Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Tom, thanks so much for joining us.
Tom Wentworth, Recorded Future
Keith, Thanks for having me.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
I'm excited to talk to you because we're talking about Recorded Future, which is a rapidly growing company in the world of cybersecurity. And there's so much going on in this industry. So let's talk about the company like, I'd love to hear the founding story and everything that the company does.
Tom Wentworth, Recorded Future
Yeah, Recorded Future is unique in that it was really founded on a treadmill. So Christopher Oliver, who's the founder founded a company called Spotfire. And Spotfire was one of the pioneers of business intelligence where you could visualize the kind of data that would normally live in a database or a spreadsheet. So he built this tool, which was a really great way to visualize lots of data. And while he's on the treadmill, you know, apparently, as the story goes, he was thinking, Well, what about unstructured data, all the kind of data that doesn't fit nicely into a spreadsheet or into a database? Effectively, that's the kind of data that lives on the internet? How do I imagine what we could do if we could understand all of this unstructured information that lives all across the internet, and then understand it kind of in the same way, you could understand the structured data in a business intelligence tool. So he comes up with this idea, runs off the treadmill runs into his kitchen and writes it down on a notebook calls up a patent attorney, and ultimately builds the IP that drove the formation of Recorded Future's products.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
It's such a cool story because I just love the treadmill part. Because I just know what I'm running. Like, I totally like just have a clear head. And that's when I start thinking about things and like just ideas come to fruition during that time. And I wonder how many companies have been started in that capacity of somebody being on a treadmill or just running? So it's interesting.
Tom Wentworth, Recorded Future
Yeah, I do a lot of treadmill running, and I've never come up with that brilliant of an idea.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Let's talk about the company and what it does today.
Tom Wentworth, Recorded Future
Yeah, the simple TLDR is that we're like the Bloomberg of cyber, if you're a trader, you'd be crazy not to be using a Bloomberg terminal. And we think if you're in the cyber and security business, you'd be crazy not to use Recorded Future in the same way. The basic shift that's happened in this industry is that for the first 30 years of network computing, when computers were connected to each other, there are really well-understood ways to secure them, you had routers, you had firewalls, you had anti-virus software. But over the past 10 years or so, as, as we've seen the shift to digital transformation. And maybe most importantly, with COVID, we saw this happen nearly overnight, right? The sort of legacy models for securing, organizations just went away, because now the threat surface, which used to be in your data center, and in your network is now literally spread over the entire Internet. So those old approaches to security just didn't work when you have everything in the cloud and everything is connected. And criminals and nation-states have seen this opportunity. And you've seen in the news recently ransomware. It's been in the news, literally every day, from back in May, we saw the Colonial Pipeline attack to even yesterday, we saw a pretty significant ransomware attack on the Iowa grain cooperative, affecting the pipeline of corn, right? It's crazy. So with this just mass proliferation of adversaries out there trying to either steal or destroy, there needs to be a new approach. And we think in that new approach, that you need to use intelligence as the only way that you can act at the speed of the adversary. And that's what we provide, our clients are able to minimize risk from cyber and physical threats by applying intelligence.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
So who are the typical customers? Is it you know, majorly fortune 500, fortune 1000 companies? And how are they using the platform continuously?
Tom Wentworth, Recorded Future
Yeah, we have a lot of customers, we have a lot of huge some of the largest companies in the world, down to much smaller organizations, unfortunately, think of the Iowa grain cooperative example, you know, that you can be a much smaller organization and still be at threat to an adversary. So while you know, we have a lot of customers who are classic fortune 100, you know, we've got school systems, we've got local cities, we've got small organizations as small as 50 million or so in revenue using us. So the sort of most people look at Recorded Future and say, Oh, they must sell the huge organization. And that's true, but it's not just that we sell to the fortune 10 and some of them, you know, more, I think, more than 100 governments around the world all the way down to much smaller organizations who are all out there trying to mitigate that cyber and physical risks that they're experiencing.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
So how does it work as far as that intelligence If I'm a small to midsize company, I'm taking recorded futures platform in the intelligence like, how would I apply that to secure my business overall?
Tom Wentworth, Recorded Future
Yeah, so we've got a customer who, who runs one of the most iconic brands of all time, I don't know if I can say their name or not. So I won't. But they're a small organization, but their brand is well known. And they're scared to death, of adversaries trying to capitalize on their brand. So what they use Recorded Future for is to monitor organizations trying to create fake domains based on their brand, name and sell fake versions of their product. So with Recorded Future, they're able to monitor for adversaries who are creating fake domain names using their brand, identify those who get those taken down. And that for them is a way for them to protect what's their biggest single asset is an organization, which is their brand. So we see all sorts of examples like that some of our customers use us to look for leaked employee credentials. So your credentials for your company are being sold on some underground forum somewhere, our customers use us to better respond to incidents. So let's say they are being targeted by an adversary, they can use Recorded Future to be able to better respond to that incident with more confidence. Our customers patch their applications more effectively, using Recorded Future intelligence, we sort of look at intelligence as something that can impact positively every security workflow across your organization, it's something that just makes everything you do work better.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
And what Recorded Future is doing it's very complex, to make this platform happen is, you know, takes a lot. So what's the current size of the company in terms of employees?
Tom Wentworth, Recorded Future
Yeah, we're about 675 employees right now, we expect to end the year at around 750. It's a lot of hiring to do in the next four months. And then next year, we're planning on adding another 30% or so. So you know, we're gonna we're a large organization and getting bigger quickly.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
And as far as that hiring is concerned, is it across all functional areas?
Tom Wentworth, Recorded Future
Indeed, it's across the entire company.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
So once someone does join the team, what's it like working there? What's the day-to-day culture? Like?
Tom Wentworth, Recorded Future
Yeah, we hire in an interesting way. We're all big fans of Danny Meyer. And you know, Danny Meyer at all. He's the guy who founded Union Square Hospitality Group. He's maybe best known for being the Shake Shack founder. And Danny's great, he wrote a book called setting the table. And in this book, they talk about how they hire for the hire for sort of cultural fit based on what they call hospitality quotient. Like, yes, you need to know the basic mechanics of let's say, being a server to work at one of Danny's restaurants, but they rate 51% of your score based on their cultural traits. And so in their case, it's optimism, warmth, empathy. So 15 out of 51% of the weighting is based on your hospitality quotient. 49% is based on your skills, our approaches to hiring the same way we sort of look at the 51% Are you a cultural fit for our values? 49% Do we think you can do the job, and the specific things that we look for and the attributes of our culture are, we've got high standards, we're building an incredible business, you know, we've got lofty aspirations to be the world's intelligence platform. And to become that we need to hire great people. And we've done an unbelievable job of that I'm, you know, it's one of those where every time I'm in a meeting, and I look around, I'm very obviously the dumbest person in the room. So I always feel good about that. We hire for inclusion. So we are really deliberate about making sure that we are diversifying the team and building the most diverse set of colleagues. And we also try to act ethically. So those are things that we hire for in our 51% rule, we want to make sure that the people we hire represent that, and also they do have to have the skills to
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
So the job market out there is very competitive. You're hiring a lot. Lots of companies are hiring in the tech industry, which is a good thing. But why is now the ideal time to join Recorded Future?
Tom Wentworth, Recorded Future
I mean, I think it's, it's if you look just at what's in the news on the front page of every major media publication. It's something related to cybersecurity. And I think that we have a mission here to be the world's intelligence platform because we really think that we can help our customers defend themselves against criminals and nation-states with bad intentions. And as a part of our mission, people here are incredibly passionate about defending our clients and playing a role in that defense and a pass in an active role in that defense. So this is the place to be not only are we an incredibly successful organization, not only are we growing fast, not only are we sitting at the center of something that's Just incredibly important right now with cybersecurity and giving our clients the ability to better protect themselves against these risks. But we have this bigger mission of being, you know, sort of the intelligence agent and the intelligence platform for the free world we really want. We really believe that intelligence is the key to defending against adversaries. And we think that our data and our intelligence can help our clients do that.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Well, if you are interested in exploring opportunities at Recorded Future, you need to go to their company page on VentureFizz, which has all their job listings. And as Tom mentioned, they're hiring across the board. So go to venturefizz.com/recorded-future, and you'll see all their listings there. Tom, thanks so much for bringing us up to speed on all the great things happening at the company.
Tom Wentworth, Recorded Future
Yeah, thanks Keith. Thanks for having me.
Transcribed by https://otter.a
