From 8 to 500: Scaling Hypergrowth in Cybersecurity GTM – Ryan Carlson, President of GTM, Chainguard

Are you wrestling with how to scale your sales team without losing focus on what truly matters? Do you wonder how to maintain a customer-centric approach as your company experiences hypergrowth? Or maybe you’re trying to figure out the right time and way to segment your go-to-market organization. This episode offers deep, practical insights on these pressing challenges, straight from one of cybersecurity’s fastest-growing companies.

In this conversation, we discuss: 

👉 Chainguard’s unique approach to building scalable, segmented go-to-market teams early and the risks and rewards involved
👉 The art of shifting from product-led to value-led sales, and why the customer’s “aha” moment matters
👉 Lessons on integrating sales, marketing, and customer success for synchronized, fast, and sustainable growth

About our guest:
Ryan Carlson is President of Go-To-Market at Chainguard, a cybersecurity company that’s seen exponential growth, rising from under 10 employees to nearly 500 in just a few years. Formerly a key leader at Okta, Ryan brings a wealth of experience in building teams, scaling revenue, and cultivating customer trust in the enterprise software world.

Summary
Ryan Carlson shares tactical learnings from “inside the rocket ship” at Chainguard—how to scale people, structure, and strategy while keeping real value for customers at the heart of everything. If you’re determined to grow sales and marketing without sacrificing fundamentals, don’t miss this candid, actionable episode. Tune in for proven strategies you can implement right now!

Links:

• Ryan Carlson on LinkedIn
• Chainguard Website
• Book a 30-minute meeting with Andrew Monaghan

Transcript

Andrew Monaghan [00:00:10]:
Welcome to the live stream. If you're listening to this on Thursday 26th June as we're recording this or welcome to the podcast if you're listening to after the Fact now, as many of you know, and I did some analysis a couple of months back to find the fastest growing Covid baby cybersecurity companies, startups essentially measured by headcount growth. That's probably the best proxy that we have. And I'll show you the eye chart. But what I found. So obviously the fastest growing one was Wiz. I was interested the ones below Wiz island came in second. And I talked to Eric Appel who heads up sales at island, gosh, 18 months ago, a couple of years ago now, and recently I talked to Steve Rog who heads up sales at Cyera.

Andrew Monaghan [00:00:57]:
And I'm kind of excited about this conversation because Chainguard is in fourth place if there's a race, which I know there's not. And on the call today, we have Ryan Carlson, who's the president of Go to Market at Chainguard. Ryan, welcome. How are you today?

Ryan Carlson [00:01:13]:
Good. Andrew, thanks for having us on your chart. You had Chainguard in third place. You just called this fourth place. But it's, it's third place. I'm sorry to correct the record right off the bat. Just kidding.

Andrew Monaghan [00:01:22]:
Well, you know, I hate doing, I hate going against my guests, but I actually took a Wiz off this one. So it looks like you're in third. But you never know. I think the chart would look kind of silly, right? Was it way up here and everyone else would be further down. So I took was that and had you guys on. But yeah, you're right, it looks like you're starting. But does it matter? Probably not, right?

Ryan Carlson [00:01:40]:
No, I'm not competitive at all.

Andrew Monaghan [00:01:42]:
Exactly, exactly. But looking at actually your own headcount, growth at Chainguard is kind of nuts, right? I mean, not that long ago, 20, 21, you're down at 8 people, 10 people. And as of today, looking at the numbers, you're up to almost 500. Does that sound about right?

Ryan Carlson [00:02:00]:
Yeah, these are directionally correct and the shape of that curve is absolutely correct.

Andrew Monaghan [00:02:04]:
I'm guessing, I know that you took some money earlier this year, right. I'm exactly sure when it was announced. But you can see you've added almost 200 heads, I think it is since the start of the year. And that would indicate there was some funding happening in the background. And sure enough, in April you announced a big round.

Ryan Carlson [00:02:21]:
Yeah, I mean We've raised over $600 million across four rounds of series D. And a lot of that is to fuel that growth. But a lot of that investment happens knowing that we plan to grow. That way, we can talk for all about all the reasons that's happening.

Andrew Monaghan [00:02:34]:
Yeah. And what I loved about your announcement, Ryan, this is a bugbear of mine is in announcements, you actually gave a revenue number right now. It kind of frustrates me and, you know, frankly, you know, trying to guess how fast people really are going. And when people don't give revenue numbers, all the things swirl in the background. Right? Like, yeah, frankly, I'll tell you, when you talking to Steve at Sierra, I was pinged like before and after the interview, like, oh, ask them about revenue. You know, how real is it all? You know, until you actually come in and say, well, actually, this is what it is. All these, you know, competitors or whatever doubt a little bit about how real it all is. I'm glad that you put that in there and you said that in 2025, fiscal Chainguard grew its ARR seven times to $40 million in ARR.

Andrew Monaghan [00:03:21]:
That breaks the triple, triple, double, double growth curve right there.

Ryan Carlson [00:03:25]:
Yeah, it's been incredible growth. You know, we're, we are proud of those numbers. And, you know, you're right. It's rare to, to put those numbers in there. It used to be back in the day when you announced funding, you wouldn't talk about valuation. Now I think you keep adding, have to add, as a standard practice, more and more information. We added ARR here. We are much more proud of the customer growth, though, than the ARR growth.

Ryan Carlson [00:03:43]:
That's really ultimately what matters for us.

Andrew Monaghan [00:03:45]:
And here you said there are 150 customers. Is that for the containers product? Is that your main product?

Ryan Carlson [00:03:50]:
That's a core product? Yeah. We have a lot more we can talk about here. Some of them are mentioned on the screen here. VMs and libraries alongside Chainguard containers. But yeah, the bulk of that revenue comes from the Container Images product line.

Andrew Monaghan [00:04:00]:
All right, well, let's. Before we get into all the business side of this, let's get to know you a little bit. Ryan, I have, believe or not 49 personal questions here. The good news is that I don't ask you all 49. I have this number generator here. It's completely random, I'll tell you. And my algorithm to get it random is protected by all sorts of fancy encryption. It's strong, it's advanced, it uses all sorts of unique things to go about doing its job.

Andrew Monaghan [00:04:29]:
And what I do is I spin a random wheel Here. No one can see my wheel, but you'll hear it on the released episode. And it spits me out three questions. Are you ready to go?

Ryan Carlson [00:04:39]:
You're trying to make me nervous. It's working. Yeah. Let's do it.

Andrew Monaghan [00:04:41]:
All right, I'll press the button. All right, first one. Number five. How did you make money as a kid?

Ryan Carlson [00:04:53]:
Not well. My first real job. My first real job. We lived. I grew up in rural Colorado. Whenever I say I'm from Colorado, people ask me, what ski town did I live in. It was not a ski town. This was out more on the plains.

Ryan Carlson [00:05:05]:
Rural Colorado. A lot of horses around in our neighbors had a horse barn. And I shoveled stalls for my first real paying job. The guy's name was Mel Mandel. I still remember he paid me in cash. That was my first real job. And then through high school and college, I worked on my father's construction crew. I was also under the table job.

Ryan Carlson [00:05:23]:
I hope the IRS isn't listening to this, but doing construction, shoveling stalls showed me, you know, why I wanted to get into tech. Ultimately, I think is a good lesson from the early days.

Andrew Monaghan [00:05:31]:
Yeah, you find out what you don't want to do in life. Right. And hopefully the statute of limitations on under the table pay as a kid is gone by now. All right, let me spin the wheel again. All right, number 23, what's an embarrassing or memorable moment in your sales or marketing life?

Ryan Carlson [00:05:55]:
Well, I think public speaking, if you're talking about sales, public speaking is always embarrassing. I've done a lot of public speaking. Early on, it was a struggle for me to be comfortable with it. And one of my failure mechanisms with public speaking was that I would talk really fast. I might be talking really fast right now, but after one, a presentation I gave early on, it was actually in the uk, One of the team members came up and said, you, you reminded me of a ferret on espresso when you presented it. So that was a reminder to try to slow down.

Andrew Monaghan [00:06:22]:
Us Brits have unique terms of phrase sometimes, right?

Ryan Carlson [00:06:25]:
Exactly.

Andrew Monaghan [00:06:26]:
All right, last one. Let me spin it again. Number 39, what is the story behind you getting your first job in cybersecurity?

Ryan Carlson [00:06:41]:
My first real foray into cybersecurity was a company called Okta. And I met them when they were about 10 people. I didn't think of it as a security company. Maybe that's a through line. We'll talk more about this. But I thought of Okta as an opportunity for a new type of company to be built as everybody was transitioning from on prem package software in the workspace to cloud based SaaS product, which of course ubiquitous now. But back when Okta was started, that was still in the early stages. I thought of Okta as a company that was really an IT play that an employee productivity play and that ultimately made those employees secure.

Ryan Carlson [00:07:17]:
But I didn't really look at it as getting into cybersecurity. I looked at as can I get into a great company that's trying to build something new as early as possible? And it happened to be a cybersecurity company in the end, but it wasn't intentional.

Andrew Monaghan [00:07:30]:
And what did you see even with 10 people that was like, yeah, this could be my home for a while?

Ryan Carlson [00:07:35]:
There are discontinuities in technology where something changes fundamentally from an old way of doing things to a new way. And I've seen a couple of those over my career. And the one that was clearly happening when Okta was being formed was that transition from on prem packaged applications for employees to SaaS based applications. When that discontinuity happens from an old way of doing things to a new way, it creates opportunities for new companies to be built because oftentimes the incumbents can't transition. They're too bogged down in the old way of doing things. And so what, what interested me in Okta was that okay, this is the opportunity to create a new type of company, but really that opportunity is not going to be realized if you don't have a great team. And I thought that the team at Okta was especially strong and I thought the market size was huge. It's any company who has any kind of employees could ultimately use a solution like Okta's.

Ryan Carlson [00:08:25]:
So it was really the fact that they had an amazing team going after a big market and the discontinuity in an old way of doing things to a new way created this disruptive opportunity.

Andrew Monaghan [00:08:35]:
And you were there for 10 years, right laterally you were the CMO, but you joined obviously probably when a CMO was not needed back in the day. As I was thinking about this Ryan, I was kind of looking at it going well, scaling Okta from a very small number to a very Large number in 10 years during this zero interest rate period. I'm wondering how different that is and how you went about doing that compared to where you are now. Postserp in Chainguard yeah, the 10 years.

Ryan Carlson [00:09:03]:
I was at Okta span 2011 to 2021. So there was, you know, zero interest rate phenomenon. Portion was at the end of that. And in Okta's case, it actually coincided with obviously a very transformational, impactful event in Covid. So for Okta, when zero interest rate really started to kick in, Covid also was coincident with that. So you kind of had two different external factors driving the business, affecting the business. And I think you're asking about how do we plan during that time, is that right? Yeah, I mean, yeah, with zero interest rate, obviously, you know, money's flowing freely, you can take bigger risks. That's true as a company, as a vendor, it's also true with customers.

Ryan Carlson [00:09:42]:
And so you could, you could argue that that made it easy for people to make buying decisions for you to invest, for you to get access to capital. And all that was certainly true. I think sometimes when you look at the zero interest rate period, a lot of people looked at, you know, companies that were growing through product led growth or bottoms up growth. Okta was always very much a top down enterprise sale, selling to C level executives, CIOs in particular, CISOs as well. And so I don't know if it affected us in that way, but the COVID period really was interesting for Okta because just like every other company initially when Covid hit, it was pure uncertainty. Nobody knew what to do, nobody knew what that meant for us, for the world. But then it very quickly changed into, well, Okta's product and technology could help companies who have to go remote work immediately with no choice. And so Okta benefited for quite a while from the COVID tailwinds of remote work because everybody who's working remotely now needs to be more secure, have access to applications and technology and Okta help with that.

Ryan Carlson [00:10:42]:
After that, I don't know if it's changed fundamentally because if you're doing it right, you're looking at business fundamentals. So at Chainguard we very much look at what is the investment opportunity we have have when we raise money from the investors we have. And we want to grow the company in the way that you showed with that head. Current headcount chart is really are these smart business investments? And smart business investments are always smart business investments, you know, regardless of interest rates. And so it hasn't changed us a whole lot for us because what Chain Guard is doing is really working. And so it's, it paints a pretty clear path to where we should invest more.

Andrew Monaghan [00:11:15]:
So even now you're sticking to fundamentals, right? I feel like during the teens, the 2018s, it was more aggressive, let's say. Is that not what your impression was at Okta? The hiring ahead of revenue was a little bit more aggressive.

Ryan Carlson [00:11:32]:
I think there are a lot of companies who certainly lost track of fundamentals on revenue and they would use other metrics to value the business and people let them do that. But I wouldn't say that Okta did that. I wouldn't say that Chainguard's done that. None of the companies I've been at looked at fundamentals. Certainly access to capital has been easier or less easy throughout these times, but I think any great company is always going to have access to capital.

Andrew Monaghan [00:11:53]:
And when you left Okta, how many employees did you have?

Ryan Carlson [00:11:56]:
There was, I think around 3,500 to 4,000 employees.

Andrew Monaghan [00:11:59]:
Okay, so let's fast forward. September 2023, you joined Chainguard as the. As the president of Go To Market or as a CMO originally. I can't remember.

Ryan Carlson [00:12:09]:
As president of Go to Market.

Andrew Monaghan [00:12:10]:
Okay. And roughly 90 employees. Looking at the charts I was looking at, as I said. Right.

Ryan Carlson [00:12:15]:
Yep.

Andrew Monaghan [00:12:16]:
Okay. So very different environments, very different stages of growth. What did you think your focus was going to be in the first three to six months when you got there? And how did that differ from reality?

Ryan Carlson [00:12:28]:
Yeah, Chainguard and I got connected through mutual friends and investors. And when I first met Dan Lawrence, our CEO, you know, I joke with him all the time, is the first thing he said to me is, I'm not looking to hire somebody like you. I said, great. You know, I'm trying to get to know great founders and different businesses and see if I can help. And then that conversation kind of led to, obviously I joined and Chainguard at that point had the early signs of something that was working with the Container Images products. And that wasn't Chainguard's initial product. Their initial product was a product called Enforce, which was really looking at software supply chain from a visibility standpoint and attestation and governance, really giving people insight into their software supply chains. And that insight turned into a deeper insight when Chainguard realized instead of giving people visibility into supply chains, we could just help them fix them.

Ryan Carlson [00:13:18]:
And that was the genesis for the Container Images product. And I started to talk to Chainguard right around that time. And so it reminded me of many other high growth companies where you can see the thing that they have has traction. I talked to many of their customers, I talked to many of their prospective customers just around this problem area and how Chainguard was solving it. So you could see that that was very clearly. You know, you can describe Chainguard's product in 60 seconds. And if you're talking to the right person, they totally get it. And then it just became very clear that there was a team who could build something I guess at scale.

Ryan Carlson [00:13:51]:
It was the team that Dan and Kim and Matt and Ville, the co founders, all had assembled together in one place. Very unique experience when it comes to containerized software, to open source software, to software. Supply chain security had built a lot of things, you know, at Chainguard but before that together, working together at Google. It was just very clear that that was a team that could do a lot. And I felt convinced that I could help them a lot on the go to market side.

Andrew Monaghan [00:14:16]:
And then as you came in then what did you think you were going to be doing? And then what was, how did you get kind of pulled and pushed around trying to solve problems and grow from there?

Ryan Carlson [00:14:25]:
Yeah, at that stage you're kind of, you know, the bulk of the employees at that time were on the product and engineering side. Chainguard's initial years, you're investing and experimenting and really inventing a new technology and new product. And so that was the bulk of the employees at that time. And so I thought of my job as two things. Really figure out what should the go to market look like. We had customers who were buying it. Could that be repeatable? Could the things that we had heard from them be scaled across many customers and how do you crystallize that? So that was kind of job one and then job two was to build the team around that to take that unique product and technology to the customers we were targeting, you know, at scale and so figuring out what the plan, the, the go to market motion should be and the, and the strategy and just kind of the process and then build a team around it.

Andrew Monaghan [00:15:09]:
Now how big was the sales team and marketing team at that point?

Ryan Carlson [00:15:11]:
I think there were two salespeople, there were probably six marketing people at that, you know, at that time Chainguard had invested in marketing a different way. Not in generating leads, but really in generating a brand. And that really served them well. The initial marketing team at, at Chainguard really focus on creating a brand around, you know, open source software, supply chain security, rather than what a typical early stage marketing team would do, which is try to just generate leads. And that really served Chainguard well.

Andrew Monaghan [00:15:36]:
How do they do that?

Ryan Carlson [00:15:36]:
It is a lot of content, a lot of thought leadership pieces around the space one of chain. You know, Chainguard has four core values that are very true and I think are very resonant and also not, not the same as every other company's core values that those are also hallmarks of Great companies is they have really distinct and true core values. And one of ours is that while we do serious work, we don't take ourselves too seriously. And I think that's a really, you know, core part of Chain Guard's brand and reputation is, you know, we're doing something that really matters, but we have fun doing it. And that's true with the, you know, our partners and our customers as well.

Andrew Monaghan [00:16:09]:
Yeah, I don't think the industry needs more people to take themselves a little bit too seriously. Right.

Ryan Carlson [00:16:13]:
Yeah. Especially in security. Security is a lot of fear based marketing and that, you know, that the message can, can wear thin if you have an aspirational, light hearted component to it and you're solving a real problem at the same time. That's a great combination.

Andrew Monaghan [00:16:25]:
And this was the first time that you led the sales team as well as the marketing team, is that right?

Ryan Carlson [00:16:30]:
I had led types of sales teams in the past, inside sales teams, SDR teams. So this is the first time I had the full sales team and marketing team integrated in one organization.

Andrew Monaghan [00:16:39]:
And how did you feel about that walking in?

Ryan Carlson [00:16:41]:
It's daunting, but it's also very exciting because I think when these things work well together. There is a trend in enterprise software certainly where you have a go to market function. You used to have just a sales function and a marketing function, then a customer success function or customer support function. Integrating those into one group is much more common now because they should all be, if you're doing it right, they should all be related. Finding the prospects that can become your customers works better if marketing and sales are integrated so they're talking to each other. Winning those customers is just the start of the conversation. You need to be making those customers successful. So customer success and customer support, tech support gets integrated into that.

Ryan Carlson [00:17:20]:
And if you're doing that well, those customers become your biggest source of new leads because they're advocating on your behalf. So it's kind of a full circle integrated approach. That's why a lot of people do it. I was really excited to do that because I've spent a lot of time working with sales teams, helping them from a product marketing standpoint or a positioning standpoint. And being able to integrate it at this early stage was really exciting challenge for me.

Andrew Monaghan [00:17:43]:
Any surprises as you probably got more into the guts of how the sales team works than you maybe had before?

Ryan Carlson [00:17:49]:
I'd worked very closely with them in the past. So no surprises in how sales teams worked and how, you know, how they organize, how they run process. You know, there's a. There's a lot of different approaches to sales processes. I've. I've been through many of them before. And so that stuff wasn't surprising. Well, maybe what is surprising was how Chain Guard figured out how its integration between marketing and product and sales kind of started to scale over time.

Ryan Carlson [00:18:11]:
We had some pretty core opinions that we were, we thought we were right about, that we turned out to be wrong about, and then we updated them. So it may be more specific to Chain Guard than generally surprised about sales and marketing running together.

Andrew Monaghan [00:18:25]:
Can you be more specific about maybe an example of that?

Ryan Carlson [00:18:27]:
Yeah. If you think about Chainguard as a security solution, we're solving one of the biggest security challenges for our customers. We're getting rid of critical vulnerabilities in their infrastructure. And so that is a security benefit. So we feel like we should be selling that to security leaders. And so our initial thesis was if we can go to CISOs and market and sell to them directly, that should be our route. And so we did that and then we came back and we had a ton of success. But we found that in the vast majority of the cases, the budget for our solution actually came from the engineering organization, the CTO and her team.

Ryan Carlson [00:19:00]:
And that, in hindsight, was one of these things. That makes sense. Of course, what Chainguard is providing is critical infrastructure to people, for people to run their cloud service, their application, whatever their technology is, it's being deployed by the engineering organizations. And so even though we're solving a security problem, it's deployed by engineering. And the deeper insight we found is that we more than pay for ourselves. The value we provide oftentimes is in reclaimed developer productivity because we're doing work that the engineering teams would have had to do themselves before they deploy this. In doing that, we solve the security problem. So that, you know, it might have sounded like we should have been able to figure that out beforehand, but it was very clear after just, you know, three or four months of really talking to a lot of customers that the insight for us was we're selling to both security C level executives and technology C level executives.

Ryan Carlson [00:19:50]:
And I think that's pretty unique amongst traditional cybersecurity companies.

Andrew Monaghan [00:19:54]:
Yeah, for sure. I remember 20 years ago, there was this whole thing about if only there was more secure code, the security industry would have less to do. Right. But the feeling was at the time, and I wonder how you've seen this change, that developers had the power, right? They were developing software that's going to change and develop and bring up the company, whereas you security folks are getting in my way and slowing me down by making me check, double check and triple check my code and tell me all things I've got wrong. Is that still a feeling out there or has a kind of whole organization and the integration between security and developers matured a little bit over the years?

Ryan Carlson [00:20:33]:
No, I think it's still definitely true. The contention or the friction between security and innovation is there for good reason. Sometimes if you want to innovate from an engineering or technology standpoint, you're using something that's new or you're trying something that's new and not all the kinks have been worked out. So there's inherent risk in doing something new. And conversely, from a security standpoint, if you're trying to make your organization as safe as possible, part of that is eliminating risk. And that means these things are at odds naturally and understandably. One of the things that Chainguard helps with is like, you know, the trend you talked about, Obviously everybody refers to that as shifting left. The further you can shift security left in development cycle, the better you will be able to remove that friction or address that contention.

Ryan Carlson [00:21:17]:
What Chainguard does is we say, we don't shift left, you start left. You can start with a secure code base and then that friction gets resolved. The development teams who are exposed to Chainguard no longer look at that as, this is security chasing me to fix something. It's security giving me something that helps me go faster. Because another unique thing about Chainguard is we're not making them do something fundamentally new. We're giving them the open source software that they're already using that they want to use. We're just giving to them in a much better fashion. And so the engineering teams don't have to change fundamentally what they're doing.

Ryan Carlson [00:21:51]:
They get to keep doing what they do now. They don't have to patch and maintain open source software. And then the security teams, you know, get to, you know, when they show up into the engineering discussions, it's, it's a, it's a good conversation because they're giving something, helps them move forward, taking work off their plate.

Andrew Monaghan [00:22:06]:
I have in my mind, Ryan, kind of, you know, going into first or second sales, call the seller, one of your prospects maybe, and a bunch of people sitting there with their arms folded going, you know, why should I? Why am I here talking about security? So what was the wild moment that a developer looks at goes, oh, I get it now. What's that experience for them?

Ryan Carlson [00:22:27]:
It's funny, I had a conversation that was just like that. There was an organization early on that was very, you know, expressed skepticism about a solution like Chainguards, in large part because they had spent so much time doing this themselves. And that is the very typical pattern as we've walked into a company who has either just lived with the pain of vulnerabilities, or if they have tried to address it, they've done it largely themselves. And in this case, this organization. As a favor, I asked the CTO of this company to let us come in and present. They had already said, hey, we have this solved, They've done it ourselves. But we got as many people into the room as possible. And the aha moment was, what was this slide that we have called the doom cycle, which is, all right, you pull a container image from anywhere you deploy it, security scans it, you see a bunch of CVEs or vulnerabilities, and then the discussion begins around triaging that.

Ryan Carlson [00:23:17]:
Which ones should we fix? Which ones can we ignore? Who should fix them? And if you're lucky enough to get that into a stable state, that whole doom cycle begins again the next time you pull a new container image into play. When we showed that slide in that group of assembled attendees, you could see some head start to nod. You could see some people, like, who are identifying with that pain. So we pursued that further and we said, look, the alternative to that doom cycle is do exactly what you want to do. Pull open source software, container images and frameworks that your teams want to use. Just get them from us. And then when you deploy them and scan them, if we're doing our job correctly, there should be nearly 0 CVEs or 0 CVEs in that infrastructure. And then engineering is freed up to, from patching the past, as we say, to building the future.

Ryan Carlson [00:24:00]:
And that light bulb moment has happened over and over and over again.

Andrew Monaghan [00:24:03]:
Yeah, I bet, I bet. Also, there's probably the skeptics going, well, how do we know you've done your job to really check these images? How do you handle that?

Ryan Carlson [00:24:13]:
Extreme transparency about. It's not just what we do that matters, it's how we do it that gives them the trust in us and the confidence. And it's also, we also say trust but verify. So our initial technology innovation and investment, we're in SBOM software builds and materials, so we had a lot of expertise around, you know, fully compliant SBOMs. So all the container images that we ship to our customers have that spom so they can verify that we've controlled and done what we've said. We've done with this open source software from source all the way to registry, as we sometimes say. And so we've also really spent a lot of time in our marketing explaining to people what we call the factory or how this stuff is really hard. So they know how we do what we do.

Ryan Carlson [00:24:59]:
It's very simple to just look at a container image and say, does this have CVEs in it or not? Does this, is this minimized or not? It's much more difficult to explain how you got there. And Chainguard certainly more than any other company out there, has invested in the hard work, both in the architecture and in the scaling to be able to do that. We just explained that a lot to customers so that they don't have to just trust us. They can verify, but they do have the confidence that we can deliver what we say we do.

Andrew Monaghan [00:25:24]:
Have you gone as far as branding the factory as a thing? Kind of like the, you know, back in the security days, the X forces or the labs people? Is that part of what you're thinking about as well?

Ryan Carlson [00:25:34]:
You know, we call it internally the factory, and then we started to use that term so often with customers that it's kind of stuck. And so now we do, in some of our marketing materials, talk about the factory and it is very relevant and appropriate analogy, this factory. So, yeah, we've been branding at the factory as well. And it really is, you know, you. We're not the only game in town anymore. There are, you know, smaller companies and other companies who've gotten into this space. And the differentiator really is in that investment we've made in the factory. Because for our customers, it's not just the open source software they need protected today.

Ryan Carlson [00:26:03]:
If we're doing it right, we're helping protect the open source software that they will need in the future. And so being able to cover all aspects of Open source software is going to be a key differentiator for us. And so that factory has already set us on that path.

Andrew Monaghan [00:26:15]:
Okay, I remember you're saying that early on the company did a really good job of building trust with the core audience in the marketing. I'm wondering after being there now for a couple of years, how you developed that and how you've expanded on that.

Ryan Carlson [00:26:30]:
We do it in a couple of ways and I don't know that we're perfect on it, but what we try to do is make sure we have a close connection with our customers always. I spend as much time with my customers, with our customers as I can. And we always ask Them what can we do better? What's missing in what we're doing today? It always feels good when a customer says, we love you. You know, we always ask who's the gold standard vendor? And if you hear that you're, you know, at or near the top of the list, that always sounds good and feels good, but you can't act on it. What we always want to ask them is what's missing? What could we be doing more? And I think that that keeps us grounded in. It's not about revenue growth, it's not about employee growth. The thing that matters more than anything else is how many companies and organizations do we make successful? Do we say, you know, when we ask them, do you plan to buy more Chainguard software? They say yes. When we say, would you talk to other customers on our behalf? They say, absolutely.

Ryan Carlson [00:27:23]:
And they plan to stick with us because we're not just a great technology, but we're also a great partner.

Andrew Monaghan [00:27:28]:
Well, let's get a little bit tactical now on the growth inside Chainguard. I'm kind of keen. You went from two salespeople, six marketing people. Where are you now and how did you think about the growth and starting adding in second layer or third layers of management between you and the individual contributors?

Ryan Carlson [00:27:44]:
Yeah, the, the sales, you know, the growth. The go to market team is now, you know, in the hundreds, I'll say that. And one of the things that you can do there is you can just hire salespeople and then hire sales managers and then hire VPs of sales managers. And that is a typical way that most people would grow for a reason. It's there, there's almost immutable laws of gravity when it comes to scaling a direct salesforce. But the things that Chainguard did that I think are different in addition to those is if you think back to what we do, we're taking open source frameworks like Java, like Python, like go to Redis and MySQL and everything in between. If that's the product that we're shipping by virtue of those products, every organization on the planet is already using them. Series a startups to Fortune 5 healthcare companies, the US federal government and agencies, banks in Australia and Vietnam and South Africa.

Ryan Carlson [00:28:35]:
All of those companies are our customers. And so one of the things that we did early on in our scaling plan and strategy was to segment earlier. A lot of companies are we're going to go after large enterprise or some companies might say we're going to be SMB and then scale our way ourselves up. What Chainguard did is we segmented very early. It was in the spring of last year where we decided to have an SMB, a commercial, an enterprise, a strategic, a public sector and an international sales team. So that is not a small investment because you're bringing in different types of leaders and different types of structures. But that investment is paid off because we want to meet our customers where they are, we want to sell to them in the way in which they prefer to buy. So having a segmented sales team was one of the things that we did, I think is different than other companies would have done at our stage.

Ryan Carlson [00:29:22]:
But it was relevant, it was related to the nature of our product and that every company out there could use it. So let's segment our sales team early.

Andrew Monaghan [00:29:30]:
Yeah, it feels like the natural step is maybe go to two segments or three segments, but you're going both sides, but then also vertical and Geo as well. That's a big ask of the team to keep going fast and getting it right.

Ryan Carlson [00:29:42]:
It's one of, you know, you cannot get outsized return without taking risks. So we thought that that was a risky investment but a smart risk because we felt like that's an execution, that introduces execution risk. We can control that, but we felt like it would set us up for longer term growth if we had that segmented approach. Again, it's all about doing what we thought would be best for the customers. So yes, there is some inherent risk in it, but it's definitely paying off.

Andrew Monaghan [00:30:06]:
Is there much difference in the buyer motivations and what they're trying to achieve, the different segments or is it just slightly different sale?

Ryan Carlson [00:30:15]:
Sometimes there's more people involved, sometimes there's competing initiatives. One of the things that is we're lucky at Chainguard is that, you know, you can say broadly speaking, any CEO of any company only cares about four things. They put them in different orders, but it's really four things. They care about growth, revenue growth, they care about costs and expenses and profits. Number two, number three, they care about innovation. Whatever their product, their core product is, if they're not innovating, they're going to lose long term. And number four, they care about risk. That's legal risk, finance risk and of course security risk.

Ryan Carlson [00:30:45]:
So all four of those, Chainguard can credibly attach ourselves to those. You can quantify Chainguard's impact on revenue growth, on costs and expenses. You can show how Chainguard can foster innovation by freeing up engineering. And of course Chainguard can help with risk. And so the dynamic is different at bigger companies because those priorities might Be in competing order, there's more people working on them. At smaller companies, you have fewer people to go through. And the use case is oftentimes very straightforward. So typically the value is significant in both.

Ryan Carlson [00:31:18]:
It just takes us longer to navigate at higher organizations. And so having, again, a segmented approach means we can navigate that with people who have done that before.

Andrew Monaghan [00:31:26]:
And two months after you joined in December 2023, at least according to LinkedIn, you brought in a head of sales enablement. What was their role in helping with this transition and making sure that execution is where it needs to be?

Ryan Carlson [00:31:37]:
Sales enablement is key. If we're going to bring that many salespeople in, we're hiring sales professionals. We're not teaching them how to sell, we're teaching them what works at Chainguard. And so the sales enablement function to invest in that early is a group and a function. And Catherine Fish leads that. For us, that's tasked with a really tough job, but a very important job, which is the facilitation of the transfer of knowledge from product and engineering around a really technical product and technology into the hands of those people who have to translate that into value for customers. And so facilitating that knowledge is difficult in general because of the subject we have, but it's made even more difficult because we're adding more and more people every single week and month to the company. And that was a great investment we made early on.

Ryan Carlson [00:32:23]:
It's something we always want to keep up, leveling and making better. But enabling that growth of the people that you showed on that chart early on is a key part of the sales enablement function.

Andrew Monaghan [00:32:34]:
Yeah, I feel like coming in with two sellers, maybe it's a bit more by December, probably not that much more. That is well ahead of what people would normally do. I mean, my experience is they'll wait till they have 15 or 30, something like that, and then say, okay, now, now we need someone to kind of bring it all together. I wonder, I mean, was that an easy thing to justify internally, or did you kind of scratch your head or other people scratch their head going, is this really the right time?

Ryan Carlson [00:32:57]:
No head scratching, in part because you could see the traction of Chainguard's products with the customers we were going after. You could see that the growth was going to come. And so if you know that that growth is going to come, you should make that investment early on. I think other companies may not invest in sales enablement that early because they're still trying to figure out, do they have product market fit, do they really have something that is both predictable and repeatable. With Chainguard, you could see it very clearly. Maybe if you've been around long enough, you could see it even more clearly. But if you can see that that growth was coming invest enablement earlier, because all that growth that you're adding on will be much more productive as a result.

Andrew Monaghan [00:33:36]:
You talked about how the team is good at attaching to the business drivers. The four business drivers you talked about. Do you have a value selling person or function where they. They're always working on these justifications.

Ryan Carlson [00:33:46]:
Yeah, we do that in our out of our product marketing function. Actually. We have this framework called a business value assessment. You know, every enterprise software company in history has an ROI tool and no surprise that ROI is always 1000% and it says you should have bought yesterday. We try to do it slightly differently. We try to create a real framework. It's one that we work with the customer. We give it to them after, after the fact for them to use in part because I think that's a much more transparent way to really get at the root of how can we provide value to you.

Ryan Carlson [00:34:15]:
And it's different by use cases, different by segment, by industry. And so that is driven by our product marketing function because they really can translate the features and functions of the product into the business value for the customer. And this is a primary mechanism for us to do so. And we truly, we try to use that same framework to go back to customers after we've deployed. It's not just to sell to them, it's truly to quantify the value that they can expect to get. And so we use it to quantify the value that they actually got as a closed loop system. And that really is helpful to run that out of product marketing. So we do it that way.

Andrew Monaghan [00:34:50]:
And during your sales process, when do you tell your salespeople this is when you need to start doing the bva.

Ryan Carlson [00:34:55]:
We want to do one every single time. Not every customer wants to do it. It's really, you cannot, you should not be delivering a price to a customer unless you've just already agreed upon the value of the solution I'm providing. So it should be done before pricing. Some customers see it clearly. They don't need this. They say, with Chainguard, I get it, I'm living with this pain every day. I don't need a value quantification.

Ryan Carlson [00:35:17]:
Others need it because they need to procure a budget or they need to get approval. But there are others who look at this problem area that we're solving and they think yes, that's valuable, but not as valuable as you might think. ChainedArt and so the business value assessment really helps get aligned on how hard is this problem truly? It might look simple on the surface, but it's not as easy as people think to build this. And that's really been a helpful part of it as well.

Andrew Monaghan [00:35:40]:
All right, Ryan. Well, you've taken the run that we talked about up to just over 600 million in funding this year. You've added 200 to the headcount roughly so far this year. What does the next six months to a year mean for the go to market team? What's the big goals or big focus areas that you're thinking about right now?

Ryan Carlson [00:35:59]:
Every company, every iconic technology company goes through a couple of phases. They're usually they become iconic because the initial product had such appeal, had such strong product market fit that it can get the investment, it can get the momentum, it can get to help you build the brand, it can get the right team involved from an investment standpoint, but more importantly from an employee standpoint. Every iconic company has a great first product, so we have that. But every truly great company has to go from a single product to multi product. Some people call that going from product to platform. I think that's kind of overused. It's, are you selling one thing, are you selling many things? For us, we're already well on that path. We've gone from Container Images, the core product, which is still, you know, has a huge market opportunity for it and we're in the very early stages of it.

Ryan Carlson [00:36:44]:
But we've added on two other product lines on top of that. Container host VMs, so CVE free VMs and then we also have a product called Language Libraries. This is really around securing the ecosystem of programming languages like Python and Java from attacks like malware and malicious attacks. So those going from single product to multi product is a core part of what we're doing over the next six to nine to 12 months. That's not easy. It might sound easy or sell three things instead of one, but oftentimes when companies do that, you're introducing new buyers or new conversations or new Personas into the mix or the messages might be very different for these products and it's just hard to be clear in your description of what you do. And so we're really focusing on that. In our case we're lucky because we're expanding the value props that we do today with Container Images to more in different types of open source software.

Ryan Carlson [00:37:36]:
Still the same type of audience that we can sell that to still the same roughly types of value propositions. We're getting rid of vulnerabilities and malware in your open source software. That's a message that's going to continue to resonate with the same people that we're already selling to.

Andrew Monaghan [00:37:50]:
And how do you get the early leading indicators about whether that's going well? What have you kind of zeroed in on for that?

Ryan Carlson [00:37:56]:
Often, you know, most companies go and show an early product to customers and say, what do you think? And the customer said that sounds great. And they say, great, it must be working. You, you can't act alone on what customers or people say. You have to look at their actions. And so we really try to, to test that early on. All right, well, you have to pay for it. How much would you pay for? And those conversations are more difficult early on. If you're going to confidently stand behind an early product and say it costs this much money and these are the terms, I think it's hard for people to do that because they might think the product's not ready, it's in an early stage.

Ryan Carlson [00:38:29]:
So most companies would say, I have a design partner for it. I've given the product away to a company for free in exchange for their feedback and their testing of their product. And we call them design partners. I think pulling forward the purchasing discussion is the most important thing you can do there because it helps you not just rely on customers who want to tell you, yes, I think that's a great idea because they're probably nice people and they want to encourage you and it really forces you to say, is this product solving a real problem? And how do I know that? Well, you bring the commercial discussion into play. So we try to do that as early as possible.

Andrew Monaghan [00:39:03]:
And then what you measure qualified pipe, if there's been a commercial discussion like that against product categories.

Ryan Carlson [00:39:08]:
Exactly. And you have to test the level of the pricing as well, not just willingness to pay, but how much is an appropriate price point to set. Our approach is always, we want to deliver more value in the problems that we're in, the solutions that we're delivering to customers than the price we're asking for. And so that business value assessment framework is an integral part of that. During that early on we would, we, we want to ensure that customers always feel like they're getting paying a fair price and that we believe that we're delivering the value to them long term. We're a subscription business and if people, we're not consistently delivering more value, people aren't going to renew and so we're laser focused on that.

Andrew Monaghan [00:39:45]:
Well, Ryan, this time has flown. We're at the end of our allocated time today. I really appreciate you joining us. I imagine you're in a hiring mode still if someone wants to at least feel out to see if there's a fit for them inside Chainguard, what's the best way for them them to do that?

Ryan Carlson [00:40:00]:
Chainguard.devcareers. we have all of our open roles there but as we're growing, you know, you never know a person who might be great for the company. We just don't have a role. So I would love to hear from you directly on LinkedIn. We want to hear from everybody we can as we're building this great company.

Andrew Monaghan [00:40:14]:
That's awesome. Well, listen, every success for the year rooting for you and the team and thanks for joining us.

Ryan Carlson [00:40:19]:
Thanks, Andrew. Hopefully this wasn't too much of a ferret on espresso experience. I appreciate you having me on Sam.