Kevin Murphy (00:00)
As enterprises rely more heavily on digital communication, the threat surface continues to expand. Phishing, impersonation, and identity-based attacks are now some of the most common and damaging forms of cyber risk.
Today I’m joined by Rahul Powar, CEO of Red Sift and Mark McGovern, venture partner at Sands Capital to discuss how Red Sift is helping organizations protect trust at scale and why that matters for resilience.
Rahul, I’ll start with you. Can you walk us through your background and what led you to Red Sift?
Rahul Powar (00:33)
Yeah, sure. First off, Kevin, thanks for having me on the call. So my background is, I’m a technologist. I actually started my career as technical architect for a mobile app company of all things called Shazam back in 2000. And my background has always been around this idea of machines and pattern recognition. So, if you think about what Shazam was back in the day, it’s really just about finding the pattern of music in a large, many lifetimes worth of the audio really.
And if we move towards where we are in the internet landscape today, specifically with regards to digital trust and cybersecurity, there is a very similar pattern where the internet produces a huge amount of noise and attackers tend to exploit a lot of that ambiguity. Now the cross signals for all of this are in there, but they are quite fragmented and they’re weak. And so, you effectively have this model where you have this very high data density.
And you’re trying to find things in that pattern of noise that are really the signal that helps organizations sort of find the pieces of the puzzle that matter to them. So, you know, we saw early on that the internet is really the fabric of the way digital businesses operate today. And at the same time, it’s under attack from, you know, this very large trust challenge. And so that was the origin story of Red Sift. And that was why we’re excited about solving this problem at scale.
Kevin Murphy (01:57)
Excellent. Well, let’s dive a little bit more into that problem since you mentioned it. And I’m sure we’ll go into a lot more detail as we work our way through this session. What specific problem did you see emerging around digital communications and trust that felt, not only urgent to solve, but that it wasn’t being addressed specifically at the time?
Rahul Powar (02:18)
Yeah, sure. So, you can think of the sort of modern attack surface. So, we all know, for example, that a lot of the cybersecurity incidents that organizations face today typically start with something as straightforward as phishing. And if you actually kind of decompose that a little bit, you realize that this is actually really a trust problem at its heart. So, if you think about email and what it is, it’s really a critical part of the internet that allows this open, decentralized messaging between organizations that everyone will be very familiar with. Large organizations use email every day at very significant scale. Individual users use email every day. It’s the same system, and it’s an old system, and people don’t really understand just how old and in many ways fragile it is. It wasn’t really designed for the needs and demands of the modern internet, so security has kind of been layered on top over that period of time.
And the reason why many large attacks, even as recently as this year, start with a phishing campaign is because it’s probably one of the channels that’s the easiest to impersonate and exploit. And impersonation is really just a trust exploit. You trust someone, you trust someone and their messages. It’s delivered over the insecure channel like email, and suddenly you have an opportunity to escalate an attack and actually take control of an organization.
Kevin Murphy (03:39)
Yeah, that’s excellent. Definitely the soft belly of the internet here.
So, Mark, thank you for joining us as well. For those of our listeners who don’t know you, can you just give us a quick overview of your background? It’s deep in this space, but it also is pretty broad across technology.
Mark McGovern (03:57)
Yeah, sure, I have been doing a lot of work over my career in cybersecurity specifically. I grew up at the CIA building covert and clandestine communication systems. I did that for 12 years, I guess. And then I wound up joining startups doing application security capabilities, helping Fortune 200 companies secure their infrastructure and their one-of-a-kind applications. All sorts of customers there that we supported, including the Federal Reserve Banks of Boston, New York and Richmond, Pfizer, Microsoft.
Yeah, so a very interesting world to go into, security, one-of-a-kind systems, including actually the UK National Lottery. When they went online, we were the security team for them. Then I wound up leading investments for In-Q-Tel, the US intelligence community’s strategic investment arm. I led all their security investments for 10 years. Did a whole bunch of interesting investments there, early stage.
Founded my own cybersecurity company doing user behavior analytics, led that from founding to acquisition. And now I do what I love, which is work with early-stage companies in cybersecurity and helping them get big. That’s the whole goal from small to big.
Kevin Murphy (05:05)
Excellent. We’re definitely pleased that your path led to Sands Capital. So Mark, you’ve been covering and investing in this space for some time now. From your perspective, what initially drew you to Red Sift and this particular problem space?
Mark McGovern (05:20)
Yeah, let’s start with the second part of that first because I think what drew us to Red Sift was the ability to see the signal here and the noise. So, you know, we look at a lot of cybersecurity companies every year, hundreds.
And what really stood out in the first meeting and even in the first few moments of the meeting was the team. So you have Rahul and his co-founder Randall, who had worked together in a number of organizations and building successful products before. So, as he alluded to Shazam, but he also subsequently built consumer-facing product, that was purchased by Thomson Reuters, if I recall right, Rahul.
This was a set of entrepreneurs who had worked together before on tough problems and made them highly successful and usable. And that is incredibly powerful in cyber. I’ll leave that as the first thing to say, because I think in some ways as an investor, it’s a critical aspect of something that doesn’t – you can’t say, “oh, one team has a technology in this, but they don’t have that.” That is the key to success is the team in many ways. The technology and the aspect of that, that was compelling also, but really, it’s the focus, and Rahul just alluded to it, which is: how do I bring signal out of noise? How do I make something easy for my customers in a world where they don’t understand necessarily what’s coming at them? They don’t understand what the bad guys are doing to come at them? And maybe they don’t even understand the core technology that well that they’re using. So, email sounds like it’s simple, but as Rahul alluded to, it’s very complicated under the scenes. There’s a lot more to it than most people see.
And what their focus was in the past efforts and in this one was making it consumable and easy. So you take a team of entrepreneurs who have worked on something before and demonstrated success and you put it together with that in cyber and it’s a win. And that’s what drew us in from day one with Red Sift.
Kevin Murphy (07:11)
So is it fair to kind of interpret your emphasis on the team as important because of the just incredibly rapidly evolving nature of cybersecurity. I mean, it’s not a create a product, one and done, move away. It seems like you have to constantly be adapting to not only the incoming threats, but as you said earlier, that this surface area continues to expand and maybe even moves into places you haven’t thought of before. Is that a fair way to characterize the importance of the team itself as opposed to the product that they are currently delivering?
Mark McGovern (07:46)
The team’s an essential part of that, right? So, they have to be able to see the opportunities, to see the capabilities that are needed by their customers, and to figure out what can be practically put in the field and adopted by their customers at scale. So yeah, the team is a critical part of that. And the focus of the team is important. And I really want to stress that. The idea of usability, because usability in cyber is so unusual that it’s-
Cyber is already a large market, but the ability to go and address as many different parts of it from the global 50 down to SMBs and to sell into all those different, the market stratas, is incredibly valuable. And you can really only do it if you have a focus on usability. You can’t sell a highly complex product to an SMB or a mid-tier market company, right?
And so- but you can sell it to a super large enterprise. It’s very sophisticated under the covers ultimately, but it provides the value prop that all of them need. And that’s, there’s just genius in that.
Kevin Murphy (08:51)
Mark, I want to stick with you for second. Can you give us kind of an idea, an overview of how you view the broader cybersecurity infrastructure space as investments? Do you have a framework that you think about or is everything unique?
Mark McGovern (09:06)
Cybersecurity is resilience. So you’ll hear that word a lot when you talk to Sands Capital. Cybersecurity is, I’ll argue in some audiences, almost synonymous with resilience. It’s the ability for folks to defend themselves and their organizations against these increasingly different, as you’ve noted, Kevin, types of attacks or attackers. Cyber is driven by two different things, arguably, at a big level. It’s driven by new technologies or technologies that people want to use. So, we see that every day these days, right, with AI, with, well, AI. Is there any other set of letters that you have to say today? But the second is an intelligent opponent. This is the difference between cybersecurity in almost any other market. You have an intelligent opponent who will come at you in different ways, no matter what you’ve put in place yesterday. So, you always have to be moving in some way or enabling your customer to defend themselves in a way that they can support. When we look at it, we look at cyber as something that has a big market demand.
It’s got scale if you build the right product. And from a company building perspective, the beauty of it is it’s sticky, right? People don’t like to change the thing that’s working and has defended them. So, once you’ve made a customer happy and gotten them, it’s revenue over years. Sands Capital looks at, you know, how do we invest in companies for the long term? That’s an incredibly powerful trio.
Kevin Murphy (10:36)
Excellent. Well, Rahul, let’s switch back to you. I don’t know if anybody could truly pinpoint the exact date that email became a thing, but it was, some would argue that ARPANET back in the 70s. Maybe we could kind of put it closer to the 90s where it became more ubiquitous, but it’s been around for a very long time. Why is email and now every form of digital communication that’s come along since then, why is that such a persistent vulnerability for enterprises?
Why haven’t they solved this problem yet?
Rahul Powar (11:05)
Yeah, it’s a very good question. I think I would probably put the email birthday at maybe 1982. That’s sort of the date that the RFC, the Internet Standard for email, sort of hit its first draft. And it’s sort of hidden in there, right? Because email, as I mentioned before, is old, clearly. And if you look at the original spec, it was never really designed for security. So, I’m pretty sure in the spec itself, it says, you know, clearly there are no security controls in the spec, but who would want to use it for this type of nefarious use? Now, obviously, move forward 20, 40 years and we can clearly see that there is a lot of economic value in trying to use and abuse the trust relationship that’s associated with email. So what the industry has done over that period of time is that they’ve really got to layer in security in a way that makes email more secure to the typical types of attacks you would see against any messaging infrastructure.
So things like impersonation, man in the middle attacks where someone basically taps in and listens to what’s going on on the wire. But the big challenge for email is that because it is this distributed, decentralized piece of infrastructure, there’s no real way of sort of making a new version of email without breaking everything that already exists. So you have this really interesting problem where you have, you know, effectively billions of inboxes that all have to communicate with each other and continue to communicate with each other.
While at the same time becoming more secure over time. So how do you do that? And that’s where the whole process has become actually very complicated and to some extent messy. Mark alluded to the fact email seems simple, but it’s actually pretty complicated underneath. And the reason for that is because all of these things have layered up over time. And so, what we find is that when we look across the email landscape, we find that organizations don’t really understand all of this, A particularly well.
And B, because they don’t understand all of this particularly well, they don’t layer in all the best practices, security solutions that exist on top of email at any point in time.
And the impact of that, of course, is that many of these channels are still vulnerable to certain types of attacks and impersonation. And as a result, you have all of these news headlines about phishing and supply chain fraud and so on. That’s not to say that, there’s a silver bullet that say, if they implemented everything, all of these things would go away immediately. But it does reduce the attack surface. It makes it more difficult to do some of these things which are otherwise easier today. So there are a few layers to that question of why is email so insecure, but you know, the one level is ubiquitous, it’s decentralized, it jumps between organizations, it’s in use with everyone, at the same time it’s a really old protocol and not everyone’s implemented best practices today.
Kevin Murphy (13:49)
Yeah, let’s stick with that for a minute, because that is surprising and not surprising at the same time, I guess, that we hear these email and phishing attacks pop up quite a bit. Why is adoption not much higher? And is it partly a misunderstanding of the impact what happens when trust breaks down, when that form of communication becomes insecure. And then, actually kind of extending, I guess, the question, which is coming longer than I intended it to be, but the question for Red Sift and your brand and domain protection business, is that related in some way, or do people not understand, companies not understand the impact that this has not only on their data integrity, but the long-term impact on their brand overall?
Rahul Powar (14:33)
Cybersecurity tends to be a sort of complex topic and I think your question has quite a few sort of fairly interesting and complex elements to it. I would take a high-level view on this and say, you know, cybersecurity, as Mark alluded to, can be very complex and it’s not always well understood by all of the IT practitioners inside organizations. And then if you have the system where you basically opt into more security, there is an open question of what does commercially relevant security look like for me, for my organization, for my industry at any point in time. And the answer to that is it changes, right? As the standards get more sophisticated and as your peer group starts to implement the right controls, they become more difficult, potentially more expensive targets. So as a result, bad actors will then look at, well okay, in this cohort, who are the easier targets in the space?
And so, you can see mid-market organizations and smaller organizations who haven’t implemented all of these controls, who don’t have the resources to do all of this particularly effectively, end up seeing a lot more adversarial activity than maybe they did a couple of years ago because they remain unsecure, they remain unprotected, they haven’t implemented the best controls, but they’re still likely responsible for large amounts of commercial activity.
Or they handle large amounts of transactions in many material ways, but they don’t have the same level of resilience. So that kind of shifts around, as you would expect. And the second thing is, I think organizations are often quite used to thinking about security as something that happens at their perimeter. So, you know, as an organization, these are the inboxes that, quote unquote, I protect, here’s my network perimeter. This is what I need to sort of build my fortress around. The reality is when you think about things like attacks against customers, supply chain attacks, it all becomes very porous. There’s a large surface area on the internet. So if someone impersonates you from some, let’s say, professionalized organization in some far off land, and they hit a customer in Ohio, that doesn’t necessarily go through your network at all. It’s a supply chain attack that bypasses you completely by impersonating you over the internet.
So to think about the fortress around your network perimeter, it’s not quite the right model. And I think in order to sort of combat these types of things that happen at internet scale, you sort of need to think about your security stack in a different way. And I think organizations at various stages on the journey in that.
Kevin Murphy (17:00)
Well, let’s dive into the specifics of Red Sift then. Mark mentioned this already, he was the first to use the term AI on this podcast, so we’ll give him credit for that. Let’s talk specifically about how Red Sift applies AI to help organizations protect their digital environment.
Rahul Powar (17:21)
Yeah, I mean, AI is definitely the acronym of the moment or anything. Mark went a whole 10 minutes before mentioning it. So think in 2026, that’s a win. I think we like to think ourselves as you know, very excited about the possibility of AI, but we remain quite grounded on the fact that we see it as a tool or set of tools to solve a particular set of problems.
So the question for us is where does this particular tool actually end up being incredibly helpful? And I would, know, at high level probably pick two things that AI does for us at Redshift that I think are uniquely valuable insofar as capability matches the problem space. And the two things are AI has made it relatively easy and largely inexpensive to do things that were historically very, very difficult and very expensive for machines to do.
So when we think about things like trust-based attacks or phishing and all these other things, what’s actually happening is you’re trying to appeal to the human using some combination of messaging, imagery, presentational elements effectively to try and believe something about you as the adversary that they may not otherwise believe. So they might use things like brand logos, they might use your tone of voice, it might be an urgent sounding message from an important sounding person like your CFO. These are exactly the sort of things that historically machines have had a really hard time understanding. Machines haven’t been able to look at images, understand what this is about. They haven’t really been able to understand what a web page is talking about or what it’s trying to sell you. AI has made this relatively simple to do.
There’s still some implications about performance at scale and so on, along with any inherent biases that it may have, but it’s effectively given machines this toolkit that lets them understand human communication, human intent, and certainly visual representations in a way that has actually been really difficult for machines to do for a really long time. So that’s very powerful. So when we start to apply them to things like our brand solution, where we basically go out and look across the internet for inappropriate or potentially fraudulent uses of your brand. We can do that far more effectively at scale in a way that a bunch of humans using browsers could never do. So this is like magic really for this specific problem domain. And the other thing, which we also sort of slightly touched on, but didn’t really click into, was that security is complicated.
If we think about your average IT professional who’s actually dealing in some of the domains that we operate in, they don’t really understand all of these technicalities as well as maybe they could. But actually educating them or building up the workforce or building other expertise is very complicated and quite difficult to do. However, building expert AI systems that can codify a lot of this complexity and actually deliver at scale, that’s starting to become a reality in 2026. So these are the two things, these two pockets of capability that I think this tool set are really, really good at. And we’re excited to build more on this.
Kevin Murphy (20:38)
Well, let’s now switch to Red Sift as an investment. Mark, over to you on that.
Maybe give us – there are a number of participants in this space. What stood out to you about Red Sift’s approach to this problem?
Mark McGovern (20:53)
I’ll go back to the ability for the product, as it was developed and as it’s being designed and architected and put in the market, to be able to support the requirements across different market sectors. Not just that the underlying technology was refined enough and thought through enough and usable enough, but that you had the ability in the problem you were solving to meet those needs of wherever your customer was in their journey of understanding the threat. And that’s been incredibly powerful to Red Sift as a company, as it’s grown over time, at looking at the different opportunities that they have. So whether that’s direct sales that are product-led, so product-led growth type capabilities where there are very limited amounts of sales resources put against things, even up to the point where you have sort of account managed executives going after high end Fortune 50 companies and solving their needs. It broadly fit across that. In addition to that, being able to partner with various large enterprises who are selling into the customer base globally has been incredibly powerful, right? And if you look at it, the reason Red Sift – I was going to say we, I think we think of it as we, right? – we can do all those things is because it’s Rahul and the team have done such an amazing job of making it, I don’t want to say the word simple, I want to say the word usable, right? Usable and powerful. It’s not a static thing, right? As Rahul has alluded to, the product grows over time. Attackers are doing different things. We’ve moved not just from doing email-specific things but doing brand-related things.
Mark McGovern (22:42)
And you’ve heard as Rahul walks through some of that exposure as to the value prop there and why. Because bad guys are doing things out there. They’re not just coming after the employee behind the firewall. They’re coming after your customers. They’re coming after your partners. They’re coming anything they can figure out how to get to, they’re going to come after. And that’s the neat part about cyber and why I get excited about cyber.
But back to Red Sift, I think it’s that growth over time that’s been impressive and we’ve seen it on the product side and on the business side, which is amazing.
Kevin Murphy (23:17)
Yeah, that’s great. And I want to kind of back up on that term we because you know you have a solid relationship, a symbiotic relationship between the investor and the founder of the business when you start to think of them as part of your team.
So I like that. If you meet a private equity investor who refers to their investments as they, there’s probably more separation between those two groups than you’d want. Encouraging to hear that. And I want to kind of dig into that a little How has this founder-investor relationship evolved over time? Maybe just take us to the beginning when you guys first met, started talking, and how has that evolved to where we are today?
Mark McGovern (23:58)
You know, I remember very vividly the first time, I alluded to it earlier, when we met Rahul and Randall. It was a very startup-ish environment. I think we were sitting in the middle of a, there was a fountain by us, we were on plastic chairs, and it was interesting. And you know, one of the great joys of investing is getting to know smart people over time who are really focused on things. They’re curious. They’re working on new things. And Rahul and Randall are that. As are a number of, I don’t want to leave them out, a lot of the other people on the Red Sift team. Great people attract great people. And I think Red Sift has done that. So we’ve got a great team there.
Anytime I’m interacting with them or any of the Sands Capital folks are, it is really impressive to have a discussion, not just about what’s this maybe business issue we’re dealing with or a product issue or a customer issue, like how are we going to get to the next level, but broader wise, what’s going on? What’s going on both inside the company, in the market, in the world?
As AI has become this front-page thing, I’ll say it again, what are the edges of what’s practical? What are the edges of what we can do? And I definitely look towards Rahul and the team to help sort of expose that in very practical ways. So it’s evolved. I mean, there’s been friction along the way as there always is. Small companies, are always trying to figure out how to do something that hasn’t been done before. That’s sort of the joy of an early-stage company. There’s no roadmap for how to build this. But they’ve been great discussions and I think everything has wound up being very, well, I mean, we’re very happy, it works out.
Kevin Murphy (25:49)
Rahul, how do you view the relationship you have with your investors?
Rahul Powar (25:54)
You know, so I was actually racking my brain for the physical location where, we had that first meeting, with, uh, with the Sands Capital team. And I have to admit, we went through so many offices back in the day, I’m actually struggling to pinpoint where it was. So it really was a true, true startup experience, but I remember the plastic chairs. And I think that points to points to a little bit of the kind of business that we’re in. So cyber has some really interesting characteristics. I think Mark mentioned a few of them, right? It’s actually an adversarial business in many ways because your adversary is iterating and is evolving as things change and as the ROI is established and certain attack vectors and so on. So to some extent, you do really need to look at and accept that there’s going to be change from a product and market perspective as you go out and build the business.
But all of that implies that you’re really partnering up with, a sort of durable long horizon thinker as a partner. And that can be a little bit unusual when you’re going out and actually raising capital, especially for an early-stage business, because at the end of the day, you’re really early on that journey and you don’t even realize it. Like I didn’t realize it back then, right? When we first started talking. We found an enormous amount of value through a combination of things with working with Mark and his colleagues at Sands Capital. And I think the key thing around that is sort of this long-term thinking and this trust relationship. I think it’s really hard to build a cyber security business, arguably any business, but it’s certainly quite amplified in cyber, where your customers expect you to be a durable partner, they’re solving for the long-term. Mark alluded to the fact that once you’ve actually helped organizations defend themselves against attacks in the wild, you know, they’re going to be with you for a long time. I’m very happy to note that we just renewed our first ever customer for another three years. So they’ll be with us for almost 12 years at one point in time. That’s, you know, a lifetime in the SaaS world. So all of that only really happens when you’re really building this durable, long-term vision of a solution. And if you want to do that with external capital, you need similarly a long-term thinker in your partner. And for us, we see Sands as the anchor in that relationship.
Kevin Murphy (28:17)
Okay, great. Actually, that’s a good segue to the next topic I want to talk about the future of cybersecurity. Just give us kind of your roadmap for what you think that future looks like. And I think we’d probably have to talk about Claude Mythos if we’re going to continue this conversation today without missing a really big piece of news. How do you think about that? Has it changed the way look at your approach using DMARC or things like that, or does it not really have an impact on the way you guys’ approach cybersecurity?
Rahul Powar (28:49)
I’m happy to take it as I’m sure Mark has a bunch of hot takes. From our perspective, Mythos isn’t specifically the area that we operate in. We mainly care about protocol-level security, internet deployments. Mythos is obviously a little bit more focused on the idea of finding vulnerabilities in code. And I was actually talking with a couple of people in the industry about this when it broke last week.
And I think there’s an interesting paper out there that shows that a bunch of other models can actually do very similar levels of analysis and get very similar results. I’m pretty sure that Anthropic’s model is probably better than what is generally available, but I wonder if there’s some level of hype around getting access to it, which I think serves their purposes and everyone else around in the ecosystem. But I think that at a high level, clearly, models are getting very, very good at writing and understanding code and taking large amounts of complexity and being able to make sense of them. And clearly as we scale them up and continue to invest in them, this is just likely to get better. The idea that agents will be able to, in a very inexpensive way, find issues with software, I’d be very surprised if this is not our reality already.
And it’s not effectively a commoditized reality moving forward. I think this leads me to another observation that I’ve been thinking of over the last couple of months, certainly, which is the sort of cost of all of this. Because effectively we’re moving to a world where the cost of attack is effectively trending towards zero, whether it’s things like finding vulnerabilities in zero days in previously widely distributed and allegedly secure code.
Or the cost of launching impersonation attacks and spinning up infrastructure in order to actually try and attack an organization. So, my view is that that is the future that we’re moving towards. The cost for defending in the cyber arena, much like in the hot wars arena, also has to drop towards zero, which means that you need more proactive security. You need more autonomous systems.
And you need to find ways of being able to defuse and defeat the bad guys in a way that’s economically sensible. Otherwise, the way this entire model works is unlikely to be sustainable.
Kevin Murphy (31:06)
Mark, did you have something you wanted to add to that?
Mark McGovern (31:10)
I think what’s important to realize is this is a market that’s driven by two things. It’s new technologies- AI- can’t spell new technology without the letters AI these days, and an intelligent opponent. And those intelligent opponents are going to use whatever resources they have to get at the thing they can. They want to.
If there’s one thing we should realize, it’s that the AI world is a competitive space in itself. So even if Claude is ahead today, that doesn’t mean they’re going to remain ahead or significantly farther ahead than anyone else. So let’s take it at a fact that bad guys can use AI to find evil things to do and they’re going to continue to do that at scale probably faster than defenders in the near term. So, we will see a wave at some point here in the near term that looks dark, looks scary as some very nasty things happen because AI has enabled bad things to happen on the attacker side.
Mark McGovern (32:08)
On the fortunate side, we have companies like Red Sift who are doing things to close the door on things. So Rahul alluded before to the relatively low percentage of folks who have closed the door on fundamental protocol issues on the email side. Great opportunity both Red Sift and it’ll drive folks doing things that are durable solutions.
Enterprises will drive to close the door as fast as possible on the things that are just definitive like I do it, it’s done. We’ll deal as we have for the last 20 years on what’s the next increment of what a bad guy tries to do against us. Because it’s their job to do that, sadly. Our job is to make it economically unviable for them.
Kevin Murphy (32:53)
I guess it kind of goes back to the original comments you made about this rapidly evolving space. You can’t sit still. Well, Anthropic certainly brought this to everybody’s attention. It doesn’t sound like this is new-ish, new in the context of AI, which usually means a week or a month or so. I appreciate that.
Sticking on that, Mark, I’ll throw this one to you. In addition to that, maybe this is wrapped into the question I asked, which was probably a misunderstanding too about the impact on this particular layer of security. What else do investors often misunderstand about cybersecurity at this particular layer?
Mark McGovern (33:33)
People will often hear me say, and I think it’s true, is cybersecurity is not for tourists. You’ve done one investment in cyber, I hope it’s a good one, I do. But in reality, my experience having done this for 20 years is that there are a lot of things out there that look good and sound good but aren’t. Meaning that they don’t sell, they don’t fit the need of what enterprises need or customers need, they’re not usable, they don’t have the ability, they’re basically trying to hit the puck where it is, not where it’s going to be.
So the complication and the complexity of cyber is real. The need for resilience that it provides is real, but also the complexity of building a company around it is real. And it requires a great team, a focus on a big market and a good opportunity, and the ability to make a product that people want to use and want to keep. They want to buy it, they want to deploy it, and they want to keep it.
And when you can get those three things together, it’s magic. It is easy to be shown a presentation or shown – some very sharp entrepreneur says I’ve built this thing and everybody in the world is going to need it. I probably see 70 of those a year that will not sell or ever make real revenue.
Because the buyers and the enterprises don’t have enough bandwidth to deal with the problem you’re selling them. They want a solution, not a tool to make more work for themselves. And that’s why I think Red Sift has been such a great success in many ways, is they’re solving problems for their customers, not selling them more work to do.
Kevin Murphy (35:13)
Yeah, that definitely comes through in the comments and goes back to the importance of investing in the team and not the technology specifically because the technology could be obsolete pretty quickly and you got to evolve. So that’s good insight. Rahul, I’ll end it with one last question to you. You’ve got to look pretty far down the road in your business and also keep your nose really close to the street to see what’s happening in real time.
Where do you see Red Sift in a couple of years in terms of any kind of new products, technologies, solutions you aren’t currently running with today? Or do you have enough wood to chop in front of you as it is?
Rahul Powar (35:53)
Yeah, I think we’ve got a pretty robust roadmap for the type of problems that we’re looking to solve over the next 12 months. But to invoke the famous AI again, I do think that there is a real opportunity for us to take a lot of friction of the problem space that we’re out there trying to solve today.
And as I alluded before, the technology is about ready now. And I get excited when the technology is ready, but the potential is not realized. And I think that’s sort of where we are with AI today. I think the models are extremely capable. We’ve been able to build extremely powerful, agentic workflows that do things that would otherwise take some of our best people using some of the best insight for some of our most sophisticated customers and automate that at scale.
If we’re able to do what we’ve always tried to focus on, is make it usable, make it straightforward, build the intelligence at the back end, make it feel a little bit like magic. I mean, no one loves the cybersecurity provider, but we’d certainly try. I think when we’re able to do that, then we can solve problems at a scale that we’ve never really been able to get at before. So, throughout our entire portfolio, 2026 is going to be a year where basically we’re just trying to take a lot of that automation potential and turn it into automation reality.
Kevin Murphy (37:13)
That’s excellent. It’s just surprising how few people, how few companies realize how important this is to just being a resilient business over time. Thank you guys. This was a really interesting conversation. I appreciate you taking the time to walk us through all this.
It’d be great to check in again as quickly as this space is changing. I’m sure there’ll be a lot of new things to talk about in the short term here.
Thank you for listening to this episode of What Matters Most. Red Sift is a powerful example of how resilience isn’t just about preventing attacks. It’s about preserving trust in the systems we rely on every day.
As the digital economy grows more complex, that trust becomes a key component of this foundational infrastructure.
