Today, we're excited to bring you a very special guest episode of the "Category Visionaries" podcast. Listen as host Brett Stapper interviewed Beyond Identity co-founder and CEO, TJ Jermoluk.

Transcription

Reece

Hi, welcome to another episode of the cybersecurity "Hot Takes" podcast. I'm your host, Reece Guida. Today, we're excited to bring you a very special guest episode of the "Category Visionaries" podcast. Host Brett Stapper interviewed Beyond Identity co-founder and CEO, TJ Jermoluk. This is a great interview. 

We hope you learn a lot, and enjoy.

Brett

Welcome to "Category Visionaries," the show dedicated to exploring exciting visions for the future from the founders who are on the front lines building it. In each episode, we'll speak with a visionary founder who's building a new category or re-imagining an existing one. We'll learn about the problem they solve, how their technology works, and unpack their vision for the future. 

I'm your host, Brett Stapper, CEO of Front Lines Media. Now, let's dive right into today's episode. Hey, everyone, and thanks for listening. Today I'm speaking with TJ Jermoluk, a venture investor, a nine-time founder, and current CEO of Beyond Identity, a passwordless authentication platform that's raised over $200 million in funding. 

TJ, thanks for chatting with me today. You're a true Silicon Valley icon and I'm honored to have you here. 

TJ

Thank you very much for having me. 

Brett

Yeah, no problem. So, as I was preparing for this interview, I came across a really cool video on YouTube of the 1996 unveiling of the Nintendo 64. And you appeared there in the event as the president and COO of Silicon Graphics. So, I think that's a perfect place to start. What were you doing in 1996 in Silicon Valley? 

TJ

Well, that takes me back a long way. Silicon Graphics was a really pioneering company in the world of 3D graphics. Before that, you really didn't have the capability in any way of showing a 3D object on a screen, so somebody would have to do a 2D rendering and try and, you know, get an idea of what that would look like in 3D. 

Well, for the game world, you can imagine, you know, 3D was a huge breakthrough because it allowed them to have these characters instead of just moving horizontally and vertically on a screen, actually, be able to move in some real-life form. So, Nintendo came to us and asked us to do a version of our chips that was really compressed down that could fit into a small game box. 

And we did that project, the Nintendo project for them. It was obviously a huge, huge hit for them. And the unveiling of it was down at a big conference down in LA. I felt like a rock star walking out on the stage and having just thousands of teenagers and basically kids who were all at this conference all excited about the unveiling of it. 

And, you know, it was sort of, like, a huge rally and a big event. So, I felt great about that up until the point where they were, like, pulling me over to the podium and saying, "Hey, come and play this game with me and show me how this work." I'm like, "I designed the graphics, but I don't actually play the games. They have a whole different group of people that actually write the games that know how to play them." 

So, it was a little come down from that, but overall, it was a pretty exciting time. 

Brett

That's amazing. And what happened with Silicon Graphics after that or what happened with your career after that? 

TJ

So, Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics, and I have been together 38 years, if you can believe that. And at that time, he went on and founded Netscape and I founded @Home Network. So, we started two other kind of big iconic companies, Netscape, obviously, the first commercial browser interface to get the web going, and for myself, @Home Network, which created the whole broadband category using cable, which was, obviously, the way most people get their broadband internet today. 

So, that was sort of our next wave of companies. And then, together we also funded a number of things. We did Healtheon/WebMD and myCFO and Shutterfly and a number of other companies. It was quite a busy time in the Valley then. 

Brett

That's amazing. And how would you say it's changed the most today from what it was like back then? 

TJ

The Valley? 

Brett

Yeah. 

TJ

In some ways, it's the same. There's a tremendous amount of real passion and drive, and creative expression that goes on when you get that sort of a Petri dish of incredible people together. I've still never seen anything like it outside of the Valley where you have this mix of really bright talent coupled with aggressive and creative venture capital with educational institutions. 

There's something about that when you mix it together that became a really unique environment out there. So, I think that was healthy and continues. There was a negative part, in my opinion, to the business side of what went on out there that's problematic and has to change where you suddenly got a mix of companies where the founders were all getting some kind of super-voting and special control, and staggered shares and boards and protecting themselves and becoming more of a dictator than of a partner- participatory CEO style that I personally don't like and I don't think it's been healthy for the industry that this sort of business sense has gone on in the Valley because it was much, much more participatory when I was out there and I'd love to see it heading back that way personally. 

Brett

And would you say it was harder to raise funding in the late '90s compared to last year? How does that compare? 

TJ

Well, the late '90s before the crash of 2000, was probably the easiest time to raise funding. I mean, every single person in the Valley, you know, you got in a taxi cab or you went to your hairdresser and they were investing in tech companies. So, there was a lot of money floating around and valuations were kind of off the charts by 2000 and that's why in March or April of 2000 we experienced the great tech correction, if you will. 

It took, what was it, 15 years for the QQQ, for NASDAQ to get back to where it was. So, that was a pretty significant correction. It hasn't gotten that out of control. Yes, we've seen a big tech correction now. There's been anywhere from 30% to 50%, in some cases up to 70% or 80% kind of correction, but it's still not like it was back then. 

So, I think that we're going through something that'll take two or three years to cycle through itself, and it's healthy in the long run, and some great companies are going to come out the other side because if you look at it in the 2000 crash, who were the survivors that came out the other side? Google, Amazon, Facebook, you know, a number of companies that really came out and survived and mattered. 

And I think that same thing is going to happen now. 

Brett

That makes a lot of sense. And if we go across your entire career, has there been a specific CEO that you've worked with that really inspired you and you would say you learned the most from? 

TJ

I had the opportunity in the early days to work at HP on their very first risk project when I came in to help them build their first risk computer. And the culture there that Hewlett and Packard built was phenomenal. It definitely left an impression on me, those early days of HP. It was a real culture of inclusiveness and passion about what they were doing and technology forward thinking that radiated throughout the company. 

I would say that Hewlett and Packard were probably the people that I thought the highest of in terms of how I'd like to do it if I was ever in that situation. 

Brett

And what about books? Is there a specific book that you've read throughout your career that's had the greatest impact on you? This could be a business book or a personal book. 

TJ

"The Soul of a New Machine." Tracy Kidder. It was back in my early days, but it was an incredible story about how they built sort of a little rogue team within a bigger company at Data General to build something totally different kind of go in a different direction. And how you build a culture and a small team and get that drive and passion together. It was sort of a model for when Steve Jobs did the Macintosh thing and he went to a different building and hoisted a pirate flag and play in their own adventure. But it was definitely a model for me. It left a big impression on me when I read that. 

Brett

Nice. I haven't read that book, so, adding to my weekend list now. 

TJ

Yeah. 

Brett

Now, let's switch gears a bit and let's talk about what you're building today, because you're back in the driver's seat with Beyond Identity. So, what's the origin story behind the company? And give us the high-level pitch. What does the company do? 

TJ

Yeah. So, Jim and I were…for the last 10 years, we've invested in companies, three or four companies at a time, and I'm a very active board member, you know, not just going once a quarter, but kind of working with the team on a constant basis every week and trying to be a good mentor and helpful. So, I was more in that role. 

One of the companies that we were working with was working on home automation sort of smart home, smart building kind of automation. One of the things we realized is that you didn't want to have to come into your home or your building and first thing in the morning and log in with a password to turn your lights on. You know? So, how would we implement technology to do that? And one of the engineers we were working with at the time figured out how to put all that on his phone. 

He came back in and showed it to me and I'm like, "Wow. This is…" And Jim and I looked at each other and said, "This is way cooler than the other thing. Let's go start a company around this." And when I went off and did the due diligence, I spent a few months, you know, investigating where the market was, what the opportunity was, who else was doing anything in technology there. 

And I realized it was quite a big disruptive opportunity. And if I was ever going to kind of come off the bench and be full-time again, this was the one I wanted to do. So, I went to dinner with Jim and told him, you know, "This is one we should fund." And he said, "Great. Who should we get to run it?" I told him, "I'm thinking of doing it myself." He actually spit his wine out, he goes, "You want to what?" 

He was so excited about it. So, that's kind of how I got back in the full-time saddle. 

Brett

And talk us through what was going through your mind there. So, what made you so excited about this opportunity to want to go back in or were you already considering it, you'd already made the decision you're going to go back in, it was just a matter of which company? 

TJ

No, I hadn't at all thought about going back full-time. So, it was definitely the investigation that I had done on this company's technology. And when we looked into it and talked to friends of mine who were investing in the enterprise security field and went and talked to big companies and what were their problems, what did they experience, I realized that all the solutions that were out there, the problem was that they were all trying to band-aid a fundamental problem, which was, you know, that passwords and credentials, you know, a shared secret is a no-no in cybersecurity, and yet all of our systems are based on that. 

And so everybody, all the other companies were trying to put bandages on top of this gaping wound, if you will, instead of trying to go in and create an architecture that didn't have that problem in the first place. And so what it was doing was creating more and more friction for users of the system and trying to solve their security needs. 

"Oh, you got to use a longer password. You got to rotate your password. You got to use a VPN. You have to…" Just one thing after another that was making it harder and harder and costing them productivity, costing them help desk time instead of solving the fundamental issue. And our situation was that we had an architecture that took all that away. So, it had the side benefit of taking all the friction away for the users and giving them security at the same time and we thought, "That's a real game changer." 

Brett

Amazing. And outside of the funding number I mentioned there of over $200 million raised so far, are there any metrics that you can share that just really highlight the progress and the adoption that you're seeing? 

TJ

Well, the overall passwordless market is expected to be a $22 billion market next year. It's become, you know, the U.S. government now has put out an edict, if you want to do business with them, you have to have a phishing-resistant MFA solution. New York Department of Financial Services is saying if you do online business with anybody in New York, you have to have that form of solution. 

The FTC is now saying it. So, there's a lot of tailwinds all pushing people towards phishing-resistant, passwordless-based MFA solutions, which happens to be, of course, what we created. So, we see a tremendous market shift going on there. We think we're in a, personally, our company in a great position with the right technology to be able to do that. 

And as I said, from the beginning, we've designed ours to be that way, and so we've already been developing it from the last three or four years in that sense. We're not scrambling like other companies are to try and figure out how to, you know, change their model to fit this new outcome. So, a number of companies that we work with adopted it. They have done things where they've said, "All right. We're going to try it with a few users. We'll see how it goes. And then we'll add people over time." 

And what it turns out to be is they turn them on and everybody loves it so much, they come back and go, "Oh, we're going to turn the whole company on next week." So, people like Snowflake and Unity, 100% of their company runs on the software. All of their employees and all of their contractors use our method to interface and be able to log into their work every day. 

And so we've gained a lot of traction with that. We have a lot of companies all the way from small 100-person companies up to people that have 60-70,000 employees all using our system. So, it's quite scalable, quite a broad range of problem sets that we're addressing. 

Brett

And what do you think you've done right? If you were to maybe distill it into two or three lessons so far, why would you say the company's been so successful in such a short period of time? 

TJ

Well, I think I was able to raise enough, you know, capital that we were able to hire our critical mass quite quickly. By the time we started it formally in sort of September of 2019, we just had four of us working on it for about a year to prove out the technology, but we started in all seriousness then. And I was able to, you know, have the support of NEA and Koch Industries and my partner, Jim Clark, and we had enough capital raised to go out and hire the whole team and get that critical mass quickly. 

So, we launched ourselves just a few months later in April of '20 right before COVID. That was a bit of a tough time there. But I already had my CTO, I had my CMO, I had my head of finance. I had an intact senior management team that was able to hire out their individual teams and sort of get a critical mass across the whole company quite quickly. 

So, it's important to have good partners who believe in what your mission is, that you know they're going to be with you for the long term and allow you to make that kind of investment upfront. So, we grew quite quickly. We grew to a couple of 100 people even by the end of the next year, which allowed us to then, you know, take and advance our core technology into a full zero trust platform, you know, and get ahead of where others were trying to be in that market just by the sheer force of our technical team's strength. 

Brett

That's amazing. And could you talk us through your relationship with Jim Clark? It seems like he's really been a critical piece of many of these things that you've done in your career. I know you mentioned, I believe, the work started together at Silicon Graphics, but 38 years is a long time to be a partner with someone. That's longer than most marriages, I think, in the U.S. now. 

So, what have you guys done to really have such a long-term business partnership like that? 

TJ

Well, it comes from, you know, real respect from each other. I remember when I first went to interview with Silicon Graphics, I'd come out of Bell Laboratories, I was working in research in the computer architecture and some other areas. And I met with the then CEO of the company at that time and didn't have a whole lot to say. I wasn't really that business-minded back then at the time. 

And we sort of sat there for a painful hour looking at each other with sort of, you know, "Well, do you have anything to ask me?" And I'm, "Not really. Do you have anything to ask me?" And so I thought, "Well, that didn't go so well," but I went next door and I talked to Jim and, like, four hours later, we'd covered, you know, eight whiteboards with all kinds of architectural diagrams of how we saw the system evolving and where things were going to go. 

We really hit it off on that kind of a basis and it turned into a really deep personal friendship as well. We shared a love of flying. We both did some amateur motorcycle racing and car racing back then. We lived near each other and hung out a lot and would talk about the philosophies of life and technology over a glass of wine on his back porch. 

So, it sort of evolved into this mutual respect over time with both technical capabilities and also with just our other personal interests as well. But the other key there is that we are complementary. He's a real entrepreneur, classic entrepreneur in the standpoint of aggressive, always pushing hard, impatient about things, short attention span of wanting to move on to the next thing and get it going and push that way. 

And I, of course, am the operational side of it. So, I have to worry more about the P&L of hiring people and taking care of the details, the nuts and bolts of running it, and setting up a company. He respects, you know, my abilities in doing that and doesn't really get in the way of that. 

And I respect him when he comes to me with his entrepreneur-colored glasses, if you will, of something that I'm doing, if I'm not going the right way or not seeing an opportunity or not pivoting something or not going after it fast enough. So, it's a kind of complementary skill set and a deep respect for technical capabilities. 

Brett

That's incredible and that's just so rare in business, I think, to have those types of long-term relationships. 

TJ

Yeah. I'm very lucky there. 

Brett

Now, another thing I wanted to ask you about is the fact that you're no longer in Silicon Valley. So, for you, was that difficult to leave? And then, obviously, in the media now there's this narrative of, yeah, the exodus of Silicon Valley, the fall, so to speak, of Silicon Valley. If you were an entrepreneur and you were 20 years old, would you move to Silicon Valley today? Do you think it's critical or can everything that you used to be able to do in Silicon Valley, can you do that elsewhere now? 

TJ

If I was starting in my career I would head right back to Silicon Valley. Obviously, COVID has accelerated people's ability to work remotely. We have a tremendous number of engineers that are doing that and doing it quite well. But if you're just starting out, how do you learn that first? So, most of our engineers that are working remotely are very experienced people. 

They know what they're doing and they know how to architect and code and bring ideas to fruition. I learned that in that crucible of being there in person and all those late nights, you know, and eating pizza and drinking Dr. Pepper, and working all night long with your gang in the lab, and trying to make a machine work or boot up, or get an OS done or whatever it might be. 

That's how I learned what teams were all about, not just the basics of coding. I learned a lot of that at Bell Laboratories, obviously, and in my university career. But learning how a team worked, how a functional entrepreneurial team worked, that I learned in the Valley. 

And I think it's almost irreplaceable. There is a great scene in New York, a great entrepreneur scene in New York, so it's not like you have to do it in the Valley. There's certainly a tremendous number of great startups going on, especially in ad tech, marketing tech, fintech out in New York as well. So, I think that's also a perfectly valid place to go and sort of get plugged in. 

But I do think the in-person capabilities of being with a team when you're young and learning how that works is an invaluable skill set. 

Brett

You know, I just watched a documentary on General Magic. Have you watched that? 

TJ

No, I haven't. 

Brett

It's really good. 

TJ

Is it new? 

Brett

It came out, I think, maybe two years ago. I'll shoot you over a link. It's really fascinating. But it really paints this picture of Silicon Valley being a magical place. And it sounds like from what you're saying, you still think it is that magical place that it was before? 

TJ

I do. I do. I still work with a lot of companies out there. We sell our product to a lot of tech companies because, you know, they understand how our technology works very quickly, they get it, and they want it. They want to protect themselves with it. So, I get the opportunity to still interact with a lot of these younger small teams out there and I still see the magic happening, for sure. 

Brett

I feel relieved to hear that. I just made the decision to move to San Francisco in July, and a lot of people were telling me I was crazy, but I had that same belief that as a founder, it's probably the best place to be now. So, glad to hear that you support that decision, it sounds like. 

TJ

I do. 

Brett

I'm going to record this clip and send it to everyone who told me I was crazy. Perfect. Now, next thing I want to chat about is the idea of category creation. And that's really the theme of this podcast. And what I like to explore is just that idea of either creating new market categories or redefining existing ones. So, for Beyond Identity, how do you view it? Is this part of identity management? 

Is this a subcategory of that? Is this creating a totally new category? Or what are your views there in terms of your market category? 

TJ

Yeah. We're definitely creating a new category. Identity management and security were two different siloed parts of organizations in the past. So, companies that were identity companies, you know, Okta, a great example, built a great company off of being an identity company. Directory-based, Microsoft Azure, you know, AD, directory system, you know, Okta has that. 

But you think about how they developed it, it was all very much centric around the identity without a lot of thought given to the security of that. There was a different group working on different kind of technologies for that. So, the notion of zero trust and moving, you know, what you've probably heard is that identity is the new perimeter, but identity must, by its nature, become security-focused. 

And that's really the new category that we're working in and defining, if you will, on that road to zero trust is, how do you do zero trust authentication? Because you have to start it with the identity and carry that along through every different point within the company of touch, wherever it touches, and trying to get to an asset, to a piece of data, to another account, to a different system, on-prem, in the cloud, wherever it might be. 

So, it's really creating that new category. There are a number of companies now that are all sort of moving towards that zero trust goal, but we feel like we have a pretty good headstart in our architecture in getting there. 

Brett

And what are you doing, do you think, to stand out? Because this does seem like it's a pretty noisy space. There's a lot of different companies that are coming out. What have you done to really rise above all that noise? 

TJ

Yeah. Of course, that's the hard part as a small company is getting your message out there. I think we've done a good job. Partly with Jim and I being involved, it helps us gain access to, you know, the appropriate resources out there that get our name, get the company's name and its product out in front of people, in front of analysts, in front of the press, in front of whoever it might be, you know, that realize that this might be something interesting and gives us all we need is the opportunity to have the discussion. 

Right? Nobody's going to give you the credibility, but if you at least can enter the discussion and have a chance to talk about what it is, then you have that chance to establish your credibility and what it is that you're doing there. And so I think that some of that reputationally has helped. And then some of the team that we've pulled together in the same sort of way. If you look at the background of people like Jasson Casey and Kurt Johnson and Patrick McBride, Bill Hogan, they've been in the security industry for 20, 30 years in a number of very credible sort of companies and accounts and people ask, "Well, why are you here? And what is it? And what do you see in it?" 

And that helps kind of get the story out there as well. 

Brett

That makes sense. And just to go back a little bit to the category conversation. So, I think all founders that I speak to, and I think most founders out there have aspirations of category creation. Obviously, when you create a category, it's hard because you have to create demand for the category, then demand for the product. So, what are your general views when it comes to category creation? 

Do you recommend all companies to really try to pursue that as a strategy? Or how do you know if category creation is right for you or if you should just try to disrupt and redefine an existing category? 

TJ

I have to tell you, it's way harder, right, creating a category. It's much easier to try and take something that exists and perhaps differentiate yourself in some way. If you can get, you know, 10% different, 20% different, 50% different in terms of performance or price or capabilities, but people know what it is. Because people, when you enter into a meeting, especially with customers, they always first want to know what you are. 

Are you a zebra? Are you a giraffe? Are you a lion? Right? People's brains work in that way that they want to be able to put you in that box and understand it so they're comfortable with it and move forward. That's the comfortable way to do it. When you create a new category, you know, the easiest example would be if I went to people before there were airplanes and they had to ship produce from California to New York and I went out there and I said, "Well, what do you need?" 

they'd say, "Well, I need a faster car or a faster truck, or a truck that could, you know, hold more produce or, you know, whatever it might be because I need to get this there right away." But they don't say, "Oh, I need an airplane," because they don't know what an airplane is. Right? So, then you have to be able to tell them, "Hey, what if I could create an airplane, I would put it in the sky and I would fly it there and I could get it there in five hours instead of in two days?" 

So, then they're like, "Well, what are you talking about? How could you do that?" So, you have to go through that step of explaining to them why an airplane could fly and how you'd be able to do that? And is it going to crash? And can you keep it, you know, maintained? All these other credibility parts of the story come up. So, it means that when you create the company, you better put a team together that's comfortable being evangelists. 

Remember when Guy Kawasaki at Apple was the first sort of, that's what the title that they gave him? And Guy and I were classmates in our high school in Hawaii where we grew up, actually. And I talked to him about that in the early days. So, it's very insightful that you need a team of people that really understand and get off on that ability to evangelize, to be able to go into a situation with a customer or an analyst, or wherever it might be, and be prepared to explain yourself, to take those steps to be able to create in people's minds a picture, to paint a picture of how you can do things a completely different way. 

And not only that it's possible, but that it's practical because you can't come up with something and say, "Oh, yeah. We're going to shoot it on a rocket and use super cold fusion." It has to sound practical to them, like, "Oh, that makes sense." You're using this technology and this is how I'll deploy it, and this is why it's supportable and sustainable. 

You have to have that kind of grounding. So, those are unique people that want to come together in that category, a first-category mover kind of position. You think about Apple and Steve and what he did with the phone, you know, as an example, what they did with iPods, what they did with phones, and creating those kind of categories and the kind of people he had around him. 

That's really a great model for what you want to do. 

Brett

That's one thing I noticed when I was watching the Nintendo 64 videos. You were just so clear and you really just delivered a great message as you were speaking there. How did you develop that skill set to be an evangelist like that and to really be able to talk about technology in a simple to understand and clear way? How did you develop those skills? 

Because I think those are very difficult skills to develop, but I think they're also obviously very important skills for founders to have. 

TJ

Yeah. I was a little lucky that way. Some of that came naturally. I did not want to be in that role. I always saw myself as an engineer first, as a design engineer, as an architect. And I loved leading engineering teams, you know, focusing on building these great products. But in the early days of our company, it kind of got stalled out in our first startup. 

And Jim was really pushing hard to change out the management team. They brought in sort of an outside professional, if you will, management team, but they didn't have that love of the technology. They didn't have that sort of evangelism within it. So, he really was the one that pushed me and said, "I really need you to step up and get involved with the business side of this whole thing," which wasn't sort of a skill set that I'd ever even thought about, but it turned out that I didn't mind it that, you know, trying to explain our capabilities to customers and being in those settings and then eventually in a conference or in a setting like you were talking about where we launched the Nintendo and there were thousands of people there. 

I always fell back on, if I know more about my technology than anybody in that room, then I'm pretty confident standing up there and talking about it. I was very transparent. I wasn't ever one trying to pull the wool over people's eyes or trying to be a hype kind of person. I didn't believe in that sort of thing. 

So, I was just comfortable with it. I'm just comfortable knowing that I understood it, I knew where I was going with the technology, and I knew what problem solving, and so I was comfortable talking to people about it. 

Brett

And how important do you think that skill set is of storytelling for founders? 

TJ

Oh, big. From the time that you first try and raise money, you got to be able to weave a great story for the venture community, you know, to be able to captivate them and give them the vision of what you're doing in, like, five minutes or less. I was on the venture side as well. 

Remember, I was a general partner with Kleiner Perkins for a number of years and I saw, you know, a thousand pitches in a year and it really took a special someone and something to stand out from all that because your eyes kind of gloss over from hearing it over and over. So, yeah, founders better have one of the people on their team ought to have that ability to spin the story the right way in a clear, concise way. 

Not hyping it, not spinning it from political standpoint, but, you know, be able to boil it down to its essence and get the point across. 

Brett

And I'm sure you've worked with and encountered many founders over the course of your career. Is there one specific thing you've seen them do that just drives you crazy or you just see as you're completely wrong or just a pattern of a way of doing things or belief that you think is really harmful to them and the company overall? 

TJ

Probably the biggest fatal flaw is founders that become too inwardly focused on themselves and they aren't willing to hire a senior team around themselves that complements or even in some cases surpasses their own skill sets in certain areas. If you rely on yourself to be the greatest at everything, you know, "Nobody will know marketing better than me. 

Nobody will know engineering better than me. Nobody will know sales better than me," you know, whatever it is, then you hire a subpar team around you of yes people that never allow you to rise above your own capabilities. And nobody is that great at everything that they do. And I think sometimes founders are paranoid about that, "Oh, if I hire somebody experienced, the board is going to want to put them in charge or I'm going to lose control." 

And so that's one of the failings that I see typically of founders in putting their first team together. 

Brett

And what would be your number one piece of advice to a first-time founder starting a tech company today in the current environment that we're in? 

TJ

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. So, when you're starting a company today, you've got a great chance of coming out of this the other side if you focus. Take what money you have, scale your company to the right size to be able to make that last at least a couple of years out there and stick to your knitting. Focus on that. 

Don't get distracted with other things. Don't think that, "Oh, it's okay. If I have a bright idea, six months from now I'm going to be able to raise more money," because you're not. It's already a tough environment and it's going to get harder in the next six or nine months as the recession really hits. So, you know, stick to what you know, focus and scale your company to the right size and ride it out because great companies are going to come out of the other side of this. 

Brett

I love it. Last question for you since I know we're coming up on time. What's the five-year vision for Beyond Identity? 

TJ

Well, we want to fully implement the zero trust platform capability. It's something that's necessary for the industry. It's going to be quite disruptive for a lot of folks in the way that they've done things in the past, but it's definitely a need that exists out there. So, we see ourselves as kind of a glue in the middle of a lot of different companies that are going to pull those things together and create this capability of zero trust authentication to be able to go forward. 

We want to do that on a standalone basis. We're a great partner with a lot of other really cool companies in the security space. So, I want to be a great partner, but we want to be able to do it on a standalone basis and have ourselves eventually see the company continuing to grow, you know, getting itself public, which is just one step along the way. 

It's not an end goal, it's just a step along the way. And be able to use that to continue our expansion, continue it into other product areas, continue to expand internationally, and grow ourselves into an important company. 

Brett

Amazing. TJ, this has been so much fun. I've done about 80 of these interviews so far and I have to say this is my favorite interview. So, thank you so much for taking the time. Before we wrap, if people want to follow along with your journey as you build up Beyond Identity and just follow you as an entrepreneur and as an investor, where's the best place for them to go? 

TJ

Well, www.beyondidentity.com, the best place to keep up with what we're doing. And me personally, I'm on LinkedIn, easy to find. There's not a whole lot of TJ Jermoluks out there. 

Brett

And I recommend to all listeners to pop his name over to YouTube as well and check out some of those videos. They're a lot of fun. 

TJ

Great. 

Brett

TJ, thanks so much. Really appreciate it. Let's keep in touch. 

TJ

Thank you, Brett. Enjoy San Francisco. 

Brett

Thank you.