Tim Sadler, Co-Founder and CEO of Tessian on: What All Great Funding Pitches have; Creating A New Category and Why Human Layer Security is The Next Big Thing

I sat down this week with Tim Sadler, co-founder & CEO of Tessian, a venture-backed cybersecurity company that stops threats, by securing the human layer. In this episode, I get his thoughts on creating a new category and becoming a category leader and what he believes is the secret to getting funded successfully. Tessian has secured $60m in funding from investors such as Sequoia, Balderton, and Accel and has won numerous awards including “best security startup” by WIRED, and “best machine learning startup” by legal geek
Human Layer Security
  • [1:7] - What was your journey going from being a financial analyst with no background in security to founding Tessian?  
  • [6:50] - What does Tessian do, how is it protecting people in the remote working environment and what are some of the top security threats your customers are worried about?
  • [13:05] - How does Tessian and what it does for email security differ from what big security companies like Symantec offer?
Go-To-Market 
Category Creation
  • [17:53] - How did you come up with this “human security layer” and do you see this as a new category in security?
  • [21:09] - How did you create this new category and get the industry to recognize it?
  • [23:17] - How do you constantly differentiate yourself in the marketplace when marketing and what you say can be copied easily?
Other questions
  • [26:39] - What does Tessian stand for?
  • [28:51] - Why wouldn’t security teams try to simplify their stack and go with the “good-enough” option from other big vendors?
  • [32:08] - What was your customer acquisition channel in the beginning and how has that changed as you grew?
  • [35:36] - How did you determine pricing for a new category product?
  • [36:50] - Looking back at your go-to-market journey, what didn’t go so well and what did you learn from that?

What all Great Pitches have
  • [42:07] - What was your funding journey like? How did you manage to get Accel, Sequoia and Balderton as investors?  


Links
Company: Tessian
Book:  On Tyranny by Timothy D Snyder

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