S9E6: Optimizing Security and Compliance Using Vanta’s Trust Management for SaaS Businesses with Vanta CEO Christina Cacioppo

And I think the thing at Vanta we've learned is the blessing and curse of software is you're only as good as the last thing you've released. So you do just need to keep shipping things for customers, and that's fundamentally the most important thing.

Welcome back to Season 9 of The Room Podcast. Claudia, happy Tuesday.

Happy Tuesday, Madison. Thrilled to be back behind the mic with you. Since last season, you've had a few updates on your end. You're now at Harvard Business School. Congratulations.

Thank you so much, Claudia. It's been a dream of mine for some time to attend, and I'm thrilled to be back on the East Coast this fall. You'll have to keep me updated on what's going on in the Bay Area news and all things Pryve, where you're still co-CEO and co-founder.

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Welcome back to another episode of The Room Podcast. Today we are excited to share our conversation as we sit down with unicorn founder Christina Cacioppo, co-founder and CEO of Vanta. Vanta is an automated security monitoring platform that helps companies get SOC 2, HIPAA, or ISO certified quickly. Vanta has raised $203 million in funding to date from funds such as Kraft Ventures and Sequoia, including $110 million raised in June of last year that values the company at over $1.6 billion. Christina, in turn, is on Forbes' list of America's Richest Self-Made Women. In today's episode, we dive into Christina's founding story and we discuss topics such as transitioning from product manager to founder and the path of finding a problem to solve, product and marketing differentiation in the competitive landscape of enterprise SaaS, and building out an early enterprise go-to-market team in Motion. We hope you enjoy today's conversation. Let's open the door.

Christina, thank you so much for joining us today in The Room.

Thank you so much for having me.

We're thrilled to have you. And before we dive into your founding story with Vanta, we always like to start at the beginning with our guests. So we're curious, where did you grow up and how has that shaped your view of the world?

I grew up in the Midwest in Columbus, Ohio, and it's hard to tell 'cause I only grew up there, not elsewhere, but I, I definitely have a strong appreciation for the Midwest of the US. It's more than just flyover state. And my parents were both professors and loved what they did, and I think I just assumed all adults were like that. It took me quite a while to realize that's not everybody's experience.

That's fair. I do think when you're growing up, your parents and what they do and how they interact with the world does incredibly inform how you think about what your possible career paths can be. In that vein of early identity, did you always think you were gonna become a founder?

Not at all. I didn't know the word founder probably until I was about 20. I think I did expect that I'd work on something again that I really liked because that's what I thought all adults did.

I read somewhere that perhaps what could have been conceived as your earliest venture had something to do with Beanie Babies. Could you share a little bit more about what that maybe non-founder journey was like?

I was a very curious kid and in some way wanted to make money to see if I could. It wasn't really actually about the dollars at the end of the day. It was more, I think, about actually having a score. That's what I think it was. But anyway, one thing I did was tried to sell my old toys on eBay, very much including— I'm starting with Beanie Babies. And I was like, break-even successful, call it. This was not super lucrative, but there was a while where I was, you know, biking to the post office, biking to get money orders because it was pre-internet payments, and I didn't have a credit card at 11, 12 years old anyway. That was like a game and a puzzle to be solved, and I track how well I was doing with it.

I love that. And I think having that curiosity as a kid does really inform where you think you are going to go in the world. And Claudia and I had our own forays into lemonade stands, Beanie Baby hustling. I had a personal blog on Blogger way back when that was a thing. So love finding those passions early on, which maybe don't necessarily become what you do later on, but teach you a lot along the way.

Christina, you attended Stanford for undergrad where you received a degree in economics and master's in management science and engineering, which is incredible. But your first role out of college, Union Square Ventures in venture capital on the other side of the able. Madison is very familiar with that side. Did this ultimately lead you into the founder journey in 2013 with Nebula Labs? Tell us a little bit about this first gig out of college.

It was great in a million ways, and I'm so appreciative to USC and to Brad and Fred and Albert who hired me in 2010 there. When I joined, I probably did want to be a founder, but I was not admitting that to myself, let alone anybody else, because it was, there was a bit of, I don't know enough. I don't know the right things, whatever they are. And for 2 years I just spent as much time as I could meeting founders, and it was probably 5 to 10 different founders a week for 2 years straight. And so I just got to see so many people in general, and then I got very close to a couple too, with friends, and saw all the different ways you can be successful and all the different backgrounds people come from or ways they go about it or the ways they think about building their company. There was something that was pretty meaningful in there for me, where whatever notion I had of I'm not X or Y enough, or don't know A, B, or C, I either found somebody who was, you know, not X or Y, who I felt like I saw myself in, and developed the confidence that I could teach myself, or I wanted to try to at least teach myself to, to learn what I thought I needed to know. And again, I think I was just seeing literally hundreds of other founders, and so it was really helpful in breaking whatever model I had of it.

And when you were going into realizing you too could be a founder after meeting, you know, hundreds of founders, I resonate with that POV from the point of view of being a former venture capitalist as well, and thinking through, okay, how could I do this on the other side? Sometimes I look at Claudia and I don't even know how she's doing it. But you made the plunge to found Nebula in 2013. Tell us a little bit more about what was that aha moment that was that first company, and then the story there, which ultimately did lead you to Dropbox.

So when I left USV, one chip I still had on my shoulder was I couldn't code. And lots of people start companies and can't code or don't need to code. And I'm not trying to say that everyone needs to, but I think for me in particular, I felt if I wanna start a software company and I don't deeply understand software by being able to build with it. So what I actually did was I left USV and taught myself to code and taught myself to build a bunch of products and made a bunch of stuff, none of which you've ever heard of cuz almost all of it was quite bad. As it is when you're learning how to do something new. And so what Nebula was, was the joke was stars come from nebulas. So Nebula was like, we're going to make a bunch of things and one of them at least will be a star. We were a little too clever for our own good, but I did that with a friend named Matt, who I knew from undergrad and actually is now Vantis VP of engineering. And we built a couple things. We actually built we meant to build a great many things. We really just built a mobile Android app that was quite silly in retrospect, and it's very funny, but nothing came out of it that's meaningful or of note. Again, we built something that very few people used, especially people we didn't know, like our friends used, 'cause they were wonderful and friends, but very few others used. But I think we both learned a lot from building something from scratch, trying to figure out how to get people to use it. Eventually, 9 months in deciding, let's not spend any more time on this. And it's really painful, but we we shouldn't, and also realizing we actually worked really well together. It was a pretty painful experience at the time because, as a friend said to me, we went on this walk and thought we were going to see wonderful sights and ended up back in the parking lot, which is what it felt like emotionally. But I think I look back on it, one, try to be more generous to my prior self. Two, there actually was a ton that we learned there. It just wasn't, again, quite what we thought we were gonna learn.

I think what you just mentioned really resonates a lot in my personal founder journey with building something that you think is going to be the next big thing, and then you learn that people actually are not using this. And so then you have to go back to square one. And so I'd love to dig a little bit deeper into just how things have changed with the journey of Vanta. But before we kind of hop into that, you spent some time at Dropbox as a product manager. Both Madison and I started our careers as PMs, so would love to hear a little bit more about that juncture in your career.

Yeah, I mean, PM jobs are often a little almost too hard to get because there's a bit of a vibe of you can't be a PM till you've been a PM. Great, had a fun start there, but I also just feel like I totally lucked out here. So ended up joining Dropbox because I had a bunch of friends there, including actually Matt, who I'd worked on the app with. And again, very lucky, got to work with a recently acquired company. So this sort of startup within Dropbox that was building and getting ready to launch a new product. It was Dropbox Paper, some kind of Dropbox version of Google Docs, which hadn't yet launched at the time. And my engineering counterpart was one of the founders of Hackpad, which is a company that had been acquired, and we were totally separate from the rest of Dropbox. I mean, we both worked at Dropbox, but the infrastructure was separate. The product was separate, which we thought was great at the time. Reality kind of came a couple years later, but I just see very appreciative of that opportunity and being able to learn so much. And it did feel a little bit like trying to do a startup with big training wheels. It's not the same thing. You are working in a larger company. There's people around who know how to do things and managers who give good advice and all of that. But we also got to go through a lot of the early stage company things. Like when I joined, the Paper engineering product and design team was about 9 or 10 people. When I left a couple years later, it was 70. So you got to have the team go from 10 to 70. And things I remember founders at USV talking about of like, oh, you know, as soon as I hired 30 people, everything broke. And then you're on a team that grows like that and you're like, oh yeah, everything broke. But really just going through some of those, then going through it within the confines of a larger company again, where there's much more support and structure, I kind of even knew this is a really cool opportunity. I should not squander this because I did want to go and start a company, but it felt kind of like a let's try the best here and then things won't work and then hopefully make new mistakes. So do you like do this a second time?

You absolutely did transition from product to founder. And I think what you said about getting that experience under your belt, refining your craft before going out into the unknown personally resonates with me. I was at Uber for 3 years prior to founding my own thing, and I really look back on those moments in my career of, wow, it was really cool to be able to push as hard as you could, but in a bit of a structured environment because now everything is getting questioned, and you need to really have that kind of personal conviction that you kind of know a little bit about what you're doing as you are reinventing things from scratch. So in 2016, you left Dropbox to begin building Vanta. What was the initial aha moment that prompted you to take this plunge of being a founder?

Even when I joined Dropbox, I knew I felt to the hike analogy, tried to go on a hike and end up in the parking lot, and I like knew I wanted to try again. It also felt like doing so immediately, emotionally, almost financially, wasn't the right thing. And it just felt like I'd never worked in a company before. And as much as I knew it wasn't what I wanted to do, a single job for the rest of my career felt like a good move at the time. But to that point, I also knew at some point I wanted to leave and try to found a company again. And then I think it was a matter of when does the Paper product and Paper team, when does it feel like I'm not remiss or abandoning these people I've worked a ton with and care a ton about, which is a very self-centered frame. I think you worry about those things whether or not you should. And also, when are there people I can work with? When does that part feel right as well? And then I think the stars never align entirely perfectly and you just have to go. And that's just a personal calibration thing.

Tell us a little bit more about the idea behind Vanta. We'll kind of get a little bit more into the core product and really the problems that you're solving, but why the idea behind Vanta?

So sort of twofold. I was just very interested in security. It seemed big, it seemed important. I couldn't really make sense of the market math. There both seemed to be like a quadrillion cybersecurity companies, and when you walked around and talked to other founders, no one really used any of them. And I like didn't quite know how to square those. I also didn't quite understand like when one tool was used versus another or how to distinguish them. And so initially just did a bunch of conversations with founders and heads of engineering and security people. And they were very broad initially. Literally the first one I had was with a really strong security person at Dropbox who wonderfully invited me back for breakfast. And I just had him open up his work calendar and walk me through it. And I was like, what's the best part of your week? What's the worst part of your week? What is your job? But explain it to me like I'm 5. What do you do day to day? And narrowed in from there. But I think one of the themes that was true in that calendar study all the way through was really strong security folks, the best parts of their job is securing things, working with teams and teaching them things, improving the security of their company. The worst part of their job often is demonstrating to others that they've done the work about work. It's talking about it. It's working with sometimes a customer or like executives or the board or an auditor and walking them through and explaining. Improving what they've done. And of course, it's different for everyone and there's lots of variation, but to me, there's actually something really interesting there, which is, uh, these people are so good at their jobs that actually, and moving up in a lot of these roles means less time doing the work and more time talking about the work or proving the work. And so we started thinking about compliance as demonstrating the security you have. And I think that's different than folks had thought about it previously, but it was this interesting frame and way to get people to also do more security.

Thank you for sharing this interesting paradigm of how proving out the work you've done as being the level up in the security role. I think compliance is known to be very red tape, paper heavy. Tell us a little bit more about what Vanta's core product is and what key problem, from a software perspective, you're solving for these security teams.

At the highest level, we think about Manta as helping companies build out their security and then show it off. And today, the showing off can happen via a compliance audit for something like SOC 2 or ISO or HIPAA. It can happen with questionnaire automation, it can happen with trust reports. So we always call the whole thing the, like, building your security and showing it off as a trust management platform. And that has been true since day one. Day one, of course, no one knows they need or want a trust management platform or don't know what any of those words meant. And so where we focused initially was Cloud-native companies get SOC 2 reports because SOC 2 is the default way for a company to show off they have reasonable security. And they were really hard to get because they were these bespoke, arcane, red tape, very manual things that only big companies did. But our thesis was these are actually really valuable. And so if you can make them more accessible to small companies while still holding small companies to the same bar, like they still have to do the work, but making it easier to do the work for small companies. We started with SOC 2 automation, and then over the past 5 or 6 years have gotten much broader and extended the original premise of Vanta.

SOC 2 specifically is something that has been coming up more and more in my daily vocabulary as we're starting to go upmarket and close in enterprise contracts where on contract review, often these larger enterprises are looking for proof of SOC 2 compliance. Tell us a little bit more about how a company should be thinking about the right time to get compliant and how you've been working with startups, seeing a lot of founders who are listening to this podcast are probably just on the precipice of potentially using Banta.

No one in our YC batch was getting SOC 2s. It was like way too early for them. Now most of the current B2B YC batch is using Banta. The way I recommend founders think about this, like any other think something you'd put on your roadmap. And I would think of SOC 2 as a set of engineering work and operational work you can do to unblock upmarket customers. And the founder, especially a founder who's doing founder-led sales, probably has a sense of, if I had a SOC 2, how many more customers would I have? How much easier would the close be? How much faster would procurement go? If you can close $50,000 to $100,000 even of ARR from a customer because you have SOC 2, at this point, it is probably worth doing.

That's a really helpful framework, especially as Claudia alluded to, companies like hers are breaking into this enterprise 6-figure level contracts or upper 5 figures where you really feel like not having certain parts of your tech stack fleshed out is going to be a hindrance to being able to ultimately make those sales. And so thank you for providing that framework. You mentioned as a part of that process, the YC experience, which we know you went through and can be one incredible way to go to market with your product as companies think about selling into other SaaS businesses as well. But you have not just started with YC, you've gone well beyond it through your fundraising journey. And today Vanta is valued at over $1.6 billion with incredible investors on your roster such as Sequoia and Kraft Ventures alongside YC, of course, contributing to the $203 million that you've raised. First of all, Congratulations. That is an incredible accomplishment. We're curious, who was the first person or fund to say yes to investing in Vanta?

It's not a fund. It was actually our customers. There were two early customers on that same day, so they both get the first place title, but Ryan from Rank Science and, and Steve from Gem both bought Vanta and also were like, hey, believe in you all. Not totally sure how you ended up with the compliance business, but think it's a good idea. Will you please take an angel check? Eternally grateful to both of them.

That's amazing. It's cool to see who in the spectrum is that outside party who bets on you first and can say, I had conviction in who you are as a person and the vision that you have for this. And it's so cool that in your experience, that was actually a customer. Curious just a little bit for the security space more broadly, it has become an area where there have been more and more companies being built, and I think it's grown and evolved because people have seen how necessary it is in today's world to have strong compliance and strong security. What would be your advice for founders who are thinking about getting started in this space today in the fundraising journey?

A lot of my fundraising frameworks or advice is really influenced by having seen a lot of pitches. In a very different economic environment and very much situation. But there's a couple truisms. One is the best way to get investment is to not need investment. But truly investors love to fund businesses that don't really need it. And no one's really excited about funding a business that will go out of business if you don't fund it. So I think there is actually just a lot to be said for, to the extent you can build a proper business or like high growth business for the fundamentals, make sense or seem like they would when you're in the early days, that will just make people wanna fund it. So rather than like engineering for fundraising, just engineering for a solid business with solid business metrics. And then like, yeah, of course you wanna fund that. Also fundraising is like a point in time. It is very important and necessary, but day to day you're building your company and you have to live with those decisions. And so trying to optimize the business and the company building piece, if you nail that, which is super hard, the fundraising part is incrementally easier.

You certainly have seen success and up into the right on the fundraising landscape by sticking to the framework that you just mentioned around building a business that has fundamentals and the investment will come. But we know that a founder's journey is certainly full of highs and lows, whether it's a hard fundraise or a go-to-market that didn't quite work the first time around, among many other things. Could you share about a moment in Vanta's lifecycle where things might not have gone as planned?

And so yeah, there's lots of them. One trap we fell into in the early days was thinking our business was very special, which it was, but it was so special that it didn't need the normal roles. We didn't need customer success 'cause we weren't a normal company. We needed audit operations, which was this special role just custom built for Vanta that was part PM, part operations, part CS, part— I don't even know what else. We spent all this time, constructed this role and made this 7-stage interview process, and then we couldn't really figure out who to put through it. 'Cause you're like, no one is applying for an audit operations role. Also in the early days of startup, no one's applying. Anyway, we just made this what I think could have been much simpler. NetAccelerant could have done that. Instead, we like constructed this special thing, put people through 7 rounds of interviews. And then gave them this complicated mandate and it just didn't serve the people we hired, didn't serve our customers, didn't serve us. In retrospect, I wish I'd sat prior me down and be like, you're overthinking this. Again, Vanta, very special, but also you have CSMs like every SaaS business. Just do that.

I, I like that call out of just knowing when to overcomplicate things or undercomplicate things. And maybe sometimes the thing that everyone does is the best path because it makes sense and it can be the simplest way to achieve the goal of customer success. But it's a hard thing to balance because as you alluded to, a huge part of what makes a company grow so fast and become so beloved is when there is some secret sauce and there is something special behind it and making Vanta stick out in a space that I don't think everyone would say is the sexiest of spaces and exciting people to get to come and work for you. I personally love seeing the Vanta billboards around SF right now that say security compliance that doesn't suck too much. And I'm personally a big punster, so this really tickled me. But I am curious, in a space, how you think about differentiating your part, your product and marketing, amidst a landscape where there are other companies like Trada, Secure Frame, that, that are in the mix, and differentiating yourself in the sock chain market.

It's really wild because when we started, everyone thought this was a terrible business. There was no software doing it, and everyone basically thought, nice people, weird idea. And I think we were both at the time, and then pretty quickly afterward, Metric saw That wasn't the case. It's really a great market. And we tried to keep that quiet as long as possible. Probably kept it quiet about a year and a half. And then word got out that this was actually a very good market that was growing very quickly. And this raft of copycats has sprung up. I wish we'd been more vocal earlier about it. I think at the time I was marketing and comms is not my first nature. I'm a private person personally talking about myself for accomplishments is not my favorite thing to do. Consequently, I misjudged how valuable it would be to tell people how big and successful Vanta was and take what to me felt like an unnecessary victory lap. But I think all that said, no one was doing this. And then we had folks who copied the product down to the placeholder text, which was a fascinating experience. It's pretty annoying and it's pretty annoying for a while, but I think the thing I've deeply learned is company building is still very hard. And it is in fact relatively easy to take screenshots of someone else's product and send them overseas and get something back and say, hey, it took Vanta 2 years to build their product, but we built it in 2 months and they suck and also we're half price. And you can do that and all's fair in love and capitalism, truly. But then you've got to build a company. And building a company is way harder than sending screenshots to overseas developers. And so I think what we've seen is on one hand, the market, like lots of people started SOC2 companies in 2021 to a kind of crazy degree. There actually is a lot of differentiation now, and most of them don't ship that much anymore because again, company building is just hard, not because they don't want to ship, but it's a lot more vaporware announcements. It's a lot more, we don't have that yet, but we will, and Vanta has it, but we'll be half their price, or we'll give you your first year free, or things like that. And I think the thing at Vanta we've learned is, is one, we are the blessing and curse of software is you're only as good as the last thing you released. So you do just need to keep shipping things for customers, and that's fundamentally the most important thing. And the score takes care of itself in the long run. In the short run, there's tons of noise, and I think we've gotten better at differentiating some of it, but I, but I just worry much less about this now because I think we have largest customer base by far, most revenue by far, strongest team by far, an actual point of view on where the space is going versus what did Vanta blog about and how are we going to say we're going to do that next? But in the short run, there's a lot of noise.

I love that perspective. Thank you so much for diving into the experience being one of the first movers in a space and watching the space grow up around you because of the catalyst of your own company. I know Claudia and I have experienced on a much, much, much smaller scale a copycat podcast, and it really shook us. I think from the personal front, we were just kind of indignant, like, how dare you? This is my baby. We work so hard. And I can hear a little bit of that in you, just who are these posers? Uh, but I'm grateful for your perspective. It does come all out in the wash, and we're seeing that today with the steadfastness that you've had with Pianta. You're at over 5,000 customers today with some hallmark names from Modern Treasury to Autodesk who are trusting Vanta to build and scale their compliance. It's incredible to see how you and the team have been able to work through that noise and get to where you are today. So I'm curious, taking into effect what you already shared, how did you think about building and scaling this company from a go-to-market perspective once in that first year you were like, okay, this is sticking, we have product market fit.

We tried to be very structured about this and in retrospect had no structure, but I did about the first $500,000 of sales of Vanta. It was about 50 customers and I think more than any number amount, that was the point at which the calls felt the same to me as a founder. They weren't actually the same, but that was the point where it felt like we could bring on another person who was a very strong seller. Who could watch what I was doing in some places, be horrified in some places, learn from it. And then that person was able to sell way better than I did. Um, they actually knew what they were doing. And I think at that point what we did was like very simple math about how often is this person on the phone in a day? And like if we had a second person on the phone, would calls get scheduled faster? I think we probably had some spreadsheet formula cuz we were really into trying to do simple math for these things, but In practice, it was just hiring salespeople when we met them, or when we met someone who seemed like they could tolerate the really high ambiguity that selling the first million dollars of any SaaS product is. You try to make it as structured as possible, but it's really hard. It really relies on people's ability to think on their feet and learn things. And in our case, we're selling to engineers and is being credible to an engineering buyer, which is a different skillset. Whereas if you worked with engineers, you get it. But if you're a salesperson who's been selling to salespeople, say, just an adjustment to some of it was also just how quickly could we find folks who are excited about this setup versus horrified by it, which is a very reasonable reaction, arguably the more reasonable one, and wanted to sit in a cramped office with us day in and day out.

What I've learned through watching Claudia and interviewing other guests here just around a go-to-market team, there are playbooks that you can run, but depending on who the buyer is, you sometimes have to throw the playbook out the window. And I was speaking to the founder of a company called Hightouch. He was saying all their sales team has to actually learn the product and build the product itself, understand what's going on in the backend to be able to be the seller because the buyer is such a technical buyer. And so I love that callout about the art and science of go-to-market where you can scale with numbers, but ultimately sometimes it's about the people and what they know and understand. So that's a really helpful framework.

Thank you.

You mentioned earlier as well, just the Vanta perspective on the market, whether that be through a blog and what the company shares externally. We couldn't get away with not asking a question about AI and thinking about how companies are building and shipping and deploying even faster, which of course only means compliance is going at a breakneck speed. How is Vanta thinking about the AI space in terms of security?

There's a lot here we're really excited about, like many other companies, but I think broadly, so much of compliance today is taking information in one format, often like configuration from AWS, say, as one example, and putting it in another format, like text, like sentence answers to a security questionnaire, right? And taking information in one format and putting it in another, and that's what these LLMs are just so good at. So, we have one LLM-powered product in the market today, questionnaire automation. Doing what it sounds like, taking information that's in Vanta and helping you answer security questionnaires as they come in. There's a bunch of other things that we're working on in beta with customers now that we'll announce shortly. But I think broadly, it's just a really neat new technology that has a ton of product implications or neat product possibilities, probably across a bunch of businesses with Vanta in particular. We've got more ideas than we have time right now, which is really nice.

I want to just switch gears a little bit. In a recent Forbes article, you were quoted talking about how we can and should be working to get to parity with SaaS companies founded by women. We wholeheartedly agree, and it's a key reason why we founded the podcast. As a SaaS founder myself, it certainly resonates. We're curious, what's your vantage point on how we can build an ecosystem that works to achieve this together?

That's a lot of things. And not to be a total trope of no silver bullet, but very truly and deeply, I do think models help. Whatever it was for me at USV, seeing a lot of different people do it again, some male, some female, but the personality traits I saw in myself and other people, I personally found that really helpful. One thing I personally care a lot about, I feel like I got a bit of a cheat code at USV. Was you heard the story behind the story. There's like the stylized, like, how did you found the company story? And then there's actually the messy version. I think that's basically true for everyone, for all sorts of stories. And I feel really strongly that the stylized stories make this all seem unachievable and done by deities or something. The messy story is like, oh, that sounds human. That sounds hard but tractable. And one thing I care a ton about is, again, when appropriate and feasible, and especially in smaller audiences, like sharing the messy stories. Because everyone has them, just most people don't share them. And I do think that also contributes to a bit of a, like, deification. These people aren't really people, they're gods. That I don't think is very helpful. Totally.

Even just on this podcast now, we're in that first 100 customer slog type of thing. And just hearing you mention that it feels like founder-led sales for the first X customers feels a little bit chaotic and a little bit like you're figuring things out as you go along. When I started the journey of selling, I felt like I was just doing everything wrong. And the fact that we weren't closing 6-figure deals out of the gate meant that I was just insufficient. But really it's more of just where is your position in the market? How has your product grown? How have you built a team? Oh wow, we've gotten there. So I think I personally resonate with the fact that a lot of these sort of nitty gritty details need to be told in order for folks like myself who are earlier in their founding career to understand that what we're doing is not necessarily wrong, but it's actually the journey that every founder goes through. Zooming out a little bit, you've spoken a bit about the future of Vanta, some of the exciting things that your teams are thinking through. But Christina, I'd love to ask, what are you personally excited for this year?

I think we're working on a bunch of really neat stuff. We started very much with SOC 2 automation and compliance automation, and that is very important to Vanta and our customers and will always be a big part of what we do. But we have always thought about Vanta much broader. And really as a company that is helping our customers build out their security and then demonstrate that trust, show up security, build trust with their customers. And this year we started to put products in market that are other ways to build trust with your customers. Still compliance audits for sure, but whether it's questionnaire automation or trust reports or trust centers, there's just more we're doing there. A whole third-party risk piece for kind of savvier, larger companies. And it's very neat because I think the— you can start to build this a bit of a flywheel for Vanta and our customers of the more they're aware of their vendors and using and that are secure and compliant and trustworthy and where that customer data is going. I think there's a lot we can do there.

We're excited to stay tuned for all that is to come. We do have our final question for the podcast. And it's the hero question that we ask all of our guests. Who is a woman in your life that has had a profound impact on yourself and your career?

This is someone I have been fortunate enough to meet, but don't really know, but I have always looked up to Diane Greene. Technical female, started, uh, in like male-dominated fields, started a software company called VMware, grew it to unfathomable heights, took it public, continued running it. And if you see her speak publicly, is very no-nonsense, very on top of things, knows her stuff cold, comes off as a very strong leader. And I have very much admired what she's done professionally.

Thank you for sharing that. Maybe we'll have to have her on the podcast one day. Thank you so much, Christina, for taking the time and sharing your journey with us today. We really appreciate it.

Thank you so much for having me.

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