5 Truths from a CEO Who Created His Own Category
We’ve been hosting our New York Enterprise Tech Meetup (NYETM) for over eight years now, bringing together the enterprise tech community in NYC. We’ve heard from an array of founders, corporate executives and investors in our time, and our virtual June NYETM might go down as one of our most candid and lively conversations, featuring Twistlock CEO & Co-Founder Ben Bernstein. As evidence, we’re sharing one of our favorite comments from the audience:
“I don’t have a question…but Ben is my favorite CEO in security now.”
In addition to his energy, Ben shared how he created (and trailblazed) the container security category as well as the biggest game changers that led to the company’s $410M acquisition by Palo Alto Networks in 2019.
Here are his top takeaways from navigating the a whitespace and scaling it to success:
#1: “It needs to be a fundable idea. It didn’t matter if I had a lot of really good ideas because I was a first time entrepreneur. And if you don’t get money from VCs, then you have to build something that will eventually make sense to them down the road.”
After Ben left his job at Microsoft, he started his entrepreneurial career and like most entrepreneurs, it wasn’t a smooth start. Ben explained that VC feedback was harsh, yet critical in realizing that adding more buzzwords to a failed pitch deck or focusing on tech that was already at its peak was never going to work. Instead, the key to category creation is determining demands projected 6 months in the future.
#2: “Generally speaking, developers are smart people and if you see them put effort somewhere, that’s where you should spend your time.”
At first Ben was skeptical of the idea of “container security” when his co-founder read about the rise of containers in Hacker News. But after more investigation and seeing increased demand in the developer community, it was clear that container security was a real need.
#3: “I was always moving from 0 to 1 and 1 to infinity.”
The initial testing and trial-and-error (0 to 1) phase is important for every early-stage startup. This allows a company to test different use cases, gather customer feedback and continually evaluate where to double down, potentially more effectively then if remaining in long-term stealth mode.
#4: “There was no pricing, so we had to come up with everything ourselves.”
Initially, the Twistlock team conducted strategic exercises and determined they would charge $150 per year per host, but thanks to some last minute feedback from a friendly buyer, decided the number was too cheap and added a 0, bumping it to $1,500. Since they were the first in the space, there were no benchmarks for customers to dispute and this became the industry’s standard pricing. Charging per host was important, too. It enabled small deployments to come relatively cheap, and big deployments (ie. large banks with multi-year contracts) to be much more lucrative.
#5: “We had an amazing CTO. If you think of a deck of cards, he was the joker — he was both product and customer facing.”
Having a multifaceted CTO gave Twistlock a huge advantage on the sales side. Ben described the company as focused on driving “inside sales,” where the entire team understands the product’s ins and outs and each team’s needs to get a sale done. This advanced and company-wide communication helped reach sales success, which included some heavy hitter customers — about 50 percent of the Fortune 500 and 35 percent of the Fortune 100.
