Solving start-up puzzles, with Vanta CEO Christina Cacioppo

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1:20 Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six. That's mastersofscom slash apply. Twenty six. It seems like a puzzle. I wanted to figure it out.

1:41 And I wanted to be good at it. Christina Cassiopo's love of puzzle solving is central to her approach as an entrepreneur. She's the founder of a Tech Unicorn now, but her first business puzzle was a bit more humble. As a kid growing up in Ohio. When I had multiple beanie babies, I tried to sell them on eBay and then like ride my bike to Kroger, which is our like local grocery chain.

2:06 And get Also get money orders and cash in money orders because like I didn't have a credit card. I remember when PayPal came out. And you got like twenty five dollars if you signed up. But I I couldn't sign up because I was, you know, twelve or something, thirteen. I never got that$25 from PayPal.

2:22 Christina's beanie baby business never quite took off. But now Her BDB SaaS company Vanta has grown to a valuation of about two and a half billion dollars. It's a trust management platform that focuses on digital security and compliance. And if that sounds complicated, well

2:44 It's because it sort of seems to be. But in reality, Vanta takes a complex, clunky part of running a business off the shoulders of other entrepreneurs. On today's episode, Christina shares lessons that she's learned as the founder of a hyperscaling company with more than 10,000 B2B customers. You gotta have incredible talent at every position. There are fires burning when you're going out. Can we believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to this is truly gonna be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. Oops. It just seems absolutely not all. Ten years later, I'm like, well, that's just how you do it. We haven't made just how you do it.

3:36 This is masters of scale. Christina Cassiopo is refreshingly honest about the unglamorous work she went through before finding the winning idea for her company, Vanta. We started by talking about her first job out of school. at the legendary venture capital firm Union Square Ventures.

3:59 And what it taught her about startups. Christina, welcome to Masters of Scale. Thank you so much for having me. You went off to Stanford for college and graduate school, and then you chose to go to a venture firm. Yeah. Why? That was dumb luck. It was less of a choice.

4:17 I think coming out of Stanford when I did kind of late two thousands, VC was not something you did out of school. I just got really lucky and the folks at Union Square Ventures in New York had written a blog post saying, Hey, we want to hire someone if you're interested, like fill out this form, basically. And you know, I mean I respect a ton of things about

4:38 those partners in that firm. And one of them is they like they build their firm off the internet. They hire off the internet. They do not hire off of kind of personal networks or anything. And but I first read that post and was like, well, that's crazy. Who's gonna get that job? Why did you why did you have that reaction? Who hires like that? Especially a V C firm, right? Like you know, and it just didn't seem real almost, or it seemed like the person who got that job was gonna be perfect in all these ways I was not. But I kinda kept thinking about it and it was on a two week application period and you know, literally on day fourteen, um, I just like well What, you know, what's the worst thing that's gonna happen? Like everything will continue as it is.

5:15 And so I filled out the form and I ended up getting the job. Why wasn't V C a thing that you would do straight out of school? VCs are supposed to provide advice and experience. Both in making investment decisions and then also helping the companies. And like when you're twenty two. Advice and experience usually aren't your aren't your comparative advantage to the workforce, let's say. Right. But they wanted someone with your background, with your insight, because what were they looking for at the time? Yeah, I think it was They talked it's funny now because it feels so clutchy, but at the time it was internet native is the term. Yeah right, but it was kind of someone who grew up on the internet, quote unquote. And when a new, especially because this was again late 2000s, early 2010s, a lot of consumer social, a lot of new mobile apps. And so it was like looking for early adopters and people who were, you know, would say

6:04 Oh, you know, Four Square, do I think that's weird because I'm just sharing my location broadcasting my location to strangers? Or is that great and how I'm gonna like make new friends? And they were like looking for people who gravitated to the latter. Um, because I thought that wouldn't kind of push their their investment thinking and help them figure out what would be next. What did you learn at Union Square Ventures? USV I think they're good at a lot of things. They are very, very like market and idea driven. And, you know, like all investment theses, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but I think their their like fundamental worldview to me was if an entrepreneur finds the right market. They will win.

6:42 And I think it's different than other firms, which are more like, oh no, it doesn't matter the market, it's all about the person, like kind of the great person theory of investing. And a little bit like wackier. The better. You know, contrarian's kinda overused, but I think they did really like things that seemed dumb. The though what starts as a toy becomes serious. You know, the Twitter investment and

7:02 Two thousand six. Um a great example of that. Yeah. W wh why? I mean two thousand six just to situate it, right? Friendstor had come, MySpace was on the rise, um, Facebook was just becoming a thing, right? Was was still at universities. It felt like there was a wave coming. Why was Twitter sort of dumb? What different about it, right? You can post 140 characters on Facebook and you can do more. So why does slimming this thing, you know, why would slimming Facebook down and then not really having a user base somehow succeed? And yet it did, right? Yeah. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. So okay, so you spent a few years at USV and why did you leave?

7:51 I wanted to build things. Um I both loved The parts of the job that um were smart people would come in and you could ask them lots of questions and they would like politely tell you everything they knew. And then you could go email more smart people and like it just kind of felt like a racket and it felt wonderful. And I really liked those parts, but But then kinda after those conversations, I'd like you know, go back to my desk and write an email about it. And it just felt sort of unfulfilling. I wanted to

8:19 You know, if I kinda believed in one of those ideas rather than like writing the email to advocate for the investment or whatever, I wanted to like Go work on it. And I think I had a bit of, you know, back to the Generally, folks don't VC is not someone's first job out of school. I think I had a bit of like, well, why would someone take money from me versus Fred Wilson versus Matt Kohler at the time, right? If you want someone who is like earlier career, but exceedingly accomplished. And so I kinda felt like well I

8:46 I think I I want to go try to build something. And again, if I were pitching, I wouldn't want to take money from me. I would want money from Fred. So that also doesn't seem like a great path as shiny and as, you know, many people kind of seem like they want to do it. It it didn't feel right for me. So a lot of people in that situation, when they sit down to write the email, would have that, you know, what effort. I this is what I want to go do. I'm gonna email the CEO instead of email Fred and say, like you should hire me. Right. That's not what you did. No, I I think the other part of it was like I wanted to learn to build products. Like everything was so product centric because it should be.

9:23 And I had like a little bit of a programming background, but not really. Like I couldn't go make a website or an iPhone app. And I think to the puzzle piece, like I wanted to figure that out and wanted to prove to myself I could do that. So what I did was I took my bonus

9:38 basically lived off of it for two years. So that was kind of my Grad student. The living. And taught myself to code. How did you teach yourself to code? The internet. I grabbed a desk at a friend's company. And so I would wake up every day and go to work. And I would like go to his company and like sit with his engineers and they would be doing their like work for the company. And I would like be doing my little blog tutorial. Oh wow. But it was kind of this

10:02 sort of fake structure. Like I again, I went to work five days a week. I like got up in the morning and I did that. And sort of acted like I had a job, even though I did not have a paycheck. And that structure is actually really helpful because you wake up in the morning, you know, and you're like, What do you do? And you're like, Well, Clearly you go to work. That's

10:18 That's what one does. Yeah, and I think I think there's a lot to be learned from constructing a structure. Right. Like like building the routine, building the the ritualizing of it all. And it must have helped to be sitting with people who were coding professionally. It was very helpful. But when I would ask something, you'd get someone who's like, Oh, I remember how to do that. Like, let me sit down and show you. Uh, and it was very nice. Amazing. I mean, so it really was like you you were you were funding grad school with this bonus, and grad school just happened to be a desk at a butt at a friend's office. Yeah, so so you spent a couple of years doing this and you Don't go start a company. Don't go start a company. Upset it. 'Cause nothing I was working on was worth starting a company for.

11:01 And I was both like really fr you know, you're like frustrated by this. And I think again at US V I'd seen That actually starting the company isn't the hard part. That's, you know, shockingly easy. The hard part is like in year four when it's not really working, but you've raised us money and you have employees and you're still doing it. And like maybe you don't want to, but you're not really saying that out loud yet. And like that and that's actually kind of the median case. And I think the downside. The downside isn't the thing

11:28 becomes a crater in the earth and just ends, like then it ends and you can move on. It's sort of that slog. And so I didn't want to work on something that I wasn't really convicted in. І тук северо єс.

11:41 A stinted Dropbox, and a laundry list of misfires before Christina found an idea interesting enough to build into her own company. I think we built a couple of things that just no one wanted and then realized, Hey, we're Going about this wrong were building products and then running around and asking who wants them, which is generally very hard to do well. Uh, and certainly something I've like never succeeded at in my whole

12:06 career of building things. So what we started doing was Or said, Hey, no more coding, no more building. You just go talk to people and talk to enough people until they start to say the same thing and you find a person with a problem is the catchphrase. And so I started talking to people in security because security just it seemed interesting, it seemed important, it seemed big. And kind of to your point, like

12:31 I was really lucky and I could kind of Go explore ideas. And if they didn't work, I could probably get a job somewhere. And some of the thinking was like, would I want a job in security? I don't know. That seemed kind of interesting, but like let's go figure that out. And basically through that process landed on the idea for Vanta and of using compliance. as a carrot to get a company to start building out their security program early. Yeah. It's really interesting. I mean, you all took the approach of really going out and just talking to prospective customers and trying to understand

13:03 Before you built a product. Was their product market fit. Where was it best with the biggest total addressable market? And were you felt Called to it. Is that exactly it. And so what was there an inflection point? Was there a moment where the lightning struck and you said, this is what we need to go build? Yes and no. No, and I think it was like a gradual process over three or four months of just building confidence incrementally. And When I say that it sounds like it was better every day, it wasn't, right? Like there were ups and downs in that, but the arc over three or four months was

13:33 Upward. And I think there actually there was a moment when Basically word of mouth got out. that we're working on compliance and We got this email from somebody that roughly said, Hey, I really don't understand why you're working on compliance. That sounds like the most boring thing.

13:51 we should like get a drink and talk about your life choices. And by the way, my friend's company needs this. So like you should do it for them, but then you should probably figure out what you're doing with your life. And it was this kind of funny email because Should I be offended, but no, right? Like somehow this person had heard about what we were doing. Thought we were Kind of off.

14:10 But also directly needed it. And again, this was all word of mouth. Um while we were just kind of fumbling around with startup ideas. And so there's something there that like that felt like market pull, or there's something there that again never happened in all the other things I had built. Okay. And so just in a nutshell, what does Vanta do? Vanta helps companies build out their security programs, demonstrate compliance and manage risk. And the demonstrating of compliance and managing risk before Vanta. was largely a manual process. Super manual process. So that's why a lot of companies didn't go through it. But it was spreadsheets, screenshots, tens of hours with engineers sitting with accountants going through like cloud infrastructure accounts to give the accountants confidence.

14:56 the company's security was set up well and they could issue this report. that then all the other customers would trust. And so it was this kind of very valuable exercise, but it just It was so costly in terms of engineer time that companies would rarely go through it. Yeah, and the lawyers are then freaking out. Yes, right. So as you hit on this It sounds like both a simple and complex problem to solve. Is that is that fair. Yeah. Why is that right? I think on the simple side you're it sounds kind of obvious. You say okay, well

15:26 The company's security program is probably already an engineering systems. the way we kind of demonstrate that security via these audits and attestations is really manual. But then the report at the end is very valuable. I think these regulations are complex and nuanced. They're actually full of gray and the gray is kind of purposeful so companies can figure out what's best for themselves.

15:48 But I think that Ambiguity led lots of folks to look at it and say, Oh, you can't automate that, because what are you automating, right? You're automating this. kind of fuzzy regulation and we looked at it and said hey, for a set of companies that are just starting out, best practices actually get them really far. If you make sure that the company is

16:10 fulfilling all the regulations with best practices and get them to implement them. The company is more secure. the process of, you know, kind of generating all the documentation you need is automated. And you can actually cut out a lot of time and cost. And they can get this. report that's then very helpful for their customers and building trust. And my lawyer brain goes immediately to oh great. Okay, but are you then taking the liability if we get it wrong because we're using your software? Was that something that came up and you had to deal with or No Not really, because the way the way the standards body is the AI CPA, the ISO standards body write the write the rules is the auditors audit what the company gives them. And so it's it's the company's responsibility to provide the information. The auditors just look at it.

16:54 Okay. So you you're you're effectively providing the structure and process for the company to put the data into. Exactly. Okay. Got it. Market by market, I assume there were different compliance requirements, right? It's different in a highly regulated industry like banking or pharmaceuticals than it is in, you know I don't know, away a luggage business. That's true. And we started with SOC two, uh SOC two. Which is which was the closest thing that existed at the time to like a default. business software standard. It's not it's not a law. It's more of a like de facto standard, but that seemed like the first thing companies get. So the first thing we started with. Okay, and you're not a lawyer. Not a lawyer. How how do you become an expert on SOC two as you are an entrepreneur with a background in venture in coding now and being a product manager?

17:41 sitting down and learning a lot about it, talking to a ton of people, reading the regulations, reading the regulations with people who know a lot more than I do, asking a lot of dumb questions. Early on, I I did look into getting my CPA. It was like basically an eight year journey and I decided it was had enough school at that point. Um I guess I could have had it now if I had started then. Uh so I didn't do that. but I tried to do kind of everything but go and do that. Still ahead. How Christina built Vanta into a tech unicorn.

18:11 And what she's learned about scaling. along the way. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. There can be two types of companies. Those were great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future?

18:36 That is human centered. I'm Rana El Calyubi. On my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. And we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in.

19:07 Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show. Because every Friday we release a second rapid response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there. Welcome back to Masters of Scale.

19:46 You can find this conversation and more on our YouTube channel. I love SAS. SAS is it's a fascinating business model, right? It's also really simple ultimately when you get to committed monthly or annual recurring revenue and you can start upselling clients, like the your predictability in your business is just an incredible thing. It's also not something everyone intuitively gets. So two questions on that. One. is you're building a team. How do you recruit people in to come do

20:13 compliance, which there may be some sexier things going on at Silken Valley. And then Two Where did you go find investors to support the business? Yeah, so on on team building we did have a lot of you're working on compliance, you like that. And I think what we'd we'd say is It's actually much more interesting than I expected. Even for me, you know, you get to touch all parts of a company and learn about them from their cloud infrastructure to how they hire people to all the SaaS applications or like software companies using it's just actually a very broad domain. And so to me, there's lots of kind of interesting problems in it.

20:49 And it's actually much more expansive than, you know, just doing a Task management software or you know, document collaboration software. So there was some of that. And then honestly, I think the other part was We had such strong product market fit, not because our product was amazing per se, or it was amazing in that It let our customers

21:08 achieve something they basically couldn't achieve on their own. And they were so appreciative and grateful because compliance does sit in this intersection of something you might need to do or really feel like you need to and something you don't want to do. One thing I found is like when you offer service or a product in that intersection, customers tend to be so grateful. Yeah. And more grateful than your product might justify at that point. But again, you're like getting them to something they couldn't do on their own. And so I think there's just there's a lot of market pull, there was a lot of traction, and then our users were just So happy with us. Yeah.

21:40 in a way where objectively I kind of didn't think they should or our product wasn't that good yet. Which was true in lots of UI and UX and the website could be better and buggy and all of that, you know, is painfully true. But like I it got them the outcome. you were also solving a real problem. And you know, done was better than perfect at that point, right? And obviously not done, you're iterating. It feels like you were kind of selling a new kind of product, something that that your customers hadn't seen before. What is it like building the sales channels for a product that is really new to market? Yeah, I think we got lucky in that'cause it was strange in in basically again the way you would

22:17 get one of these certifications, but for a vanta generally if you'd approach an accounting firm that has an IT audit practice and you talk to accountants and work with them. And you know, we were clearly not accountants, we were tech people and where we first really had go to market success was selling to engineers and heads of engineering. And One of our early customers described us as like a babblefish, a translator between engineering and audit. And I think there was something kind of deeply true there, where it's our our pitch to an engineer was like, Hey, you want to go through this, you can go talk to an accountant or you can talk to some engineers, like, which do you want? And that kind of took us pretty far. And then over time we've gotten much savvy and smarter with, you know, compliance people and security people and just different personas within the company. And you were tapping into pre existing IT budgets. Is that where the money was coming from, or was it coming from elsewhere?

23:05 Mostly pre existing IT budgets, although honestly a lot of our early customers just didn't have budgets. Because they were startups growing themselves. Right. Okay. So you came to this vision for compliance software summer seventeen. Okay. And you had a co founder. Yes. Just take us through the scaling journey. So did you raise capital in twenty seventeen? We raised a very, very small amount, a couple hundred thousand dollars. Okay. We actually didn't want to raise very much because again, we didn't know what we were working on. And it felt like having Infinite money and infinite runway was actually not a helpful thing when you needed to figure out what you were doing. Sometimes constraints are helpful. Yes. Yeah. But when we had confidence. And the idea had an early product, had a couple customers lined up. We went through Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley accelerator program.

23:52 in early twenty eighteen raised a three million dollar seed round after that. And then it was sort of off to the races. Uh, which meant trying to hire both engineers and actually our first hire was a compliance expert to make sure we we kind of did what it says on the tin and you know fulfilled what we were telling customers we would do. And that was a lot of twenty eighteen. Mm-hmm. And so having been in through that ten to seventy five engineer journey at Dropbox, what did you learn from your time at Dropbox that you deployed as you were growing Vanta? Yeah. Well, I think in the early days actually it was it was a bunch of counter lessons, I think, at Dropbox. It was like, oh, we know a lot of these people, we've worked with them. Like of course they'll come work with us again.

24:35 And The answer is Yes, but no. By which I mean people like hopefully liked us or would work with us. But you were asking someone, hey, you're you have this career path at the Silicon Valley Company, you have this mortgage, you have this annual bonus. Like, do you want to make one third of that amount and like sit in a room with us and see if this will work? Uh and it was like a very tough pitch. Yeah and so I think actually there was um Some kind of missed start in in recruiting in the early days just'cause we were going after a profile that wasn't

25:05 fit for a super, super early stage startup. It taught me viscerally when people talk about stage appropriateness, what that means. Yeah. And I think our first engineers who are all kind of wonderful and lovely and and so talented were much more people who are like Up for a ride. And like the ride might be the world's most exciting roller coaster or it might be a golf cart around the parking lot. You know, and people want the the roller coaster and not the parking lot, but they were up for either. Yeah. Did that become one of your big hiring filters? Yes. Yeah. And so how how would you suss out whether they were up for the uncertainty of is this uh a roller coaster or a rocket ship or a golf cart in a parking lot? Yeah, I don't think we're very good at it then, honestly. I think we've gotten better at it over time, and the way we do it is actually just

25:53 the questions, the exercises in our interview process are all sort of ripped from the headlines line of s like they are just real things we are thinking through. And I think repeatedly through the interview process, trying to Be very direct and transparent about what we're struggling through and what it is like to work at Banta. In a way that I think sometimes surprises candidates, because they'll say, you know, you're telling me a lot or like, Wow, you have a lot of problems. And the answer is kind of yes, but these are the things we're working through and

26:21 You can learn about them now and opt in or opt out, or you can not know about them and then accept the job and then be very surprised later. And so I think it's just kind of setting up these interview processes such that people mostly aren't surprised in their first day, week, month. How'd you build out your leadership team and how do you lead? It's funny, when Vanta was about twenty people, this was just before the pandemic.

26:42 Seed investor said I should start building my leadership team. And I literally laughed at him because it just felt so it felt like playing startup. You're like, what do you mean a leadership team? Or it's like 20 people just scrapping things together. Leadership teams are things big companies have. And so I sort of, you know, laughed until we were about fifty people and then hit a moment where it was like, oh my gosh. Now I feel like there's, you know, we need we need kind of a leadership team in so many places, and I'm so behind the ball here. And so I think on that My advice actually to my prior self was like, even though it sounded hilarious.

27:14 If you are growing and you feel like you've product market fit, start at twenty such that You don't have to start later when when everything is kind of even more chaotic. How big is the company now, people wise? About seven hundred people. It's a lot of people. It's a lot of people. How do you manage a seven hundred person remote forward workforce? Still figuring it out? I think we do I don't know great, but I think Mission.

27:35 Company and product vision. Principles, which are sort of our values. And what we call strategic initiatives, but like the four big things for the company, we just repeat. Constantly. It is a little, you know, I don't know, strange to me. And you're like, I I just said this yesterday, do I need to say it again? But the answer is yes, and it works.

27:53 It's amazing. Um actually. Yeah, it is as simple as it sounds. Yeah. Twenty to seven hundred and five years is a lot of growth. Was there a point at which you were hiring dozens of people a month. Like was there a point where you were just in that hyper growth phase? When was that and what was that like? There's a bit in the

28:19 Second half of twenty twenty one. And it was chaotic. And I think, yeah, you would see these company, what do we do, fifty to one fifty that year probably, so tripled. And you'd have these onboarding classes of, you know, at the time like fifteen people, twenty people, and they felt so huge. And I think it was this moment of like we're gonna try really hard to onboard these folks and teach them what Vanta is and does, and it's not gonna go as well as we want it to, and we'll try to pick up the pieces. Again, you're on the roller coaster and it is going and you're hanging on and you're trying your hardest, but I think also the sense of like, Oh, this isn't gonna it's not gonna work as well as we want it to. Yeah.

28:55 Christina, as we sit here in the first half of 2025, we're all but required to talk about AI. I know Vanta has implemented AI into its products. I want to hear about that. I also would love to hear about How you think about AI as competition because what you do sounds perfectly suited for artificial intelligence. I think it kind of is, or like a lot of what these compliance workflows are taking information in one format and putting it in another. So taking a policy document and turning it in engineering config, engineering config into a rule that's followed, basically. You know, turning all of this into like a format an auditor wants to see it in or a customer. But I kind of think that's great for Vanta. You know, we have 10,000 customers

29:36 We have a deep understanding of these primitives and the data. And so uh this stuff should get turned into AI, but we should be the ones that do it. Or we should ask ourselves very serious questions about why it wasn't us. How are you implementing AI right now? So we have a good portion of the engineering team that both kind of builds internal tools for all of our engineers to to go and work with AI and build kind of eval and model quality. And then each product team and engineer on the product team are like in taking those tools and then using them in in their area of the product. And Building things out there. Yeah. One of the hallmarks of successful SaaS companies is they Keep adding new features and products so that

30:19 the recurring revenue from clients is going up each year as they're they're saying, Oh yes, I'd like that too. How are you thinking about that as you bring new features and products to market? Yeah, we think about it a lot. So we've we've moved from where we started of automated compliance to what we now call trust management. Which is a a broader expanse of we'll have the automated compliance pieces, we'll have workflows for security around the people in a company, the assets, so the you know, laptops. cloud servers, et cetera. the data in a company, uh, and then the vendors as well. Uh, but basically this broader sense of okay, there's compliance workflows, but again, it's such a horizontal area. It touches the security of so many pieces. And so we started to start it and we'll continue to to build out products there for our customers. Are you enjoying The seven hundred person phase of Anta?

31:08 I am I do think it is a useful founder skill to convince yourself you like each phase. But I also think again that to the problem solving piece, it's just new problems and a different problems. And every day is different still, and I I just really like that. So you said ten thousand clients? Yes. Where does the company go from here? It's funny, when I started this, people didn't think the market was very big. I mean, kind of including us, because there just weren't that many sock twos done.

31:35 And it turns out if you make something that is compelling easier to achieve. More people will achieve it. Uh-huh. And so I think that sort of cracked the compliance market open. And then what we found is Again, this was sort of the thesis of the company, but it it's become true is compliance is this like great wedge and all of these other security processes in the company. And so it does really feel like or there's kind of the hard parts of Vanta. It's like, hey, there's so much opportunity, there's so many adjacencies. Which do we choose in which order? Versus, you know, oh, there we just do this one niche thing. It's it's almost the opposite. I think we can really build a way for companies to help.

32:15 Understand and improve their security. and do that hard work and then tie it to revenue and customers so they get credit with the market for all of that hard security work they've done. But I do think it's different than a lot of security companies, which are more risk based or fear based in their approaches. We're much more, you know, how do we tie this to our customers want to revenue growth such that you can invest more in security? Yeah. Do you think about going public? Not often.

32:42 How do you think about evolving the company? Ultimately providing an exit for your investors. Like what's what's your vision for that? Yeah. The goal very much is to build a like long term sustainable independent company. And so going public, uh is basically the path for that for you know all but A very small handful of software companies. But I think one thing I've deeply learned and saw at United for Ventures is a couple of companies IPO'd when I was there was. You know, folks talk about the IPO as an exit and it is for the investors, but

33:12 The company still exists after that. Like you're still doing everything you're doing just almost on harder mode. Yeah. After and so Kind of like I don't like orienting around finances. I like don't really like orienting around. In IPO because it's A day that's

33:26 Sounds like it's like really fun with lots of confetti. And then you get up the next day and still do your job. Right. It's like the intermediate milestone versus the finish line. Yeah. So anyway, all to say. goal is very much long run sustainable company, perhaps an IPO in the future, but I think it's a milestone, not an end marker.

33:45 Responsibilities like compliance and security may not be the shiniest parts of running a business. But they are mission critical to success. As Vanta continues its meteoric rise, there is little doubt that Christina and her team will keep finding innovative ways to solve problems in this space. Her approach is a valuable reminder to face challenges with curiosity and determination. and that others will reward you.

34:13 If you do. I'm Jeff Berman. Thank you for listening. Masters of Scales await what original. Our executive producer is Eve Tro.

34:25 Our senior producer is Trisha Bobida. The production team includes Tucker Legurski, Masha Makutunina, and Brandon Klein. Our senior talent executive is Stephanie Stern. Mixing and Mastering by Aaron Bastanelli and Brian Pew. Original music by Ryan Holiday.

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