Ben Williams: evaluation

Transcript context

…That touches on something I wanted to ask. [inaudible 00:31:24] you've mentioned him a couple times, he's got this awesome newsletter, he talks about you guys all the time. I think he's very proud of the progress of Snyk and he talks a lot about that for developers, you got to win hearts and minds of developers to build something that works. Any lessons or pieces of advice for folks that are targeting developers to win hearts and minds and get engineers, developers excited about what you're building? I think there's two things, right? First of all, fundamentally for someone to get excited about using a product, they've got to care enough, right? They've got to have a problem that you're solving. I think there's two things. One, there is a shift that is happening and still happening. I think there's still a long way to go for developers to really care about security as an integral part of their job in the same way they think about functional quality or performance. I think that we're still, we're making strong progress there. It's changing all the time, but there's still a long way to go there. But the reality is that I think in most companies, developers have to care about security because their companies need to be secure. The key then is how do I make the job of being secure for these developers, as painless as it absolutely needs to be? And that means really meeting them where they are, integrating with their tools, finding ways to take security to them instead of trying to pull them out of their workflows. Flow is just this incredibly important concept for developers and you want to strive to keep them in that flow for as long as possible. The GitHub kind of pool requests are a great example of that. Someone can sign up for Snyk and they could theoretically be the only user of Snyk and connect their repos. All of a sudden we're protecting, securing those repos, a hundred, a thousand developers could be working in GitHub with that code, all benefiting from Snyk without necessarily needing to sign up. That's that example of taking the product to users without pulling them out of their workflows. I think that's absolutely critical. 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.…

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