How Keeper Security CEO Darren Guccione grew Keeper Security to $90.6M revenue and 1K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is darren guccione he is the ceo and co-founder of keeper security the creator of keeper the world's most popular past form password manager and secure digital vault and keeper chat the world's most secure messaging app for all your devices the software is used globally by millions of people and thousands of businesses all right darren are you ready to take us to the top yes i am all right popular's a big word and my audience expects me to ask about it so when you use the word popular defend that why are you the most popular well we have millions of users in over 100 countries so we you know we grow rapidly we thousands of users a day are being added to the platform globally it's it's fantastic okay so like i mean do you know for sure you have more users or customers and like a lastpass or other people in your space um we don't really compare to others but i can say we have you know millions uh we don't really know what you know other privately held companies have or don't have but we know what we have and so but in order to be popular you have to be higher than somebody else right so that's why i asked the question more define your market for me right that's really what i'm asking is define your market sure so we sell to individuals and businesses we've got over 15 million people globally using our application we have you know thousands of companies using our product we began selling the business product about two years ago and have amassed you know thousands just several thousand over the past couple of years we're traditionally private so we don't um typically disclose the exact number that we have but i will tell you that um based on what we see in terms of app store you know data and app store reviews we have really the highest level of customer satisfaction highest consumer ratings in ios for example we're a 4.9 out of five which is very rare for a security application and we really let the customers you know speak on our behalf in terms of how they evangelize the product and speak about you know their satisfaction and compliance with the product in terms of having it you know safeguard their most sensitive digital information so darren who is actually paying you is it a company and then they force all their employees to use you or does one employee start paying you and before you know it the whole company's using you well on the consumer side you know we sell to individuals at app stores through the website as well but um so we have individuals paying us just for their personal lives um and then we have employees that pay us and also expense it through their company and third we have the actual company that buys it for the benefit of their employees so it can take its form in different ways there's you know multitude of ways to access the product so you can buy it for yourself or the company can purchase it for you or like i said we see employees purchase it and because their their company doesn't really sponsor it sometimes they'll just pay for it themselves or they'll expense you know that through a report and send it to the company for reimbursable okay well just for the sake of really understanding what you do let's just stay then at the actual individual user level and and just i will understand that that user can be by themselves part of a team or part of a team where this the company actually sponsors it but we'll just talk at that level for the interview for just so everyone can understand so if someone listening right now wants this product and goes to the app store um what are they going to pay to download it from apple or android or wherever you're at so thirty dollars per year and it covers unlimited devices okay got it 30 bucks per year unlimited devices and then i assume if you have a sales process where you're selling directly to cus to companies if they buy you know a thousand seats you'll maybe obviously wiggle down on that 30 price point for volume discounts yeah so we'll start at 30 for you know really smbs and then if you need more advanced provisioning tools you know things like active directory more sophisticated architectures we'll pay 45 per user per year and so uh yeah it can escalate we also sell a family plan we sell add-ons like secure digital file storage or something new called breach watch which is a fantastic solution that protects you from the dark web and then we also sell things like you know i mentioned secure digital file storage and then we have something called keeper chat which is an encrypted messaging application so it starts with password management and then we layer in additional security solutions that are all really focused around preventing a data breach yeah and do those additional obviously product lines allow you to drive revenue from 30 bucks a year to 35 to 40 to 50 over time yeah so we you know typically people start at 30 and then they start adding to the solution so they can layer in additional services that they find a benefit to them but we try to really price at value so that the product is highly affordable um you know you're protecting sometimes millions of dollars in digital assets right because it's your identity it's your bank account social media email etc and we try to price it very reasonably so that again millions of people can you know access the system and the software for themselves or their companies put this on a timeline for us when did you launch company 2011 2011 and and give let us in your personal life a little bit i mean where were you did you just leave corporate or yeah i mean where were you at i've been a serial entrepreneur most of my life so um you know started my first company in my 20s with my partner craig lurie that was acquired by cnet networks and and just you know just bringing us fast forward it's uh our third technology company hope you get better at it as you go along but uh that's our third one yeah and it's it's been the best uh the ride's been amazing um but i have an interesting background you know my background is really like a bean counter smash with an engineer so i'm a cpa i've got an undergrad in industrial mechanical engineering and typically that's so different than you know going into software but i've been running and building software companies really most of my professional life and for about 15 years i took a break and focused on really real estate development real estate development yeah i did um real estate finance and development for like high-end residential resort hotel uh properties and did that for about 15 years as well as a lot of tax structure and tax planning and then i got back into technology about just about 11 years ago full time so i've been doing um this is my latest venture uh which is key for security with my partner craig lurie and uh you know it's our third company together and we think it's you know the greatest thing that we've done really since the start of our technology career so fill the team out for us so it's you and craig and how many others today um today it's about 140 okay so we've grown a lot you know in the past couple of years we've really almost quintupled the size of our business we were roughly 35 people and we decided to launch our b2b enterprise business and that has really driven a lot of the growth and just expanding the whole cyber security offering with our individual users as well you know getting into other things aside from just password management really focused on the problem with um preventing a data breach so where are all the different things and tools that you should be using to really you know protect yourselves whether it be from the dark web or with passwords or secure file storage or encrypted messaging if a hacker gets their hands on your smartphone tablet or computer you really want to make sure that you have a multitude of different tools that are protecting you and safeguarding you against an attack and daryn have you guys built this up uh kind of the harder but more respectable bootstrapped way or did you guys go out and raise capital yeah we haven't reached any outside investment capital yet so this was bootstrapped and i seed funded the company and never looked back it's been a blessing you know we've taken a lot of the profits and we continue to reinvest in our growth so you're breaking then you operate basically a break even today then no no we're uh we make um really high profits yeah we're a profitable business well my point is though if you if you bring i'm gonna make this up if you bring 10 monthly to the bottom line you're probably going to reinvest that next month to drive growth right or are you paying out like dividends or rev shares to employees yeah so we have um we do really what we call a discretionary bonus pool at the end of every year so yeah so we pay out to our team members and we'd like to think that we're pretty generous company in that regard and so uh yeah it's privately held uh majority owned by my partner and i but we have you know stock options we've got the discretionary bonus pool so we like to make sure we take care of our team and also leave you know ample working capital on the balance sheet to you know fuel the investment in our team and our growth yeah um i'd love to see and there are a lot of people thinking about this mad wire jb kellogg just came on they just passed about 104 million bucks in arr and he's doing this model where it's essentially right you know they don't want ipo they're hugely powerful they just basically do rev share across their whole base and everyone kind of models it differently some people it's just you know the...