Acquired Live at Radio City Music Hall (Presented by J.P. Morgan)
It’s finally here! Today we are releasing Acquired’s first “concert film” — the full video recording of our Radio City live show from this summer with Jamie Dimon, Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien, Barry Diller, and cameos from around the Acquired Cinematic Universe including Christina Cacioppo, Ben Clymer, and Howard Schultz.
To watch the full production on any device, please head over to Spotify where you’ll find it available for free in the Acquired feed right alongside all our other episodes: https://open.spotify.com/episode/77Kl3BsiEQLpli2Q2ozZuf?si=4f4609e343504fd0
Sponsors:
Live Show Presented By: J.P. Morgan
Shopify
ServiceNow
More Acquired:
Get email updates and vote on future episodes!
Join the Slack
Subscribe to ACQ2
Check out the latest swag in the ACQ Merch Store!
Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.
Solving start-up puzzles, with Vanta CEO Christina Cacioppo
Compliance and security might not be the flashiest parts of running a business, but that’s exactly where the CEO and founder of Vanta saw a $2.5 billion opportunity. Christina Cacioppo joins host Jeff Berman to share lessons from hyperscaling her trust management platform.
Read a transcript of this episode: https://mastersofscale.com
Subscribe to the Masters of Scale weekly newsletter: https://mastersofscale.com/subscribe
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
I failed 22 times... then I built a $2.5B Company | Christina Cacioppo from Vanta
Episode 646: Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talks to Vanta founder Christina Cacioppo ( https://x.com/christinacaci ) about quitting her job and betting on herself.
—
Show Notes:
(0:00) Stumblehustling into USV
(4:36) Betting on the left side of your email address
(8:30) The art of fear
(11:47) Making bad art
(13:30) The marshmallow test
(17:26) Startup advice to beware of
(18:16) The idea for Vanta
(21:00) The only question that matters
(22:30) Managing your mind
(27:47) How to pick an idea to chase
(29:03) The real origin of Vanta
(31:00) Building a flywheel
(36:06) Controversial opinions
(40:49) Pushing past the no
(46:17) Not flinching during negotiations
—
Links:
• Vanta - https://www.vanta.com/
—
Check Out Shaan's Stuff:
Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd
—
Check Out Sam's Stuff:
• Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/
• Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/
• Copy That - https://copythat.com
• Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth
• Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/
My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano
20Sales: How to Scale a Career While Scaling a Family, Strategies and Specific Tools To Help Maintain Work-Life Balance, What Companies Can Do To Empower Parents To Be Their Best Selves & How to Prevent Parental Leave Being an Inhibitor To Your Career
Today's 20Sales is a special Mother's Day edition where we are joined by 6 of the best sales leaders who also happen to be rockstar mothers.
The Profiles
Maggie Hott is on the GTM Team (Go-To-Market) at OpenAI. Before OpenAI, Maggie was Director of Sales @ Webflow and before Webflow spent an incredible 6 years at Slack.
Stevie Case is the CRO @ Vanta. Prior to Vanta, Stevie spent an immensely successful 6 years at Twilio as VP of Mid-Market Sales.
Renu Gupta is an advisor and sales consultant to some of the fastest-growing SaaS companies today. Previously she has held sales leadership roles at Slack, Thrive and Dropbox.
Lauren Schwartz is the VP Enterprise Sales @ Fivetran. Before Fivetran, Lauren spent 4 years at Segment as Senior Director of Enterprise Sales leading to their acquisition by Twilio.
Julie Maresca is the Head of Global Accounts at Atlassian. Prior to Atlassian, Julie spent an immensely successful 6 years at Slack in numerous roles including Head of Enterprise Sales for North America.
Jessica Arnold is the VP of Global Sales Development @ Amplitude. Before Amplitude, Jessica was the Senior Director for Inside Sales North America at Dropbox for close to 6 years.
In Today's 20Sales Mothers Day Episode We Discuss:
1.) How have you navigated growing in your career at the same time, growing your family?
2.) How do you balance your career and being a mother - when do you lean in and out?
3.) What are some specific strategies or tools that have helped you maintain a work-life balance?
4.) How do you prioritize your mental health and wellbeing while juggling your responsibilities at work and at home?
5.) How do you handle the guilt that many working mothers experience when they have to focus on their career?
6.) What are the unique challenges and advantages of being a mother in a sales leadership role?
7.) How has your experience as a mother influenced your leadership style and decision-making?
8.) How have you navigated going out on maternity leave without it having an impact on your career?
9.) America has one of the worst parental leaves of any country in the world. How can you advocate for parental leave if the existing policy isn't up to par?
10.) What are some ways that companies can create a more inclusive and supportive environment for working mothers in sales leadership roles?
20Sales: Why You Should Not Do PLG and Enterprise Sales at the Same Time | How To Move Into Enterprise Sales Gradually | How To Make a Comp Plan For Sales Teams | Why Discounting is Good and Can Be Used with Stevie Case, CRO @ Vanta
Stevie Case is the CRO @ Vanta where she oversees Vanta's go-to-market team to support the company's rapid growth. Prior to joining Vanta, Stevie was Vice President of Mid-Market Sales at Twilio, joining as one of their first account executives, Stevie helped to grow the sales team from a dozen to over 1,000 team members and played a pivotal role in establishing Twilio's enterprise business with key Fortune 500 customers, generating more than $400 million in annual recurring revenue. If that was not enough, Stevie is also a Founding Operator @ Coalition Network and a prominent angel investor.
In Today's Episode with Stevie Case We Discuss:
1. ) From World's First Pro Female Gamer to CRO:
How did Stevie make her way from pro gamer to CRO? How did her career in gaming make her a better CRO and sales leader?
In her early sales career, how did being a single mother with a child impact her approach to sales?
What can founders do to make workplaces more inclusive for parents today?
2.) Enterprise or PLG: Which One To Choose:
Why does Stevie believe it is not right to do both PLG and enterprise at the same time for startups?
How can startups and sales teams move into enterprise selling gradually through testing and without committing a significant budget to an enterprise sales team?
How do founders know when is the right time to move from PLG to enterprise? What are the signs?
3.) The Mythical Sales Playbook:
How does Stevie define the term "sales playbook" today? What is it not?
Should the founder be the person to create the sales playbook? If not them, then who?
When is the right time to make your first sales hire? When is the wrong time?
4.) Mastering the Hiring Process in Sales Recruits:
How should we structure the interview process for new sales reps?
What is the right profile for these first sales hires?
How do the best sales talent answer questions and perform in interview processes?
How can we really test for grit and curiosity in the interview process?
What are the single biggest mistakes founders make when hiring for sales?
5.) Discovery, Discounting, Deal Velocity:
With sales cycles being so long, how do you know if enterprise sales reps are good?
What is the difference between good discovery vs bad discovery?
Should founders engage in discounting to get deals over the line? When does it work?
Privacy is a moving target. Here’s how engineering teams can stay on track.
Ever since personal information started flowing into applications on the web, securing that information has become more and more important. General security and privacy frameworks like ISO-27001 and PCI provide guidance in securing systems. Now the law has gotten involved with the European Union’s GDPR and California’s CPRA. More laws are on the way, and these laws (and the frameworks) are changing as they meet legal challenges. With the legal landscape for privacy shifting so much, every engineer must ask: How do I keep my application in compliance?
On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Rob Picard and Matt Cooper of Vanta, who get that question every day. Their company makes security monitoring software that helps companies get into compliance quickly. We spoke about the shifting sands of privacy rules and regulations, tracking data flows through systems and across corporate borders, and how security automation can put up guardrails instead of gates.
Many security frameworks are undergoing modernization to reflect the way that distributed applications function today. And more countries and US states are passing their own privacy regulations. The privacy space is surprisingly dynamic, forcing companies to keep track of these frequent changes to stay current and compliant. Not everyone has in-house legal experts to follow the daily developments and communicate those to the engineering team.
For an engineering team just trying to understand the effort involved, it may be helpful to start figuring out where your data flows. Tracking it between internal services may be overkill; instead, track it across corporate boundaries, from one database, cloud provider, SaaS system, and dependency. Each of those should have their own data privacy agreement—plug into your procurement process to see what each piece of your stack promises on a privacy level.
Your DevOps and DevSecOps teams will probably want to automate much of the security engineering process as possible. Unfortunately, automating security is hard. The best path may not be to automate the defenses on your system; it might be better to instead automate the context that you provide to engineers. If someone wants to add a dependency, pop up a reminder that these dependencies can be fickle. Automate the boring stuff—context, reminders, to-dos—and let humans do the complex problem solving we’re so good at.
If you’re looking to add an in-house security expert as a service, check out Vanta.com. Their platform monitors connects to your systems and helps you prep for compliance with one or more security frameworks. If those frameworks change, you don’t need to do anything. Vanta changes for you.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Christina Cacioppo - Building the New Standard in Security – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 38]
My guest today is Christina Cacioppo, founder of Vanta, a security and compliance software business founded in 2017. In our conversation, Christina brings to life the idea of “finding a problem that exists and fixing it.” We dive into the experiences that led her to launch Vanta, the strategy she took to build, price, and distribute the product, and we touch on her lessons from running a growing organization. I always admire the drive that founders have when they set off to build something -- Christina fits that mold, and you will hear about how she embarked on a self-taught journey early in her career. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Christina.
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.
-----
Founder's Field Guide is a property of Colossus, Inc. For more episodes of Founder's Field Guide, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.
Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here.
Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus
Show Notes
[00:02:44] - [First question] - How she first found her interest in business
[00:04:09] - Early days exploring business for the first time
[00:07:09] - Lessons learned from USV that have been applied to Vanta
[00:07:42] - The next stage of her learning journey after USV
[00:09:20] - Making a massive pivot in life and teaching herself to code
[00:10:53] - The four-year road that lead to building Vanta
[00:12:39] - First encounters with the software security problem space
[00:15:21] - Origins of SOC 2, what it means, and what it does
[00:17:11] - What software security means writ large
[00:19:32] - Who demands a SOC 2 and why
[00:20:57] - How Vanta improved a broken process and productized it
[00:23:33] - What V1 of Vanta looked like
[00:26:30] - Understanding the value of using spreadsheets first
[00:27:48] - From static to streaming and finding product-market fit
[00:29:22] - Monitoring whether or not a company is SOC 2 compliant in real-time
[00:32:19] - Auditors that still exist in the compliance space today
[00:33:39] - The pace of onboarding new clients onto the Vanta software
[00:34:53] - Figuring out a price point for the service Vanta offers
[00:37:06] - Developing the business model and scaling it
[00:39:18] - Lessons learned and innovations created about effective sales organization
[00:41:52] - Hardest hills to climb in building Vanta
[00:43:17] - Building competitive advantage into the framework of the business
[00:46:07] - Overview of the frontier of software security
[00:47:43] - General thoughts on competitive advantage as a whole
[00:49:43] - Quality control of decision making in Vanta
[00:50:40] - Downstream effects of structural and organizational business design
[00:52:30] - Hard lessons learned going from being academic to pragmatic
[00:53:36] - What the future could look like for Vanta based on its current trajectory
[00:54:26] - What her information diet consists of lately
[00:55:27] - Areas she’s interested in currently but learning more than being proficient
[00:56:59] - Ways in which she’s become a better leader
[00:57:46] - Unique factors about what makes Vanta tick
[00:58:45] - Negative advice to would-be founders out there
[01:00:22] - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for her
[01:02:44] - Major insights learned from living in Rwanda, Thailand, and Uganda
