Proactive Network Threat Detection with Ricardo Villadiego
There’s unlimited potential to create innovative software with just a laptop, an internet connection, and your mind.
It’s a motto that Ricardo Villadiego lives by and has driven him to solve complex technology problems and start two companies: Easy Solutions in 2009 (acquired by Centersquare- formerly Cyxtera- in 2016) and Lumu in 2019. Today, Lumu is a market leader in Network Detection and Response, helping over 2,500 businesses of all sizes continuously measure their state of compromise to stay ahead of threats in real time.
In this episode, Forgepoint Capital Managing Director Leo Casusol speaks with Ricardo about his early career in engineering and sales, overcoming obstacles as a Colombia-based cybersecurity entrepreneur, venturing into international markets, using AI at Lumu to make “magic” and uncover network threats, shifting to meet the evolving threat and technology landscape, SecOps automation, advice for other entrepreneurs, and more.
Episode 16
November 13, 2024
“When I got more time on my hands after the exit of Easy Solutions, I started researching why some of the largest breaches at the time- think Target, Home Depot, UPS, Equifax- why the adversary was within those companies between 18 to 36 months. Why were those companies- with the budgets that they had, the amount of technology that they deployed in cybersecurity- unable to identify that the adversary was within the company? The end result of that process was that they weren't looking for the compromise. They weren't looking for the adversary within the company. That starts changing the way you tackle the problem. What if somehow you can measure in real time your state of compromise? What if you can do that continuously and now prove continuously otherwise- prove continuously that you are not compromised?”
Ricardo Villadiego CEO and Founder of Lumu
Episode Highlights
Transcript
0:23 Introduction
Leo Casusol [LC]
Welcome to the Forgecast. I’m your host, Leo Casusol. This afternoon it is my pleasure to have with me my good friend Ricardo Villadiego. From now on, we are going to call you RV because that is how everybody knows you.
RV is the Founder and CEO of Lumu Technologies. He is a successful and serial entrepreneur with over 30 years of experience in developing, selling, and implementing technology solutions globally. He has deep expertise in cybersecurity, financial risks, and fraud prevention. Before Lumu, RV founded Easy Solutions, a company that was focused on identifying and preventing electronic fraud. With deep roots in Latin America and under RV’s leadership, Easy Solutions expanded into North America and eventually became a vibrant business inside Cyxtera Technologies. It was then that I had the opportunity and pleasure to meet RV and work alongside him for several years.
Now, as the CEO of Lumu, he has a grand vision to protect businesses globally with continuous compromise assessment, detection, and response.
Ricardo, welcome and thank you very much for joining us today.
Ricardo Villadiego [RV]
Thanks for the invitation, Leo. Glad to be here.
1:38 RV’s Early Career at Unisys, Internet Security Systems, and IBM
LC
Fantastic. Tell us about your background and your upbringing. I think most people know that you grew up in Colombia, so we would love to know about your career and why you decided to become an entrepreneur.
RV
So where do we start? Let me go back to Cartagena, a magical city. I don’t know if you have been in Cartagena, but if not, it is a place that you should. It is a vibrant city- probably the best day of your year will be the one you spend in Cartagena. I studied there, grew up there, then moved to Bogota to study electronic engineering. While I was in Bogota studying electronic engineering, I had the opportunity to join the internship program for Unisys Corporation. They assigned me a task that I think changed my life. This task was to build a driver so that ATM machines were able to speak to CPIP. At the time, those machines were using different protocols. So, I had this task in front of me and started building this driver and understanding the protocol. I quickly concluded that the protocol was really weak and if banks were going to put transactions through that protocol, bad things were going to happen. That was from the late 90s into the 2000s, and I eventually went into the Unisys Corporation security program.
From there I moved to Internet Security Systems, a company that is fully dedicated to cybersecurity, probably one of the fathers of cybersecurity as we know it today. I had the opportunity to work with the team that was scaling the business across Latin America. I learned a lot of go-to market and product marketing.
When Tom Noonan sold the business to IBM, I stayed at IBM but started thinking about the idea of building a company from the initial knowledge that I had of how banks were going to be attacked due to transactions over the internet. The internet at the time was taking off and banks were putting their transactions online and moving transactions on digital channels.
I ended up deciding to build my first company, Easy Solutions, to tackle the anti-fraud problem. That was a huge problem then and still is today, and I think it is going to continue to escalate. That was the beginning of RV in the entrepreneurial scene.
4:34 An Early Adopter of Security and a Foundation in Engineering and Sales
LC
During your time at Unisys, you started your career from a technical point of view and you helped customers understand the weaknesses in the technology that they were using to serve their customers. You were supporting sales efforts and you ended up, for a period of time, having a very successful career in sales where you were selling all over Latin America and building a very large network of contacts that served you later to build a foundation for Lumu.
How do you relate that sales engineering and sales experience to becoming an entrepreneur? Is it something that really helped you get to where you are today?
RV
It did, but I became a sales guy by accident. I was technical- I studied electronic engineering like I said before and loved to build software. I love to build software because that’s the only thing that you can do with just a laptop and your brain. Any other thing you want to do, you have to buy stuff. Software is the only thing that you can do with a laptop, an internet connection, your mind, and your hands.
I often say there is no limit to the potential of creation with a laptop, an internet connection, and your mind. I love doing that. However, at the time in the early 2000s, we didn’t put “cyber” with “security.” It was only “security.” The sales guys at the time were making a bunch of money selling other stuff. No one wanted to sell security. I was the only crazy guy across Latin America thinking that this was going to be a huge problem. So, I convinced my bosses at the time to let me sell this thing myself.
So, I was selling it, implementing it, and training the customers into the solutions that we were selling at the time. It helped me [become an entrepreneur] because when you can see the complete cycle of product development, to marketing the technology to the customer, to supporting the technology for the customer and deploying it, you really are covering most of the things required to build a company. It was an asset that, when you connect the dots now looking backwards, helped me build the foundation of the founder that I am today.
7:25 Overcoming Skepticism and Limited Access to Capital as a Colombian Founder
LC
We always say in the business world that you either have a problem looking for a solution or a solution looking for a problem. When you created Easy Solutions, you knew there was a problem in the marketplace. You knew that banks were putting their transactions at risk. You had an idea for a solution and you assembled a team of people in Colombia to build the solution. Then you decided to go to market. What sort of early challenges did you face when you took Easy Solutions to market for the first time?
RV
You don’t want to even go there. It was crazy, Leo. It was crazy because, for starters, Latin America was not a market at the time that was a producer of cybersecurity companies. It is still not today. Most cybersecurity companies don’t start from Latin America. Most of them start from Israel, from Europe, and of course the United States. It was challenging for the market to validate that a technology that was going to be built from Latin America was going to be able to solve the problems that they had. At the time I was competing with RSA, with IBM, with some of the big leaders and the big names in cybersecurity tackling the anti-fraud problem. That was one of the first problems: the acceptability that the technology could be built in Latin America.
The second is access to capital. The people were telling me bluntly, like, Ricardo, I think you are on drugs. It’s not possible that you can build this company and have this ambition of building the global leader of anti-fraud from Latin America. It’s just impossible. When I was knocking on the doors of the VCs to pitch the story, they all said that the story was compelling, but they didn’t really relate to that idea of building a company where the development team was going to be in Colombia. It was challenging to get access to capital to build the business.
I remember one of my investors at the time saying, “Why don’t you go back to LATAM, try to convince people to invest in your business in Latin America, expand a little bit, and then come back when the idea is more proven?” That’s exactly what I did. I took my first $3.6 million on that business from venture capital in Colombia- the only venture capital in Columbia. There were no VCs in Colombia other than like this only group and no one else. We started convincing banks across Latin America to deploy Easy Solutions. Then, at some point Gartner started calling Easy Solutions looking to speak with me because they were getting this feedback from banks that were displacing RSA and IBM to deploy Easy Solutions. That’s how we got into the [Gartner] Magic Quadrant for the first time for online fraud prevention. Then the investors in the US started to look at the company.
Overall, there were a lot of challenges on market acceptability, access to capital, and making sure that the team that we were acquiring at the time was the right one to build the company. You have this visionary trying to push the idea that this dream was going to be able to be built. But there was no evidence that this could be built from Latin America. It was critical to give confidence to the team that we had- the research and development team, the sales team, the marketing team- that we had an idea that had the potential to become a huge success, which eventually it did.
11:33 Translating a Business from Latin America to the US, APAC, and EMEA
LC
One of the things that you and I have talked about before is that Latin America, from a US or global perspective, is normally considered a single market when, in reality, each country has unique characteristics in terms of economic groups, ways of doing business, and in fraud. Specifically, each country has different attack vectors that banks need to react to.
When you took your company and you expanded outside Colombia, what was the strategy and the lessons learned that you got from building a Latin American business and later making a successful crossover into the US? Because that’s when you and I met, when you were already an established player in Latin America and you were already selling successfully in the US.
RV
There were a lot of lessons learned and, to some extent, a lot of frustrations in that process because translating a business from Latin America to the US is not a streamlined process. Just like it is not a streamlined process to translate business from the US to Latin America. You have to adapt to the business.
In my case, I’m a technical founder and I thought at that moment that the same problems the banks in Brazil were facing were similar to the problems the banks in the US were facing. That’s not necessarily true. Because that is untrue, then your product evolves in a way that is incapable of solving the problems of the customers that you have in the different markets that you’re trying to serve. One of the things that we did very differently at Lumu was to expose the technology to the US market from day one. That gave us the ability to evolve the technology in a way that is solving problems for multiple customers, across multiple verticals and across multiple segments.
But going back to Easy Solutions, that was one of the things that we had to go back on and refactor some of the technologies to ensure that they were appealing to the US customer as well. There are other problems that exist in Latin America that are overlooked by many vendors in cybersecurity and across other markets. It’s labor, the cost of labor and the effect that it has on the way your technologies evolve. In the US, because labor is so expensive, technologies tend to become almost self-managed. There’s a lot of automation involved in the technology that you build because labor is so expensive. In Latin America, you can solve anything with cheap labor. The gaps that you have in the product can be solved by adding more people to the problem. It is something that is good, but at the same time it’s bad depending on the markets that you’re trying to serve. We had to manage all of those problems to ensure that we came to the market with a very compelling offer for the US, then Europe, then APAC, and EMEA. I remember having calls at 3:00 AM in the morning because Japan was waking up and the largest bank in Japan was using our transaction anomaly detection technology.
15:08 Founding Lumu to Innovate Real-Time Continuous Compromise Assessments
LC
Obviously, you learned quite a bit building Easy Solutions and you had a successful exit of the company when we created Cyxtera. Then you got the bug again- creating something new. That was the genesis of Lumu.
You did two things that were super interesting that I would like you to share with our audience. Number one, you changed the scope of the technology and the problem that you were going to solve. You stepped away from fraud, financial crimes, and transaction monitoring into cybersecurity- pure technical cybersecurity. Number two, as you said before, you decided to design and build the product for the North American market at the same time that you were building that solution in Latin America and serving the needs of your Latin American customers.
Talk to us about that evolution, that change of mind, and the genesis of Lumu. Maybe for the benefit of the audience, explain a little bit more in detail what Lumu does and what it really means to measure continuous compromises in real time, which is something that is novel and unique in the marketplace.
RV
It is, and it started when I got more time on my hands after the exit of Easy Solutions. I started researching why some of the largest breaches at the time- think Target, Home Depot, UPS, Equifax- why the adversary was within those companies between 18 to 36 months. Why were those companies- with the budgets that they had, the amount of technology that they deployed in cybersecurity- unable to identify that the adversary was within the company? The end result of that process was that they weren’t looking for the compromise. They weren’t looking for the adversary within the company. That starts changing the way you tackle the problem. What if somehow you can measure in real time your state of compromise? What if you can do that continuously and now prove continuously otherwise- prove continuously that you are not compromised?
When we started building this idea with some of the early members of Lumu, we went to some of the banks that were customers of Easy Solutions and we pitched them the idea. They said that it made perfect sense, that they were not doing that continuously yet they had the data that enabled them to do so. But in their minds, they were collecting the data so that when they had a problem, they had the ability to do that research. It’s completely ineffective. You have the data, but you’re not using the data. You’re only going to use the data the moment that you’re compromised. Why don’t you use the data to identify early signs of compromise and eliminate the larger problem?
The lesson learned from that process was that even though they had the data on legacy SIEMs, and they had this idea that the data is accessible to them, but SIEMs store the data in such a weird way that the data is not available the minute that you want it or require it to do an assessment. That was the first sign that there was a problem to be solved- how can you capture the data and instrument the data in such a way that you can ask questions to the data in real time about the state of compromise.
I remember this bank telling me, “Ricardo, I have that data and I want to do your compromise assessment. Here is the contact of my technical guy. Let’s make sure that he provides the data.”
One week goes by and they weren’t able to access the data. A month goes by, and he [the technical guy] says “We opened a ticket with the SIEM provider.” They weren’t able to get one year of data from the SIEM so that we could do the assessment. To make a long story short, once we got the data we were able to identify a couple adversaries within the network of this large bank. That solidified the idea that there is a problem to be solved around making continuous compromise assessments in real time, available to customers of all sizes- which is the other problem. Usually, only the big guys with the dollars to deploy this type of technology have the data and all the capabilities to implement continuous compromise assessments. But the reality is that it’s a problem affecting companies of all sizes and all verticals. I think the novel thing that we did at Lumu is that we made this problem practically implementable for companies of all sizes. The smallest companies that we’re serving may have less than 20 endpoints or 20 users. The largest company that we’re serving today has over 250,000 users. And we provide the same technology and the same capabilities for both.
There were other things we learned in this process, too. But I don’t want to monopolize the conversation.
20:52 Leveraging Network Data to Detect Attacks Earlier and Prevent Critical Compromises
LC
I think what is super interesting for everybody to understand is that your vision was, “I need to process data in real time in order to validate or demonstrate that my customer is not being compromised.”
You have to start with one specific type of data. We all know that in cybersecurity, telemetry or data sources are abundant and you can take data from multiple places. But you took a very interesting approach. You saw another break in the market. You said, “I am going to use this specific data to assess the potential compromise.” What was that [data] and why did you pick that specifically?
RV
It was the network, and I’ll tell you why. A network that’s compromised behaves differently than a network that is not. We’re firm believers in that and we validate that day in and day out in every one of the companies that we are protecting.
Why that data? Number one, because it’s overlooked by the traditional vendors. It’s overlooked because it’s complex and it’s a lot of data. If you put that data into a SIEM, your ingestion cost is going to go through the roof. But not all of that data is relevant. The magic that we do with Lumu is that we collect the data and we instrument the data in such a way that we can store that data for two years and query that data. That’s two years of network metadata that we’re storing for every customer in real time for the more than 2500 customers that are using our technology today. That’s the magic.
Then, the other reason is that regardless of the controls that you have- your EDR, your firewall, your SaaS technology- if the bad guy bypasses those technologies, he’s going to land in the network. Those other controls- you can tamper with those controls. As a matter of fact, if you look at one of the DEFCON conferences from this year, there was no EDR vendor that was not bypassed by one of the latest POCs about memory hooking. All of them were bypassed. When the bad guy bypasses the EDR, he’s going to land in the network. If the bad guy tries to tamper with the network, the end result is that they are not going to be obtaining the evil effect that they want because they’re not going to get the communication that they require, their infiltration, or the access to the command and control commands that they require. The data doesn’t lie. The network doesn’t lie. That is the other reason why we got into collecting telemetry from the network.
Lastly, you can eliminate a lot of blind spots in the network. The traditional approach in cybersecurity, Leo, has been to collect telemetry from crown jewel segments. The reality is that a cyber attack doesn’t start in crown jewel segments, it ends in crown jewel segments. So when you decide that your protection strategy is monitoring crown jewel segments, you are implicitly deciding that you don’t want to review the early signs of that compromise. You only want to review the compromise when it’s at the end of the problem. In modern attacks, you have less than five seconds to react when the attack is identified on a crown jewel segment. Versus, when you identify the attack in the early stages of evolution, you have plenty of time to eliminate that attack that is never going to evolve into something that is really critical in your organization. That approach changes the dynamic of how the SecOps team works, going from putting out fires to becoming more strategic in the organization.
25:00 Lumu’s “Magic”: Anomaly Detection, Deep Correlation, Collective Defense, Transfer Learning, and Lumu Autopilot
LC
Absolutely. I want to double click on something that is also very unique about Lumu. It is impossible to use traditional methods of data analysis to process all the telemetry that you are consuming. Yes, you did start with the network, but now you consume all the telemetry available inside the enterprise from cloud vendors to EDR solutions to firewalls and network devices, etcetera. But you guys didn’t apply traditional methods. Today we all talk about AI and the hype of AI, but you guys were an AI company from day one. Talk to us about that. Why did you take such a big gamble? Why did you apply expensive, complex, and hard to develop and deploy technology to process this data? How much benefit have you gotten out of that investment?
RV
Connecting the dots again, from my Easy Solutions time with my Lumu time- remember the cost of labor, how the cost of labor affects technologies. Some of the lessons that I have learned from one company to the other are along those lines and how we don’t make the same mistakes twice.
We needed to process this amount of data to significantly automate the detection process. We built a patent pending technology to detect compromises in the network that we call the Illumination Process.
The Illumination Process involves different stages. We do correlations with known IOCs; everyone does that, we just do it better. But the magic of the AI capabilities is when we have filtered all that network metadata that didn’t correlate with known IOCs- we ingest that into the first AI engine, which is called anomaly detection. What it does is that it maps the network of every company as if it were a vocabulary, and AI is very good at detecting anomalies across that vocabulary. Now we know exactly when a company is “speaking” with an IP address, a domain, or a URL that it wasn’t “speaking” with before. That is an anomaly.
Traditional NDR technologies often leave those anomalies to the security analysts. But those anomalies are just that- anomalies. It doesn’t mean that they are something bad- in today’s world, there’s infrastructure coming up and down all the time. The other novelty of Lumu is that we don’t give those anomalies to security analysts. The anomalies are ingested by another AI model that we call deep correlation. What that AI model does is technically measure the distance between every anomaly and the cluster of known bad data that we have. If they’re too close, then there’s a clear sign that there’s going to be a compromise affecting the company. That’s the magic of detecting compromises at speed.
When you add that with the fact that all our customers are sending the data to the same platform- it’s a SaaS platform, completely distributed and sanitized across the multiple tenants that we have on the same platform- now you can apply two interesting AI concepts. One is called collective defense. I know you guys are very familiar with this concept, in which when we identify something that is bad from one company that is using our technology, we’ll automatically protect the entire customer base that we have. That’s collective defense.
The other concept is called transfer learning. Every company that provides data to Lumu benefits from the learning that Lumu already has done from the entire ecosystem. We’re going to start learning from each new customer the platform has. That learning that we’re getting from that new customer is transferred to the rest of the companies that are using the same platform. So, those two powerful concepts of collective defense and transfer learning are part of our story.
More recently we launched Lumu Autopilot, which enables us to automate security operations. One of the problems that exists in the market, and one that we had to learn ourselves, is that many believe the only problem is to identify compromises within networks. We thought, naively perhaps, that companies know what to do when they identify a compromise, and it turns out that they don’t. There was a bigger problem to solve, which is the problem of security operations. Lumu Autopilot effectively automates that problem. When we identify a compromise, we’re not only responding to mitigate or isolate that compromise, but we’re also automating the management of that incident. We’ll start monitoring the incident. If there is a new evolution or new data that we need to ingest or need to query from the company’s stack, we’ll do that to make a final determination of whether the incident is safe to be closed because it doesn’t represent any risk for the company after Lumu has taken actions or if it needs to be escalated and manual intervention is required.
30:52 Lumu’s Product-Led Growth Strategy
LC
I’m going to ask you two quick questions. The first one is, most people probably don’t know that they can use Lumu without being a customer. You have a very unique approach in making the technology available for people to test, to validate, and to detect compromises without having to pay for the technology. You use what is in the industry called PLG (Product-Led Growth) Motion, which is very expensive to implement because you really need to have a product that is easy to download, deploy, implement, and produces value early on.
So, the first question is, has that strategy proven to be more effective than the traditional enterprise sales model?
RV
100 percent, 100 percent. I think another one of the lessons learned from Easy [Solutions] to Lumu is that with Easy, I had to go almost beg banks to test my technology. Here, anyone can go online, open a Lumu free account, and start realizing the value of the technology. That helped us in a way hijack the sales process. We didn’t have the ability to get into those sales processes early on in the company. But it also accelerates the value that we provide to companies. It also helps us convey more value and to quickly close some of the deals that we have in the pipeline. It’s very effective. I recommend it as much as possible.
32:22 The Path Forward Amidst Shifting Threats, New AI Technologies, and Growing SecOps Demand
LC
Fantastic. The second quick question for you is, cybersecurity is an ever-changing landscape. New attack vectors, new risks, technologies like AI- and Gen AI is becoming something that is going to be prevalent in the next few years. How do you see and what is your vision for the next three to five years for Lumu to, number one, stay ahead of these changes in the threat landscape and number two, also to continue to build this technology moat that you have around the company? Because to replicate what you guys are doing, it’s going to take a lot of time and a lot of effort and a lot of expertise.
RV
It does. You’re right. Cybersecurity is an ever-changing world. I think that the one thing that is 100 percent sure in cybersecurity is that every action that we take on protection, is going to create a reaction from the adversary’s point of view. That’s going to be the constant in cybersecurity. But then when you look at the cybersecurity scene today, we’re very proud that the market has finally accepted security operations as the North Star to eliminate threats. If you go into some of the biggest vendors in cybersecurity, they all have a security operations story. Whether it is CrowdStrike or Palo Alto or Cisco, they all have a cybersecurity operations story. And I think Lumu was an early player in the market advocating for cybersecurity operations. The lack of rigor in cybersecurity operations is what got us into the problems that exist today.
Lumu is positioned to continue to lead the security operations market. I think that convention is going to be replicated across vendors and is going to be replicated across customers. The fact that all these vendors now have that basis of security operations is really giving us tailwinds to educate even more customers and make them realize that what we were saying four years ago is really what is happening. So, security operations is a fact, there’s no doubt and that’s not going to go away. That’s the key.
What is the next step? The next state of Lumu is how we enable the security operator brokers, for lack of a better word- the MDRs, the MSSPs, the MSPs, the resellers- to deliver the security operation outcomes of our unified platform. That’s what we call the security transformation, which we’re investing in significantly to make sure it happens. Some of the larger MSSPs across Latin America are already using our technology. That same story or thesis is being replicated in the US.
In order to do so, we need to make sure that the same concept of continuous compromise assessment is applied, like you said, to other telemetry in the enterprise. Endpoints, identities, cloud, or other elements of telemetry that we’re now collecting to apply the same concept of continuous compromise assessment. Not only coming from the network, but from the different platforms that companies have today.
36:09 RV’s Evolution as a CEO
LC
I’m going to state the obvious. Obviously, you have a lot of passion for the technology, the solution, and the product, but you are now the CEO of a very vibrant and fast growing startup in the US. You have multiple responsibilities, one of which is to deal with me as your board member and to produce results. How has your role changed over the last three or four years from the inception, the idea, the creation of the product, the defining of the go-to-market, to where you are today as the CEO of Lumu?
RV
I think the key to that is to identify where your time is going to create a bigger impact and a bigger value for the company. In the early stages, that was making sure that we were able to recruit the right talent. In some other stages it was to make sure that my impact in the business was on product marketing and how we position this technology that in some cases scares people. There’s a new way of doing things in cybersecurity. How do we make sure that we market that in a way that customers accept that innovation? In other moments of the business, it was to ensure that we had the right go-to-market strategy for different geographies.
For example, the time that we are spending today is on how we make sure that we implement the right growth initiatives to sustain the evolution of the business. Is it going to be organic or inorganic, a mix of that? We have three main bets or growth initiatives. Brazil is growing significantly for this company. The slim market in the US is growing rapidly in the market as well as the MSPs. Those are the three initiatives. Those are the ones that take up most of my time, making sure that we have the right approach. Making a mistake at this stage in any of these approaches can put us back one or two years. We want to make sure that those different approaches that we are putting together on these growth initiatives are carefully implemented.
38:30 Advice for Aspiring Founders
LC
Fantastic. I’m going to ask something a little bit different here. You are a very experienced CEO and not only are you a serial entrepreneur, but through your career you have developed expertise in all areas of running a business from technology to sales, to engineering, to go-to-market, to capital raising, etcetera. You’re very generous with your knowledge.
The question that I would like to ask you is what advice or what career path would you provide to an aspiring cybersecurity founder, somebody who has an idea and that same technical passion that you have and wants to create a company out of that idea?
RV
Well, the first thing is making sure that you find the right problem. There are many problems in cybersecurity. It doesn’t mean that all of them are going to create a huge TAM (Total Addressable Market). Make sure that you find the right problem.
Once you find the right problem, fall in love with the problem, not necessarily with the solution. I remember, at Easy Solutions, for every idea of growing the business, there was always a new product to come out on the market. At some point it may be the right approach, but that’s not necessarily the best approach. At Lumu, we are very focused on staying on this product, this one product that has a huge TAM, and that discipline helped us create deep in the product. The product that we have today is a state-of-the-art product, it is the leader of the NDR market. We have only been in the market around four years and when you compare us with the other players of the market that have been here for 20 years, it’s incredible what we have accomplished in only four years. So, make sure that you have that discipline of focusing on that specific problem.
Make sure you find the right team. I’m the face of the company, but I wouldn’t be able to do my job if I didn’t have the executive team that I have, people that are experienced in building products, marketing the company, operating the business, operating the not so sexy part of the business which is making sure that you file the taxes, making sure that you make payroll and some of that stuff. Make sure that you have the right team.
Stay safe, stay healthy. Building a business is not an eight-hour per day job. It’s going to look more like, in some cases, an eighteen-hour per day job. You have to ensure that you have the energy to do this, to build this, and share that energy among your team.
It’s hard to build cybersecurity companies without capital. You need to start talking to investors. What we are doing with Forgepoint is an example of that. I met Alberto probably during my Easy Solutions times and then I met you at Cyxtera, five to seven years after you decided to invest. Oftentimes in my early days as a CEO, I got very frustrated about speaking with investors and getting nothing of that. The first time that you speak with an investor, you are a dot. Then the second time and the third time and so on and so forth, they start building a trajectory of your ability to execute in the company. That gives them the conviction to eventually invest in the company, like you guys did.
Perseverance. There are going to be huge, tremendous problems when you build a company. Perseverance and resilience are skills that all entrepreneurs have to have. That’s the only way, honestly, to build a business. Every day I wake up and I know there are going to be five or seven challenges in the day and I need to deal with them one by one, making sure that I eliminate the roadblocks to enable the team to be successful.
That’s some of the advice that I can provide.
43:01 Closing
LC
Fantastic. Ricardo, as I said before, you are always super generous with your knowledge and experience and now with your time. We, at Forgepoint, cannot say anything more than thank you very much for the partnership. I appreciate the friendship that we have and the patience that you had with me because I remember when you pitched Lumu the first time. We are super, super excited about the impact that you guys are having in the industry and the future that Lumu is going to have. I would like to give you the opportunity to make some closing remarks. But again, thank you from me, from Forgepoint. I’m sure that everybody’s going to enjoy this Forgecast.
RV
Thank you, Leo, for the invitation here. I echo those words. I truly value the partnership that we have built here with Forgepoint and with the rest of the team. I’m sure that you know the dent that we have made in the market so far doesn’t even compare with the upside that we have in the business. Thank you for the invitation.