John Collison: evaluation

Transcript context

…The real story is twofold. One, prior to Vanta, I worked at Dropbox. I worked on what at the time was a new product, Dropbox Paper. We were trying to take it to market and didn't take it to market as well as we could have for several reasons. One of which was... It turned out at the time, all the Dropbox contracts had written into them, "We're secure, we're compliant, we're pen-tested, we're XYZ." Our new thing had none of those. In order to talk to someone with a Dropbox account, which was 100 million people or whatever it was, we had to go through this process. This was Dropbox 2015, so the height of its Silicon Valley power, year and a half, 10 engineers, feature building, all that. That all happened. I was not smart enough to then be like, "Aha, startup idea." Instead, this... Dropbox, what are you doing? This sounds bad. It was about a year and a half later, just talking to startups and founders about security, trying to figure out, is there a company to be built here? How do you get more startups to care about security? How do they do it? Kind of came across companies that either did nothing for security but felt really badly about it sometimes, but still did nothing. Then companies that had a lot of stuff in place. The lot of stuff in place was because they'd gotten a questionnaire, they'd gotten SOC 2, because of an enterprise customer. That was the, "Oh, that thing." I remember that being crazy, and onerous, and terrible. But also if you do it, that is like, Pass Go, Collect $200. Huge benefit on the other side. It was the combo of those two things. What you're describing, I think, is just so commonly the experience in founders who start companies. I mean, it was our experience with Stripe as well, where we had just run into the problem before. But it's funny, I often run into people in university who are excited about starting a startup. That's generally… Obviously, there's lots of sexy stories of people who dropped out of college to start something. That's generally a bad time because you talk to university students, often, their ideas for companies are pretty half-baked. Find My Friends.…

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