Ben Williams: evaluation

Transcript context

…As an outsider hearing all this, it's a product that magically helps you avoid security issues, very little work, does a lot of the work for you. It's hard to imagine it not working looking at it now, and I'm curious what it was about the early days that just felt like maybe that people didn't believe in this working. Is it just there was doubt that it would be smart enough to find your security vulnerability issues? Was it the timing wasn't right, people weren't ready, weren't concerned about security enough? What do you think it was that created challenges early on? Because looking back, it's like, of course this is going to work. How could it not? It sounds just like a magical all win product. First of all, don't think the challenges were there in terms of the developer adoption. Even when those first kind of forays into self-serve were struggling in terms of breaking into some of the larger customers. The developer adoption, the free user base was still growing at a really good pace. That momentum was just constantly building and it's that momentum that has ultimately fueled the sales led business as we've gone through the years. But it was just those few things I think that I mentioned earlier in terms of stumbling blocks that needed to be overcome because when those first sales and marketing hires did join us and we started having conversations and we also tweaked some of the things in the product to meet, had some breadth, had some additional languages, ecosystems, building those table stakes features, then it really unlocked and it was rocket ship time from then. Got it. Sounds like the biggest issue is monetization. Can we make money doing this? Developers love it, they're using it like crazy, but will people be convinced to scale this an inside an organization and pay us a bunch of money for it?…

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