EVERY SPOKEN WORD
145 min read · 28,962 words- BGBen Gilbert
How do I open again? Welcome.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
Wait, what is this show? What are we doing? [laughing]
- BGBen Gilbert
Welcome to How I Built This.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
Welcome. [laughing] No.
- BGBen Gilbert
[laughing]
- DRDavid Rosenthal
No, nothing against How I Built This, but that's not us.
- BGBen Gilbert
All right, let's start. [laughing]
- DRDavid Rosenthal
Okay. [laughing]
- SPSpeaker
Who got the truth? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Sit me down, say it straight. Another story on the way. Who got the truth?
- BGBen Gilbert
Welcome to this special episode of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert, and I am the co-founder and managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs, and our venture fund, PSL Ventures.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco. But today, Ben, you are hosting me at your lovely home here in Seattle.
- BGBen Gilbert
Welcome to the studio.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
[laughing] It's great to be here.
- BGBen Gilbert
And we are your hosts. Ho, ho, ho.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
Ho, ho, ho, happy holidays.
- BGBen Gilbert
Happy holidays. [hip hop music]
- DRDavid Rosenthal
Man, I, uh, I don't know about you, but, uh, I'm ready to put a bow on 2022. [laughing] Well, we have much to talk about.
- BGBen Gilbert
Yep. Well, listeners, normally I have, like, a script, like, a thing that I'm looking at in front of me to know what to say now, but I don't really on this one, other than to say join the Slack. There are great people there-
- DRDavid Rosenthal
Yes
- BGBen Gilbert
... including probably you, if you're listening to this episode. We don't think this is an entry point for a lot of people into Acquired. We think this is probably if you're a fan, you're gonna listen to this, but I don't think this is gonna be anyone's sort of first show, so we're gonna try and go a little, uh, a little deeper and nerdier than normal.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
We've got a little agenda. We're gonna recap 2022 for the show, for tech, for us, talk a little bit about what's ahead in 2023. We've got some extra, extra fun carve-outs.
- BGBen Gilbert
Indeed. Well, we would be remiss if we did not thank our good friends at Vanta. So before we dive in, over to our conversation with founder and CEO Christina Cacioppo.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
One of the things we've talked about over the season, Christina, is how security and compliance has really evolved in these few years that Vanta has been, uh, really pushing the market forward, and it's no longer just about, like, check the box, playing defense as a company, and especially as a startup. It's actually about playing offense. Given all that and the kind of central role that Vanta is now playing in this space, how do you see security and compliance evolving?
- SPSpeaker
Really excited about the future, so I think a handful of things we're seeing. This concept of, you know, security and compliance and basically proving the security you have to your buyers has just become table stakes to B2B companies. When raising the seed round for Vanta in 2018, walked around and totaled the VCs that were gonna SOC 2 all their startups, and many of them very reasonably looked at me perplexed and said: "But my startups don't get SOC 2, so what are you talking about?" But now we serve a majority of the current YC batch, so people in YC right now, and again, like, YC is all about just getting revenue, but these reports just help you unlock that, and they do that by, like, opening up new markets, whether it's international or enterprise or healthcare or regulated industries. And I think particularly in the 2022 funding environment, so much is about revenue growth from secure, trusted sources, and so I think we're gonna see more companies move upmarket faster than we might have otherwise, and these big companies know that, you know, they're only as secure as their vendors are. If your vendor gets breached, looks like you did. It doesn't matter it was them, and so there's just... I think we're gonna see more and more scrutiny here over time, and that's gonna filter down into higher expectations for startups. So having stable customers that aren't gonna go out of business on you and hopefully are gonna expand over time, and one of the things these security and compliance certifications and reporting helps you do as a founder is sell to those big companies and prove your credibility. And, you know, you might not have the tenure of a kind of more established competitor, but you have their practices. You are taking good care of the customer data that you've been entrusted with and are ultimately gonna be a good and trusted business partner for the long run.
- BGBen Gilbert
Our thanks to Vanta. If you want to become a customer, along with 4,000 other companies, you can click the link in the show notes or go to vanta.com/acquired. With that, this is not investment advice. This is probably the episode of the year where we will come closest to things that might be interpreted as investment advice as we talk about things that we have liked and didn't like and predict the future and all that, so do your own research. All right, David, what are we starting with?
- DRDavid Rosenthal
All right, I think we gotta recap 2022. [chuckles] Despite the craziness of the year of 2022 in the, um, broader world, tech, markets, economy, this was a pretty great year for the show. I have down here my signature Acquired episodes-
- BGBen Gilbert
Mm
- DRDavid Rosenthal
... and favorite memories from the year. We started the year with Taylor Swift.
- BGBen Gilbert
Yes.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
Isn't that crazy that that was, like-
Episode duration: 2:22:18
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