From a standing start to 900 employees in just five and a half years – that is rapid growth by anyone’s standards.
But that’s just what the cybersecurity experts Darktrace has managed with its Enterprise Immune System which is designed to combat cybercrime head-on.
How does a company manage to achieve such success in such a short space of time – and counter the very real risks involved?
We’ve been talking to Poppy Gustafsson, the joint CEO of Darktrace.
Can you tell me how Darktrace started off?
When we started, cybersecurity was all about keeping the bad guys off your network by building a wall around it to make sure no-one could get in.
But what if the threat was INSIDE your network – or someone gets access through stolen passwords?
The problem with building a bigger wall around your network is that the attackers get a bigger ladder and there will always be someone that finds their way in.
So Darktrace took a different approach?
Yes. We want to challenge the status quo. We adopted an artificial intelligence approach which was something that was unheard of at the time. That ability to challenge the status quo is important when you’re doing something new that hasn’t been done before.
How did you go about attracting interest in your new way of tackling cybercrime?
We used a lot of biological metaphors. When you’re trying to articulate something that’s very technically complicated, analogies work very well. One thing we used was the human immune system.
If you think about your body it has – at its core – that innate sense of health and self. So by knowing what’s ‘you’ it can identify the ‘other,’ even if that ‘other’ is a virus that your body has never seen before.
Your body can then adapt, mount a defence, and write the code of that defence into your immunological memory. Our approach and our product replicated the human immune system.
And how does it work?
So, the artificial intelligence sits at network level and it creates a pattern of life for each and every device in that network.
Each of your businesses is as unique as your fingerprint. And so it (the AI) goes in and learns what that fingerprint looks like. And if behaviour changes it can flag that change to you in real-time.
So how did you deal with some of the reactions to your somewhat radical approach?
Well, we became very, very good at challenging the status quo and anyone who said to us: ‘this is the way you’ve got to do it because this is the way it has always been done.’
That was like a red rag to a bull and we immediately felt we had to do it differently!
Please tell us how you went about doing things differently.
One of the examples is that we operate a co-CEO model. I am a CEO based in the UK, and the other CEO – Nicole – works in San Francisco. The co-CEO model is not always successful, but for us, it’s been a natural evolution.
It was about identifying our strengths; I have a maths background so I tend to do a lot of the numerical side – the operational side, the financing, things like that.
Nicole has a marketing background and she spends a lot of time thinking about the product ‘roadmap’ and what our customers want from us.
There were so many people who said it couldn’t work. But we are a brilliant partnership because it naturally evolved – and wasn’t imposed on us from outside.
What about your staff? How did you make sure you had the right people in place?
You are going to be very, very busy growing your business and you need to have a team that you can not only trust but also amplifies your ambition.
I remember early on when we were first growing Darktrace people said the kind of guys you need to be hiring – and they obviously had to be ‘guys’ – must have at least 10 years experience in cyber because it’s very technical.
But we didn’t want to hear from people who have inherited the ways that have always been used in the past. So we thought we’d bring in bright and brilliant people that we know are capable but maybe have less experience.
We teach them about our product in-depth and then they go out and they’re talking to customers, not lecturing them about cybersecurity. People don’t want to be lectured about the problem, they want to know what your solution is.
Give us an example of how your approach worked in practice.
Five years ago our sales model was that we provide a demonstration of our technology working within the customer’s environment. And it would last three months.
One of the young graduates we bought in asked: ‘Why are we doing it for three months – why not do it in just three weeks?’
And we thought “You’re absolutely right!’ The technology is more than capable of showing what it can do in three weeks.
So, by doing that one simple change we reduced our sales cycle by a third.
Even I had inherited a preconceived way of doing things so having someone say ‘Why are you doing it like that?’ was invaluable. It wasn’t her experience talking, it was her common sense.
Would you say that hiring sets your culture?
I cannot overstate how important it is.
If you’re working in tech and something as cutting edge as AI you are operating in a world that hasn’t been explored in its entirety. There aren’t really any answers.
You must ask your people to work outside of their comfort zone and ask them to take risks. To help them we have to be really supportive and encourage them to do more rather than pushing them to do so. And they have got to know that they can fail.
If you’re the one asking someone to work outside a comfort zone you can’t punish them if it doesn’t work. It’s a case of ‘ok, we’ll just try it differently next time.’
When you are a very fast-growing business, with speed vitally important, how do you keep a focus on what you’re trying to achieve?
There’s going to be a lot of noise and a lot of people doing things for the first time. You have to always keep coming back to the problem you are trying to solve and that way you maintain focus in all the decisions that you make.
How important is flexibility?
For me, it all about flexibility.
We make mistakes every single day, but, because of the culture of the organisation, we tend to brush them aside and focus on what we’ve got right.
I mentioned that we hired a lot of very young people at the start but now, as we’re maturing, we have to think about how we support our customers – and do we need a different type of person for that?
Constant re-evaluation and being flexible about your approach is really important as you grow.
Would it be fair to say you are passionate about technology?
It’s such an exciting and innovative place to be and it’s bringing so much operational benefit and advantage to business.
For me, getting cybersecurity right is like having a wonderful comfort blanket.
Artificial Intelligence is often thought to be about cyborgs coming in to replace humans. But in reality, it allows us to keep on top of all the exciting tech innovations while keeping us safe along the way.
Thank you for your time, Poppy.