# Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn 20VC · May 24, 2023 · 59 min · 13,467 words Speakers: Guy Podjarny, Harry Stebbings Source: https://www.996.fm/episodes/20vc--ep-6a60582f/ ## Cold open **Guy Podjarny** [0:00]: I think first to market is poorly defined. What does matter is being a leader in a market and having some gap. I love to ask our product managers and angel investors that I make. This capability you're building, in five years' time, would it be more or less necessary in the world? And why? Why do you think that is? ## Intro **Harry Stebbings** [0:16]: I mean, my world, what a show we have in store for you today. You're listening to 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. And today, I'm joined by a friend, an incredible founder in the form of Guy Podjarny, founder of Snyk, the leading developer security platform, helping developers secure as they build. Snyk has raised over $1,000,000,000 since launching with their last round reportedly priced at $7,400,000,000. As for Guy, Guy was previously CTO at Akamai, cofounded blaze.io, which was acquired by Akamai, and was the product manager of AppScan. Guy is also a public speaker, O'Reilly author, and an incredibly active angel investor with over a 100 angel investments. I'd also wanna say a huge thank you to Ed Sim and Tom Hume. Some amazing questions, suggestions today. They really did make such a difference. But before we dive into the show today, ## Sponsor read **Harry Stebbings** [0:59]: you've heard me talk about how Coda is the doc that brings it all together and how it can help your team run smoother and be more efficient. I know this because Coda helps me. 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For startups, AngelList reduces the friction of cap table management, banking, and fundraising all in one place. Teams can focus on scaling and let AngelList handle the rest. Thousands of startups have moved their cap tables to AngelList in the past year. AngelList also supports large venture funds and their teams with an automated software first approach and the best customer service in the industry. Fund managers can focus on making great deals, while AngelList handles reporting, taxes, compliance, and more. So if you're ready to scale your startup or fund with the platform at the center of it all, visit angellist.com/20vc to get started. 3210. You have now arrived at your destination. ## Conversation **Harry Stebbings** [3:36]: Guy, I am so excited for this. I remember when we first did a SAST show many years ago. We get to do this in person now. I've known you for many years, so thank you so much for joining me. Oh, thanks for having me on. Always a pleasure. I wanna start today with a little bit of context. How did you make your way into a lot of startups? And most importantly, how did you come to found Snyk? **Guy Podjarny** [3:54]: So I've been working in startups throughout my professional career. I was in the sort of the cyber parts of the Israeli army, and then went into a startup in the AppSec space that got acquired by another startup that got acquired by IBM. I'm Israeli. Moved to Canada in the process. Left IBM to found a web performance startup, a company that's more in the DevOps space, making websites faster. And so I at that point, I had shy of a decade of sort of application security experience, trying to get people to appreciate that it matters, trying to shift left, get developers to embrace it. Leaving them, got my entrepreneurial of founding startups experience going with Blaze, We trained for about two and a half years and sold that to Akamai where I was CTO for about three and a half years and moved with them to London. And so Snyk was basically, once I was ready to leave Akamai and found another startup, Snyk was was a bit of the culmination of those journeys. It was about bringing a DevOps ethos and a lot of my sort of learning doing angel investing and from the first startup and all of that into the world of security and application security. Guy, what are you running away from? I think more than anything, I'm running away from tribalism, from this sort of notion of, like, I'm in this group, and this group is better. There's elements of that in sort of Israel. And while the army kinda gave me a bunch of successful starts, I have fairly severe disagreements with how the sort of the occupying kind of army in Israel is handling today. It goes to the way I approach company building and selling a London and Tel Aviv office, but making sure where there's never, like, an Us versus them, and even the sort of the core business of Snyk and sort of developers and security and embedding that in it. I worry about the deglobalization process that is happening in the world, and even my sort of charitable kind of agenda and all of that, it really focuses upon inclusion and on being one as opposed to being a part of the tribes. **Harry Stebbings** [5:31]: You always said a a line there in particular. Said at this point, I had 10 of experience, and you said about the multiple founding journeys before Snyk. I had a guest on the show the other day that said about serial entrepreneurship being overrated. I thought it was an interesting statement. Do you agree with that? Or do you actually think that's complete bullshit, and there is so much value to be had from the serial entrepreneurship? **Guy Podjarny** [5:51]: I actually think entrepreneurship is a profession, so I'm maybe I'm on the opposite side of that spectrum for that comment. I think there are some things that you only learn by being an entrepreneur. So if you want to, like, fundraising is probably the most obvious one, but also just the sort of the initial journey of finding product market fit. Starting from a blank slate is just not something that typically is a reality, you know, in any other surrounding. Getting the first hires and figuring out how to do it, convincing people to join you. For the number of people that turn me down, definitely in Blaze and even in Snyk, is unpleasant. And so I think there's some things that you learn there. But also, I think what happens is that I like to say that if you're comfortable, you're not growing. And that there's like a Freud better statement that says there's no growth without pain. Startups are mightily uncomfortable. You're throwing yourself in a surrounding in which you need to learn things very quickly, figure it out, run around. And so I think when you immerse yourself in a space, you build a certain perspective. Like, when you found a company, you learn a ton very quickly. I feel like, for me, for instance, my knowledge of dev is much deeper than probably it would have been because I founded a company in the sort of the performance space, in the DevOps space versus if I had worked that type of surrounding. **Harry Stebbings** [6:56]: And I I totally agree, I get you. You mentioned that kind of you have to get good at fundraising. Do you believe that the founder has to fundamentally embrace and be brilliant at fundraising as founder and CEO? I was on a panel the other day, and they were like, no. You don't. That's not a cool job. It's about building the business. And I said that's bullshit. Fundraising is part of building the business. **Guy Podjarny** [7:14]: I like selling, and I don't like deal making. I love getting people to fall in love with an idea that I have with a concept, with something I'm building, with a perspective I have. And so that's selling. That's really getting someone to believe the promise, believe the potential, believe in you, and I think that's very exciting. I separate that from the sort of the deal making. We'll sort of, okay, and how much are you going to pay for this? And I think that aspect, maybe you can actually be a very successful founder and not be very good at it. You might be leaving some percentages on the table. But I think if you're not good at selling, if you can't get your idea through, if you can't empathize enough with someone looking at the market and get your message through. I just don't think you're gonna be good at building the company unless maybe you can hire someone to do that for you, but that's probably more cofounder than than in that case. What do you think makes you good at selling? My kind of core skills revolve around the combination of empathy and analysis. Deep empathy into to people around. I find people interesting, and I I think I'm a good communicator. I kind of phrase things well. But that also comes back to understanding what people might wanna hear. I'm analytical by nature. I'm an architect. I break things down into components, into pieces. I see that the world is that everything is a product. Everything is an **Harry Stebbings** [8:18]: architecture. It's interesting. You said about one word that perspective and selling your perspective because I spoke to so many people from Tom Hume to Ed Sim to many others, and they all said that you have the ability to see around corners like no one else. And my question is, how do you create a framework, or how do you allow yourself to continuously see around corners or put yourself in a position to see the future before other people do? I think the **Guy Podjarny** [8:41]: key elements are first of all, I try to break things down into first principles. Not just I see that x is happening, but rather why is this happening? Why is whatever DevOps disruptive to security? What are the fundamentals? You break it down. You get down to well, it's it predicates around independent teams. Okay. So it's independent teams that are the core of this sort of agile development approach. So how do you do security in agile? So if you break it down into sort of the core principles, then you can now try to relate them to needs or to where you think has legs to evolve and where not. And so I try to break those down. The other thing that happens when you break it down is that you can grow your thinking. Like, even if you can hold a ton of complexity in your head, it's still limited, even the best people around it. But when you think about a topic and you reduce it down to these sort of core principles, like you say, okay. DevOps builds on blamelessness, continuous processes, and in independent teams. Now even you yourself cannot bother yourself with all the sort of the mess that is behind those statements, and you can build on top of that. So you can build bigger and bigger pictures building on those components. And sure, you'd be able to drill down into one of these tracks a bit more than maybe someone who just hears those principles. But I think it allows you to think bigger if you codify the world that way. Think the other piece that's very important to it though is that once you do that, you need to get into the habit of anchoring in the future. For instance, I love to ask our product managers and angel investors that I make, this capability you're building, in five years' time, would it be more or less necessary in the world? **Harry Stebbings** [10:06]: And why? Why do you think that is? Is there a right answer to that, and how do you analyze the different variants of responses? **Guy Podjarny** [10:12]: It it really starts by asking the question, but it tries to step away a little bit from being stuck with something that is exciting to you to do today, but you're really just plugging a hole versus solving a systemic problem. Sometimes the fact that something will be less relevant in five years' time, it doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. It just means that you should invest appropriately. It might mean that it's okay to put something a bit more tactical about how you address it. It might mean you shouldn't rely on that as your growth vehicle. And when you're founding a company, if the answer to the core value proposition that you have isn't yes, if you can't rationalize why it is more needed in five years' time, you should pick a different idea because you wouldn't be at any sort of scale if you're just starting in five years' time. That's when your idea should be most needed. **Harry Stebbings** [10:54]: To what extent do you think you can actually say? And I know that sounds strange, but bluntly, the hardest thing I think about investing in AI today is the speed of evolution. I'm bluntly betting on great people who are directionally right because Yeah. It's moving so fast. To the extent that you can say, five years time would more or less, and I'd say, who knows? **Guy Podjarny** [11:13]: Yeah. I think it's very hard. AI is especially disruptive at the moment, and I do think that there is AI as a whole will totally dominate the world. Specifically, there's there's a a certain certain kind of a honeymoon period happening with GPT and LLMs, which I think will find the right limits to it. I think, typically, if you're immersed in a space, if you come from a space and if you have sufficient sort of ability in it, you can roughly get market timing within a plus minus two years time horizon. Plus minus two years is like life and death for a startup. And so you do have to you have to navigate the journey. I guess, again, my system over here is not so much to sort of perfectly language. You're making a bet. You're saying, I think this is necessary. You've asked the question about whether it'll be more necessary moving forward. You have a thesis about your sort of theory of change and how you would do it. I try to apply this sort of big vision, small steps type lenses. And so big vision, you have to be working towards something that matters at the destination, but it has to be a sequence of steps towards it. And ideally, you don't regret taking any of those steps. If they take longer, if you get stuck in them for a couple of years, you don't regret taking that step. And so you try to figure out the destination, figure, of course, your upcoming step, have a sense of what the next step would be. You don't really know past that, and you get going. And so if you get stuck, you still have something that you've built that is of value, and you continue. And sometimes you find yourself on a different path, and maybe that's okay and maybe **Harry Stebbings** [12:27]: not. You said two words. Well, yeah, there's some seriousism, but you said drill down and market size. When we drill down on the market size of Snyk when Snyk was founded, this is a very small segment. Any traditional venture fund, you would say, market size is too small. How would you advise founders who are building for initially very small markets and especially hear that? **Guy Podjarny** [12:48]: Yeah. I think people have a lot of sort of cynicism around market size. I think you have to separate between the existingly defined sort of market sizes as whatever what Gartner at the time said about application security market size. Those are transitory. Those would change over time, and I think they're not important. You shouldn't make decisions based on those. They change. They have been proven to change over time. I think the second is the market size as actual kind of value proposition that you think you can deliver the world. How many people would need this? How much value you're providing? And I think for me, Snyk, I never had any doubt about the market size there. It's we're helping make software development secure. The value proposition is the multiple of the number of developers of the size of software development and the importance of security. Both of those will just continue and the multiple is huge. I had conviction it was never a bother. What I do think is important for founders to appreciate is when you talk to an investor, like it or not, the investor is going to need to have a market size in their investment thesis. It is very important. You can't be big. It can't be bigger than your market. It has to be proportional. And so you have two options. You can ignore the TAM conversation and hope that your investor figures something out that matches your needs, or you can actually try to walk them through it and think about it and explain why you think the market is big. **Harry Stebbings** [14:03]: I think you can imagine you'll see Blazing it away is the right approach. But I think you can, like, use it as an advantage to show your depth and analysis of sort around market evolution. I hate it when people say, security market's 2,000,000,000,000. Okay. But the security market is actually heavily segmented, and it's actually incredibly broad. Can we segment it, show growth within different segments, and show how we think it changes it? Do you see what I mean? That's how that **Guy Podjarny** [14:24]: I do. **Harry Stebbings** [14:24]: And I think especially **Guy Podjarny** [14:25]: in early stages, when you're talking about the idea, you don't know how the market exactly would evolve. You have to focus on value. Within that value, you have to size it. Okay. How many dollars do people typically pay for that type of value? Like, there has to be a dollar component to it, but you have to start from just magnitude of value that you provide, **Harry Stebbings** [14:40]: and then the dollars go from there. We mentioned the initially small market that you served in the early days. How important is being first to market, do you think? I **Guy Podjarny** [14:48]: think first to market is poorly defined. What does matter is being a leader in a market and having some gap. To do that, you have to have something that is differentiated in an area that matters. If you're doing something that's a little bit more wild, a little bit more different, so if you're first to market with that approach and you successfully execute on it and win some order, then you have differentiation. And being differentiated in a market, that matters. And so it really is just about about leadership and about differentiation more than about time. Being first to market is just one way sometimes to achieve that. **Harry Stebbings** [15:19]: You said differentiation, that messaging is a great way to differentiate, the way you tell the world of your story. You said before, use messaging as a way to build the right product. What did you mean by that guy? Yeah. **Guy Podjarny** [15:31]: So messaging really forces you to distill what you do into kind of customer need. I find way too often what companies what founders do is they either they come from a very narrow thing. I'll be amazing at this whatever sort of open source library that, you know, codifies whatever XS code and something, and it'll be superb. They love the technology or AI or crypto or whatever, and they don't translate that into sort of a customer need. And on the flip side, people saying, I'll be a platform. I just had a conversation with with actually an investment find that started by saying, we are the most flexible platform for business and finance. We're in beta. As well, like, that just does not work. And so I think what messaging does is it helps Why does that not work for people who don't understand? It's because you basically underappreciate. On one hand, if you're too narrow, that you have to expand it to the use case, to the need of the customer and understand their experience end to end. And sometimes, even if you only provide a portion of it, they don't have a solution for all the rest of it, you're not going to succeed. So you have to think about their entire use case. What is the value proposition that you want to offer them? What is the problem that you want to solve? And similarly, from the platform perspective, people underappreciate the complexity, but once again, they care about their tech. They care about how we'll build that. And my favorite sort of statement to tell founders is nobody cares about your product. They care about the problem that you're solving for them. And so why are you talking about your product all the time? You should really lead with what is the pain, what is the problem that you're approaching. And so messaging is a forcing function to, first of all, understand what is the value proposition that you have, what is it that you are doing for a customer. It has natural brevity constraints, like it has to be short. So you have to distill it. You can't say, I do this and this. You don't need to be a messaging expert to know that doesn't work. And so you have to naturally prioritize. It's a great forcing function. And once you do that, I think people perceive messaging as, I already know what I'm doing, and now I'm just dumbing it down or simplifying it for the world. But it's not. You're actually simplifying it for yourself. You are focusing yourself. If you know that you are solving a problem, like, for a user, you'll end up building a different product. I can give an example from Snyk. So Snyk's ethos was always developer for security. That was first. That was who we are. And then open source security was our sort of the first product market. Then both were needed for us to be able to succeed in the market, but the ordering of them was very important. The primary problem we're addressing for companies is that developers were not embracing their security solution. And so that was the problem, and our thesis was always like, it started from use open source, stay secure. And it evolved minimally to develop fast, stay secure. But it always focuses on like the thing that you want to do as an organization, and then how do we help you address it. How often should it change? I think messaging naturally evolves. There's the just the practicality of getting better at saying the same thing. And so if you find yourself being on a call and saying, I like phrasing it this way, although on the website, I say that way, maybe you should change what's on the website. The second thing that happens is your product evolves, and so your value proposition starts from something a bit maybe more narrow, maybe it shifted, maybe it expanded, and so your sort of messaging evolves. But then also the market evolves and and changes, and that's maybe over a longer horizon. But I think a good example of that, again, in sort of Snyk world is at the beginning of it, had to convince people that they should engage developers, that developers can and will own security. And today, think a lot of that is accepted, And now the conversation and therefore the messaging, the problem they have is more, how do I do that? How do I scale that? And so the messaging has to adapt. **Harry Stebbings** [19:01]: The challenge and the biggest challenge I see is one of kind of horizontal product marketing or messaging, which is when you are a Notion, when you are a retool, when you serve such a breadth of use cases, how do you effectively message in product market? What would be your advice to founders who actually serve a very broad customer base from dentists to accountants to developers with a very horizontal tool? Well, you have to choose. **Guy Podjarny** [19:23]: You can't be everything to everyone or you'll be pretty crap at all of it. Your platform can have a vision, have an aspiration of being everything to everyone, but it has to have a specific subset of users, a subset of the sort of the market for which you're amazing at the beginning. And there's a variety of reasons for it. On the product itself, it's because almost all of these problems are more complicated than you think they are. As you unravel it and as you kind of really think about the customer's entire use case, then you learn that there's a lot more that they need to build. But even beyond the product, it has a go to market element to it. You want to find a group of people that talk to one another. That's the whole idea of getting a certain flywheel is you get a certain momentum. And so you have to pick a slice, be amazing at it, and evolve from it. And that piece needs to be big enough and small enough. Right? It needs to be big enough to care, that it can feed you for a while, that it can be an important enough anchor, and that it can be a good stepping stone for adjacencies as you expand. But it needs to be small enough that you can make it to the top, that you can become a force within that community. **Harry Stebbings** [20:21]: I totally agree with you there. Can I ask, did it just go up into the right? Sorry. Because we look at it and many billion dollar company it is. Was there a board meeting with Ed Sim at all where you looked at each other and went, no. This isn't working to plan that I might have heard about. **Guy Podjarny** [20:34]: It's amazing how sort of history remembers the successes and not the sort of the failures. I think what worked well at Snyk from the beginning is getting developer adoption. And so we were very focused on the most important thing we're looking to crack is get developers to embrace the security product. If we figure that out, revenue will come. **Harry Stebbings** [20:51]: That's not always the case, though, is it? **Guy Podjarny** [20:53]: We see a lot of tools which get a lot of developer adoption Yeah. And **Harry Stebbings** [20:57]: a lot of love, and revenue does not come. **Guy Podjarny** [20:59]: Yeah. I think it depends. You have to assess your market, and I do think that I had a certain depth of understanding in this one. And so I thought the most difficult thing, the biggest thing to prove was that developers will actually embrace this security solution if you build the right company, if you build the right solution. I entirely underestimated the gap between getting that to be successful, which we did, to actually getting a commercial business going. What was the gap? We basically successfully got developers to embrace this, and then at some point, we sort of opened up the payment gateways and allowed people to pay for it, and nobody did. And then we worked through it, and this is so maybe about a year into the company, we had GA'd. You know, we've had the beta out for about nine months, and we had thousands or maybe tens of thousands of users at the time. We opened up the online purchase and nothing like a minimal, miniscule trickle came in. Really, a year later, we were still at 100,000 ARR. At this point, it's two years in and many millions of dollars burned and tens of thousands of of users. So some people believe that. So I had to reaffirm the conviction. I had two primary moments where I had to do that. One was I had an adviser who was I really think of him in high regard who heard he wasn't super involved, heard the conversation doing it and says, Guy, I think you're fucked. You're basically classic dev tool pitfall, which is you get a lot of developer love, but nobody's willing to spend money on it. And really, I was pissed. I was really annoyed. I came back to San Francisco, flew back to London, and basically spent sort of the other weekend fuming and thinking, am I? You know, am I doing it? And the bottom line was basically reaffirming the conviction that I would rather crash and burn than pivot to just focusing on the security audience, and that I don't want to build just another slightly better must wrap. I want to build something that matters, and what matters is breaking through to developers. And so that was a big one. And then I guess sort of a similar, maybe a little bit more frequent case is even before that, I had a whole horde of VCs come along, see the thousands of users outside, see the visibility, and basically trigger a preemptive process. I leaned in. I said, okay, it looks compelling. I think like I I basically drank my own Kool Aid. And I leaned in and everybody and everybody looked at the company and repeatedly, everybody and everybody looked at it and says, oh, amazing usage, no revenue. Can we stay friends? Maybe we'll consider for the next round. We don't know you yet. Blah blah blah blah. Do you have any advice for founders having been through that then? I think you have to be careful around how quickly you lean into a preemptive notion. Preemptive and the idea of sort of VCs coming along and saying, hey. Maybe I want to I want it so bad, I will pay up ahead of time is very ego boosting, and it feels very good. Then you also know that you don't want just one horse, like you don't want just one bidder. And so it's very easy to say, why don't I talk to everybody now? And when you do that, you're sort of going a bit all in, and and you I think you can really live some scorched earth. I think for us, if it wasn't for Ed Sim and Boldstart and, like, him and Elliot being believers, they basically topped us up, we did get some offers. We just didn't get, like, the right offer from the right investor. And I had a whole personal thing. My father-in-law passed away literally during the same sort of week on it, and I was thinking of whether I take VC calls from their Shiva. It was an intense period. And they stepped up and said, look. We see it. We believe it. We think you're sort of on the right path. Why don't you take this sort of smaller this bridge check on the best valuation that you've received in this sort of term sheet, but a smaller amount of money? And that was great. Like, really all around, and that set us up and allowed us to get to the point this was still eight months before we got to a 100,000 ARR. But then four months after that, instead of a 100,000, we were at $6.50, and a year after that, we were at 4,500,000. And so, basically, the the roughly two years in, two and a bit years in, the dollar funnel started going to the right direction. **Harry Stebbings** [24:37]: I'm in many companies that are a 100 k in aero after several million dollars burned and several years. And honestly, as an investor, I'm going, oh god. Why don't they just give me my money back or give up or do something different? This is not fucking working. What do you say to those founders who has been through it, and how do they know whether to keep going or actually just it's not like Just **Guy Podjarny** [24:59]: call it a day. I think you have to have an understanding. To me, it comes back to that sort of first principles thinking. And so you have to break it down and says, why is it not working? If if the answers are only if only I built this feature, if only I, like, talked to that person, then I think you're missing something. I So think if you're just churning, if you're just trying to hit in different directions, then it might indeed be sort of a problematic sense. You have to have a theory of change of what is it fundamentally that is causing my current situation, and what am I doing about it to significantly change it, whether it is reach, whether it is core product principles, and therefore, use cases do they enable, whether it is indeed a different sort of buyer persona than a user persona, etcetera. **Harry Stebbings** [25:36]: That's a really interesting one, different buyer persona versus user persona. Because I think what we're seeing now with kind of the downturn in the macro is the kind of reversion back to purchasing power to the CFO, away from kind of individual contributors and teams having a lot of purchasing power. And so we now have very segmented buyer personas and then user personas, as you put it. How do you think about effective messaging when the person buying is not the person using? Yeah. It's **Guy Podjarny** [25:59]: really tough. I do think this is a bit of a tough moment for PLG companies. I still think that it's a temporary reality, and so you have to think about What makes you think it's a temporary reality? I think a lot of the fundamentals that got us to sort of the PLG movement is the fact that modern organizations rely on an empowered workforce that can make decisions and move quickly. At the moment, everybody's looking for places to cut. Empowerment is not the word of the day, and things get centralized. If you're a startup, you have to acknowledge that in the current reality, and you can shift your messaging a little bit to focus on, you know, for instance, productivity or cost savings that this product can provide. But it's a little bit tricky because you might get lured down a path that is not product led, that is enterprise, even though your market is really best situated to be one with product led. So it's a bit tricky. I have a few angel investments like that, and it's not easy. You have to make a case by case decision. But I think fundamentally, over time, I still think product led, empowerment oriented solutions that focus on the user versus the buyer are important. You have to help your users communicate with your buyers. You have to help them understand what is the use case, what is the value proposition. I've said use case probably already a dozen times, and I say it all the time because people confuse this with, they say ROI, they say features, know, they say they talk about the technology, they talk about just finance. All of those are not important. What's important is the value to the customer. All of these things are just symptoms of it. So you really have to understand what is the value. And my favorite statement to customers is to say, look, if we align on the value that we provide you, we should be able to align on the price. So I think if you figure that out as a company, what is the value you provide, now it's just an articulation element. It's about how do you get that message across. **Harry Stebbings** [27:33]: So I agree it's a tough time for PLG. I also think it's a tough time for unbundled specialized products. I think we're gonna see this kind of reversion back to a world of bundling where everything is just cheaper. You will probably give up your Calendly and go back to Google Calendar if you are in a large organization as an example. I do you agree with that reversion back to bundling? And how do you advise founders then here in an unbundled world? I think it's always **Guy Podjarny** [27:56]: a bit of a balance between them. And so best of breed products for the point activity that they provide are presumably better. They're best of breed. I think right now, there is a lot of platform consolidation. I will admit that Snyk is benefiting from that now that we have the breadth, but I think a lot of it is from just from cost savings, single vendor relationships, things of that nature. But I think there are ways to build a platform that may actually makes it truly better in total if you make your products work together. It really it again comes back to that notion of how much additional value, how differentiated you are. If you're a point best of breed product that is twice as good as the generic product, you probably will still succeed. Like, companies or customers will still want to use you as long as you articulate that value. I think what maybe has changed is the appetite for a product that is 20% better but is indeed separate and has all the overhead of having another vendor and another solution implemented. Products often categorized as either painkillers or vitamins. Do you invest in vitamins? It is better to have a nerve. It's better to have a pain that you're addressing when you're talking about the primary. I like to think I have this two by two in my head, which talks about kind of pain and frequency. So if something is is low frequency, high something that may be like a big incident that happens or maybe building your sort of RBAC system or something, then really you need a strategy that is all about presence. It's high pain, so when it happens, you need to be there and be available. If something is high frequency, low pain, then it's all about friction. It's something that always bothers you a little bit. Mhmm. And so the effort of picking up a solution needs to be proportional to the pain that you're sensing. So it's really all about friction. And so I think those are the two primaries. If something is high frequency, high pain, it's all about comparing it to the existing solution because there's no way that they're not doing anything about something that is high frequency, high pain. And so it's all about the better mousetrap. It's all about differentiating from existing approaches to solving it. And if something is low frequency, low pain, and maybe that's like a version of some of the vitamins, then it can't be your lead. At best, it can be a feature, but it can't be the primary thing that you're doing. **Harry Stebbings** [29:56]: I really like that kind of matrix to think through. We're both big fans of the seven powers, Hamilton Helmer, probably one of the foundational books that I get everyone to read who joins twenty BC. Why do you think it's really important for founders to understand seven powers and where their powers lie first? **Guy Podjarny** [30:10]: I mean, so I'm a big fan of the powers framework. For those who don't know you at the high level, it just it talks about how do you deliver value to a customer, eventually forming as, like, free cash flow in a way that is sustainable, superior, and significant. So something that is truly better, it's truly superior, it's significant, it matters that it's better at whatever is that it does. It's not whatever an ice cream truck with sort of the tallest roof. It doesn't matter. And it is sustainable. It's hard to copy. I think the reason it's important is the worst thing that can happen, in my opinion, to a startup is not to crash and burn, but to get stuck. It's to build something that is like a little bit valuable, and you build it up to a business that is $2.03, 5,000,000 in ARR, not dismissing the sort of the difficulty of doing that. But then you get stuck. You do grow at a 20% rate from that rate, and it's too good to just walk away from, but it's really not what you signed up for or your investors signed up for. I think powers really are about the ability to grow your business. You think ahead, again, you anchor in the future, and you say, what is it that I'm building that will actually allow me to build on and grow? And if you don't have power, if you're building something that just has product market fit but is actually pretty easy to copy, if you're building something that purely relies on operational excellence, then you're in a pretty risky situation. Right? And if any competitor comes along or like a burst of incumbent of operational excellence and you might lose your place, the the idea of power is indeed to be that multiple. And so I don't think you should, like, dive in and only care about power at the beginning. You're you need to be building value or, like, sustaining some value you created. But if you don't think about it, then you're carrying that risk of just getting stuck. **Harry Stebbings** [31:43]: Do you believe in defensibility at the early stages? I'm very strong, which is like defensibility from day one is bullshit, I always think. Do you agree with that or do you actually think when you're looking at companies you aim to invest in are highly defensible? I like this. And defensibility plays a big part of your mindset. **Guy Podjarny** [31:57]: I think at the beginning, you can't be defensible. You have nothing. I think that maybe the only exception to that is if you have very unique knowledge in the file. Exactly. **Harry Stebbings** [32:03]: Then maybe that's an exception. I think now, actually, is a really unique time with kind of a new wave of AI companies, which, like, you come out of ten years of, I don't Stanford's AI lab. That is a defensible mode of knowledge, which other people likely don't have. **Guy Podjarny** [32:15]: Potentially, although now that has grown. So that's the core net resource kind of power. And do you have some sort of very unique set of skills that nobody else can have? And are they indeed superior and indeed significant? I think specifically right now in AI, the space is moving fast enough and there are enough people that it's not really a cornered resource. It can be a necessary and a valuable capability, but I think it's hard for that to be alone. But what I do think is critical is to think about how does this business become defensible. So if you assume success, if you assume you found product market fit, which absolutely should be consuming 90 plus percent of your attention should be on product market fit, not power at the beginning. You have to build something of value to then sustain and differentiate. So sorry. Step one, get product market fit, and then we think about percent and powers. Correct. So I think when I invest, I think about some theories about how you could build a defensible project over here. If this was to succeed, what is it? Would you have a network? Would you be accumulating some data? Would you be aggregating, accumulating switching costs from within the customer? Is there any sort of counter positioning that you're doing it there? Are you doing something that incumbents, even if they see they would choose not to adopt, like the Netflix blockbuster example. Right? Or for Snyk, it was dev first. Dev first is something that is counter positioned to the security industry. **Harry Stebbings** [33:26]: It could look at this with traditional journalism. They will never send you questions ahead of time, and they choose not to. I will always do that. It's a counterpositioning example, I think. **Guy Podjarny** [33:34]: I think so, and I I don't know the industry well enough, but it's an example of that of saying if people are already well incentivized to believe and stick to the existing system as it works because that is what makes them powerful today, then counterpositioning against them. And so I think per Helmer's book, the two powers that you build at inception are cornered resource and the counterpositioning. And so you can come indeed with some some unique knowledge or perspective or with a counterposition that is hard. That's like the innovator's dilemma, hard for the incumbent to produce. I don't think you should focus on those, but as an investor, even at the early stage, I try to theorize about what could it be. And then once you've theorized that, you put that aside and you really just focus on product market fit and you have to get something working. Once you get something working, then you start tweaking. When you're getting to the point where you hit product market fit and now you need to scale some things and things like that, maybe you should tweak priorities. You shouldn't overhaul priorities, but you should tweak priorities for things that matter. It could be the type of legal license you give to your customers around the use of data that you have. It could be investing in some viral mechanism. It could be trying to invest in stickiness and switching costs. **Harry Stebbings** [34:39]: If we think about kind of product market fit, this is the first chapter before we move to the seven powers. I had an investor update last night, it was a 1,400,000 ARR business. It got there over a two and a half year period. It's been a little bit slower than everyone thought. It's not growing particularly fast, but it's still doing badly. But it's taking quite a lot of cash to get there. And I just looked at and I said, does this have product market fit? I don't know. Customers are staying. They're paying. There's enough of them. There's enough money. 1,400,000 is not nothing. It's not being pulled out of their hands. Yep. Was it very obvious for you when you have product market fit? And when more often than not with your angel investments, is it obvious? **Guy Podjarny** [35:16]: Yeah. I think sometimes it isn't. To me, product market fit is really about when demand outweighs your capacity to satisfy it. Kind of can't hire people fast enough, spin up servers fast enough, whatever it is, the scale, because demand outstrips it, then I think you hit product market fit. I think, like, first to market, it's a little bit of of a poorly defined term. For Snyk, there were at least two elements to it. There was the product user fit of getting to developers. And so I think we hit that one pretty quickly. And there was a lot of learning still about getting that done, but I think we got that. But it was very different between that and the product buyer fit, which is probably a bit more akin to product marketing if you're talking **Harry Stebbings** [35:52]: about the business. For me, with you, you've got the product user fit, and then you've got the business model fit. It's almost like the same problem as Twitter in some ways I find, which is like, Twitter is a great product, like, Snyk in the early days was, but you now need to layer on a business model that works. **Guy Podjarny** [36:04]: Yep. And so that's why I think in use cases, I think in value propositions. And so who is it that you provide value to? That's the first question. If you don't provide value, then, you know, it's no good. And are there enough of those? And then eventually is, would they pay? **Harry Stebbings** [36:18]: Do you think there's different degrees of quality when you look at the different seven powers? So brand power is one. And when I look at that, I'm like, I love it. And as much a brand person as anyone, but I believe it's inherently more transient and momentum driven than some of the other powers that we can discuss. Do you believe there's different variants of quality of power? **Guy Podjarny** [36:38]: Yeah. For sure. I think actually, I've had a couple of conversations with Hamilton, and so we discussed this. He ends up dissing his own brand and process power. So it says both of those are just so easy to claim that they end up being a little bit loose in in your definition. I do agree with that. I look at brands like Chanel, like Louis Vuitton. Though brand power is very powerful, it's like for a tech startup or for a company that is that is building out, it's just so easy to claim that you have brand. I think the idea of brand is really to be able to sell the same product for a significantly higher price because of people taking pride for it. And so, like, for instance, you think about Snyk. Know? So Snyk has a certain amount of brand power. There's a certain amount of, like, fairy dust, sort of DevOps fairy dust that all the security companies want. There's a certain amount of that that people believe. But it's not the sustainable, sort of superior, significant capability. I think that's really the sort of the risk with powers is that try to call everything a power, and that loses the sort of the whole kind of idea of defining and understanding your powers is that you know where to invest. **Harry Stebbings** [37:37]: But let's analyze Snyk. Which of the seven powers, if you could choose two, are you like, I hang my hat. We have these the strongest. **Guy Podjarny** [37:44]: Yeah. We went pretty deep on it. We've done sort of power exercises for different competitor groups, like our powers as compared to the dev tools that try to go into security versus our powers compared to the security players are a little bit different because the sort of the capabilities, what's normal in the ecosystem is different. I'd say that Snyk's two primary powers are, you know, one was counter positioning, which sort of still holds in the security space. This notion of coming in developer first is to an extent at the expense of some CISO power of some sort of top down decision power in which a lot of these security companies have been designed to satisfy. And so that that whole approach is very different. And then the second is and I will claim process bar here despite the sort of the criticality, and that is developer product led growth, sort of the PLG in the security industry. And that was actually my argument with Hamilton, which was to say, I think that if you go into an industry that is traditionally top down, it is coming in with a product led approach is counter positioned at the beginning. But over time, you build process power by the sense that, let's say, a bunch of people resigned from Snyk and went to an existing sort of a company, even a new company, but definitely sort of an existing one, and they try to replicate the product led growth motion within that company, it'll be very hard for them to do it. It is mirrored into the culture and the product and the go to market, and it's so intertwined in how we operate that it's very hard to replicate, but it is a power against the security incumbents. It is not a **Harry Stebbings** [39:07]: power against the ones coming from the dev, say. If you isolate those now and you sit in the room with your team, you're like, great. We know those two powers are really well. It change your threat mode? **Guy Podjarny** [39:16]: Yeah. I think, firstly, it might be interesting to think a little bit about the exercise that we've done. So what we've done was we took four primary competitor categories, and for each of those, we tried to write down the primary capabilities that we differentiate on in those areas. And then we thought about the capabilities we could build that we think that are sort of interesting to us. And then we for each one of those, we sort of assessed, are they truly superior, significant, sustainable? And that was a good exercise. Even if we've done nothing else, and sometimes actually, we've done this a few times. Sometimes we've done nothing but the conversation, but it still distills your understanding of it. And I think that's very important. It's a mechanism. This and questions like, would this be more important in five years or not, are things that I do with the product organizations and definitely with the labs organizations, which is very skilled in this now, to help us anchor in the future, to help us think about where it is going and where it is headed. And so that is very valuable. By the way, the hardest part is then distilling that into the top items. What is the one or the two items that you would pick for every sort of box? What do you think is the biggest mistake that founders make when they consider seven powers? Most of them just don't consider seven powers. Right? They think about things a bit more loosely. But I think people are unwilling to pick. They think this is important, and this is important, and this is important. And so they end up underinvesting in the things that matter most. And so, especially in the context of success, at some point, you feel like the world is your oyster. You can do a lot of different things. You you go into them. So at the beginning, it's about product market fit. It's not about the powers. So if you actually over rotate on powers, that would be the mistake. Over time, as you get something that is successful, I think powers are important because they help you pick the next thing to do. They help you ask, okay, if you're going to expand in x, add another product or expand an audience, the best question to ask is, which of your powers help you in that expansion? If the answer is none, then you really should pause and reconsider because basically you're saying, I'm going to go into those areas, and I'm gonna compete on operational excellence merits alone. And so if you don't even know what your powers are, pause and go off and have a conversation about it. And it doesn't really matter if you use the powers kind of framework. It doesn't like, that's just a helper. It's about understanding what are your core sort of sustainable differentiators. **Harry Stebbings** [41:21]: In terms of product market fit, I think the single biggest I've done now, astonishingly, a 170 investments over eight years. But the single biggest summon of companies that reach product market fit versus those that don't, I found, is, execution, like granular speed of execution. Do you agree with that? And how important do you think speed of execution is in terms of getting to product market fit? **Guy Podjarny** [41:42]: I think of it as iteration. I think there's almost like an element of hubris in thinking that you can get into your ivory tower, come out in a year, and come out with some wondrous thing that is precisely right. It isn't really, I think, the best sort of bet for you to make. And I'm a believer, and I think what you need to do is you need to iterate. I think that is the sort of the speed of delivery. How quickly do you iterate? The faster you do that, the faster you learn. The faster you learn, the faster you're gonna hit product market fit. So I I agree with that. One caveat that I would add is you need to be iterating in the right direction. I like to say that if you're good, then you optimize for the feedback you get. If you're not good, that's a different problem. And if you're if you optimize for the feedback you get, you want to set yourself up to be getting the feedback in the area that matters. And so if you want to build a product led growth company and all of the feedback you get is from a dozen design partners that you work with in a top down fashion with sort of the CTO, then you will optimize for something, but it's unlikely that you would optimize for getting a self serve community led product. You want to iterate quickly, but you want to understand what is the the fit between your product and the go to market, and you want to put yourself in a position to get the feedback in the right direction. **Harry Stebbings** [42:44]: There are so many other areas I wanted to talk to you about. You've raised multiple rounds of funding from some of the best in the business. What do you think are the most common mistakes you see your angel investments make when fundraising with venture investors? And what are some of your biggest lessons from raising from some of the best in the business? **Guy Podjarny** [42:59]: I think the biggest mistake angels make investing with VCs is underappreciating the different context, especially if you're co investing with a VC that is primarily an A or a B VC and they're signing a seed check. For them, it's a very small bet. It's the opportunity to go ahead. For you, it might actually be, as an angel, that might be your sort of primary check. I put a lot of weight into the diligence and the vetting that some of the sort of the venture firms that I co invest with do, and so I do value that a lot. But I also want to contextualize it for me and to say whether that's important. And for me personally, while I expect a financial return, I invest largely for the learning, for the journey. I feel it helps me. First of all, it's fun. Second is it helps me actually in Snyk, helps me understand. I think it helps me be a better craftsman. And so I have all sorts of filters that the sort of the VCs don't necessarily have. My first filter is, do I want to get on a call with this person again? Do I like them? And then is this an area that is of interest to me? Ironically, for instance, I don't invest that much in cyber. And there are exceptions to that statement, but for the most part, I'm more passionate about sort of product led and those types of systems, and cyber tends to be more top down. I think you you build your personal preferences. Don't just think of it as an asset. How many checks have **Harry Stebbings** [44:08]: you written? I'm close to a 100 at this point. Can I ask you, like, financially allocate towards angel investing? Do you look at kind of holdings and go, okay. We're gonna put x amount here into angel investments? **Guy Podjarny** [44:19]: Only as a limiting factor, but don't get don't go overboard. My primary limiting factor is time. I invest versus taking advisory roles because want I to know, like, the base minimum is you get my money, and hopefully that's helping you build. Now on top of that, I want to be a value add investor, and I want to learn from the journey. And so we're relevant and when where I can, I take calls, and I do a fair bit of those? I probably spend, I don't a day a week or so, you on angel related stuff, maybe a little bit less. That is my primary limiting factor. Beyond that, I've veered a little bit because I do as much as I do now in direct angel investments. I mostly actually reduced my kind of LP allocation. You know, I find I do want to limit my venture exposure. And I think it's important to remember for me is most of my money is still in stake. Most of my money is in the venture of my business. Like everything around me, I am in a high risk mode. And so in theory, the wise thing for me to do within the bank is to put all my money in some fixed income account. It's gonna be not get it there because really it's about don't lose this, the money that I have. In practice, I just don't work that way. I'm a risk taker, and I enjoy the journey. And so What's been your biggest investing mistake? Investing in things that are obvious, and it's really because they stay small, and they come back to being almost entirely focused on operational excellence. I like that there's something a little bit crazy. I try to count the leaps of faith that I have to make in making an investment. If it is too many, I don't invest. But if there are none, I also don't invest. There needs to be something a little bit out of the ordinary, like I believe that, for this to actually translate into something big. **Harry Stebbings** [45:46]: So I I always have if we need a secondary jump amount and so a great example of that would be a neobank for teenagers. Okay? The big question, the risk there is, can we transcend four kids or four teenagers to also converting them into just adult customers? That's the jump, really. What I don't like is for adult customers, and then there's an additional jump beyond that. Like, the secondary jump, then I'm out. Yeah. Do you see what I mean? **Guy Podjarny** [46:12]: I do. And **Harry Stebbings** [46:13]: I do think it's **Guy Podjarny** [46:14]: easy to see how if you have too many leaps of faith, then you can't do it. I think to me, the learning was that if there are no leaps of faith, it probably means there are a dozen companies doing exactly the same thing. And if you were to do it, which I, at this point, typically don't, then you really are heavily betting on the operational excellence of that team. And so that's a different lens to **Harry Stebbings** [46:33]: SaaS for the team. I totally agree. Price wise, have the best companies consistent even the highest price when you look back? **Guy Podjarny** [46:39]: No. I mean, I think there is a correlation. I think it it comes back a little bit to the sort of the founder's ability to sell versus their ability to raise money. Right? If you can articulate the opportunity very well, then oftentimes that translates both to your ability to sell it to investors and the ability to sell to customers. But no, I don't think it correlates heavily. I think it's like slightly, and I do think also companies can get themselves in trouble by raising too much money too early, mostly because they end up sort of pouring fuel on areas that don't actually need to be accelerated because you don't actually know what you're doing. And so I think it's dangerous. Now we're in a slightly different reality in which some companies that have raised at a higher valuation, they need to mentally prepare. They're going to work their ass off for another sort of two years now to basically get a flat round because they got such a kind of overvalued round. So if you're early and you're pre revenue and you got a $100,000,000 pre money valuation in the previous round, you now need to get some revenue, and you need to work on it. And hopefully, the next round, you've earned that sort of a $100,000,000 valuation. **Harry Stebbings** [47:39]: Will you be able to retain your talent? As team members, you're going, wait a minute. I'm gonna bust my ass off for two years, and I'm gonna have flat stock options when I could just go to an AI company and get boosted stock options? **Guy Podjarny** [47:51]: People should get top ups in in equity, and I think investors should be ready to do that. You got the higher valuation, and so you raised more money at a lower price. It's a little bit easier for the valuation for the sort of the investor that actually has paid that amount, but it's a little bit harder for them to accept it. But I think generally speaking, people should be financially incentivized in a competitive manner around that growth, and they should be believers in the mission, especially early. **Harry Stebbings** [48:14]: Two more questions, and they're really unfair. But I'm gonna ask them anyway, and you can't get away from it because there's a light on you. What was the best first investor meeting you had? The best first investors. Someone who invested in Snyk. Yeah. Someone who invested in Snyk or maybe didn't invest in Snyk, but the first investor meeting that you have with them where it was just like, this person gets it. They understand. They see the future with me. This is a mind meld. Oh, yeah. **Guy Podjarny** [48:36]: It's tough because it goes a fair bit back. The the name that comes to mind is Amit Patel, who is an angel investor who joined us in that sort of round in which, like, everybody was looking at it and saying thanks, but no thanks on hits, and Boldstart did the top up. I think he's the only angel investor to sort of join there. He's a professional angel investor, and I've spent, I think, one of, if not the most sort of **Harry Stebbings** [48:54]: impactful angel investor in in Snyk. Listen. I wanna dive into a quick fire round now. So I say a short statement, and you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay? Yeah. So what do you know for sure that others don't believe to be true? **Guy Podjarny** [49:06]: That when you have a good idea, you're not the only one that has it. Rather that you you never have as much time as you think to act. We think that we're sort of these unique creatures that just have this sort of unique insight. In practice, we're influenced by everything that happens around us, and there are other smart people around. They're noticing the same thing. They're probably building the same type of solution with the same principles at the same time. So you better get going. What's the biggest hiring mistake you've made? Probably hiring before too big, too early. And so hiring people that are overoriented at processes or longer term status of the company, trying to sort of be ready ahead, but are not necessarily that good in today's needs. **Harry Stebbings** [49:45]: You can invest in one fund as an LP, obviously, from 20 VC. Which fund do you invest in? I like a bunch of different phases, but Boldstart would probably be my pick. What's the most painful lesson that you're also most pleased to have learned because of the learnings that you have from it? **Guy Podjarny** [50:00]: I think that when someone isn't working out in the company consistently, letting them go is not only in the company's favor but also in their favor. You're really doing them no favor, keeping them in a failed position. That's doubly correct when the company is growing. When you're in hypergrowth, when someone starts to fall behind, especially in leadership position, they need to be twice as good to be able to catch up and keep accelerating to the twice in size that you're gonna be in a short order of time. And oftentimes, you're just **Harry Stebbings** [50:27]: setting them up for failure. You brought in a CEO who sat on the board for many years and you worked closely with for many years, but you handed over the role of CEO. Was that hard? It was hard. **Guy Podjarny** [50:36]: It was also one of the better decisions that I've made. I think you have to understand what is it that you want to do. If you want to be a big company CEO, then as a founder, as long as you're executing well, you have the right to do it. Otherwise, you want to ask what the company needs from me most and what do I want to do. And for me, I felt like the thing I was most valuable thing that I could give the company was around my ability to see around the quarters, my ability to understand where this is going. And I basically didn't have time to give that to the company because I was spending all my time trying to scale the organization. And the flip side, I had this opportunity to bring Peter who was is amazing, and my relationship with him is unique, and he could basically come on, do that better, and focus me on the other piece. And that was also where my passion was. And just because something is working doesn't mean it can't be better. So it wasn't from a point of failure. It was another step that made it even better. And it was very hard, it continues to be hard like any kind of a partnership is. How has being a father changed the way you operate and lead? I find that the analogy of the company is your baby, your start up as your baby, apt. And I think one of the things you learn, I have two kids, is, you know, when you have one child and you want to accommodate their needs, then it's really about, you know, they want whatever, and you need to either absorb it and give them or not. When you have two children, you realize you're in a position in which you have to one child desires might come at the expense of the other, and you have to actually teach them to do the balance and do what you think is communally best. And think I it's the same kind of in the company. You know, clearly, it's adults and not kids. But you learn over time that you can't please everyone, and I want everybody to love me, and I think many people do. But at some point, when you have enough people, there's gonna be some people that are unpleased, and you need to do the things that is in the kind of the greater good and the good of this broader family, even when you still think about it as a family and even when those are hard moves to make. Do you agree with we're a family, not a team, or do you think it's a team, not a family? I think it's a team, but I think teams can get awfully intimate. I think it's okay. It's a team that is on a mission. And what type of team is it? Is it a commander unit stuck in some format? Is it a set of explorers going to Antarctica and doing it? It's not a team as in a group of friends who met for a basketball game on the courts and went back home. It's a team that is all in together, and I think that's sometimes that's a more intimate and close knit group than a family. And so making moves like letting someone go or quitting if you're the one that goes, they can be awfully emotional and awfully personal. I do think it is a team because you can't fire a child. You can't fire an employee. You can't quit from your family. I know many would want to. And so I think it is a team, but it doesn't make it any less intimate. **Harry Stebbings** [53:02]: What's the single best performing angel investment? When you think about cash back DPI or TVPI, potential to return or return cash, what's the best one? **Guy Podjarny** [53:11]: Yeah. I think there was a time horizon element to it. Probably for me right now, it's a security scorecard, which has done very well, and that was invested all the way back at $6,000,000 valuation. But a bunch of others are doing quite well. Cloudinary maybe is the other contender, maybe even better. Cloudinary is an image management company that's been bootstrapped that I was an adviser in early on. Yeah. I've got a few of them. I do think Synthesia is an amazing company I'm invested in now. Light Dash. There's a bunch of, like, great companies that I'm excited to be investors. Penultimate one. What would you like to change about the world of venture? Venture companies would never invest in venture companies. There's nothing scalable. There's no tech. There's no real kind of scalable assets in venture today. Most of it is, like, law firm style, a bunch of smart people that are relying on hiring additional smart people. And the little tech that does get built is all about deal flow. It's all about finding investment companies. And I would love to see venture investing in tech that makes their companies more successful, that makes them more scalable, but in general, kind of make it a bit more systematic. And I believe, I don't know for sure, that there are sort of inklings of this that are happening, but I think that can be a disruptive force in the world of venture. A final one for you, **Harry Stebbings** [54:18]: Guy. Twenty, thirty three, ten years. Okay. Where's Guy then? **Guy Podjarny** [54:22]: Yeah. I don't really believe myself if I talk about past the five year horizon, but what I would like to think is that I focus on our family foundation. So we started a charity focusing on social inequality. So it's a learning journey right now. It's a pilot a few years. I've got a couple of people in The UK, couple in Israel, and learning how to give away my money. And and it's fascinating, and it's humbling, and a lot more sobering than the sort of, at the end of the day, posh world of tech. And I would like to think that in ten years, that would be a more lion's **Harry Stebbings** [54:47]: share of my time. I have to ask this. You mentioned giving away money. Do you think about your relationship to money? I'm very **Guy Podjarny** [54:52]: uncomfortable with it. I like my kind of creature comforts. I like my sort of larger house and posh vacations, and I enjoy those. I like premium, even super premium. I I really dislike luxury. I really dislike sort of status symbols and wearing something because it is to show that you're doing it. I those are negative value to me. And so I'm learning it. I'm enjoying the ability to help family members, to help friends, and and I think those are the things that give me the most pleasure. And eventually, it's a bit of a burden. And I talk about giving it away. I think all the money that I have at Snyk, my wife and I were planning to give that away. But when you give away larger amounts of money, suddenly that becomes a burden. It's not donating $50 to UNICEF. It's a burden. I I accept those moments where I get annoyed with it, I and don't pretend to be miserable for it. Those first class problems by definition. But I think it's an effort, **Harry Stebbings** [55:39]: not just a joy. And listen. For larger amounts, we'd be happy to relieve you of it for 20 VC donations. Listen. I've loved doing this. This has been such a broad discussion, but thank you so much, and this has been so much fun, my friend. Thanks **Guy Podjarny** [55:51]: for having me, and thanks for putting this on. I always enjoy the episodes. Yeah. That was fun. **Harry Stebbings** [55:56]: I mean, some real myth busters there. Defensibility on day one doesn't matter. Being first to market doesn't Absolute myth busting episode. Guy was fantastic. If you wanna see more from us, of course, you can by searching for 20 VC on YouTube. But before we leave you today, ## Sponsor read **Harry Stebbings** [56:11]: you've heard me talk about how Coda is the doc that brings it all together and how it can help your team run smoother and be more efficient. I know this because Coda helps me. 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