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Founder Interview

How SecurityScorecard Reached $71M ARR and 1,700 Customers Growing 50% Year Over Year (Interview with Co-Founder and CEO Aleksandr Yampolskiy)

Interview Date
October 3, 2021
Interviewee
Aleksandr YampolskiyCo-Founder and CEO
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Company Metrics at Interview Time

ARR (2021)

$71M

Paying Customers (2021)

1,700

Revenue Growth (2021)

50%

Net Dollar Retention (2021)

115%

Cash in Bank (2021)

$200M

Historical Snapshot

These numbers were reported by Aleksandr Yampolskiy during the interview recorded in October 2021 and are a historical snapshot, not current figures. See SecurityScorecard’s current numbers.

Key Takeaways

  • 01SecurityScorecard reported approximately $71M to $73M in ARR in 2021, growing at 50% or more year over year
  • 02The company served 1,700 paying customers in 2021 with an average contract value of $40,000 per year paid upfront annually
  • 03Over 25,000 freemium users were on the platform, with paying customers able to invite vendors for free
  • 04Net dollar retention was between 115% and 120% at the time of the interview
  • 05Gross margins were between 75% and 80%
  • 06The company raised $180M in 2021 and was sitting on approximately $200M in cash
  • 07SecurityScorecard rates over 12,000,000 companies in its dataset
  • 08Revenue was $1M in 2015 and $6M in 2016, reflecting rapid early growth
  • 09More than 10 customers were paying over $1M per year
  • 10The company beat its main competitor BitSight approximately 70% of the time in head-to-head evaluations

Company Metrics at Time of Interview

MetricValueSource
ARR (2021)$71MFounder interview, Oct 2021
ARR (high end of range) (2021)$73MFounder interview, Oct 2021
Revenue Growth (2021)50%Founder interview, Oct 2021
Paying Customers (2021)1,700Founder interview, Oct 2021
Freemium Users (2021)25,000Founder interview, Oct 2021
Companies Rated in Dataset (2021)12,000,000Founder interview, Oct 2021
Average Contract Value (2021)$40,000Founder interview, Oct 2021
Net Dollar Retention (2021)115%Founder interview, Oct 2021
Gross Margin (2021)75%Founder interview, Oct 2021
Cash in Bank (2021)$200MFounder interview, Oct 2021
Funding Round (2021)$180MFounder interview, Oct 2021
Funding Round (2019)$50MFounder interview, Oct 2021
Revenue (2015)$1MFounder interview, Oct 2021
Revenue (2016)$6MFounder interview, Oct 2021
Customers Paying Over $1M Per Year (2021)More than 10Founder interview, Oct 2021
Win Rate vs. BitSight in Bake-offs (2021)70%Founder interview, Oct 2021

Growth Breakdown

Revenue

SecurityScorecard reported ARR of approximately $71M to $73M in 2021, up from $6M in 2016 and $1M in 2015. The company was growing at 50% or more year over year, well ahead of its primary competitor BitSight, which Yampolskiy estimated was growing at around 20%.

Customers

The company had 1,700 paying customers in 2021, each on an annual upfront subscription. More than 10 customers were paying over $1M per year, and over 25,000 freemium users were active on the platform, invited by paying customers at no cost.

Profitability and Margins

Gross margins were between 75% and 80%, and net dollar retention was between 115% and 120%. The company had approximately $200M in cash in the bank following its $180M raise in 2021.

Funding

SecurityScorecard raised $180M in 2021 and $50M in 2019. With $200M in cash on hand, Yampolskiy described the company as well funded and not in a rush to pursue an IPO, though he indicated it was being considered within the next couple of years.

Growth Strategy

Virality Through Freemium Invitations

Every paying customer can invite any vendor or supplier into the platform for free, asking them to improve their score. This drives a continuous flow of new freemium users into the funnel, which Yampolskiy credited as a key distribution mechanism.

App Exchange Marketplace

SecurityScorecard launched its Integrate360 marketplace in Q2 2021, partnering with companies like Tenable, HackerOne, Microsoft Teams, and CSC Domain Register. The marketplace was tracked as a win reason in competitive bake-offs, with a target of being cited in 15% of wins.

Annual Upfront Subscription Model

The company charges annual upfront subscriptions priced by the number of scorecards a customer wants to monitor. This model creates strong cash flow and allows SecurityScorecard to resell the same underlying data to multiple customers at minimal incremental cost.

OKR-Driven Execution

Yampolskiy implemented a weekly executive stand-up where all VPs and above report on OKR progress. This accountability loop, which he said failed when first tried four years earlier without the weekly check-in, became a core operating discipline for the company.

Customer Education and Onboarding

The company built a dedicated team for customer onboarding and education, measuring product stickiness using Pendo. Improving the stickiness score by 45% in a quarter was one of the Q2 2021 OKR key results, reflecting a focus on delivering measurable value to existing customers.

Best Quotes

“So we are right now at about 1,700 plus paying customers, right? So people who use our scores to rate others, we have over 12,000,000 companies in our dataset that we rate, 1,700 paying customers. And then there's over 25,000 freemium users, because any paying customer can invite for free any other company into the platform and say, Hey, go improve a score if you do business with us.”
“The average contract is about $40,000 a year paid upfront. Some people pay us millions dollars a year paid upfront and some people pay us $10, $20 ks. The average is about 40,000.”
“That's correct. Yeah. So we're to finish this year at about anywhere from 70 to 73,000,000 annual recurring revenue. We're growing very rapidly. We're consistently exceeding 50% plus growth rate, much faster than our direct competitor. Our direct competitor is barely growing at 20%”
“We're still sitting on almost 200,000,000 in cash. In the bank.”
“I can tell you our net retention is solid, right? Our retention is hovering between 115% to 120%. I want to increase it by about 10 further and get it into like 125 to 130. That's definitely kind of an area of attention for us.”
“Our gross margins are very healthy between 75% to 80%, and we're not worried there. So overall, I feel like it's only just internal execution. All the tailwinds are in a favor. It's really all about just methodical execution and getting the right team together and building additional products that we can cross sell, upsell into our customers to deliver more value for our customer base.”
“We don't need to have permission or consent to rate anybody because all the signals we pick up are non intrusive from outside.”
“if I give you all our source code, all our architecture, all of our 25 plus patents and said, go compete with us, You're not going to have this historical dataset where we calibrate what datasets map more accurately to likelihood of a breach. And the more information we accumulate, the higher the barrier to entry becomes.”
“No, we're going to exceed it. We're going to break 100.”
“we tried doing OKRs about four years ago, right? Like four, four and a half years ago for a company. I can tell you that back then we miserably failed, right? Like it didn't work.”

What Happened Next

This interview captured SecurityScorecard at a moment of rapid growth in late 2021, with $71M in ARR and 1,700 paying customers. The figures and projections shared here reflect what Aleksandr Yampolskiy reported at that point in time and are not current. Visit the SecurityScorecard company profile on GetLatka for the latest available data on revenue, customers, and funding.

View SecurityScorecard’s current profile and metrics

Full Transcript

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey folks, my guest today is Aleksandr Yampolskiy. He's a globally recognized cybersecurity innovator, leader, and SecurityScorecard's co founder and CEO. He's led SecurityScorecard since its beginnings in 2013 to become one of the world's most trusted cybersecurity brands. Aleks, you ready to take us to the top?

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

00:15>> Let's do it.

How SecurityScorecard Differentiates in Cybersecurity

Nathan Latka

00:16All right. So you are in a very hot space. How do you differentiate yourself from some of the others like KnowBe4 or Malwarebytes or others in the cybersecurity space?

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

00:25>> Sure. So we don't compete with guys like KnowBe4 or Malwarebytes. There's a lot of security solutions out there, but the insight that we had when we started the company is that a lot of solutions out there, but there's no KPIs being used to quantify how you're doing. So we invented a way to measure and communicate cybersecurity.

00:49>> And that became a crucial tool to communicate risk to the board, to measure suppliers, to measure investment targets, to measure others. We do have competitors in a space, but we rated the largest number of companies with we have a broadest and deepest amount of coverage. Have a marketplace of apps and services, and nobody else does compared to us in the rating space.

Nathan Latka

01:09What is the name of your rating that you've branded?

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

01:12>> SecurityScorecard.

Nathan Latka

01:14Literally Yampolskiy is called SecurityScorecard. Yeah,

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

01:18>> like a company name represents basically what we do. We give companies scorecards and we teach those companies how to improve the rating and how to become more

Nathan Latka

01:28So I'm seeing obviously, Ever Finance is an example with a 72 score broken down, they score really poorly an F on network security at 52, their DNS health is 74, their patching cadence is 75. Aleks, I say this like I'm smart, I know what the hell those things mean, I don't. But how many of those kinds of things do you measure?

The SecurityScorecard Rating and Data Moat

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

01:46>> We pick up hundreds of different signals from outside non intrusively. You don't need to get a permission or consent. And then by sitting on seven years of historical data, we reduce all this information into a score. And we've demonstrated historically that companies with a bad score have a seven times higher likelihood than companies with a good score to suffer a data breach. And that actually is what gives us a moat. The moat is that even

02:14>> if I give you all our source code, all our architecture, all of our 25 plus patents and said, go compete with us, You're not going to have this historical dataset where we calibrate what datasets map more accurately to likelihood of a breach. And the more information we accumulate, the higher the barrier to entry becomes.

Nathan Latka

02:33Do you need the company's permission to issue a score? For example, if HubSpot's public, can you do an analysis and publish base and say they had a really bad score, would it impact their stock price?

Rating Companies Without Permission

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

02:45>> We don't need to have permission or consent to rate anybody because all the signals we pick up are non intrusive from outside. And a signal could be very simple. For example, I look at the website of Latka magazine and I see at the bottom copyright 2008, hypothetically. It's 2021, so it means you've not updated your site for thirteen years. Very simple data point, but it points you to what's happening behind the scenes in the company.

03:13>> And there could be much more complicated signals like for example, malware beaconing outside of your infrastructure, indication of poor patching cadence that you're not updating the software. And indeed, if we look at our customers, if we look at users of our solution, people based decisions, who to do business with, who not to do business with, who to insure, what type of premium to charge for cyber insurance, the key business decisions being made based on the scores

03:41>> that we provide.

Nathan Latka

03:43This makes complete sense. I want to dive into sort of how you dominate this space, how you came up with a score that became industry standard. But first, how many customers are you serving now today?

Customer Count and Freemium Model

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

03:51>> So we are right now at about 1,700 plus paying customers, right? So people who use our scores to rate others, we have over 12,000,000 companies in our dataset that we rate, 1,700 paying customers. And then there's over 25,000 freemium users, because any paying customer can invite for free any other company into the platform and say, Hey, go improve a score if you do business with us. And so as a result,

Nathan Latka

04:19that drives additional people to join the freemium funnel as well. Well, I want to talk more about that freemium funnel, including this one pager you sent me for your Q2 planning, where you have effectively three buckets of key results that you focus on and how you're driving the business that way. But first, take us back, you launched the business in twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen. Do you remember what year you passed a million dollar run rate?

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

04:41>> So we launched the business basically in 2014. And for most of 2014, we were incubating the product. So we really were just building a product in 2014. And so

04:57>> we really surpassed the 1,000,000 run rate for the business only in 2015, because most of 2014 was spent building the product. We only really started selling around June, July 2014 and it grew rapidly. But the first year we passed a million was in 2015.

Pricing and Average Contract Value

Nathan Latka

05:15And do you remember what your starting price point was? I think you're really playing mid market enterprise now today. Have you moved up market over the past six years?

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

05:24>> So the way that we operate is it's an annual upfront subscription, right? Like you pay annual paid upfront. The variability is the number of scorecards you want to monitor. And a scorecard is just a company. It could be your supplier, your investment target. And charge anywhere from a few thousand bucks a year for monitoring a scorecard. And the prices could go down if you want to monitor quite a lot. So some people can monitor tens of

05:56>> thousands of scorecards, for example, like a private equity firm monitoring its investments or a big bank monitoring its vendors. And some people can monitor 10 or 20. So the average contract is about $40,000 a year paid upfront. Some people pay us millions dollars a year paid upfront and some people pay us $10, $20 ks.

06:20>> The average is about 40,000. But the cool part about it is if I charge you to monitor Latka magazine, right? And I charge 20 other people to monitor Latka magazine, I don't incur any additional costs because I recompute the scorecards once a day, and then I just resell the data. Doesn't cost me anything more to Yampolskiy

ARR, Growth Rate, and Competitor Comparison

Nathan Latka

06:40get 20 more customers or 40 more customers to get access. And so can I do the math there, Aleks? 1,700 customers at that $40,000 ACV puts you at about a, what, a $70, $71,000,000 run rate today?

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

06:52>> That's correct. Yeah. So we're to finish this year at about anywhere from 70 to 73,000,000 annual recurring revenue. We're growing very rapidly. We're consistently exceeding 50% plus growth rate, much faster than our direct competitor. Our direct competitor is barely growing at 20%

Nathan Latka

07:12And who is your direct competitor?

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

07:13>> BitSight? Yep. That's kind of the main competitor we have. There's a bunch of smaller ones, but we don't really see them in bake offs as much. And next year, plan to continue the same growth rate and more. So we're going to by far surpass the 100 plus next year and beyond. Actually anticipate to be able to grow faster next year.

Nathan Latka

07:38Do you know how much revenue BitSight is doing or estimate?

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

07:41>> Those guys are going to do about a 100,000,000 in ARR and they're growing barely at 20 percent.

Nathan Latka

07:48Interesting. What stalled them out? Do you have any ideas? Maybe you guys, maybe your growth has stalled them out.

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

07:53>> Well, we them

07:57>> 70% of the time in a bake off. There's many, many companies who switch over to us when we ask them, why do you switch? They say, look, number one, your product just has a lot more value. We have workflow automation, we have the inside out component called Atlas, we have a marketplace of apps and services. At the end of the day, we are a customer first company. I'm an engineer, right? Like I was a chief security

08:24>> officer. So naturally, the way that I run the company, it's all about the customer. You need to deliver value for the customer. The most important chair in the room is occupied by the customer. And our competitor is more of a sales marketing driven company, right? Like they're focused on P and L, but they're not as much focused on the customer value.

Nathan Latka

08:45Alex, we love capital efficiency. Obviously, public markets love capital efficiency as well quantified by rule of 40. It looks like BitSight has raised about $400,000,000 to hit 100,000,000 of ARR. $4 raised for every dollar of ARR. You guys, I believe, only raised $290,000,000 and you've been more efficient.

Capital Efficiency and Cash in Bank

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

09:02>> We're still sitting on almost 200,000,000 in cash. In the bank.

Nathan Latka

09:06Yeah. So it's

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

09:08>> sitting on almost 200,000,000 in cash that we can use opportunistically for many, many options.

Nathan Latka

09:13So obviously, you've spent other money besides just what you've raised because you have revenue coming in. But you've spent obviously a way less than your competitors have to grow to the same more relatively same amount of ARR. Where are you?

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

09:26>> But look, I mean, we're definitely investing ahead of a curve. It's a new market being created. We believe that security ratings, when you drive a car, you have a speedometer showing to you the speed with which you go in. You go to a doctor, they measure your blood pressure, you buy a stock bond or a stock instrument, you have credit ratings from guys like S and P, Fitch and others. For cybersecurity, something like that has not

09:52>> existed. We believe it's a market that's going to be a huge, huge market down the road.

Nathan Latka

09:58Help me understand growth and valuation. This is a game you have to play once you're on the VC track, I think you're playing it fairly well. You recently raised 108, I believe in April this year, 180,000,000 at what? Basically a billion valuation, right?

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

10:10>> Correct.

Nathan Latka

10:10That was a post money valuation?

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

10:13>> That's the post money. Yes. So we raised it about a billion post.

Nathan Latka

10:16And take me back to the $50,000,000 round you did in 2019, what valuation was that at?

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

10:22>> We more than tripled, right? We more than tripled. Basically, was in the 300 something, like 320, 340. We more than tripled the valuation.

Nathan Latka

10:33340 post money?

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

10:35>> I don't remember the exact number, but something roughly in that range. But every round we did was oversubscribed, multiple term shifts. We believe that within the next eighteen to twenty four months, again, we're going to triple or quadruple the valuation of a company or more. There's a good opportunity for us to take this company public to an IPO. So lots and lots of interesting

Net Dollar Retention and Gross Margins

Nathan Latka

10:59tailwinds in our favor right What metrics, I mean, you and I both study publicly traded SaaS companies and benchmarks and things. What sort of numbers do you think you have to hit to be competitive on your first day of trading if you do decide to go public?

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

11:12>> Well, look, whenever you go public, also By the way, of course, you want to have a good story, but you don't want to have a story which cannot be further improved, right? You don't want to be going public and nothing else can be improved and it's all downhill from there. That's not the story you want to tell. You want to tell a story of growth and the story of potential and the story of upside. Look,

11:37>> I can tell you our net retention is solid, right? Our retention

11:44>> is hovering between 115% to 120%. I want to increase it by about 10 further and get it into like 125 to 130. That's definitely kind of an area of attention for us. I think from a growth perspective, we're doing fine.

12:05>> Our gross margins are very healthy between 75% to 80%, and we're not worried there. So overall, I feel like it's only just internal execution. All the tailwinds are in a favor. It's really all about just methodical execution and getting the right team together and building additional products that we can cross sell, upsell into our customers to deliver more value for our customer base.

Expansion Revenue and Upsell Strategy

Nathan Latka

12:29Your number one way to drive expansion revenue right now, believe, correct me if I'm wrong, is to sell more number of scorecards tracked. Are there other things you're upselling against right now that you think will enable you to get to that 130, 140 net dollar retention mark?

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

12:44>> Well, we need to have more modules to cross sell, upsell, right? We have Atlas, which is the inside out component. We have ratings, which is the outside in. And we're actively building and developing additional modules that our customers are asking us for. Ultimately, at the end of the day, it's all about the customer value. That's what it's all about. I'm not sitting and thinking, Oh, how do I optimize the metric? I'm thinking, How do I

13:12>> deliver more value to my existing customers? Because if you deliver more value to your existing customers, they're going to love you, they're going to be loyal.

13:21>> Also you expand your total addressable market by doing more of that.

Nathan Latka

13:25And so Alex, in 2022, if you add no new customers and you can only focus on building great new product lines, new modules to upsell your current base, how much do you think you can grow by?

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

13:36>> In 2022?

Nathan Latka

13:37Next year.

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

13:38>> Yeah, I'm going to grow at least by 50% without adding any new modules.

Nathan Latka

13:44Ignore new customers. If you only focus on expansion revenue in 2022, do you think you can get to 30%, 40% just upselling current base?

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

13:52>> Yeah, I'm pretty sure I can. Yeah. I'm actually quite sure that I can. So we like to under promise and over deliver when we scale the company. So yes, our customers are loyal, they're happy, and lots of those customers buy a lot more from us.

OKR Process and Execution Discipline

Nathan Latka

14:08Take me more inside out, you're an engineer, which means you focus on the numbers. I was in your office, we were doing the photo shoot for this magazine and I saw these hanging things and I'm going, what is this Aleks? So we have your This is an older one, but it'll help us learn here. We have your Q2 twenty twenty one SecurityScorecard OKRs. Help me understand how this OKR process works. What year, what revenue did you

14:29start? How big were you when you started implementing these and how do they work today?

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

14:33>> Sure. So OKR, which stands for objective key results, many companies use it, Google uses it, Intel uses it. Initially, it was pioneered by Andy Grove, who was the CEO of Intel. And so always the objective, you set kind of like an aspirational objective, and then the key result are the measurable results and they cascade to the rest of the company. So

14:57>> we tried doing OKRs about four years ago, right? Like four, four and a half years ago for a company. I can tell you that back then we miserably failed, right? Like it didn't work. Ah,

15:13>> And I'm like, Wait a second, OKRs worked for this company, why are they not working for us? The reason was simple, we made only one small tweak. Now, every Monday, we have a stand up exec meeting for all VPs and above, and we start that meeting by going over the OKRs. What did you say you were going to do last week? What did you actually do? And so it creates social pressure and it creates accountability for

15:38>> people to report on the progress. And that small subtle tweak where now you just do like a group meeting and you report weekly on your progress made all the difference. And so to give an example, back in Q2, one of the objectives that we had was to launch a marketplace. We wanted to create an ecosystem of apps and services on top of a platform that we created. And so we had an objective, build the best in

16:03>> class marketplace. And we had two underlying key results. Number one, launch a press release, which announces at least five new partners joining the marketplace. So the key R was how many people signed up in a press release. And the second key result was to measure how many times was the marketplace mentioned as a win reason when we backed off against the competition. We wanted to make sure that that win reason goes to 15% of the time,

16:31>> marketplace was a driver for the win. And so we measured it relentlessly. We launched the marketplace with a lot of incredible partners like CSC domain register, Tenable Vulnerability Scanner. RedSift, HackerOne, Microsoft Teams, and many others. Our customers loved it. It delivered value and it helps us differentiate and win more deals.

Nathan Latka

16:56So you hit this one, the headline, what, 06/02/2021, SecurityScorecard launches integrate three sixty marketplace to enhance value for customers by finding, managing and mitigating cybersecurity risks. So you guys, you kicked that one in the butt. Your other two objectives, the second one was enhanced customer education and onboarding. It was interesting what you used to measure this. You said, We're going to use Pendo to measure our stickiness score, and we want to improve that, I believe, by

17:2045% by the end of the quarter. Tell me more about that one.

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

17:24>> Yeah. So the big initiative for us, again, focused on how do you provide value for the customers was how do we educate people about what security ratings can do for them? Because if I give you a score, how do you use it? How do you communicate to the board? How do you hold your suppliers accountable? So we built a whole team responsible for onboarding education, and then we measured the output. We measured in Pendo, which

17:48>> is a tool to attach to kind of how people use your product, we measured was the stickiness actually being improved. And so that one also worked really well. And again, the trick in startups, you don't know what's a good idea, what's a bad idea. So you need to try a bunch of things and then you see what sticks. But once you see that it sticks, you need to just relentlessly drive execution, measure it and hold people

18:14>> accountable for delivery. There's no magic. There's a lot of hard work.

Nathan Latka

18:18A lot of hard work, and obviously measuring is important. The last thing you measured increased the percent of existing, both paid and free clients contributing private data to your platform from three sixty three companies to 1,000 companies. Why is that important, and did you hit that goal?

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

18:33>> Well, it's important because we believe strongly that our job is to help companies improve their score. So outside

18:44>> and scores have limitations and companies need to have a way to provide feedback, to provide commentary. Just like if you have a restaurant, you could have customer reviews on Yelp, but the restaurant should be enabled also to provide its own story, provide its pictures, provide its menu. And so similarly, we believe that we need to create opportunities where we give companies a score, they need to be able to improve it, influence it, provide inside out data,

19:12>> inside out feedback, commentary. And so that was an important goal for us to really foster that inside out communication.

Nathan Latka

19:20Love that. Wrapping up here, obviously when you go public, you always see companies in their S1 Braze just filed. They'll say how many accounts they have over a million bucks in ARR, just the one contract. Where are you guys at today? How many accounts pay more than 1,000,000 a year?

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

19:34>> So we don't disclose that number, right? We don't disclose this number publicly, but the number has been very meaningfully growing, right? I can tell you, I mean, there's no concentrated risk, right? There's no concentrated risk in our revenue. There's no one customer accounting for

Nathan Latka

19:52much more than No, no. Revenue.

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

19:54>> Not looking for risk. But I can tell you, we have a whole variety of customers across government, insurance, private equity, right? And we have a whole slew of customers and those guys are paying us millions of dollars a year and deploying us on their entire portfolio. it's been happening more and more.

Nathan Latka

20:17Aleks, can we say more than 10? Is that fair? I won't push you harder, more than 10 customers with greater than 1,000,000 a year contracts?

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

20:24>> Yeah, think it's fair. Yeah. Think that's a fair response.

Freemium to Paid Conversion Focus

Nathan Latka

20:27But you're also building top of funnels, just bottom. You have 23,000 freemium accounts worth 1,700 have converted to paid, that 6.8% conversion to paid. Is this a critical focus for you moving forward, is converting more freemium to paid?

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

20:40>> It's a focus, but it's not a critical focus. We believe that

20:51>> every company in the world should have a scorecard. Every company in the world should have their own scorecard. So we're much more focused on making sure that every company out there has access to a tool for free. They can sign up for free. They don't need to pay anything and they can control their reputation. And that's been a much bigger focus for us to make sure that we create those distribution channels for them to sign

Nathan Latka

21:14All right, Aleks, before we wrap up with the famous five, you're sitting on something interesting here, potentially pre IPO company, you passed a million in 2015. Do you remember what year you passed 10,000,000 run rate?

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

21:23>> I

21:26>> mean, it

21:29>> must have been around 2017. I mean, I have to again check the numbers, but I would assume it was around 2017, right? Like it was a fairly typical story, right? Like triple, triple, double, double, double. So I think

21:47>> we did a couple of million in ARR in 2015, then we tripled to about six or seven, and then we doubled rapidly. So that was a good trajectory for us.

Nathan Latka

21:57Yep. No, that makes sense. The reason I'm asking is I'm trying to back into what revenue multiple you raised at in 2019. So it sounds like you were around, what, mean, you were like a 35,000,000 run rate in 2019? '30, '35?

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

22:12>> Yeah, something around that.

Nathan Latka

22:15But healthy growth, you think you'll grow 50% from seventy one million this year, end of next year, you'll think you'll break what, 85, 90,000,000 ARR?

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

22:22>> No, we're going to exceed it. We're going to break 100.

Nathan Latka

22:25Next year? I love it. Look at this guy's confidence. He just looked right in the camera and said, We're breaking 100 next year. Do you file the IPO next year or do you think that's 2023? Preston

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

22:35>> We are being opportunistic. We are well funded. We're sitting on plenty of cash. We're optimizing the company. We're increasing the shareholder value. We're not in a rush to do it because for us, IPO is just a branding event at the end of a day. But look, we're sitting on plenty of cash, we beat competitors a lot, a lot of time, we're taking away customers from them, we're growing faster than them, we've got a better, more innovative

23:00>> product. I think within the next couple of years, we'll be

Nathan Latka

23:03strongly contemplating to do it.

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

23:05>> Alex, Next year, but within eighteen to twenty four months, we'll be strongly considering it.

Famous Five Rapid Fire Questions

Nathan Latka

23:11Folks, you heard it here first. Aleks, let's wrap up with The Famous Five. Number one, favorite book.

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

23:16>> I love Good to Great by Jim Collins.

Nathan Latka

23:19Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

23:27>> Mean, look, I study everybody. I like to study everybody.

23:35>> Mean, I love the work that Kevin Ryan does. He was my boss at Gilt. He founded MongoDB Business Insider. I'm a big fan of Kevin. So yes, I talk to him, I follow him.

Nathan Latka

23:45Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building security scorecard?

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

23:50>> What's my favorite online tool for building security scorecard?

Nathan Latka

23:53Yeah, like Pendo is a good example, but name I something else. Preston

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

23:56>> use Evernote a lot. Every day I start, I use Evernote to organize my thoughts.

Nathan Latka

24:01And how much sleep do you get every night?

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

24:04>> Not nearly enough. I usually go to sleep around eleven to midnight and I get up around 7AM. So about seven hours of sleep.

Nathan Latka

24:14And fair situation, married, single kids?

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

24:17>> Married, two kids, a boy 12 years old and a girl 10 years old. So they keep me busy, excited and occupied.

Nathan Latka

24:26And she's quite the trick or treater you shared

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

24:29>> before Yeah, was the much written last night and eat all the papers.

Nathan Latka

24:34How old are you, Aleks?

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

24:35>> 40.

Nathan Latka

24:36Last question, something you wish you knew when you were 20?

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

24:40>> Something I wish when I was 20. Well, at the time I wasn't dating anybody. I wish I would have met more people back then.

Closing Summary and $100M ARR Outlook

Nathan Latka

24:49Guy's SecurityScorecard, the standard and understanding if your site is at risk or not and how good you're doing. Private equity firms use it, over 1,700 paying customers use it, paying an average $40,000 per year paid upfront. The break is $72,000,000 run rate this year, up 50% year over year. They broke 6,000,000 run rate back in 2016, 10,000,000 in 2017, 30,000,000 in 2019. Fast trajectory here as they focus on adding additional modules to help founders beef up

25:13their security, 115% net dollar retention and growing rapidly. Feels very good about breaking a $100,000,000 in ARR next year. Aleks, thank you for taking us to the top.

Aleksandr Yampolskiy

25:22>> Thank you, Nathan. Talk soon.

Nathan Latka

25:26One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We call it deal or bust. One founder comes on, three hungry buyers, they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards, their expenses, their revenue, ARPU, CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday, 1PM

25:51Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central. To make sure you don't miss any of that, make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the big red button, and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big

26:13fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you wanna take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You want to get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying. Sign up

26:35for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. We

26:54got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. All right. I'll be in the comments. See you.