to talk to them. And if you don't know your market, then you go figure out your market first before you try to, you know, really invest a lot of time, energy, et cetera, into playing in that market. The other thing I did totally different was, We very early on made it a point that we were gonna build our company as we added folks in offices, in office, in person. We are across DC, New York, and Denver primarily. Doesn't mean we don't have some folks scattered here and there, right? That's at the end of the day, talent, you know, I'm going after the best people I can find, full stop. However, it is, You know, you said it earlier, it's a competitive advantage to be in person, and it compounds. And having the ability to riff off each other, not every second of every day, but having the ability to have your colleagues there and for them to feed off your energy and you to feed off their energy, no matter the industry, you know, even in government cloud security where I play, it makes a huge difference.

Do you, do you think it is harder to find people because it has in-person culture?

To be honest with you, no, I have not. We've not run into, you know, a dearth of candidates trying to, you know, that apply for positions and so on. And the other thing I'll say is maybe this is another piece of this. I think when you're building a company, that is growing very quickly like we are, but also deals in very high-stakes anything, whether in my case it's security. You know, I would argue that, you know, if you're not building a company that's doing something high-stakes for its clients and customers, then, you know, the value is questionable, right? Like, it should be really important what they're paying you to do. You know, in our case, it's high, very, very high stakes, right? They're putting Their application into our environment, we're hosting it, we're securing it, and then the US Army is consuming out of that environment. I mean, it couldn't be higher stakes. In our case, what that means for hiring is that, at least at this stage of the company, we're not really hiring any, you know, too many junior folks. We're hiring senior-level folks. We're hiring folks that have been, you know, in their careers for a while.

Mm-hmm.

Basically, the way I talk about it internally is like, I'm hiring Delta Force, and you don't get to go to Delta Force first day at the academy. You spend 4 years in the academy, then you go to Ranger School, then you go, so on and so on, and then you're on Delta Force. And that is, that's, I think, part of the secret sauce of why we've been able to execute so well and so quickly and scale so quickly. is because I'm hiring folks who know exactly what they're doing. They're not learning everything new on the job. They're coming in and they're able to hit go. And so, and those folks tend to be in and around certain geographies anyway. So, back to your question, has it been hard to find people? I mean, I'm always competing for the best talent, don't get me wrong.

Right, right.

But, has it been hard when I've said, you know, hey, we're primarily in office?

Yeah. Yeah, I, I feel that, There's definitely like the pendulum is swinging back.

Yeah.

Where I'm interviewing more people who are begging to go into an office for companies.

I mean, it's hard to work from home. You got kids, you got the dog, you got, and just in general, like, I mean, we all went through COVID. We all, many of us, you know, for extended periods of time had to do that. And it's, I think there's the psychological cost to, Not having a literal physical separation.

Definitely.

You know? So.

Yeah. I, I, I mean, I, everyone knows, anyone who knows me knows, like, I am so about being in person and I, I do think it's a competitive advantage. I think that you, there's just things that you, you, you find out and do together. Like, you just, you learn stuff, you come up with ideas that you would literally never.

Yeah.

Never. I'm not gonna set up the Zoom call to do the meeting to just brainstorm something that just is passing through my head versus just—

Walking by—

Stare at, you know, my chair or walk by someone's office. So, um, yeah, I, anyway, I, I, I'm a big believer in that. I, so talking about people like you, you have, from what I understand, I mean, you're gonna get to a point, you're, you're one of the more efficient companies that I've had so far on the show in terms of revenue, Yeah. Per employee.

Yeah.

And it's gonna cross probably $1 million at some point, sounds like soon.

Yeah, in, in the next quarter.

Which is amazing.

Yeah.

Is that because of what you said about the Delta Force people that you're hiring? Is that because this is using AI to do something crazy that, you know, is automating all the work? Like, how, how are you getting to that level of efficiency?

Yeah. Well, let me first say that, you know, it's, um, Look, I'm traditional and old school in the sense that, look, I do believe a business should make money. I think it doesn't have to be right away. And that's no disrespect to the, you know, there's obviously massive industries right now, particularly in the AI space that, you know, are burning. But then you look at what some of the most shiny examples of, you know, Anthropic most recently, right, released a bunch of results and they've got an operating profit, right? So I don't think it's that controversial even in that industry that, yeah, you've gotta be able to prove that, You know, at the end of the day, that this is a real business. And the way we think about it at Knox is, and the way certainly I think about it just in general about any company, is number one, yes, there is absolutely some of it comes from the fact that, you know, we've got, you know, Delta Force. That said, Delta Force costs more. Let's just be very honest, right? Like, I'm going after the best of the best of the best, and I pay them accordingly.

Right.

Like, I don't lose on salary negotiations. I just don't. That's not, to me, the value of having that elite individual on the team is so much higher than any extra, whatever, $50,000, $100,000, whatever they're, you know, I'm putting on the table for them, that it pays itself back in days.

Hmm.

So, that's just my general philosophy. I need to be very convinced that they're the person. And every single time I've gone after that person and I've been advised, hey, you're overpaying for this talent, every single time I would've done it all over again. So, that's number one. So, it's less about it, but of course, they're so much more efficient. So, that's certainly one of it. 2 is, you know, I've built companies not in the age of AI. I've built— now I'm building a company in the age of AI. It is not one particular thing, but it is kind of across the board that yes, we now as builders have tools that are just themselves more efficient. Like, I mean, I'll take a very, you know, very boring example of a CRM, you know, and it used to be not very long ago, like literally I remember as recently as 3, 4, or 5 years ago where you get to a certain size, call it $20 million in revenue, You absolutely need to be spending quite a lot of money on not just the CRM, but also the consultants to make the CRM work, whether it's Salesforce or, you know, pick your traditional CRM. Now there's like 50 different options for you that are all AI native. You don't have to, you know, staple something onto it that all of a sudden it can just do things. And I don't need to ask 7 different people who I'm paying, you know, whatever extra tater a month to, Like, help me generate a report.

Yeah.

Or, you know, something silly like that, you know? And it just, it moves, it allows decisions to be made faster. It allows, you know, just, it just, it just reduces entropy 'cause you have just fewer like pings and so on. And yeah, it's cheaper to do stuff that way, right? So, and you scale that across every function, Right? Whether it's operations, sales and marketing, certainly engineering. I mean, I certainly don't have to tell your audience, you know, how much efficiency engineering has gained out of building in the age of AI. And all of a sudden, you know, it's, again, it's never been a cost-saving type of mentality. It's just been a, let's be— Let's run really fast. And nowadays to run really fast, you actually end up running with, you know, just more efficiently.

That example of the CRM is such a good, it's such a like in the weeds tactical example, but it's such—

We've all lived it. You know, it doesn't matter what business you're in. You've lived this.

You paid the consultant to build the report in Salesforce, but because the databases don't work this way, you have to run multiple reports and then do this. And now someone can go build a dashboard tomorrow. You know, they can go to—

I can literally like prompt it into the, you know, I just ask the CRM, hey, what's my, you know, LTV to CAC for the last quarter? Like, it's just not that, you know, of course. And by the way, that's not to dismiss, like, there are professionals who are like cleaning the state. Like, we have that too. But, you know, it's just, it is, it, it, like, you, you would, your head, you would be, you know, head in the sand type of, you know, Luddite if you didn't acknowledge that like this is real, you know? And, and for companies that aren't building, you know, I, I'm, I get the advantage of, you know, we, we started Knox at the end of 2024. So it's a—

You don't have any of the debt.

I don't have the debt.

Yeah.

You know, I fully respect and can appreciate and have empathy for, well shoot, I'm 5 years old, I'm 10 years old, I'm 15 years old as a company. Like I do have the debt. But at least from what I can see, there are pretty low, you know, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit that again just makes, makes for a very, very, you know, it, if you're not taking advantage of all of this, that's on you.

Yeah.

You know.

I wanna talk about the Delta Force people 'cause I think people are gonna listen to this and say, I want those same Delta Force people.

Yeah.

How do you determine if they're, you know, how do, in the interview process, like, is that, is the process crazy? You know, are they going through 10 rounds on site for 6 hours doing extra? I, I'm trying to get a sense, like, how are you assessing these people?

It's a great question. You know, it, it so depends on obviously the role, right?

Yeah.

So, so, but what I'll say in general is, and, and again, I realize this is not gonna scale to, Tens of thousands of employees or anything like that. So, I'm speaking to the folks here who are going from, you know, 1 to 500, let's say, in that range of people. A lot of it, first and foremost, is, you know, we need to have, like, I need to have heard about you. You know what I mean? You're not coming in cold and, you know, we're learning about you cold and you're learning about us cold. We need to have been connected through the ecosystem, if you will, somehow, some way. Now, I perhaps have a slightly slight advantage on this. It's a bit of a disadvantage. You know, I know at some point we'll talk about kind of fundraising and TAM and so on. In some ways it's a disadvantage because in some ways I work in a pretty niche market. I mean, like FedRAMP, you know, like, and so on. So, and even, you know, you can expand it a little bit to, you know, say like kind of government contracting. But it's still niche relative to the whole world of cybersecurity or the whole world of enterprise sales or, you know, whatever. So, so in some ways, you know, people say all the time, D.C. is a small town, especially if you're in technology, etc. And obviously we do a lot of work in D.C. So, so some of it is, is specific to my market. But the point is, I don't— I just don't believe— I don't care how much time you spend with someone through an interview process. To answer your question, no, we don't do 10 rounds of interviews. But I would argue that even if you did spend 10 rounds of interviews with someone, what, at best you're gonna spend 10 hours with them?

Mm-hmm.

Like, what are you gonna learn about someone in 10 hours? Now, first impressions matter, all of that matters, but you really don't know a person until you have worked with them for a few quarters. You know, like, that's really how you're gonna know. So, long story short, reputation matters a lot. I was just scrolling LinkedIn and I saw Gili Braun from Cyberstarts. He put something like, you know, access is better than capacity. And he was talking about when you're hiring sellers, you know, I don't care how many AEs you can hire, if they can't get to the buyer that you're trying to get to, like, yes, there's a simple, you know, VC or PE or, Even CEO quota math where you're like, okay, well, if I need to go sell $10 million of stuff, I need 10 reps because they each have a quota of a million and bada bing, bada boom. Like that's and it's like, okay, well, my approach is I'd actually rather have four Delta Force people who I am going to rip out of the hands of my competitors. I'm going to rip out of the hands of you know adjacent companies. Like I'm going to go after them and snipe them.

Hmm.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna pay for recruiters. I'm a big believer in, in working with elite recruiters. I, I think it's crazy when, when I hear folks tell me, Irina, you're spending so much money on recruiting fees. I'm like, yeah, and you see the kind of talent I'm getting on the team? I would've never been able to get to that level of talent without the help of those guys. So, I'm a big believer in, you gotta invest to go get Delta Force. And again, it's, it, it's, it's dead. It's dead on arrival if there's not some sort of connection that, you know, I can go back channel and go find out more about this person from other people I trust, is, is the long and the short of it. 10 rounds of interviews is gonna do nothing for me. So frankly, my interview processes are probably some of the most efficient. It's like they talk to me depending on, again, where they sit.

Yeah.

They, if the person sits with me, they're probably a pretty senior person on the team. You would think for an SVP or whatever, I'd have, you know, 6 rounds of interviews. No, it's me. It's, you know, I really believe in the power of advisors. And what I mean by that is I'm gonna go get someone that I can't afford, they won't work for me type of thing, but they're the, you know, former, you know, From a government perspective, you know, we have Carrie Lee, who's the former CIO of Veterans Affairs. Really big effing deal, you know. When we were bringing in, and we have John Zangardi, who's the former Department of War, Department of Defense CIO. When we were bringing in our CISO, first of all, I called them to say, who do we know? And second of all, you know, they, He spoke to me, he spoke to Zingardi, spoke to another one of our advisors, Epperson, and that was it. That was the interview process. You know what I mean?

Mm-hmm.

Like, it's not, it's about, I wanna find folks who you want as much as you can. My recommendation is have folks in your corner who have seen it all before, know what excellent looks like, even if you don't know what excellent looks like, Have them be a, uh, your, your, your sounding board. And then the other thing is, you know, you bring folks in, you hire fast, you fire fast. You know, like, I'm a huge believer in that. And, and it's not malicious and it's not, um, you know, like, if it's not working out, you're— no one's doing anyone any favors by keeping everyone in the same boat.

Mm-hmm.

And so you part ways with folks professionally. You do it again in a way where, you know, folks are landing on their feet, the whole thing. But if it's not working out, there's no point in forcing it. And that's at any level, by the way. It's just not worth it.

Yeah. I was telling you before when you walked in, my kids wanted to interview me for the podcast. And I think by the time we publish this, that their episode will be live. And one of their questions to me was, have you ever had to fire a friend of yours? And I told them basically exactly what you just said, which I said, The answer is yes, many, multiple times.

Yep.

And, and, but my belief is that if they're not being successful, especially if there's someone— most human beings want to be successful— and if they're not being successful and won't be, it's actually the right thing to— it's the right thing to do to say, hey, you won't— you're not being successful, you won't be. You have to make sure you do it in the right way. But, um, I think that, that a lot of first-time founders, it takes them a long time to to build that fire-fast muscle? 'Cause it is, it's still a human—

Absolutely.

It's a hard thing to do, you know?

Yeah, I lose sleep over it even, you know, I've had to do it recently. And yet it doesn't necessarily get easier from a, like, you brought a friend on and now you have to tell them, sorry, it's not working out. And by the way, it's especially hard, you know, I've had to do it both in, you know, this is not my first company, I've lived through, situations where the company isn't doing well, you know, and for one reason or another, or the market is tanking and et cetera. In some ways, it's almost easier to do it in those situations. I think so, sure. 'Cause you're like, it's not you, it's not me, it's the market. We have to downsize. You know, there's that conversation. I would argue that conversation's actually easier than the conversation where it's like, we're ripping, we have, so many gaps we need to fill and folks we need to hire, and yet you're not working out, and, you know, and so on. That's obviously not how I deliver that news.

Yes.

But, you know, the point being, like, that, that's— it doesn't make it any, any easier. But, you know, at the end of the day, you are responsible. You know, you've been entrusted as the CEO with your customers' trust, your your investors, if you have investors, your employees. And again, you know, if it's gotten to the point where it's clearly not working out for one reason or another, you're letting all of those guys down by not making the hard decisions that you have to make somewhere else. And again, it's, that is your job as CEO. I mean, you have like, you know, I always say like the job of the CEO is pretty simple. It's make sure the company doesn't run outta money. And hire and just make sure the right people are in the right roles and they're unblocked to do their thing. But that's it. That's your whole job. Prioritize accordingly.

I wanna talk more about the Delta Force and paying these people.

Yes.

It took me actually, probably I believed it during BetterClub, but maybe afterwards even more so of the value of the best people. The best people. I think I could have paid my best people, the best 5%, 10%, I probably could have paid them double what they were getting paid.

Yeah.

And still the ROI would have been 20x, 100x, because those people, they attract other good people.

Yes.

They work on a project, everyone gets energized by that. You know that project's getting done. They're gonna come up with ideas that you'll never come up with or no one else. Like, Those people, but for a lot of founders, especially early, especially earlier, oh man, but I'm gonna try to get them for, you know, $50,000 less than what their market rate would be. That's a good idea. Now, of course, that person comes in and starts thinking to themselves, well, I'm crushing it and I'm getting recruiters 'cause obviously I'm great. The people before I work, you know, and, and I think it's hard, actually. It's, it's a very hard thing to, to overpay and then be like, well, this is not fair because this person's in the same role as this person, but this person gets paid 50% more than this person. Right, right. And now looking back, it was so stupid. Like, I—

It's like pennywise, pound-foolish.

Yes.

Right?

And so when you describe it, I love that approach of just, now again, you have to know that they're great or if they're not, let go of them quickly. 'Cause if you're paying that much, you know, it's expensive. But having a team like that—

It's also the mentality of like, go big or go home, you know? And I mean that in a responsible way, right? There's the, You know, the 2020, 2021 go big or go home kind of venture capital world of like money is free, everyone's raising $700 million companies. It's we might not again, you know, and and so that's that's not what I mean. But but I do mean like like you you got to understand. I mean like I'm I'm a big believer in the whole you know paranoia mentality, right? It's not you know I'm I'm I have. Many things in my brain, very optimistic approaches to lots of things. But I also, in the same breath, am also paranoid of whether it's competition or just market changes or whatever it might be, right? Like, you got to have a healthy amount of paranoia to build a business, a successful business. And, and, and back to the point on getting those absolute A-plus superstar Delta Force people, they do 2 things. They enable you to hit all the optimistic and go after the mission and the vision and the targets and the goals. But, you know, they're also, if they're with you, that means they're not with your competitors. That also means, That, you know, they, yeah, like you gotta, you gotta think about their, or, or, or not even forget competition. They're just, they're, they're applying their superpower brain to the problem that—

Yeah.

You wanna solve and, and their, and their energy and their talents and so on. Yeah, I, I look, that said, am I Mark Zuckerberg giving out $100 million salaries? I can't, I, I can't. But if I was in Zuck's shoes and I absolutely, you know, for him it's a rounding error, I think he's doing the exact right thing. You know, I think just money alone is never gonna be enough for people like that.

That's true.

Like, that's what you gotta remember.

That's true.

If they're the best, like—

That's true.

They got plenty of offers. They could go work at a much bigger company and make a lot of, be a lot more liquid immediately. You know what I mean? So at the end of the day, the salary negotiation and comp negotiation you're gonna have with them is only gonna come after them actually being bought in.

Yeah, yeah, makes sense.

And if you've got that level of person bought in, then again, there is a limit, of course, but But I like this philosophy. But they, but by the way, they're not gonna ask, you know, understanding the stage you're at, maybe you're, you know, at this revenue point, at this revenue point, at this revenue point, right? Like, again, if you're, one, one way to tell if they really are as good as, you know, you think they are and they, you're getting feedback that they are and so on, and their reputation says they're, they are, is, you know, they're not gonna ask, if you're a $50 millionaire or company, they're not gonna ask you for $100 million salary, right? Because then they're, like off their rocker.

Right.

You know, like they're, they understand what the maximum kind of within the realm of reasonable is. And, and so yeah, long story short, the like the pennywise pound foolish mentality is, you know, way more expensive than get the very best people you can that you can afford, push as hard as you can to define what afford means. and then go get after it, you know? And then everyone, you know, really makes their, you know, at the end of the day, like, what are you all in for this for? It's, you know, it's growing the company. Hopefully everyone's got equity. Like, that's really where the value comes in anyway, right? So you want them bought in.

Right. I wanna go to the very beginning. I wanna ask you, where did you get your first 10 customers from? Because I ask A lot of guests this, but in your case, to your point about how mission critical this is.

Yes.

For a startup to get 10 people to trust them to run their environment, like how, how did you do that?

Yes. Well, number one, in our particular case, we were not starting with an idea and a PowerPoint deck and a, hey, trust us, take this leap of faith, right? The origin story of Knox is that I, had this problem at a prior company that I co-founded, Class.com. I literally bought a company that was already doing this very mission-critical, you know, running the FedRAMP environment for Adobe. So, it kind of came plugged in with that level of customer. And it wasn't, you know, just for a year or two. By the point I bought them, they had already been serving Adobe for 12, 13 years continuously.

Wow.

So, then that rolled into Class. We did it for class. That was phenomenal. Few, few quarters later, you know, it was very clear that, hey, this is probably useful for others. And so we spun this out as its own entity, bought the IP, et cetera. So, so I will say, you know, from a trust perspective, going to the first 10 customers, having my first, you know, 50 conversations, I could already point to the fact that, yes, we're a very young company as Knox, But just to be clear, this environment is actually very mature.

Battle-tested.

Battle-tested, very mature. And by the way, you know, in our case in particular, FedRAMP is— it's an annually audited environment. It's a monthly monitored environment by the US government. So, you know, long story short, it's like I have like 10 years of tax returns basically to show you like this is legit. You know, that said, Even with all of that under our belt, the biggest question was actually not, you know, can you do this for Adobe? It was, can you actually do this for us? We're not Adobe. Yeah, you guys know Adobe. It almost started working against us because it was like, well, you guys know that environment so well, of course you can handle it, but we're a brand new customer and you don't know our environment, and how could you possibly run it securely? You don't know anything about us. And so where I think we were able to cross the, you know, where do we get our first 10 customers? Number one, it's, you know, look, if you're starting a business like you, I mean, you have to network wherever you can, you know?

Mm-hmm.

And for me, that meant I was calling up a lot of my, you know, fellow you know, friends who run companies. Some are in the kind of $20 million to $50 million range, some are a little bigger. But the point is, you, you can't be shy to, you know, it's not build it and they will come. Like, you gotta go get 'em. And so I, you know, I called up a bunch of friends who, again, are either running companies, they're the CEO, or they are in leadership positions across those companies and said, hey, you know, are you guys doing anything in federal or have tried to or whatever? And that hit rate was probably, I don't know, 5%, something like that. The other thing that I'll say is never be, you know, particularly, you know, we don't— I've never used this term, but Silicon Valley loves this term, you know, design partners.

Hmm.

I think it's a great idea. I think, you know, it doesn't mean you have to give someone something for free. In fact, I think it's important to charge. Otherwise you're just, you know, you're getting, you know, Brett Taylor calls these folks AI tourists, you know, when, you know, folks try to call Sierra to AI and, you know, kick the tires. And he's like, that's why we charge for pilots. It's not like we need your money. It's just like, don't waste our time, you know? So I think it is important to charge. But long story short, you want to meet them where they're at. That's number one. Meaning in our case, that meant my CTO and my chief architect were on all of the original calls. It wasn't just me.

Hmm.

And that might be overkill and you might think, oh, well, why are you bringing, you know, why are you wasting the technical team's time on this? I don't believe in that. Like, when it's early days, like, you gotta get, You know, like, particularly in our industry, getting that trust. Well, a lot of it was actually my chief architect, Casey, and my CTO, CJ, them being so knowledgeable on this, 'cause they were literally the guys that have been running this environment since day one, since 2011. Just talking to them as a CISO or a VP of security or whatever, who's kind of like, FedRAMP in 90 days? No way. You have a half-hour conversation with either one of them, And it's like, oh shit, this person really knows everything about this. Like, like I've never met anyone more knowledgeable about this. And oh, by the way, they actually run this. It's not that just they're talking. So, so, you know, that's the other thing I'll say that's maybe a little bit more generalizable, which is, you know, don't— I, I would not take an approach of like, well, you know, the business people do the business stuff and the tech people do the tech stuff. Like, at the beginning, you're, you're in survival mode and you gotta get And then the last thing is, meaning no meeting is beneath anyone. And then the last thing is, I'm a big, big believer in using the power of driving urgency with external events that just create a momentum around deal. And in our case, that was early on. It was, we got 2 customers across the finish line, literally because the RSA conference was coming up. And I was like, well guys, it would be a really great place for you to announce that you're FedRAMPed at the RSA conference, because there's a lot of relevant buyers, not just the government, but also, hey, if you're FedRAMPed, like you're, that means you're really secure.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

It's a really nice place to say, I'm really secure, at one of the top security conferences on the planet out of the year. And that stuff, people get it, and it works. And the power of a press release, the power of using those types of forcing functions above and beyond a, hey, it's the end of the quarter, and your discount, you know, expires on April 1st. That works too, by the way, don't get me wrong. But especially early on, that's not your leverage. Your leverage is not, oh, I'm so amazing, I'll give you a discount if you sign by this date, because they're like, why am I even signing? You need to show them what's in it for them. The other piece that I will, the last piece I'll say is, this is more, this is not about the first 10 customers so much, but it is about at least where I have found, just in general, if you can, if whatever service product that you're selling, in Knox's case, we are a TAM expander for our customers. We enable our customers to now serve an entire market that they previously either were completely shut out of, or it was very, very challenging for them to get into because they had to deploy their software on-premise. And that's, you know, I don't need to tell you about like, there is a reason SaaS has taken off in the last 25 years. It's a little bit easier than for everyone than, than, than on-prem rack deployments. So, not every business is gonna have that ability. I get that. And I've been in the, in the other side of it. But as much as you can get away from, hey, I'm just here to save you money to do a thing you're already doing, but better, but a little better and a little cheaper. To I'm going to unlock something for you that is a a whole new revenue stream for you. That is always going to go over better, assuming you can actually deliver. And two, you are now all of a sudden not dealing with a cost center owner within your buyer set, right? Within a buyer set, you could have you know the CEO. You could have Someone who owns the P&L, or you could have someone who owns a cost center like a CISO. Well, now all of a sudden I've elevated the discussion from a CISO to the CEO who is a P&L owner and, you know, can appreciate the upside. That completely changes the game. And it's interesting because that I've seen now, totally not my industry, but I see it with my customers, outcome-based pricing. You know, I know Palantir was doing this, you know, early days, but they were kind of alone very much. And now I see a lot of the AI companies are the application layer AI companies, you know, Sierra AI, they charge for resolved ticket, you know, and, and everything, all the other stuff, they're not, you pay nothing, you know, outcome-based pricing is, is, you know, it's a little bit of both, right? Cost saving and, and upside, but And then of course there's, you know, true outcomes-based and kind of sharing in the what we unlocked for you type of pricing that, again, I think Palantir is very good at. But there's more and more companies that are doing that now. Very interesting. And I think it comes back to exactly that. If you can be on the revenue side rather than on the cost-saving side, Getting, whether it's the first 10 customers or the next 100, is a very different ballgame.

Yeah, so, because when I, when I said, you know, what, what are the, how'd you get your first 10 customers? You said, I reached out to friends who ran companies, and it's actually a non-intuitive answer to the type of product that you, when you say that, it's like—

Exactly right.

That's kind of interesting. I would expect you to say that you went to all the CISOs you know.

That's right.

But that's not what you said.

That's right.

And then you just explained that, which to me, Even when we first met and you told me this, I was like, that is not who I expect the buyer to be. But then when you talk about it as TAM expansion, it makes a million percent sense that the CEO is sitting there saying, we have this, this, all this opportunity, this white space that we literally cannot go service.

Correct.

And in our strategy sessions, we keep saying, well, having been through it, we'll do that when we're bigger, when we can deal with the—

That's right.

All of that stuff. And now someone shows up and says, you want access to all of that?

Yeah. I'm gonna lower the hurdle from a complexity perspective. I'm not gonna lower the hurdle from a cybersecurity perspective, but I'm gonna lower the hurdle from a complexity and compliance perspective. And now all of a sudden you can go hunt in that environment. Yeah, it's very interesting to folks. Now, of course, by the way, that's not to discount the CISO, right? The CISO gets involved, right? Like, you know, so they are, that's why, you know, we were at RSA and we're at Black Hat and, you know, all—

The CEO can make a much faster decision Of course. On spending that money and—

Absolutely. Every single time, every single time. And that's why, you know, it's an, I still spend a lot of my time with investors even though I'm not actively raising, et cetera.

Right.

Because I find investors are like my best referral.

Interesting.

You know, network, right? I, you know, if a fund hasn't heard of us, you know, I'm like, hey, by the way, I'm probably already serving someone in your portfolio company, so go call them. You know, they're probably customer of mine already. But even if they're not, the amount of conversations I have with investors, whether they're private equity folks, growth equity folks, or even more traditional VCs who are like, wait, this is fascinating. I need to go introduce you to like 2 or 3 companies.

Okay.

'Cause, look, I feel for VCs. My husband actually runs a fund, very successful deep tech fund. And You know, I see it all the time. Like, there is a, you know, what did Travis Kalanick just say? Like, I don't know, last week he's like, look, like, VCs, it's hard for them to be legitimately helpful above and beyond, you know, the check they write. Because how could, you know, you live this every day, all the time. You're in this market 'cause you probably lived this problem years before you even started the business. And they have, you know, a portfolio of like, it's irrational for them to be like legitimately helpful to you all the time, every quarter type of thing. So that's a, that's an insane expectation of them. So if, if, if I, Irina, as CEO of Knox, can, can, you know, whisper in an investor's ear and be like, just FYI, next time you hear FedRAMP and someone just writes it off during a board meeting, you should at least pipe up and say, well, actually there's a bunch of companies who have gotten FedRAMP super fast for, you know, way cheaper. This company Knox does it. You should at least call them. The amount of time that, I don't know, there's probably 20 or 30 companies that are customers of ours that were introduced that way. So it is a very, it is highly compelling because when the investor says that to the CEO, well, that's a massive unlock for them.

Mm-hmm.

That's like, whoa, you just legitimately solved my problem, investor, rather than, We pontificated in a strategy session and like maybe it was helpful, maybe it wasn't, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

So, um, yeah, yeah.

But all different go-to-markets than I would have assumed, you know?

Totally.

I would never, honestly, I wouldn't have ever guessed that this would be the, that this would be the path. But it makes, when you say it, it makes complete sense.

Yeah. So it's, um, uh, and, and yeah, and I, uh, encourage, um, everyone to really—

But this goes to the start of the conversation just in terms about really understanding your customer, understanding where the value is here.

Exactly. And in many ways, I am my customer. I've been my customer. I am my— I understand how my customer thinks, right? Which is, you know, it's a very like Jerry Maguire, like, show me the money, right? You know, like, what— why am I investing in this? Okay, well, if there's real opportunity, uh, to, to go after this market, then great. Or, or if there's a halo effect, right? Like, particularly again, I can only speak to my business. Half of my customers, they're not getting FedRAMP'd just so that they could serve the US government and the Pentagon and so on. They're doing it so they could be more competitive when they're going after RFPs to serve JP Morgan, to serve Kaiser Permanente, to serve Coca-Cola, et cetera. What do all of those have to do with one another? They're all big. They're Some are more regulated than others, but at the end of the day, they care a lot about security. They have a lot to lose. They have information that people want to go get and data people want to go get, whether it's a bank, a hospital system, or just a big enterprise company, pharma company, whatever, right? And people are hacking them all the time. And if you can come in with whatever you sell, cyber solution, a business productivity solution, a whatever point solution, if you can come in and say, oh, by the way, of course, through our procurement process, we're going to have to do a cyber review of my solution, that's understood. But FYI, my solution has actually already been diligenced by the US Air Force, and by the DHS, and by the Treasury Department of the United States, which runs a tiny little thing called the IRS. They care a lot about data security over there. Just FYI. So when you're doing your diligence, again, kick the tires, do all the things, but also know that this has already been pre-diligenced. It makes a big difference in that sales process. Of course it would, right? Of course it would. Because all of a sudden the counterparty, whether it's again Kaiser Permanente or JPMorgan or Coca-Cola CISO is sitting there saying, well, that just seems like a safer place to put Stuff, just common sense-wise.

Right.

You know, so, um, I, we, we, you know, you gotta understand your customer.

Yeah. Given all of this, given that you were the customer before, like you mentioned, given all, was it very easy to fundraise?

Um, I would say, I, I, I would not say it was easy, you know, I, and, and, and, and I'll put, Into the easy bucket. I mean, there's like a million memes on the internet about like, if you were, you can leave OpenAI, if you're at OpenAI or Anthropic or whatever today, you can like, just be a Stanford dropout, have worked at OpenAI for 2 quarters, leave, put a deck together, and immediately someone will give you $100 million.

I think before you put the deck together.

Before you even put the deck together, just have that resume.

Exactly.

So long story short, like there are certainly companies even today that, and CEOs and so on that, you know, just on the idea of someone or just on someone's profile, long story short, the fundraise takes, you know, a few weeks at most. That was not our case. Our case, in our case, we took about 6 months to raise the seed round. And we took probably 3 months to raise the A. So, you know, it wasn't— so I'd say we were kind of average, maybe. I would say the biggest objection that we heard was, who cares about this market? Like, who cares about the US government? Who cares about— you know, we're certainly in like a little bit of a defense tech bubble, right? Maybe bubble, maybe not bubble. But, you know, there's certain defense tech is having a moment. You know, we are decidedly very much not defense tech, right? Like, if you listen to the customers I'm rattling off, very few of my customers are pure-play defense tech companies. Now, we're very honored to serve some that are very, like, specific to law enforcement and so on. There's Vannevar Labs, Peregrine, wonderful, wonderful companies. The vast majority of the folks we serve have very robust commercial businesses. whether it's in healthcare or just enterprise in general, and they're saying, hey, I have such a great product, battle-tested in the wonderful world of capitalist commercial world, that I would also like to bring to the US government, which is exactly our mission. Our mission is to unlock access to cutting-edge technology for the US government. It doesn't need to be a defense tech ERP, it should just be the best ERP, and then the VA should have access to it, stuff like that. So, So long story short, the feedback from investors was, you know, we don't understand the TAM, we don't understand like, is this really a big enough problem? And again, a lot of it is because, yeah, we started very niche and, or, you know, it's a very niche until it isn't, you know, and, you know, you as a, someone, you know, as someone, as a CEO, you, and as just a team that starts a company, you have kind of, you know, Brett Taylor said this, like, you have kind of 2 options. You could either go after a really big TAM that everyone knows is a big TAM, but the downside is you're gonna have a lot of competition because everyone knows it's a big TAM. So everyone's gonna go after it. And, you know, may the best provider win, or providers. And, you know, he said that about Sierra because obviously Sierra's in a huge, total addressable market, you know, like every call center on the planet is his target market and then some. And indeed, I mean, they are the leaders in their space, but it is a very competitive market. You know, there's probably 10 players that I could think of off the top of my head that have like over $100 million in ARR in that market. Or you could go super niche and no one believes that it's a huge market again until you prove and show that it is. At the end of the day, you know, you only need one, you know, investor to pull the trigger.

Yep.

And kind of, you know, facilitate the round. And, you know, I'm very grateful that in both of those fundraisers, we had options and we ended up, you know, choosing in some cases, actually in both cases, not necessarily the highest valuation either. It was very much, you know, working with the right people, with, with the right, you know, muscles that their firms and partners themselves could bring to the table. And, you know, I wouldn't change anything about it. But, you know, long story short, the grass is always greener. You know, it's like, oh, I, you know, you could wish like, oh, I was in a much bigger TAM, but, you know, yeah, it's just gonna be more competitive, you know? So which devil do you wanna fight? That's such a good, that's such a good call. And I wanna underline that.

and taking the term sheets and taking the investors that maybe, you know, in this case sounds like didn't have the highest valuation.

Yeah.

And this is something I just, I, so many, you know, you talk to Y Combinator founders and they just, their self-worth is tied to what is the valuation I can, how can I maximize the valuation of what I raise? I have, there's just a—

The valuation hangover is real, friends. It's very real.

It's very real. And you don't, when you're in it, when you're in it, you're like, oh, they'll gimme that valuation. Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna take that. And then of course all those people from '21, you know, now we're seeing it and we're gonna see the same thing probably 3, 4 years from today where people are gonna go, oh man, when I was doing $3 million, I should not have raised it a billion. That was probably not a good idea.

That was, yeah, there was a little bit of a mismatch there.

Exactly.

Yeah.

But when you're in it, you know, you— Oh no, I was— this is, I lived through it.

I, you know, I, this is obviously not about that experience, but I literally did exactly that. You know, like basically, you know, almost those numbers to the T. And yeah, that valuation hangover is real.

Very real.

You know, it's hard to hit those targets because you sign up for totally insane, you know, multiples that, you know, the thing that you gotta remember when you do that is like you don't control the, you know, ARR multiple or the EBITDA multiple. I mean, usually it's on ARR. That is gonna be in the market a few years from now. Like, that's completely market driven. And so, you, you know, you gotta be careful because if you are gonna need more money and it's 2 years— 2 to 3. 2 to 3 years from now. Now, if you have a path to profitability, totally different animal. But if you, if you're gonna need more money and, you know, the market swings and now, you know, no one wants to come in at, $2 billion.

Yeah, right.

You know, it's, it's, um, like you, you, you are, you're giving up a lot of control and for what? You know, I think it's actually a very, it's a, an underrated superpower to actually have a low valuation. 'Cause, oh, by the way, you know, we, we talked about hiring folks. Um, there's a hell of a story to be told in terms of, you know, recruiting folks and, and, you know, look, at the end of the day, again, I can't pay Google salaries and I can't, But when I tell folks like, hey, you know, you're getting equity that was issued at, you know, when we were 10x smaller, no matter what happens in the market, we are just by definition worth more than what that was priced at.

Yeah, you're in the money.

You're in the money. You are in the money no matter what happens.

Unfortunately, most people don't. Maybe the Delta Force people understand it. I would say the vast majority—

That's right. No, I—

Executives, you know, even executives. And you start explaining and they're like, no, no, but they're worth $15 billion. I'm like, I understand actually that's bad for you.

Yeah.

Not good for you.

Yeah. You're not, yeah. Can you 10x from there? You know, like, whereas I'm telling you, you're coming in, you're already up 10. Like, it's pretty good, you know? Like, so it's, yeah, it's a, it's very real. Now that said, again, depending on the industry, you know, like, I think the like SoftBank mentality, Yeah. It's probably not only SoftBank anymore, but I just know it from 2020, 2021 mentality of like, you know, even like Travis Kalanick at Uber, like he talked a lot about this, which is, you know, my competitive advantage at Uber for a while is just I had more money than everyone else and I could, you know, like literally the VCs were funding all of our $10 Uber rides. Now, I haven't seen a $10 Uber ride in years, but you know, the point being, You just outraise your competitors, right? And you kind of crush 'em with insane economics and then figure it out later, right? Type of thing. After you hit critical mass and you've annihilated all the competition. It works in some cases for sure. Clearly Uber is a great example of that. So I'm not saying it's—

For everyone that it works in it, but for every—

Doesn't work for every scenario that it works. You're exactly right. Like there's a ton of—

There's DoorDashes, there's the Ubers, there's these stories that, but there's so many, you know, that they've outlasted that we're literally trying to do the same, totally the same thing.

I mean, look at the delivery market, right? The GoPuffs and so on of the world like that. It's a really tough business. And so, uh, or it's a tough strategy to, to, you know, to, um, again, I am not like, I don't have a personal dog in the fight on the AI, like true AI race, at least From what I can tell, um, there is— the lessons have been learned from 2021, and folks are as much as possible going to, you know, there is outcome-based pricing.

Right.

There is, you know, there are these other pricing models as opposed to just it's a, it's a race to the bottom. The way the labs are doing it, you know, we'll, we'll see if, uh, if they can sustain it. But anyway, point being, It is a— the valuation game is, it's— you are playing, you're basically, you're driving a car very, very fast at that point and you have no room for error.

Exactly.

You know, and you are going up the winding roads of, you know, whatever, you know, the Capri and like, you better know what you're doing because— and hope that literally nothing goes wrong. Otherwise, like, that is just kind of— it's just really tough to raise at those valuations.

Yes. What is the biggest challenge you face? I know it's only been a short period of time, but what's the biggest challenge you've faced since starting Knox and how have you overcome it if you have?

Well, certainly, you know, getting great people is, but we've talked plenty about that. Some of the other bigger challenges, you know, I'll take this in a slightly different direction, which is, you know, we had a thesis early on at Knox around just pure technology. that is AI-specific, which was that, you know, we should, you know, we can kind of throw everything into these models. And specifically for us, it's around remediation. So, just to kind of boil it down into plain English, you know, what is FedRAMP? What is, it doesn't even matter what baseline, like, at the end of the day, it's about keeping government data secure. Like, that's what we do all day long. And the way you keep something secure, is you, hopefully you built it secure by design, but then of course you're gonna, you know, even stuff you used is going to be vulnerable at some point in the future because someone has figured out a way to break into it. And so, what you do is you continuously monitor an environment, you scan for vulnerabilities, et cetera, and then you have to fix them, and you have to fix them quickly. Because the time between, I mean, we've seen it ever, even since you and I last caught up, OpenAI has hacked Hugging Face and, you know, Anthropic has, I don't think they've yet disclosed the 3 other companies they've, you know, autonomously hacked. The point is, in the cybersecurity world, it is now, you know, everyone knows we've gone from, you know, 45 days on average to get to a zero-day. to hours. And that means that as— so that's on the attacker side. So on the defender side, that means I have minutes to close a gap because the attacker's coming very, very fast. We took— we had a thesis at the beginning of Knox, which was, okay, we obviously, as this environment grows, assuming we're even moderately successful, we are going to have a lot of fixes that need to be patched all the time for vulnerabilities that we're finding. And the way we should do that is we should, of course, leverage AI, and we should use the state-of-the-art techniques that were around in early 2025 and mid-2025 as they relate to using the models to, you know, basically create agents that will do things, whether that's push a patch or whatever. Long story short, again, not to get into all the technicals, also because I think my CTO would be in a much better position to articulate the technical reasons, but long story short, it was the wrong technique to leverage these AI models. Also, I don't have to tell anyone listening, between mid-2025 and even end of 2025, let alone everything that's happened this year, the way in which you can build with AI, the way in which you can lower the amount of hallucinations and take them to zero, the way in which you can have AI check AI's work, all of these things, how much harnesses have evolved, all of these pieces of the technology have evolved dramatically. So long story short, what that meant from just a pure developing, building out Knox is we basically had blow up the first iteration of our auto-remediation platform, Knox AI, and basically rebuild it in 2026 with everything that's, that A, we've learned, and also B, that, you know, where the industry has gone. And, you know, I'd be lying if I said that wasn't a challenge. You know, like, who wants to hear, oh, hey, all the stuff you invested in, All of last year, just kill it, you know? No, and there's, you know, there's always like the, it's like a classic, you know, tale as old as time, you know, engineering always wants to refactor everything.

Right, yeah, yeah.

And the business, you know, the CEO's always like, stop it, like, stop re— you know, redo it, like, just, you know, put a little bit into tech debt and just keep moving, you know, we gotta keep moving forward. And, you know, long story short, it was— there wasn't like one necessarily kind of come-to-Jesus moment that, you know, me and the CTO had. But, but it was over the course of, you know, probably a quarter where it just became very clear that, you know, we're throwing good money after bad, if you will, if we keep going down this path that is clearly just the inferior technology roadmap. And that, that You know, that takes a lot of trust and it takes, you know, you just, you gotta like, you know, eat your vegetables type of like, you just gotta like suck it up and do it. And I think at the end of the day, what I took away from it was if you're gonna do something that's such a hard pivot or, you know, a hard decision, an expensive decision, You, as much as possible, need to validate that the new one is actually working. I mean, it sounds really basic and common sense, but I believe many very insightful things are actually just come back to like basics and common sense, which is, okay, fine, we're gonna try this new approach. Let's make sure that As early as possible, whatever we can do, whatever thing we can measure, whatever, you know, MVP we can, we can test it out here, whatever that is. Let's, let's invest the extra time, dollars, people, whatever, to build those out now so that, you know, long story short, I don't wanna get, you know, if I'm flying a plane, I don't wanna get halfway across the country only to know that I was going the wrong way the whole time.

Mm-hmm.

Like, let me buy the instruments now to tell me where the heck I'm going so that I can course correct sooner, faster this second time around. And that served us well.

Mm-hmm.

So, that I would say was one of the more, you know, unexpected turns we had to take. But I'm glad we did it, and we're still learning. And by the way, you know, we're not immune to this happening all over again.

Right, right. Of course.

You know, especially when you're leveraging state-of-the-art tech.

Right.

You know, but at least now we also have a muscle as a leadership team and as a management team and as a company that, okay, if this happens, fine. But there are things that don't change, which is how are we validating that the new thing is working again. How do we get more comfort faster or kill it faster? Let's, you know, and again, we learned a lot about how to, how to do that.

I want to transition to your background. And did you, when you were growing up, did you know that you wanted to be a founder, an entrepreneur, a CEO, a leader?

No, I certainly, first of all, I didn't know what entrepreneur meant. I just, you know, founder, and it's like, now it's like obviously cool, and like people know what it is, and that it's like even a job that you can like, like kids know that that's a job. This was not the case when I was growing up. You know, I mean, you probably tell by my name, I'm an immigrant, and You know, I come from, you know, Eastern Europe and, you know, as from, from, you know, the former Soviet Union. And, you know, both my parents are engineers and I kind of thought that, you know, whatever I do, it's gotta be like rooted in math and science. And 'cause those jobs tend to be forever type of jobs.

Mm-hmm.

So, at least have a good foundation in them, even if you don't end up being a developer or whatever, like have a strong foundation in that. But yeah, I mean, running a company was totally foreign to me 'cause again, Soviet Union's socialism.

Yeah.

The birth of socialism, the no ownership of anything is kind of a crazy thing. Now you think there was a whole period of 70 years when there was no private enterprise in one of the biggest, landmass countries on Earth. It's crazy. No wonder it failed spectacularly. But for me, I think 2 things really opened my eyes to it. One, I went to— I didn't even know this was a thing. I just thought I was going to a good school and this was a good program to go to. But I did a dual degree undergrad program at UPenn, and one of the degrees was a business degree, a finance— I ended up doing the finance version of it, but at Wharton. And I mean, when I tell you, like, again, I don't come from a family of finance background at all. I remember sitting in my freshman year class and someone said, oh, the iBanking interviews are happening. And this was right around the time when the iPhone was coming out. And I was like, oh, it must be like an iPhone thing. Again, I just, I just didn't know. I very quickly learned what iBanking was, especially at Wharton. It's a very strong funnel from straight from the graduation post into, you know, Goldman and Morgan Stanley and so on. But, you know, long story short, like, I really didn't know any of it. But what it did, what it did open my eyes to was just like, you know, the capital markets that companies get, you know, that there's this whole thing of like, running companies, operating companies, et cetera. So, and I ended up after college going into management consulting to learn whatever one learns in management consulting about running a company. At the very least, it taught me how to make some slides. I would say it taught me a lot more than that.

Yeah.

And a very, very good foundation, at least just to, you know, learn to be an adult in a room type of thing. But then I would say the other pieces, Is, is, you know, certainly the, the, the, the world in the United States at least has changed in that obviously there has been a lot more over the last 15, 10, 15 years. You know, again, just the culture has changed that, you know, there is this incredible double, triple, 10x-ing down on, there's a real capital market here that will invest in people's ideas. And, and see what happens. And, and, you know, you could see it with obviously the number of venture-backed startups. You could see it with the growth of the venture industry, the growth of the, you know, just private investment in general industry. And, and, and, and I, I'm in many ways I'm a product of, you know, kind of growing up during that time where I just was able to see especially how technology has, has enabled folks to start businesses, et cetera. So, and I would say, you know, it's, it's, it's, it has been ex, you know, ex, certainly it wasn't planned this way, but I'm, I'm, you know, the, the, I don't know, kismet maybe you could call it, the, of, of, of what ended up being the company that I'm running, you know, going back to the whole immigrant piece, you know, One thing that being an immigrant does for you is, at least I can say for myself, is I certainly am never gonna compete on patriotism to this country with our armed services men and women and our veterans and so on. But I would say, I would venture to, I would posit that immigrants are right below the level of patriotism after our armed service men and women because we know what it's like. like to live here, you know? And we're not confused about like what country did, did we, you know, what's the best place on earth to, to, to just live, you know, and to have opportunity and economic opportunity and all of it. Like, we're not confused. It's here. It's like full stop. It's not literally anywhere else. It's not in Europe.

Mm-hmm.

It's not in Australia, it's not in Asia, it's here. And so, you know, again, this was not necessarily why I started Knox, but certainly the mission of Knox To me is actually very personal because it's like, hey, we're here to unlock access to cutting-edge technology for the U.S. government. I think it's insane that the U.S. government—that is not the sole reason why the U.S. is you know such a capital capital magnet and innovation magnet and talent magnet and all of it—but it's certainly you know it's the sine qua non. The that without which not, you know what I mean? Like, you, you couldn't have, uh, the legal system we have, the capital market system we have, the just all of what we have. You couldn't have Silicon Valley if it wasn't for the US government. And, uh, and the fact that that government doesn't have access to the stuff that's invented in Silicon Valley and then developed and grown across the United States. And then of course, you know, there's lots of companies that come here to grow their, You know, whether they're founded in Israel or Europe or Asia or whatever, you know, long story short, the fact that like they don't have access to that is wild to me. So it did kind of come full circle a little bit from a personal perspective. But that is, yeah, a little bit of what gives me even more personal connection to like, I want this to succeed on a number of levels for a number of reasons.

Yeah. You know, did you in your career, have you had a mentor or someone, you know, that's kind of helped you, you know, through this journey? Maybe just the journey you're in now with Knox, even before, like, have you had someone like that?

For sure. Lots of people, certainly some more than others. You know, I worked for 10 years, I worked under the same CEO, a guy named Michael Chasen, who was CEO the first technology company I worked at, PrecisionHawk, where I was on the leadership team, worked very closely with him. We grew that from 0 to 30 ARR, and then we co-founded Class.com together. And he's a super seasoned entrepreneur. He founded Blackboard back in the days, so like SaaS 1.0, you know, grew that to— You used that. Yeah, right. I was like, oh, I literally used that in college. You know, grew that to, you know, multiple hundreds of millions of revenue. Sold that, took it public, took it private with private equity. So, you know, long story short, you know, that's to me, that was such a gift to work under him for so long because, you know, he is just a seasoned operator, you know, and I learned so much from like, how do you really, you know, get stuff done and how do you really grow a business and how do you be aggressive? And, you know, a lot of my philosophy around, you know, being You know, not being penny-wise, pound-foolish really comes from him. 'Cause he, he was always like, you know, 'cause, you know, he, you know, I very much had a little bit of a shortcut of like, I didn't have to like make these mistakes myself. I could just kind of—

Right.

You know, see it live in front of me where he was, you know, I'd be like, we're overpaying. And he'd be like, you don't understand. Like, you are not gonna regret paying top dollar and then some for an acquisition, a person, a whatever. 'Cause if it's going to absolutely change the trajectory of this company, who cares about an extra whatever, you know? So anyway, so that's certainly one. I would say, you know, equally so, my husband actually. So he's on the venture side, and so he sees the totally different, you know, aspect of how to grow companies. And, you know, it's interesting, right? VCs, They invest, and and then generally people are either calling them because something really amazing is happening or something is absolutely blowing up. Like it is, you are in firefighting mode all the time, or you're in opportunity chasing mode. Like it is a very high intensity job, and you know, just kind of learning through him about companies big and small and what they've gone through and how they've solved it, and and and he himself is is brilliant at. navigating all that, I have leveraged, you know, his guidance and his expertise a ton, you know, more than anyone really. So I would say those 2. And then in general, I'm just a big, I love reading and, well, mainly audiobooking because I don't have like the patience to sit down and read. But I don't know, I pick up like a little bit from, all sorts of, certainly like business biographies are great, but, you know, I like right now I'm reading, you know, Lyndon Johnson's biography.

Mm-hmm.

Like, he was not a business guy, but that guy knew how to get stuff done in a, you know, especially in DC where, you know, I'm, I'm having to get some stuff done in DC and I'm learning a lot even though, you know, he was whatever, 70 years ago that he was doing his thing. You know, human nature doesn't change that much. So it's, I don't know, I think maybe not everyone agrees, but I think there's a lot of like very practical, no shit advice that you can, and learnings you can get from that kind of stuff. Meaning like from reading biographies rather than, and certainly even like I just finished Michael Dell's biography.

Yeah.

I thought that was great, you know? Well, really well done and really cool to get into his brain. You know, his stuff's like $20 and you got some pretty cool wisdom out of it on your own time, you know? And you didn't even have to like figure out a way to get into the, a room with Michael Dell.

Right.

You know, I don't know, it's pretty cool. So yeah, that's how.

Awesome. Um, last question for you. Knowing everything you know today, all the experiences you've had, what is the one piece of advice you'd go back and give yourself before you started your first I would just double down on, you know, like, don't give up even when it's really like, it will never be easy.

No matter what you do, it's never gonna be easy. Push through, find a way. I've, as I keep going, I just believe it more and more. Just find a way, push through. And the other thing I'll say is like, you know, integrity is everything. Like, it's, you know, you're not doing it right if you haven't been in situations where folks are gonna ask you to compromise your integrity for a business deal, whatever. And that's when you, like, that's when you get tested and, you know, make sure you choose right every single time. Uh, and, and, and you treat people with integrity. You, you, you display integrity, you treat people with integrity, you expect integrity of others. You know, that like at the end of the day, if you're, if you're a CEO, you're in business, it, it's a relationship thing at the end. Like it is a people thing through and through. Uh, you, you will not go very far if, uh, if you compromise on that.

Irina, thank you very much.

Thank you so much.

I really enjoyed this and, uh, We probably could have gone for a couple of hours, but, you know.

Well, I appreciate you having me.

Thank you very much. And for those listening and watching, I hope you enjoyed. And if you did, please share this out with your networks, and we'll see you for the next episode of Not Another CEO Podcast.