anecdotes Emerges from Stealth — An Interview with Yair Kuznitsov, co-founder and CEO
As anecdotes prepared to emerge from stealth, I sat down with CEO and co-founder Yair Kuznitsov, to discuss the company’s background, product and vision.
Aaron: Let’s start with you and your co-founders’ backgrounds. How did you all meet?
Yair: Our story began quite some time ago, when I worked with Eitan, my co-founder and VP R&D, in the Israeli Intelligence forces as group leaders. We were tasked with creating the most innovative cyber technologies for the IDF, for the years to come. Similarly, I met Roi (our other co-founder and CPO) when we worked together at IntSights, where we worked closely to build a technically challenging SaaS product.
At the end of the day, all three of us are cybersecurity and infrastructure enthusiasts, with similarly geeky interests and hobbies, and a deep personal connection. As our paths crossed and we explored the possibility of building something together, we realized that we had a chance to build a market-leading business in a massive domain: the infosec compliance ecosystem.
Aaron: So how did you and your co-founders conceptualize anecdotes?
Yair: In our previous work life, Roi and I had to ensure that our SaaS product complied with SOC2, and we just couldn’t believe that the compliance process for highly-performant, cutting-edge software was still rooted in screenshots and manual processes. The inefficiency was mind-boggling. We set out to evaluate some legacy GRC (government, risk, compliance) solutions, but they all failed. Spectacularly, actually.
So to us, there was this obvious need for scalable technology to alleviate the burden of manual evidence collection in the compliance process. This need, combined with the ongoing and dramatic adoption of cloud computing, microservices and SaaS solutions, created a perfect opportunity to build anecdotes. It’s a superior approach to compliance and infosec, and it allows companies to preserve their precious engineering resources for what’s truly important — innovating and winning in an increasingly competitive global market.
Aaron: Why did you decide to come out of stealth now?
Yair: We had huge demand for our product from the get-go, and that was accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Security and audit teams are working from home and are actively looking for solutions like ours, ones that facilitate their compliance processes. Until now, they couldn’t find any to meet their needs.
As we saw this great interest from customers and their partners, we realized that it’s about time to release our product to the general public. Our product is mature, already serves some of the world’s leading enterprises, and we are confident that anyone using it will enjoy smart and simple compliance.
Aaron: So there were really no good alternatives out there?
Yair: I mean, there are some newer compliance workflow or process management solutions that have come out, but we are as different as night and day, and customers see that right away. We’re the only deep technology platform for modern IT organizations; nothing in the market compares to our technical or product approach. That’s why leading CISOs and infosec leaders from compliance-sensitive companies like Lemonade and Appsflyer were really eager to get started with us.
Aaron: You’ve touched on this, but exactly what is the state of compliance manager workflows today? How complicated is it? What pains are you solving?
Yair: The compliance process is far from simple. Compliance managers talk to countless stakeholders — both internal and external — to ensure compliance best practices are upheld and to prepare for upcoming audits. And they must manually manage and maintain evidence via unreliable legacy technologies. A meaningful amount of work shifts onto overburdened and expensive developer teams as well.
anecdotes’ platform solves the problem of repetitive, manual evidence collection and alleviates audit fatigue.
Because our platform standardizes data and automates evidence collection, compliance managers can now be proactive, helping to scale their business, instead of merely consuming resources to comply with business requirements.
What’s more, our automation and standardization make it easy to adopt and manage multiple frameworks, which likewise contributes to business scale.
Long story short, we understand compliance leaders’ pain points and know exactly how to mitigate them.
Aaron: What are your mission and vision for anecdotes?
Yair: We’re striving to bring real innovation to uncharted territory — the sky’s the limit! Specifically, we want to leverage technology and a cloud-first state of mind to redefine the compliance ecosystem. By empowering compliance leaders to scale their infosec compliance efforts with ease, we hope to help companies and their auditors with their audits, ensuring compliance peace of mind.
And on a more personal level, as developers, we’re passionate about creating new and compelling things and less excited about bureaucracy — and we know that other developers feel the same way. We want to save developers, compliance leaders and other contributors one million hours of their time, so they can spend it on other work that is useful and interesting (and maybe get 5 minutes to relax!).
Aaron: What feedback have you received from compliance managers using your solution?
Yair: So far, it’s all been very positive! Our customers have expressed pleasant surprise over just how user-friendly the solution is. AppsFlyer, for example, cites the simplicity, quick onboarding and visibility the anecdotes platform provides. We’ve heard time and time again how anecdotes enables seamless evidence collection and collaboration with stakeholders (like auditors and co-workers), saving compliance managers time and, frankly, energy.
Aaron: If I may add to everything you’ve said — from my vantage point as a VC — this has been a universal problem for years, for companies big and small. It’s hard enough to build a start-up in a new and competitive market, so the large amount of management attention and developer time that has to get spent on compliance overhead is just incongruous. Yet it happens everywhere, and the problem is just exacerbated by macro factors like microservice architecture adoption and growing developer costs.
And you guys haven’t taken any shortcuts. The alternatives in the market restrict their scope to workflows or a limited range of compliance standards because none of them are deep and scalable technology platforms, like anecdotes. Congrats on the category creation and leadership; we’re excited for the journey.
Yair: Thank you!
