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Transcript
Narrator:
Welcome to 9 0 9 Exec, your source for wit and wisdom and cybersecurity and beyond. On this podcast, your host, veteran chief security officer and Cyber Aficionado Den Jones taps his vast network to bring you guests, stories, opinions, predictions and analysis you won't get anywhere else. Join us for 9 0 9 exec episode 43 with Kumar Chivukula.
Den:
Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of 9 0 9 Exec. I am your host, Den Jones, and as always, we've got some inspiring guests on the show. Today's like no other, an old colleague of mine, our founder of his own company, our co-founder CEO of Opsera. Kumar Chivukula, welcome to the show, man. It's been a minute and since we left Adobe or you left Adobe first, you've been busy building this empire. So why don't you introduce yourself and then just mention a little bit about what Opsera does.
Kumar:
Yeah, first of all, great to see you. Great meeting with you Den. It's been a while and I appreciate the opportunity and yeah, it's quite a bit of journey. It's been a while. Yeah, since after Adobe, I joined Symantec and was there for some time and part of the journey of Opsera started when I was in Adobe. Some of the things that we've seen, the transformation from the Adobe transformation where it went from box product to SaaS-based offering. As a result, we disrupted so many things that we built internally in the data center. We went to cloud and the cloud introduced a lot of the challenges. So both Symantec and Adobe are two largest software publishing companies as you know, right? We had a firsthand experience of looking at how we ship the software, how we deploy the software, how we build the software, and looking at the trend that was happening around that time, digital transformation, every company's is a software company. As a result, the struggle that we went through on Adobe and Symantec, when I went to Symantec, it was a dejavu all over again for me. Like, okay, I've seen this movie before and in a different format, different setting. One is a creative software versus cybersecurity, but underlying software challenges at the same. So
That gave an opportunity for me to discuss with a few people like you and CSOs and CEOs and CTOs and validated the idea. And then as part of that thought process and then validating the idea, we felt, we came to conclusion that I think this problem is something we need to address because not every company can effort to have that much money, that many resources, and that was technology to build the software at scale. So that was inspiration for Opsera. So we started the journey in 2020 January and we didn't know the pandemic was right around the corner. Sorry,
Den:
Timing, timing is everything. Yeah,
Kumar:
Timing is, yeah, we raised the money and we started working with myself, my co-founder. We started the journey and then here we are and we can talk about more, but it's just in a nutshell it it's been a fascinating journey and there's a lot to learn and we did a lot of good work, great work in some areas and a lot to achieve more with the respect to ai. Now that pandemic is gone, we got used to that and the new normal and then now we have AI and gen ai, we can talk about it how it is coming in the way for us or for the rest of the companies as well.
Den:
And so for those who are not familiar with Opsera, how would you describe the problem you solve and the typical customers that you work with?
Kumar:
Great question. So Opsera, just to take a step back, we are the A power DevOps platform and during our time and working with people, a lot of the enterprises they deal with a lot of point solutions. They're struggling with keeping the point solutions come together, play in a harmonic way so that we can move the bits from code to cloud. So what ops is doing enabling empowering enterprise companies and developers to make their software delivery faster, better and secure. So what we mean by that, from the time the developers come in the code, there are multiple stages that has to go through the software where build, test, validation, security, which is software, supply chain, security comes in the way and quality and then approvals compliance, then you do the deployment because you don't want to just rush it and deploy the things in production and something goes wrong.
In enterprise world, there's a very less tolerance from the users of enterprises that they will, they don't give you a second chance. As a result, lot of it's brand reputation. You don't want to have a customer's unhappy about your product and that's the genesis behind that. As a result, we build a platform where in which we help enterprises to seamlessly deploy them with an automated template templates. It's their favorite choice of tools of CSCD and automation at scale and then with quality security guardrails without them worrying about writing a blue code, everything can be managed in a template as way so that you hire a smart engineer to create a template. You don't need to hire 10 other people to do it, you just take this, modify them, reuse them, push them to production. So goal is to move the bits from the code to cloud faster.
That's one use case of the ops. Second use case is helping their customers to auto remediate the security issue that comes along the way in the overall software supply chain. And that's where we can talk about the partnership that we have with other people. The last part is about how can we help enterprises to, especially with code A systems that are there with the GitHub copilot and bunch of other things in the market recently where people are able to see the benefit, but how much of benefit, what value impact ROI for the developers as well as enterprises. So nutshell, software delivery management and we are DevOps platform but focusing on STLC, SaaS applications, automation and then autom remediation of the security and then unified insights and across the ecosystem of software SDLC.
Den:
And then your typical customers tend to be enterprises that have Fortune
Kumar:
5,000 customer requirements, predominantly Fortune 5,000 customers like our ICP where we target right now, given we are a platform startup companies, they have a similar struggle but they want to keep the business logic close to the infrastructure and where they do the DevOps initially. But when it comes to the ICPs, about two 50 developers, anywhere between two 50 developers, we see the tools are going to be more, a little bit more friction is going to be more they understand that, see the problems much faster than 10 developers, five developers. So we look at the ICPs five fortune 5,000 companies with anywhere between two 50 plus developers
Den:
And I think one of your value propositions is a financial savings situation as well because I think done right and we've lived the done wrong thing 15 years ago or so, but done, you can save a boatload of money leveraging your platform, right?
Kumar:
Absolutely. There are three, four areas, but OPEX is savings definitely is one of the front and center of the equation, especially when you're talking about the tools. We talked about a bunch of tools in the ecosystem. Half of the time we discover a lot of the tools are spun by the engineers or the DevOps team running in the data in the cloud not being used. So what we can do is we can help rationalize the tools to start with it. That's easy savings for them. You're paying something you should not be paying in the first place. And other maintenance, licensing costs, people costs and management costs. So if you add up all of them, if you have 10 tools, you're paying the north of cloud and maintenance licensing costs, people cost a couple of hundred thousand dollars and a year. You don't need that in the first place. And also you don't need an exposure of the security or any of those things and they're not being managed. That's one op savings. Second opex savings comes in, you can manage at scale without needing of hiring tons of people. You have five people in the DevOps thing. We don't need to go through the grind of doing the same thing over and over again. The same five people can effectively leverage, offset a platform, do more with less. That is the second opportunity we offer to the enterprises as well.
Den:
Yeah, and it's funny, so I do share this with a lot of companies, founders that we partner with or advise and it's in the sales pitch. I've seen companies so busy on features and functions and how they're better than their competitor and I'm like, that's not attractive to most CSOs or CIOs. What is attractive is save money first, improve efficiency or reduce friction and then reduce risk. You see, because there's always an element of risk, but if I could save 20% of the budget for running this thing, then that can be serious money and from a C-level perspective, you can reinvest that money on other initiatives and do more.
Kumar:
Yeah, you brought up a good point and one is the cost is always plays the role, but there are other elements. When you talk to the CTOs, the question that we ask, they are under pressure to deliver more with less, less also go to market faster. How can we release things faster? How can we put the features in customer hands faster? Especially with ai, they're under even tremendous pressure because this coding assistance, a lot of people talk about white coding, they talk about a bunch of other nuance that we have. This application is there, this tool is there to generate things faster. Yes, it'll generate things faster, better, but you need to be careful about how you the you can go from concept to idea to concept to MVP faster. That is what is helping once you have a concept to MVP faster, how can you take that into a more productionized is where a lot of the time and effort goes in. But absolutely cost savings is one of them. Time to market is another one and then risk factor that you mentioned, which is absolutely you don't want to put something with known bugs and known issues into production in the first place. And definitely you get exposed very quickly as soon as you do that.
Den:
Yeah, it's excellent. So I'm going to pause for a minute for a quick message from me actually. Hey folks, just want to take a minute to say thanks for listening to the show, watching the show, however you engage with us. If you're liking the conversations, if you think we're adding some value, we'd love you to subscribe and share the show with your friends. If you know of anyone else that would benefit ideally for us that will help us be able to grow the show, invest more in the quality, get some more exciting guests and keep bringing you some executive goodness. Thanks everybody. Take it easy and enjoy the rest of the discussion.
Kumar, we're going to shift topics. Let's talk about the journey. So I've paid attention to your journey because we were colleagues at Adobe and stuff and a lot of the stuff that you've been building with Obera is a lot of the lessons you've learned over the years of living this life as a practitioner. So you understand the problem because you lived it, you lived it again at Symantec and now you're like, okay, wait a minute, we can solve this problem. And I believe, and I'm thinking out loud for you really, that you're like, I can solve this problem and we know there's thousands of companies that need this problem solved. So the early founder, I understand the rationale to form up Sarah, but what were some of those early challenges that you had to overcome? So the first six months you got this vision, you got this idea, what were those early challenges?
Kumar:
Yeah, it's a journey full of a lot of learning and for sure you have to be humble to be an entrepreneur to begin with and you want be passionate about the idea but fall in love with the idea because one thing I learned, the whole thing is you have to be ready to absorb because you may think that you have an idea, but when you start doing the market research you'll find that the same idea is done in different ways by a lot of other people as well. So you need to be in a position to position your company, your product in a way where you can add value and quickly to your point, you brought up another good point a few minutes back, you brought up a lot of people get nominated by the features and functionality. It's not the features functionality. If you only focus on features functionality, you will not be able to build the product and you need to be in a position to see is your problem the problem that you are working or solving? Is it going to solve the pain or you give the vitamin, only give the vitamin. I don't think you have to spend a lot of money behind acquiring the customers. You have a lot of push if you solving the pain and then you get it's easy sell and quantify the pain on a scale of one to 10. If it is anything above seven, you have a chance to sell to enterprises much faster because they don't want to deal with pain.
Den:
The
Kumar:
Second thing is that regarding some of the challenges, I would say each journey is different. Each founder's journey is different and we failed in the first two items, to be honest with you. Before we went to the check for the investors, we had an idea and we tried doing it and probably like 18 months before we got the check and we started working on, we did a lot of the homework behind the scenes,
Den:
We
Kumar:
Engaged, we tried to do it and one thing I advise people is from my experience and just because you fail faster and don't give up and if you really believe in it, there's a market opportunity truly passionate towards working and solving the problem. Do enough market research, talk to people and capture enough ideas, gather your thoughts and make sure your ideas are accurate. And by talking to people with subject matter experts, advisors and your potential prospects and customers, you don't have to ask them for any money. Just ask them for, okay, can you just review this idea? Do you agree? If we were to give you the solution for this problem that you're facing or the pain you're dealing with it, would you write a check? Will you be in a position to pay the money for this idea? And if you have enough conviction and validation, then you can start, go build it.
Nowadays, maybe five years back, building the product is a little longer. Now with all the AI code assistance and a bunch of other things, the window is definitely became shorter than what it was, but we failed. And even though with all in spread of all of them, the reason we failed, we were relying on a part-time developers and we realized quickly after second attempt working with the agencies and partners and Upwork and those type of people are not going to work. We went and hired four people through our initial payroll within four months or five months of us doing it. That means that you are working continuously or nonstop before you start building the MVP. And that changed the magic that gave aha moment for us.
Den:
And I think that's the challenge. One of the challenges is if you don't have the funding in place, then how do you get the bodies to do the building of this thing? For us at 9 0 9, we don't build product. I mean actually we have recently launched a little project passion project product, but it's really lightweight, right? We're not close to what you guys are building, but that initial, I've got to bring people on board full time as a first time CEO. I'm sure that was a little daunting, right? I mean what advice would you have for people who are, they're kind of struggling with that decision of I need full-time people and I'm balancing the money and the payroll and I'm scared because we're not bringing money in and you're just hemorrhaging money. So what advice do you have for somebody who is in that challenge right now?
Kumar:
I think there are creative ways to work on it, to be honest with you. There are people only in the startup world, I don't think people are working in startup that're not working for money, only for money. Their money is important, but there are creative ways you can make it work and you can make them as a early founding member, founding engineer and then you can offer some equity and also you can have a way to structure the cash and equity. There are multiple ways you can work on it. And a lot of people look for the people who have done the work in startup in the relevant field and those are the people tend to solve multiple challenges and then you can be creative with them for sure because they understand that. I think that when you look at the now, I went back and if we were to do it all over again and I would've done a couple of things differently and to get us through the market faster, I think you need a shared mindset. And to have a shared mind, shared vision is important because they need to believe in what you believe. Otherwise there is not much you can do because you can't force 'em to do something, they're not interested, they're not in alignment with you. Second thing is attitude towards that. So in the early days, that whole discovery journey and then figuring out and playing with this idea and then try to see which direction is the right way to go is where a lot of the learning aspect of it,
Narrator:
People
Kumar:
Are open to that. That's where you can build a long-term relationships. The third aspect is flexibility and adaptability because you may think that you have a great idea by talking to people. Maybe Dan, I talked to you and got an idea, go to the drawing board, come up with a solution by talk to another 10 people idea might change and we need to be ready to accept that. Otherwise it'll be very challenging to proceed further. Last but not least, technical skills because if you have these cultural aspects aligned, technical skills will come along the way. But I think the product basically how you can situate the product, how you can cater the product is which market you are catering to. Having the clarity is important, but I think at the same token, I would suggest that where I would also think about which go-to market, I'm going after having the clarity along with building the product is where I lacked initially.
But we formed and I admit that, but had it been, we were always wanted to go to enterprise, but we also in between, we dabbled around pre-trial with PLG and other things. You need to be very clear early on how you build in the product that will set your stage for you. If you build in the developer productivity, you have to give something for them to play around with it, something for them to test it out, something for them to contribute, something for them to create. Otherwise you will not be able to succeed in the long run.
Den:
Yeah,
Kumar:
Go ahead. Sorry.
Den:
Well you were making me think of, you and I are both first time founders and we grew up in IT and security and stuff. So the reality was our background was we're working for a large company, we are a random employee and then when you put this hat on, all of a sudden you're like, oh, what does ICP mean? What does top of funnel mean? And I was lucky I was at Banyan and I reported to the founders and stuff, so I got immersed in that world pretty quick over the two years I was there. But if I hadn't done that, I'd be sitting here being like, what do you mean top of funnel? What do you mean ICP and these terms, right? I'd be like, fuck, I dunno. Yeah. So when you are trying to put that hat on your business, your marketing, your sales, so you've got all these people in your team, what was that challenge when you were building this business? I mean you're way ahead of me on this journey, so hey, it will help me. So how do you juggle all those different hats that you have to try and wear?
Kumar:
Yeah, it was hot and trust me, I'll admit that first year was really hard and for us, because while we are headstone building the product, we also need to test the market. We didn't start selling the product after we got the funding and we were working parallelly and we were working in a position in the market position, the product and working with beta customers and also some paying pre basically POC customers which are willing to pay. That's how we started the journey along the way. Oh, I had to redo learn the crash course of marketing crash course of sales. I'll tell you this one, when investors gave, when we were going down the path of raising money, these are the same exact concerns people have because we have not done this work. And they were very candid with us in some of the conversation, but one of our existing point, the Clear ventures, Rajiv and Chris, they were very candid, you have to be the best salesperson in the company.
I was totally worried because how can I never sold anything but fast forward and when you really believe in what you believe and you understand the customer problem, you lead with value, you lead with the impact. And you touched upon few, what are the things that people care about in the software world and is it because they're solving a problem? Are they removing the risk or solving the cost and helping the company to grow and go to market faster so they can generate the revenue. If you understand some of the dynamics, which I was fortunate enough to be part of the Symantec journey with some of those things from the conversations and it helped to understand the concepts, but I had to learn a lot of things in a crash course format and to put myself in the sales hat, wearing the sales hat and go to customers.
And initially it was hard to take rejection to be honest with you because it rejection is not because they don't like me because you have to understand that they may not be the priority at that point of time or they busy with something else. But over a period of time we understood that how do we pitch this idea to the customer and how do we lead with value? And you have to learn, unlearn and learn few things in the sales. I have appreciation towards the go to market and the sales side of the equation now compared to five years back, and of course in the year after first year we launched it, you have to do constantly have to work with customer because for example, if we come to you, we have 10 things that you prioritize today. If I say that RA cannot be the top 10, how can I be the top five or top three for you? What are the areas that you're struggling, areas you're thinking to solve it in the next three months? How can I align to those ideas and thoughts and challenges so that I can be the top three? So it becomes easy conversation. That is the crux of the conversation with people. And if you can solve that and you be the top of their mind, then a lot of the things you don't have to fight through the process.
Den:
And I think a lot of founders lose sight of that. I mean I think a lot of them, they're so immersed in their belief of their baby being beautiful in magic that they forget that everyone's baby is beautiful in magic. So when you're having that conversation with the prospect, it's not necessarily that they don't think you've got some genius thing, it's just in the budget that they've got in the problems they've got. Does your thing solve their top five problems? I mean if you can get that to be a Yeah, we solve or as we spoke earlier, we save you enough money,
The way you're doing it today is cool and all, but we believe we can save you money because right, and that's one thing I like about what you guys are working on is you actually have a very good value proposition for cost avoidance or cost savings, right? Either indirect or direct. And that for me as a practitioner means the world because every CSO I talk to and every CIOI talk to, they're under so much pressure to reduce cost, do more with less. I mean, fuck you and I heard that shit for decades. I mean do more with less. We're laying off five more people in the team or we can't afford to. So if you could ever go back up to your boss at Adobe or Symantec or meet at Cisco and say, the way we're doing it today is going to cost you 10 million over five years if you do this, you'll save 3 million over five years to you want that. And then they're like, of course I want that. Because the way you've structured the conversation is something that means a lot to probably like the CFO or somebody else, right?
Kumar:
Yeah, absolutely. I think the more important thing is in the grand scheme of things in it and when we are working people process technology that we learn when you comes to product, it's the product and market and the people and the process and technology. But I think I combine the product and technology, but I think most important thing you have to have in the building, the startup is the right set of people with you and building the team and along with the product is absolutely important. If you have the right people along with you in the journey and right leaders, right people, right advisors and right investors, you have a chance to build a company that you can build an enterprise company out of it because you need to have that team and you need to be humble about it. And when you're hiring people, you need to admit that you don't know.
You don't just say you don't know, you get help. And if you pretend that you know it and you continue to pretend that you know have an answer, that's where the challenge comes in because time is one, is funding gets run out of it. You will have a short runway for every fund cycle. You have to meet targets, you have to make sure that you meet the projections and your financial targets and OKRs and while you're doing it, having the team when good team and great team along with you and you will be able to, because founder's journey is very lonely. And if you think that because you can't share a lot of things with a lot of people and you have to internalize it, you need to have advisors, our trusted advisors
Narrator:
Where
Kumar:
You can go and have a conversation openly and candidly. And also same thing with your leadership team and your employees and open conversation and regular conversations and being transparent, honest in the journey because they also believe in the idea. They also believe in committing their career, their life and their personal journey to the equation. So you need to be as honest, as transparent as possible with them.
Den:
And I think, God, you touched on so many things there. One was network. So your network needs to be solid because the reality is some of those people will be your advisors, some of those people will be in your team.
So have a good network is as you go through your careers really important. And then recognizing I've probably got one of the biggest egos in the Bay area actually, but I think recognizing where you're strong and weak is really important because the one thing I know right is I've got areas where I'm like, oh, not only am I not strong there, I don't like it. There's shit I just don't want to do. But then there's people on the team that love that, whatever it might be. So I think like you say, right, when you're building your team and you're building your culture, this whole trustworthy transparency is vitally important because you're really trying to convince them that you've got a vision and a journey as a CEO, come with me on this journey and ideally we'll solve great problems, we'll make a lot of money in the journey and everybody will love it and it'll be great and we'll become known for being brilliant. I mean whatever the journey is. So for me it's like, and like you say, yeah, it's a bit lonely. I mean in my networking groups there's a bunch of CEOs, founders and people like that that you could catch up with because now you can all be lonely together.
So yeah. Now I want to jump into the funding stuff. So you guys recently just closed around the funding, right? So congratulations on that. Is part of that then you also strengthened some partnerships. I know we've got a LinkedIn live session coming up in a few weeks and we'll put the links to that to show notes but don't want to share a little bit just about the funding round. What was that experience like? How hard was it to get more funding? What's resonating with the VC community as you explained the journey?
Kumar:
Yeah, each fund rounding is different and each stage is different, but recent one, first of all, thank you. And it's a collective way of doing the work and this thing and fortunate enough to be associated with a good group of people and investors with us and they give the guidance and we work towards the goals and OKRs and position the company position the future metrics and accordingly so that they see the clear roadmap, clear vision along with us. The second thing is it's not a one time thing. You just show up and they just write a check. You have to work with them for a period of sometimes six months, sometimes nine months, sometimes a year. You continue to travel the journey with them so that they see you in action, you meet with them multiple times, which is what we have done it with.
The Prosperity seven ventures that will led the round along with Clear and along with Hitachi, along with our existing investors who participated with the Taiwan capital and others, they all participated, they contributed, they supported us. We have to be there and continue to work with them. And one is that the raising money is one part of the equation. Now how do we execute that? The reason we raise money to grow and scale because we have enough proof points that we established with respect to existing customers, customers that are retained with us for a long period of time and then willing to give the defer. And also we were able to expand within the accounts and also we got the customers through acquisition of our go to market channel. So you show the promise, you can repeat the process, you can return the customers and be able to have a path to achieve the targets.
As a result, we raise money and we have done the partnership. One of the biggest thing that series B is going to be besides growing the team is establishing the partnership. One is GitHub, which we have a fortunate enough to be associated with GitHub at the right time. And we are a complimented with GitHub. They're an a power developer platform. We are a power DevOps platform. We are an extension to their platform, which works nicely for us in competing with some of the likes of cloud based and hardness and those type of people. And Databricks is where we associate the partnership to help DevOps for DataOps. The third thing which we're going to do next week is LinkedIn live or Java. And then they build a company Lineage, great company and similar to us, they're solving one of the interesting problem, which is relevant problem in the software supply chain.
And they technology is really strong. We partnered with them before we got the funding. Unfortunately, some of the investors are common between both of us. And I worked with Java before Symantec, a lot of things lined up and when Java looked at the demo, he said, okay, I think we have Synergy. Let's work together. And we identify the problem. They're really good at looking at providing the security posture and dependencies and software builder materials and helping the companies to solve the problem. But without Sera, what they were doing is what they're relying on customers to do. The remediation, we came together, now we are offering the full on solution. They provide the scan, they provide the spam, they provide the plan, we take it, we auto remediate them without having especially open source vulnerabilities. 90% of them on O opaque and developers, whoever wrote, they're not working in your company. Yeah, they dunno. How can you penalize the existing developers to solve the problems written by someone else and half of them not be managed. As a result, our partnership is coming together, helping the enterprises to auto remediate them and without them worrying about security vulnerabilities coming in the system. It's continuous process, which is what we promised them. So love to share more details next week along with J.
Den:
Yeah, I think, yeah, I'm looking forward to that because I've spent a little bit of time with you guys just to understand the better together story. And for me it really expands on the whole DevSecOps puzzle. Now as every CEO these days says, you guys are AI powered, so everybody's AI powered these days. So why don't you share a little bit about how are you guys leveraging AI in your platform? That's the first piece. And then the flip side, we will dig into AI in general and where you see this headed, but so can you share? Yeah, what does AI powered mean to you and what's the benefit your clients are going to see because you guys are leveraging AI as part of the platform?
Kumar:
Yeah, wonderful question. So yeah, we struggled our initial days of AI because of so much is changing at the pace and rate. I've not seen it in my entire career and I believe that's the case for many people as well.
Den:
So
Kumar:
Whatever we are building it, it's changing every two months, every two weeks, every three weeks. So it was very hard to get your arms around that. That's the rate of the change. We were dealing with it. So we had a bunch of patterns that we filed. We secured the patterns within the lines of DevOps DevSecOps doing with ai, not with generative ai. For example, predictive insights, anomaly detection and basic security scorecards and quality scorecards in a predictable way. So all this, we have the patterns now how do we put in the action? Good news was we didn't build a whole lot of AI beforehand and we were waiting for the right opportunity and because doing in a traditional way, it would've cost a lot of money. And now gen AI's entry point is much easier, but also disruption is also happening at the same rate.
So we carefully focused around our own space what we do best, because I think even with LLM models that are there in the market, they don't solve magically. They don't solve the problem. You have to train them, you have to give a lot of data, and you have to make sure that they don't hallucinate and then you don't want to put in the customer hands, especially with enterprises giving the wrong answers at the wrong time in the first place. We're very careful about it. We are very thoughtful and intentional about it. So when I say AI power, we took the open source models, we have a few open source models. We took it, we trained them with the data that we have in the metadata, not the customer data, purely metadata that we generated across hundreds of tools with a lot of interactions. We have about hundred 50 plus integrations.
We know the metadata, we know the patterns, we've fed the data. Instead of doing the manual data, one of the thing that we learned is synthetic data. How can we train with synthetic data? These models are trained with synthetic data. You can't just feed manual data in between, which is one of the lessons we learned. Now, last year onwards early part of last year onwards, we generated the synthetic data through model. We train the same data, which we get, have much better results right now. And with that, what we've done is we have three parts in the overall ecosystem in Sera DevOps DevSecOps. One is how can we help reasoning with further unified insights? You are sitting as a CTO or VP of engineering, a director of engineering or manager. You want to understand what's happening in my ecosystem. I have thousands of engineers, of hundreds of engineers.
What are, we're working on it? Where is my velocity? Where is my throughput? Where is my reliability? Why my throughput is going down? Grab is showing something down or up. What does it mean? What's impact? Now what we have built is a powered a code insights assistant with hummingbird ai. You can interact with it. We will give you the summary of what is happening and you can interact with it. Why my velocity is down and can you tell me what are the contributing factors recommendations. It's like you're talking to somebody, you can interact with hummingbird ai, get the insights, trending recommendations, remediation aspects. You can be more actionable with ops, ai, hummingbird with the insights. The second very thoughtful reasoning part. Second part is we have built the agent for BS code where developers are there, they can trigger the pipelines without them coming to opsa and also get the information and something goes wrong.
They can intelligently get the information remediation as well. So something goes wrong in a pipeline consists of 10, 15 steps, sometimes 20 steps. You don't want to break your head and figuring out all the logs. What we do is we take all the logs, aggregate them, give you the exact error that is causing the problem and remediation immediately next to them. That is so powerful. Otherwise, developer don't have access to all the tools. They get home logs, they get tickets. Now they can see that what happened, what is the issue, what is the resolution, what is the remediation? They can immediately take an action. Eventually we want to take it to the next level is autom remediation, which is security, which is,
Den:
Yeah. And that sometimes takes a little bit of confidence in the trust, really, right? I mean, because leveraging AI is brilliant, but we all know that we're just on that journey and not everybody's got the same level of confidence in the results being generated by AI platforms. So being able to see it and decide upon it, and then in the future, yeah, automation is brilliant, but I know a lot of people that get concerned if something gets auto remediated and then it screws it all up and the whole thing goes to shit,
Kumar:
That's where you know that guardrails and checks and balances and you need to have those things in place and which is basically now there is a bunch of new concepts came in. Being LLM judge, instead of relying on one model, you take the answer, you go through another model and ask a similar question, see whether they're matching so that you have additional validation in the ecosystem. These are the things we learned along the way. There's not a whole lot of information. We discovered all of them as part of the synthetic data. Being LLM, being the judge and making sure that you apply, put the rag infrastructure, vector database supervisor, agent, an agent architecture, all of them came pretty much clear to many people in the last six to nine months.
Den:
Yeah, no, that's brilliant. Where do you see, I guess that's a two part question. Where do you see AI going? So in the sense of help your customers and then also in a sense of you guys leveraging AI behind the scene to accelerate or improve or that kind of side of things. So two questions there really.
Kumar:
So I think I wish a crystal ball to predict the entire thing, but what we've seen to be very candid with you, coding, writing and writing the emails, writing your blog posts and writing the code, it is helping, but it's not replacing people because it can, we've seen it within in our, I'll give you a couple of examples to make it more realistic for you guys. We were trying to build something for one of the conference and it would've taken four to six weeks. We challenged ourself, we worked on the creatively with prompt engineering and tried to elaborate some tools and few other things we came up with same solution would've taken four weeks. We built it in less than two weeks, end to end, to end, not I'm talking about from the idea to production, which would've taken more cycles, more time, but over a period of time we even reduce that.
I think that is going to happen. But your idea to proof of concept to the something that is in a working condition, you can do much faster than what you were doing before. And how do you take it where you need to put the knowledge, domain expertise and business knowledge and business acumen is very, very important. And because when you do the judgment around that and when you make calls around the human interactions where is not there at this point of time, so still have to do that and taking into production. So I think that coding and writing and any of the use cases within that area, it is definitely helping people to solve it much faster to me, running full on production. And again, you see a lot of the case studies and done by recent MIT and few other people. A lot of the investment is an experimental investment and you can't just do it by yourself.
The thing that I see is you need AI will be there. AI will be the center of the equation for years to come. It'll help enterprises to do more things that we have not seen before. New roads are going to emerge. Absolutely. New roads are going to emerge. Just like when a cloud came in, DevOps and SRE functions didn't exist in ai. You'll have a different functions will come and we'll offset some of them. But I think at the same token where I was going with this thing is you will have the customer, it's a change management at the end of the, it all boils from change management with a clear ROI. You need to be able to hedge the BES with a clear ROI and change management. I think now that we have enough evidence in the market in the last two and a half years, I think definitely AI is going to be the part of the future of the companies and we are continuing to use to power our platform.
Den:
And I do, it's funny, I tell people this all the time. I don't fall any of the companies that say, Hey, we're AI powered, but next year people won't say that because everybody will just expect that all companies are AI powered. So I had a demo of a product last month and in the platform homepage, right? Their page and they put in their ai blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, yeah man, you can rip that out next year. I know why you want to put it in now because you want to impress upon people that you guys are adopters and you're in there. But a year from now, people just expect that everything we touch has an element of AI behind the scenes ideally. So as we wrap up the episode today, what one piece of advice would you give somebody who's following your footsteps out? One gem that you're like, Hey, this is the one thing, if I could do all of it again, this is a one thing.
Kumar:
Oh boy, there's so many. It's like I said, it's a lonely journey and you surround with your trusted people, especially with your family friends, and you do a lot of sacrifices because especially what you're working, you need to take the family into consultation and you need to come the confidence and your friends. So there's so much that goes around you. It's not a one year journey. It's not a three year journey. It could be five to seven, could more depends on where you are in the spectrum of the idea spectrum of the market. So I think taking the family and friends and the trusted network into conference and stay close to them and then don't try to keep it to yourself. Try to share the information as much as possible. And you'll learn a lot. I think I wish I had as somebody who can give the blueprint ahead of time, to be honest with you that I didn't have it.
I didn't had it at the time. I learned the way build the network over the period of time. I think having a mentor ahead of time before start the company, spend some time with them. One of the example, I'll give, not going to name, I've seen a couple of founders where they came from different countries, spend some time with the founders here for three, four months, literally spending time in the intention of starting the company. They learned so much in the first three months of the journey, would've taken so much time. They would've wasted so much time before after they started the company because they would've made more. So many mistakes. Finding a mentor, good mentor can help you guide the things and keep you honest, grounded, along with your family, friends, and network is important.
Den:
I think that's brilliant. Yeah, that's brilliant advice. And I think that's the one thing for me, and it does go back to the network, it goes back to your friend circle, it goes back to your family. It goes back to the early people you hire in the business as you're building the culture and the team. And it can be lonely. And I think the other thing as well is if in the early days you're sharing your idea with your friends and you're trying to get their feedback and stuff, not everyone's going to give a shit and not everyone's going to think it's a good idea. It still doesn't mean that it's not a brilliant idea, just some people don't get it. I mean, I see that from time to time as well. And actually one of the things that we launched our nine to nine IC platform, so we're trying to connect cyber students with employers for part-time work.
When I first spoke about that, I had a couple of people in my team be like, I don't get it. I don't think that's really good. And then the more and more people, the more people we've built it now, and the more people we talk to about it, they're like, oh, that's brilliant. It's vitally needed in our industry to bring in fresh talent, low friction to use it, blah, blah, blah. But the whole idea of just getting students to work great because they could go to Starbucks or they could go get a real job and earn some decent money, but for us as employers, it's low cost, it's cheaper. And
Kumar:
Also you bring the new breed of talent into the market because otherwise a lot of people think the cybersecurity is something sitting out there and very hard to get in, very hard to crack. You expose them, they get the experience, they understand it. You're building the new talent into the market.
Den:
That's a goal, man. That's a goal. Well, Kumar, thank you very much for being on the show. I really appreciate it. Everybody, Kumar Ula, co-founder, CEO, er, watch these guys. They're making some magic happen and the partnership that you're going to hear more about in their LinkedIn live episode, that'll be around the corner. So yeah, I would love to have you guys join us, Kumar. Thanks man. You get to say the last word.
Kumar:
Thank you really. First of all, thank you Ben, and really enjoyed the conversation. I know brought some memories back from our conversation. At the same token, it's all about the team. Without the team and the team that you have and investors and employees and customers are there, they make you look better and make you take the company to the next level. And besides what is mentioned, without them, there's no company. Right. And kudos to them. Thanks to all of them At the same token, thanks for the opportunity. Looking forward to having the LinkedIn live with the Java and Linears team.
Den:
Thank you. Yeah, that'll be brilliant. Thank you very much.
Kumar:
Thank you. Have a good evening. Bye. See
Den:
You.
Narrator:
Thanks for listening to 9 0 9 exec. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and don't miss an episode of your source for wit and wisdom in cybersecurity and beyond.
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