Founder Real Talk GGV Capital

Nicole Perlroth is an advisor to the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and the bestselling author of the 2021 book This is How They Tell Me The World Ends, a groundbreaking in-depth exploration of the global cyber arms race. Prior to that, she spent a decade as the lead cybersecurity, digital espionage and sabotage reporter at the New York Times. She’s now building her new early-stage venture fund, Silver Buckshot Ventures, which she describes as “a mission fund backing next-generation cybersecurity startups that, together, take out every tool in an attacker’s arsenal.” Fighting cyber crime requires collaboration and multiple approaches. Nicole shares stories of how she fell into the cybersecurity beat, her advisory work with the DOJ, some of the challenges with cybersecurity work, and her thoughts about how Silver Buckshot Ventures can help.

Dani Grant is the co-founder and CEO of Jam.dev, a developer tool that allows for faster communication between product and engineering about bugs and fixes. While working at Cloudflare as a product manager, Dani and her eventual co-founder Mohd Irtefa dealt with frustrating debugging experiences first-hand, and came up with a product solution to help developers, engineers, designers and product managers can capture screenshots and development blocks in one click. Today, Jam has captured the hearts of huge clients like Unilever, Staples, T-Mobile, and Dell. Dani shares the importance of tracking user retention, iterating your way to total product market fit, and more.

Idan Tendler is the Senior Vice President of Application Security at Palo Alto Networks, as well as the chairman and co-founder of Place-IL, a nonprofit tech initiative. Idan discusses his previous cybersecurity analytics startup, Fortscale (later acquired by RSA Security), and some key lessons he learned from his experience building the company. Before Fortscale, Idan founded Bridgecrew, a company that helps developers better secure their cloud environment. With the goal of to making developers love security—a seemingly impossible task—Bridgecrew built an open-source product called Checkov, which allowed the company to get millions of developers to use their product. Today, Idan is also busy building Place-IL, a non-profit initiative that helps connect immigrants to Israel with job opportunities in the country's tech industry.

Rich Waldron is the CEO and co-founder of Tray.io, a company he founded with his two best friends. This is the second time we're talking to Rich on Founder Real Talk, make sure to check out his episode from 2019! Software has been around for a long time, and in many different forms. On the waves of cloud adoption and digital transformation, it's more important than ever for companies to make technology accessible to their employees. Tray.io users in any department can use its automation platform to transform fragmented processes into powerful business outcomes. Rich talks about Tray's latest $40 million Series C extension, product and growth plans, and more.

Kishore Gopalakrishna, co-founder and CEO of StarTree, created a solution to a database problem with his co-worker and eventual co-founder Xiang Fu while working at LinkedIn. At the time, LinkedIn was debuting its now-popular feature called Who's Viewed Your Profile, which required the ability to slice and dice massive amounts of data in real time. Kishore and Xiang developed what they called Apache Pinot, a real-time distributed analytical processing data store used to deliver scalable real-time analytics with very low latency.
The pair went on to found their open source company, StarTree, in 2019 to build a commercial version of Apache Pinot. The analytics provided by its technology are increasingly essential for all kinds of business decision makers, and the company's quickly emerged as a leader in serving up real-time user-facing analytics at very low latency—for millions. In this episode, Kishore talks about the solutions StarTree provides, its key relationship with the developer community and the roadmap for the company, which just announced a $47 million series B led by GGV, with participation from investor existing investors, Bain and CRV as well as new investor Sapphire Ventures.

Sid Sijbrandij is the CEO of GitLab Inc., the one DevOps platform that allows teams to collaborate, create, and deliver software in a single application. Before founding GitLab Inc. in 2012, he worked on recreational submarines and taught himself to code, going on to work at the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security, where he did version control software around lawmaking. GitLab Inc. was founded on Sid’s love of programming and a desire to create an open-core company. Fully remote from day one, GitLab Inc. is one of the largest companies to operate this way, with more than 1,700 employees across 65 countries. In this episode, Sid talks about open source, his community, and company transparency, along with the GitLab Inc.’s recent IPO—and what it means for the future.