Breaking the Mold: Why Early-Stage Startups Must Invest in Brand – Jimmy Tsang, CMO, MIND

Are you struggling to differentiate your cybersecurity startup in a crowded market? Wondering how to build trust with buyers who have been burned by legacy DLP solutions? Debating whether to invest in brand early or focus on lead generation? In this episode, we dig into these challenges and explore how fresh thinking in DLP and brand strategy can accelerate growth for cybersecurity vendors.

In this conversation we discuss:
👉 How legacy DLP lost trust—and how modern approaches are rebuilding it
👉 Why brand investment from day one matters for early-stage cybersecurity companies
👉 The marketing journey from technical differentiation to emotional resonance with buyers

About our guest:
Jimmy Tsang is the Chief Marketing Officer at MIND, bringing years of cybersecurity and marketing leadership experience, including innovative roles at IBM Security and high-growth startups. He has helped launch and scale multiple cybersecurity brands, always at the intersection of technology, trust, and storytelling.

Summary
Listen in as Andrew Monaghan and Jimmy Tsang unpack the evolution of DLP, the critical role of branding for startups, and how messaging can shift buyer perceptions. If you want actionable insights to grow your sales and stand out in today's noisy market, this episode is a must!

Connect and Learn More:

• Jimmy Tsang on LinkedIn
• MIND Company Website
• Book time with Andrew Monaghan

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Transcript

Andrew Monaghan:
Brand is something that most early stage companies don't invest in. It's seen often as important, but not as important as, and you can fill in the blank about a whole bunch of things which seem to take priority over the branding of the company. So it's refreshing to see a company that right from the start has viewed branding as key. It's no surprise that this is not the founding team's first go around starting a cybersecurity company. Mind is the company and it's in a tough segment, which is dlp. There's lots of baggage out there with prospects who have scars, they have preconceptions, misconceptions, even fear around deploying, implementing, trying to use dlp. And yet Mind is making progress as an early stage company, which is why I really enjoyed my conversation with Jimmy Sang, the CMO at Mind. We talked about how the DLP segment has evolved, what they learned as they positioned Mind right from the start, how and why their positioning evolved over time, and a whole lot more.

Andrew Monaghan:
I'm Andrew Monahan and this is the Cybersecurity Go to Market podcast where we tackle the question, how can cybersecurity companies grow sales faster? All right, well, Jimmy, welcome to the podcast. Great to have you on. We're going to be talking today about something that's near and dear to my heart, going back many, many years, and that's DLP. You know, if you and I were talking in 2005 about DLP, we'd be in a world of things such as agents, host approaches versus network approaches. We talk about regex and how to get better regex. We'd be talking about compliance checklists, we'll be talking about the veracity of the data that we're getting, things like that. So we're not talking about that these days. What happened, what broke in DLP that forced it to evolve into where we are right now and 20 years later in 2025?

Jimmy Tsang:
Well, you'd be surprised because we're still talking about a lot of those things even today, especially with our customers. Again, they still have a lot of these legacy DLP products and tools. And it's hard, it's hard to really sort of replace and unwind a lot of that technology and all the policies that are related to it. But I think what broke really DLP is trust, is the trust in the DLB tools and the programs that a lot of these organizations created. You know, I think I've heard of your other podcasts where you mentioned dln, right? You know, data loss monitoring and that's what basically DLP became. It's about monitoring where issues happened. You're getting a lot of alerts, but you're not doing much with it because you're not trusting the system to be smart enough to be actually be efficient enough to actually take action. And I think that's the difference these days is, you know, it's especially in this, I mentioned the, the era of AI, the era of AI and cloud, you know, these attack surface or the, at least the exfiltration surface is much broader than it's ever been.

Jimmy Tsang:
And how do you trust your DLP program, a legacy DLP tool, to be able to stop but not inhibit productivity, stop data leaks, but not inhibit appropriate productivity in the same time? So, so I think that's what's breaking for DLP in general is in this era of productivity, I think everything has accelerated in terms of innovation and productivity because of AI. How do you trust that your DLP will not stop that, but also be safe enough or secure enough to use AI and stop data leaks? I think that's what a lot of organizations are dealing with. They're trying to battle and understand how do I enable the organization without stopping it?

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah, I imagine the AI presents an interesting challenge. One is it's probably part of that expansion of the attack service exfiltration surface. Right. But also I'm wondering what it really means for the veracity of being able to trust your dlp. Have you been able to see and measure the improvements in what you're able to do now or is it still a little bit early to do that?

Jimmy Tsang:
Yeah, well, what's interesting is our company would not exist without AI. You know, so mind itself would not exist without AI because that's really the foundation of our platform. Like we wouldn't be able to basically discover and classify the billions of files that we see in our customers environments without AI. So really the trust there, the visibility that you get with AI these days is just incredible. And the idea is that really there's no mind without AI. But also, yeah, in terms of how do you go from legacy DLP that's really based on policies based on user tagging of data, of regex pattern matching to automatically classify data to something that's automated and that's trustworthy. And what we're seeing is, you know, we're seeing like 90, 95% reduction in false positives that we used to. But also not just false positives, but even alert noise.

Jimmy Tsang:
Because, you know, when you have static policies that just generate alerts even though they may Be interesting. They may not be very critical, they may not rise to the priority that security team should look at. So really the idea is, you know, our platform looks at both the sort of the context of the alert, but also the content within those files, which is actually unique in the industry, is being able to see what's inside the files and what's around it to actually say, hey, you should be paying attention. So our customers actually are trusting the system because it's not throwing them, you know, hundreds or thousands of alerts per day, but, but it's actually elevating the alerts that they should worry about. And that's really interesting that they get less alerts, but they trust the system more because they feel like those alerts are real.

Andrew Monaghan:
It feels like from what you're saying then that capability has definitely changed in the last even couple of years. Nevermind the last five, ten years. I would imagine one thing that changed a lot slower is the perceptions of, of buyers around what they think DLP is, what it's been, what it might be, how useful it is. I'm wondering what state of mind do you see most often with the evaluators and buyers of DLP today?

Jimmy Tsang:
Yeah, I think it's around confusion. I think that's the state that we see. They're confused by a lot of different acronyms that's available in the industry. Whether it's the espm, dlp, DDR, There's a lot of acronyms out there that sort of try to help to solve this. So I think it is a state of confusion. And the idea is that with 20, as you said, you've sold DLP in the past 20, 30 years ago, there's a lot of scorched earth in that process. So I think what they're trying to understand is, you know, what's different, what's different today? How does AI change the game? And they're willing to actually to learn and educate themselves on what's possible. You know, how do we go from compliance to actually data security that we always wanted but they never could achieve? You know, basically DLP became a checkbox, checkbox for a lot of people.

Andrew Monaghan:
So, and I'm wondering what that means for you as someone who heads up marketing at a modern DLP company. How you think about how do we change those minds, how do we reduce the confusion, how do we make this more simple in their minds than perhaps it is already? It must present an interesting marketing challenge.

Jimmy Tsang:
It is. You know, I think initially when I joined the company, it was around our innovation Right. Our technical capabilities, our features, the use of AI, how well we classify. But I think what we soon hear heard is with this confusion is really the fear of actually licensing a DLP or even starting a DLP program in general. Especially with a lot of smaller or mid sized enterprises, they're almost unwilling to entertain putting together a DLP program, hiring the people licensing the software needed. But what we're seeing is, you know, now they're, they're trying to educate themselves and obviously with the era of AI and mind, we're just seeing the use of AI and making it, you know, efficient and trustworthy again. When we started off it was all about those technical capabilities and trying to educate the market. But I think what we soon realize is that most people don't trust dlp, they don't trust the segment and that's what we're trying to build with our mind brand and the messaging that we have going forward.

Jimmy Tsang:
So one of the first things that we did is we pivoted towards something called stress free DLP. It's not about modern DLP, it's not about next gen DLP, it's actually stress free DLP. How do we actually lower the stress for CISOs and their teams? The lower the stress from the amount of alerts that they get lower the stress of trying to put together a program. And that's what we're seeing a lot more with our customers. And we have a lot of great testimonial videos about it where these CISOs, these heads of security, are building programs with mind, with little headcounts and be able to effectively enable data security without all the resources that were needed in the past. So stress free DLP is a little different. Obviously there's a little bit of rhyming there, which we had fun with, but it's actually I think resonated with folks. But a lot of people challenge us on it.

Jimmy Tsang:
How can DLP be stress free and that's a good thing. We're actually engaging in conversations and they're willing to listen and see how we can help them get a stress free DLP program.

Andrew Monaghan:
And was it relatively easy to come to that insight? That stress free was the thing to zero in on or did it? Do you try a lot of different things? And was a lot of testing or what was the process?

Jimmy Tsang:
Yeah, so I wouldn't say there's a lot of testing because you don't have a lot of time to test when you're a startup. But definitely we had a lot of ideas. We try a lot of different things, both in social, on digital, but also, you know, in our conversations. And you know, we basically, obviously what's important is to observe, to measure and to just understand where the intent and the sort of the trust that CISOs need. So it definitely came over time. It wasn't our first messages coming out. Our first message was a little bit more towards our technical capabilities, which is mind what matters. Like mind what matters is what is the sensitive data that really matters and that speaks a little bit more towards our technical capabilities because we could find sensitive data that Regex could never find.

Jimmy Tsang:
Regex is all about credit cards, Social Security numbers, basically numbers that have patterns. But with AI, with our platform, we're able to find source code, credentials, financial statements, healthcare records, lab reports, so much to that I think people were interested in that. You know, that's a nice function, a nice feature, nice capability. And it was amazing at the time because it's definitely part of the modern DLP paradigm. But really I think they wanted to have trust and confidence in their DLP and that's where stress free DLP sort of resonated.

Andrew Monaghan:
Do you think with hindsight that you needed to kind of start with the technical product feature kind of orientation to get to the more emotional position that you have right now, or do you feel like, I wonder if we just be a little more careful, we might have got there sooner or even instead of.

Jimmy Tsang:
Yeah, you know, obviously you need it in parallel because soon after, you know, they get past the stress free DLP part, they're like, well, how do you do it? Right, yeah, so you, so, so, you know, you may not, you know, again, we led with it in the past. It was interesting because a lot of people were, you know, interested in new technology, they would be interested in learning more. Right. But those that may not be interested in new technology, they just wanted a solution, they wanted confidence. They, you know, I think that appealed to them more, appealed more to their emotions than to their sort of tech head type of mentality. Right. So yeah, I mean innovation is great. You know, we have that obviously capabilities, all of the what backs up stress DLP on our website, in our conversations.

Jimmy Tsang:
But I think it's a really just good conversation starter. A great engagement with CISOs and with folks that we don't know, that don't know us.

Andrew Monaghan:
I think that's a really good insight, Jimmy, and I'll tell you why. I think that if you look at even like so 2005, I don't know what the right number is, but I'm going To bet there was somewhere between 500 and 1,000 vendors in cybersecurity. Right. You fast forward to now, there's 3,900 just vendors, not including resellers and MSSPs consulting companies, things like that. Right.

Jimmy Tsang:
It's very noisy, right?

Andrew Monaghan:
It's really noisy. Really noisy. Confusing. And if we as an industry think we're going to position ourselves and differentiate ourselves the same way as we did it 20 years ago, we're going to fail. Right. We need to adapt to what's going on right now. And I think the idea that you adapt by just talking more about features or finding new ways to talk about a feature is not going to cut it. And I like the fact that, that you led that charge, say, well, we need to up level.

Andrew Monaghan:
I think it's up leveling. You move from logical to emotional, which is what you're doing with the stress free. And then eventually you get the philosophical, which is the kind of join a movement thing that Andy Raskin and some of the big marketing narrative guys talk about. But that movement up is probably already separated yourselves from, I don't know, 80%, 95% of other cybersecurity companies because they're, you read their websites and you listen to their sales teams talk. It's all very feature orientated. I think it's a big shift that many have to make.

Jimmy Tsang:
Yeah. I also think it's not just the emotion, but sometimes I learned this at IBM Security is don't dwell on the fear, don't dwell on, hey, insider risk, bad actors, malicious insiders. Don't dwell on the, those type of hoodie icons, images that you see, but really dwell on the positive outcomes that can come out of your solution or at least the implementation of your solution. So I think that's what I've learned over the years. Not just that in mind, but even with IBM Security is the revelation is that we're dealing with not just defenders, we're dealing with business leaders who are CISOs. And the business leaders care about the business, protecting the business, but not just about like stopping threats or you know, being creating moats or walls. So I think that was another thing that our Mind brand was trying to build is really a sense of sort of enlightenment. Right.

Jimmy Tsang:
You know, even the name mind means like, you know, really be thoughtful and be enlightened about what's happening with your environment. And obviously we love the word mind because it works with a lot of puns and stuff like that. Like peace of mind is a big word or phrase that you'll See on our website, and we use in our daily language, but it does resonate. Again, we're not trying to talk about the dark side of what's happening with data leaks, but really, what's the possibility? What's the bright side of dlp?

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah, I don't know if this is a question or just a statement to think about. I wrestle with this a lot. Not a lot, but I wrestle with it. So, I mean, if you look at the research, buyers are more motivated by loss aversion as opposed to the positive gains from their decision. If they feel somehow they're going to be missing out on something or something you catch them at, then their propensity to buy and make a positive decision, to go make a change is more enhanced than if it was just here's the better future. Right? But as we know in our world, you can't walk around saying you're going to get popped, the bubble is going to end, your brand's going to go to zero, your stock price will go to a penny that went out like 30 years ago, and yet you still hear some people do it, but you can't do that. Right? So I don't know. It's a really tough thing when you think about it.

Andrew Monaghan:
Say, well, we can't throw out all the research and say, well, it all has to be positive. Somehow in there, we just threaded the idea that there is a downside if we don't do this. But you can't lead with. I guess, I don't know if you've thought a lot about it, especially as you were saying, you're leading a lot with positivity around mine right now, which I totally understand. But I don't know. I think there's two sides to the coin that I think it's tough to really figure out at times.

Jimmy Tsang:
Yeah, there's definitely two sides. Some industries or some segments in cybersecurity, you can't really have a conversation without the sort of the dark side, right? Like if you deal with, you know, EDR or, you know, malware, protect malware protection or ransomware attacks, I mean, that's real. That's like, that's happening and that's, that's going to bring your, you know, your organization down. And what's really important there is really educating how you can stop that. Right? So with dlp, it's a little bit, little bit more nebulous, right. With dlp, because there's obviously a number of things of, like, you don't want to lose your sensitive data, whether it's IP source code credentials. There's definitely a lot of bad things that can happen when you do lose sensitivity like that. But there's a lot of good things that can happen if you actually protect against it and enable the organization to do really cool things without putting a lot of hurdles in.

Jimmy Tsang:
And that's what DLP sort of fell down with. Right. A lot of executives did not enjoy being blocked when they're trying to do their daily jobs. I don't think a lot of people would enjoy being blocked on, you know, using ChatGPT or their corporate AI engine if, if they get blocked every. Every other prompt. Right. So how do you do it effectively, efficiently, without hurdles? I think that's, that's more interesting than, hey, you know, we have these bad actors or these malicious insiders. Yes, that's important.

Jimmy Tsang:
But that's the other side of the coin. And I guess when you, you know, when you tell stories, you need to have both the hero and the villain. And you can't, you can't just do like, hey, let's talk about the hero, because it's really boring, right? So you sort of have to have both. And so. But I think the conversation is more to that extent. But obviously we lean towards the positive, the hero than the, I would say the bill. But some segments, they should focus on malware protection. I mean, it's just.

Jimmy Tsang:
Or ransomware attacks, because that's like immediate. Brings your company down.

Andrew Monaghan:
All right, Jimmy, let's learn a little bit more about you personally. Believe it or not, I've got 49 questions on my list here. But the good news is I'm not going to ask you 49. I've got this incredibly sophisticated and an advanced random number generator here. I actually use some, some personal grade DLP to make sure that my daughter's gonna steal it, exfiltrate it outside the house. But I use that to. To generate three numbers between 1 and 49. You ready for me to spin the wheel?

Jimmy Tsang:
Ready. Go for it, Andrew.

Andrew Monaghan:
All right, let's go. All right, number two. How did you make money as a kid?

Jimmy Tsang:
Okay, well, yeah, actually, I needed to make money as a kid because I was addicted to arcade games. So my first summer job was with my dad.

Andrew Monaghan:
Actually.

Jimmy Tsang:
My dad managed a Chinese restaurant in Long Island, New York. And in the summers, I would actually accompany him for, you know, basically weeks on, on the end and was a takeout boy. So. So even before actually it was legal to, to actually start making money, I did help the Chinese restaurant there, but. But yeah, that was a Great experience. It allowed me to continue to, you know, support my addiction of video games. But, you know, soon after that, you know, I received my first work permit when I was 14 and a half. Did office jobs.

Jimmy Tsang:
But the most interesting one was being a canvasser for a nonprofit organization. And, and that really taught me respect for sales because I, I, I don't know if I can do it, but it was, I did it for a summer. Learned a lot, really, you know, got me out of my shell to talk to people. But I, I respect sales a lot and that's, that actually led me into the journey of just sales and marketing in general.

Andrew Monaghan:
I love that. And, and being in the family business, right, that's, that can be a tough gig. You probably go underpaid by your, by your dad, I would imagine.

Jimmy Tsang:
As long as I had quarters to feed machines, you know, arcade machines, I was happy.

Andrew Monaghan:
What was your favorite arcade game?

Jimmy Tsang:
Well, my favorite, I guess when I was college is Street Fighter 2. That's my most favorite. But I was a crazy Ms. Pac man player. So I would just be on there for like an hour.

Andrew Monaghan:
All right, let's spin the wheel again. Number 29, what's an embarrassing or memorable moment in your marketing career?

Jimmy Tsang:
Let's see, let's avoid embarrassing. Let's go for memorable. So I was at IBM Security for a number of years, and I had a great project at IBM Security where I was able to basically propose the creation of a video game in cybersecurity. We actually called it Terminal. It actually took place in an airport terminal. And it's about, you know, hackers basically bringing down an airport. And this was, you know, it was going to be an epic video game. It actually had video shootage where we were going to go to Austria and actually take over a terminal and take some footage there.

Jimmy Tsang:
And it was going to be great. And however, as you may think, Covid hit in 2020. So rather than get stranded in Austria in the middle of COVID we decided to stop that. But we actually just did it all through animation and some learnings there is that it was IBM and a lot of obviously big companies have big budgets for marketing. Obviously in the startup now is not so much, but, you know, we can, we can, we basically, you know, we're able to sort of think and be creative in what's, you know, what's possible, the realm of possibility. And that was amazing. But unfortunately we were going to, you know, unleash it in RSA 2020 and unfortunately we canceled that. That was in like May time frame.

Jimmy Tsang:
Of 2020 and we canceled that. And I think what we left with at our IBM security booth was, was some lounge chairs and said, hey, enjoy the space, we're not here. So that was quite an experience. We spent quite a bit of money on that game and it never quite got to the point where we wanted it to be, but definitely memorable.

Andrew Monaghan:
What immediately strikes me, Jimmy, is IBM and video games are not a natural marriage. Was that a little bit of a challenge to get that approved or through the process of that end?

Jimmy Tsang:
Actually it wasn't in the sense that, you know, the idea was it was for engagement, you know, is it was going to be used both in person as well as digital. So we were going to launch it at rsa. We were going to, you know, create, you know, provide some screens, some gaming chairs, have people really, you know, experience what it's like to experience a hack and the stress of a hack, you know, in real time. And how do you solve all those questions, all those issues in real time but you know, in both in person at the event, but also online. So it was going to have like multi channel, you know, sort of interest and engagement and, and it was, you know, just, you know, up in the realm of where our products were, you know, in terms of threat intelligence, threat remediation and you know, again it would have been great. It was great sort of half wise because we did launch it digitally but we couldn't bring it in person for at least a year or two.

Andrew Monaghan:
All right, well let's spin the wheel one last time. Number 15, what is the story behind you getting your first job in cybersecurity?

Jimmy Tsang:
Yeah, that was serendipity. I wasn't looking into cyber specifically. I was actually interested in mobile. And the reason why is I joined a company, a B2C company called Traffic.com, way back when. If you're familiar with it. It's almost like weather.com right? But for traffic. You know, it allows you, allows consumers to see traffic on their commutes and everything. But yeah, I started there as a product marketer and we were acquired by NavTech, like one of the global mapping companies out there.

Jimmy Tsang:
And then we were acquired by Nokia and that started my journey into mobile. And then soon Nokia went through their layoffs. It was quite a experience. But then I joined a company called Fiberlink and they actually had mobile device management. So Mass360 was the product. I was the leader for prime marketing there. And that started my journey in mobile because, you know, it was great at the time, iPhone was coming up, right. I think it was launched in 2007.

Jimmy Tsang:
I joined, you know, Mass360 in 2012 and that's when the iPhone started to be used for enterprise purposes. And it's the whole BYOD phenomenon, bring your own device phenomenon was happening and, and, but that started my journey in.

Andrew Monaghan:
In cyber and never looked back, huh?

Jimmy Tsang:
Never look back.

Andrew Monaghan:
Never.

Jimmy Tsang:
You know, and obviously diversified, you know, beyond just mobile phones. But at the time it was just, you know, it was just the era of mobile was amazing and obviously now is the era of AI. So it's very cool.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah, no kidding. We've been talking around the idea of brand, right? You clearly at MIND have put a lot of thought into what that brand should be. If we were, if there's a third person, this call who's, you know, either CEO or you know, first marketing hire at a much earlier stage company, you know, they're just getting going. How would you encourage them to think about brand at an early stage and maybe think about brand but then the trade offs, right? You can't do everything. So how do you trade off brand work with lead gen work and things like that? How would you encourage them to think about that?

Jimmy Tsang:
Yeah, so, you know, I think the idea of brand needs to reflect the technology, right? So you know, obviously, and I can only speak from my experience with MIND and a few other companies is, you know, you don't start a brand without a foundation. And the foundation and the brand promise is our technology. Right. So once we started building the technology, it's been a couple of years before even I joined mind. So they spent a couple years building technology and when I joined mind, we launched a year after. So they've been building technology for years and I helped build the brand with the brand agency. So that's another thing we could talk about. But we built the brand on top of that foundation, the foundation of AI, the discovery and classification that happens in an automated fashion.

Jimmy Tsang:
So all the capabilities that really power our brand, our MIND brand was, was built first and then once we, you know, had that foundation, then we can actually start building like what are the elements of the brand that, that feed into it. These capabilities feed into that brand. And we actually started building that brand a year before we launched. So again with the brands, the brand promise, the, the messaging, the website, the guidelines that we have, all the key elements, design elements. So we built, we built it even before, a year before our launch. And what that did is allowed us to really come out of the gate running. Right. You know, we were shot out the gates did really well just getting recognition because our technology and the brand worked well together because it was not an mvp, it was a full fledged DLP platform and the brand reflected that and, and then built trust.

Jimmy Tsang:
And that's what the power of brands is all about is how do you build the trust with your customers and with the general public in general. So and that's what was reflected in our website. So if you got a website today, it's, it's very similar to where we launched even a year ago and, and it's meant to convey that sense of trust and confidence in a platform that can deliver stress free dlp.

Andrew Monaghan:
Let's rewind because you said something that I don't often hear at all, which is not only I guess the founders early on thinking about brand, but they actually were willing to spend the money to bring in an outside agency to work on it with you. I would go to lend Jimmy and say that's not normal. Were you blessed with very forward thinking founders who are like no, this is absolutely a thing to do or did you have to go in convince mode in your first six months or a year?

Jimmy Tsang:
There's no. I have to say we were blessed. So Iran Barak, he's our co founder and CEO of mind. This is his second startup. His first startup, Hexadite was purchased by, acquired by Microsoft in 2017. And the second time around he brought with him lessons from his first one. And one thing that he wanted to do early on was bring on marketing. Not just brand, but bring on marketing to make sure that brand, the go to market engine, the marketing tech stack, the whole demand gen engine gets running when we're ready to launch and didn't really want to wait for validation for maybe initial deals to start happening but really come out of the gate because again they spent that time to build that product.

Jimmy Tsang:
Right. I think they felt and we felt that it was ready to go and so we were lucky enough to have Iran with his experience saying hey let's invest in marketing. First of all, bringing me on board and then bringing on a branding agency on board to finalize our brand. So. So that was through some sort of foresight and experience that Aran and the co founders brought to the table.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah. When I look at your site right now, this is not what I call series A blue. I can't remember who coined the phrase but I just love it. Right. You look at earlier, what are you doing? I'll just make it blue.

Jimmy Tsang:
Ah, I see. It's like IBM blue.

Andrew Monaghan:
It's Kind of like that. Right. It's like, I don't know how true it is, but if you look at a whole bunch of series A companies, the predominant color is just a very normal blue, maybe dark blue with white text or whatever. But yours is not. Right. There's animations on there, there's different things. That captures the imagination a little bit. This is very different.

Andrew Monaghan:
Right. So I wonder how you measure coming out of stealth as you launched, were there any ways you were measuring somehow brand and whether your investments were working or was it done on the idea of, look, this is just the right thing to do, let's just go do it?

Jimmy Tsang:
Yeah. I think initially as a startup, it's hard to measure. Right. Because it's hard to get out the gates without a huge budget.

Andrew Monaghan:
Right?

Jimmy Tsang:
Yes. You know, if we had sort of immense amounts of budget, then we can, you know, advertise, we can, you know, create awareness. We can, you know, really fire up a lead gen program based on, you know, millions of dollars. And, and, and that's not the reality of most startups. So really what we had to do is launch it, but also curate it along the way and have those conversations with our customers and really get validation in the market through conversations, through the use of our technology. But also we started to get a lot of industry accolades that we didn't really seek initially. Again being part of the RSA top 10 finalists for their startup competition and as well as the Black Hat's top nine sort of finalists for their startup competition. Those sort of came and we were pleasantly surprised.

Jimmy Tsang:
But I think it's really a validation of really where our brand and marketing as well as the conversations and the technology that we built, but definitely the conversations with our customers. It was just, you know, it's hard to measure when you're starting out because the numbers are fairly low when you think of demand gen. But I think validation needs to happen over time and just doesn't happen right off the, off the bat. So I would say a year into the, you know, since launch, we're in the right direction and we're excited about, you know, our customer traction, the deals that we have. But then the, you know, industry accolades and the amount of sort of organic outreach that we received, especially in the past year.

Andrew Monaghan:
You've been doing this in cyber for a while now, right? Leading marketing efforts, leading marketing teams and clearly you've been thinking a lot about what this means for mind. I'm wondering if you've got a hill, a marketing hill, you would die on the other marketing Leaders just don't believe or haven't seen yet, whatever, or disagree with you on that. You'll say companies should do this, but it's perhaps not the popular opinion. Anything that springs to mind.

Jimmy Tsang:
Yeah, I mean, I think brand would be one, but since we chatted a lot about that, I think another one would be in person events. So obviously coming out of COVID there was not a lot of in person events. So a lot of it became about organic or inbound marketing. How do you drive them through digital channels? But I think what we've seen, especially in the past year with mind, is that in person events are really invaluable. They allow us to have conversations with customers in person, with live engagements and we're seeing them. I think the attendance of these events, whether it's rsa, black hats or even regional roundtables, it's more than ever. And I think people are, you know, especially CISOs and cyber leaders are very interested in meeting folks in person and, you know, building trust there rather than just through their own research or through inbound marketing, which is fascinating. I think there were sort of ebbs and flows in that, in that cycle.

Jimmy Tsang:
But obviously with COVID everything became, you know, not in person became digital. But now I think I'm not sure I'm willing to die on that hill. But I think it's an important part of our marketing strategy is in person events as well as inbound. But usually with inbound it takes a while to build a demand gen engine, especially organically, even with budgets. So with that you need to have really a portfolio approach towards marketing.

Andrew Monaghan:
All right, Jimmy, last question for you. I'm going to spring this on you. We're recording this in October 2025. In three years time, imagine there was a headline, I guess on a website, not on a blog or a newspaper headline about DLP that is groundbreaking. Big captures attention. What do you think that headline would be in three years time about dlp?

Jimmy Tsang:
No, I mean, that's a good question. I actually don't think it should be. There should be no headline about dlp. I mean, it should just be part of the normal overall process. I mean, with AI, with the capabilities we have today, you know, I don't see in three years time how much better it could be. You know, I think it should be like starting today and up into those three years that I think the adoption of modern dlp, you know, DLP that actually understands context, looks at the content, looks at data at rest, data in motion, unstructured data, structured data, I think it will be I think in the next three years it's going to be well covered and in hopefully three years time it's non news. It's like hey that's how we thought it should be after 20 years.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah, it's boring. It's boring because does the job right.

Jimmy Tsang:
Yeah. And what's fun, what's fascinating is DLP is hot news now because of all the innovation. So I would say the headlines is happening now and three years time it should be. I hope it is boring because then, you know, I'm not sure. Obviously we're not going to solve every problem with sensitive data leaks but but it should be hopefully a normal part of you know, a cybersecurity program rather than the sort of a compliance program going forward.

Andrew Monaghan:
Well Jimmy, on that note, that's a great way to end. I really enjoyed chatting to you this morning. Thanks for joining us and I wish you and the team and mind team every success for the rest of this year and into next year as well.

Jimmy Tsang:
Thank you Andrew.