144: Rajiv Pimplaskar, CEO and President at Dispersive, talks about connecting with cybersecurity customers and scaling sales

Imagine you could build your startup with mature technology that is tried and tested in some of the toughest IT environments in the world. It's basically a startup but with proven technology. That's what Rajiv Plimplasakar is doing as the president and CEO of Dispersive. Find out what dispersive are doing and how they're going to market in this episode. Welcome to the Sales Bluebird podcast, which exists because at B2B startups it's hard to get consistent traction and scale the sales team. Sales Bluebird provides you tips, tricks, experiences, examples, ideas, and inspiration from people who know a thing or ten about building cybersecurity companies. I am your host, Andrew Monahan. Our guest today is Reggie from Clint Laskar, president and CEO of Disperson. Regiv, welcome to Sales Bluebird.

Thank you very much, Andrew. It's a pleasure to be here.

It's exciting, right? We're here at RSA this week. There's probably some background noise on this. We're surrounded by a whole ton of people here at the Marriott, which I think a lot of the listeners will know is a regular haunt for uh vendors and leading luminaries at RSA. Before we get into the business side though, Rajiv, three questions to get to know the real you a little bit better. First one, let's go with dive bar or cocktail bar?

Dive bar.

Dive bar?

Absolutely.

Where do you live? Which part of the world are you in?

I'm in New York. That's a good dive bars in you. Oh, absolutely.

What's that one that I could take into? McSorley's? Would you call that?

McSorley would qualify, yes.

Light or dark beer, and that's all many options? Dark beer. I love that place. Next one is name one great airport you've been through.

I have to say Singapore's Shanghi Airport's my favorite.

That's like a city, right? I mean, it's got everything.

It really is. There's very few things that uh you can point out that anyone would find objectionable.

Right. It's clean, it's convenient, there's got every community you can imagine you'd want, and probably a few you could never imagine you wanted all there. Absolutely. It's quite the city. Last question: how did you make money as a kid?

Ooh, well, I used to be quite persuasive with my parents, as well as extended family members. So doing small chores for them and uh being able to, you know, essentially uh collect on the back of that.

Any chores that you particularly hated you ended up doing?

Well, to be honest, I pretty much hated all chores.

You were a kid, right?

However, I was uh you know determined to realize the value of uh the money, and so ends justify the means.

Yeah, fair enough. My I've got two teenage daughters right now, 13 and 15, and yeah, they they did not like chores. A huge surprise there, right? All right, well, let's move on to the business side of this. So you are the uh the president and the CEO of Dispersive. Tell us a little bit about where you are on the journey with dispersive, what stage are you at and number employees, what have you gonna share publicly?

Sure. So dispersive is a very unique company in the market in that we're only one year old. We were incorporated in uh April of 2021. We're roughly about just under 25 people. We, however, have the privilege of a very mature and uh stable product that was incubated out of DARPA. Oh, okay, and that's uh in its fourth version of uh evolution in the market. The product comes with a world-class engineering team. It also has the privilege of having 51 patents granted plus three additional uh pending, and though that granted number includes nine in the European Union.

And for those that don't know DARPA, uh explain DARPA to everyone.

Yeah, so DARPA is the quintessential defense research organization. A lot of the work that DARPA did was around solving for future problems, and this is 10 plus years ago, where they started looking at things like nation-state actors, man-in-the-middle attacks, how to divert uh attack vectors away from soft targets, which are endpoints or clients, towards the network where these can be more effectively deflected and handled. And uh these uh altruistic individuals who got together to create the technology really uh that's the genesis of what subsequently became dispersal.

And what's the process of commercializing something out of dark or the rules and regulations of all you can and can't do?

Yeah, so you know it's funny because it's a bit of a hit or miss as to whether something gets commercialized or not. As you know, in general, it's challenging to take a military technology and mass market it, so to speak. But at the same time, you know, current geopolitical events as an example can sometimes be an accelerant for that process. So it really depends on uh the product, the team, and the go-to-market fit, as you would imagine it does for most companies, in terms of being able to take that kind of a core technology, productizing it, and then bringing it to market.

Yeah, I think DARPA plays a quiet but significant role in the industry. Remember, gosh, 20 years ago I was at PGP when it was inside McAfee. We had PGP labs, and we had two people there, they balance them with leading in, and they would go off and win DARPA projects and do the research on things such as the battlefield of the future. You know, so things that are probably in the battlefield now or uh started off in thinking anyway, 20 years ago is maybe projects like that, right? You're right, some do come out and some don't. You never see the light of day beyond maybe some use or some research inside the defense organizations.

Absolutely. And uh one of the interesting uh observations and I think trends really is that uh in many ways uh the federal government, particularly the military side, tends to be at the canary in the coal mine when it comes to cyber threat, right? Cyber is now in many ways the new uh Cold War. And uh most, you know, of what we are hearing about even uh this week at RSA underscores that. That it's really about nation state, it's about these APTs, right? Or advanced persistent threats, and it's about supply chain. And so these are issues that have been already tackled in the military government space, and we as a commercial organization have a unique opportunity to learn from those situations and essentially not have to make our own mistakes.

Yeah, yeah. So, Rajiv, I'm a longtime salesperson, I'm also from Scotland, and we're a simple people. So, how would you describe to me what dispersive does in language that I would understand?

Absolutely. And first of all, I have to say I was born in Edinburgh. You are so uh there's there's something we have in common there.

I spent all my years growing up in Edinburgh. There you go. Wonderful.

Look, so dispersive, I like to think of it as a little bit of the uh the iceberg analogy, right? Where what you see on the surface is just 10%, but the true depth is uh really underneath the waterline, so to speak. Dispersive, the best way to explain it is you cannot hack what you cannot see. And dispersive provides the equivalent of a stealth technology on a fighter plane for a cloud infrastructure or a site-to-site uh network. And by so doing, we're able to essentially take the digital footprint off the radar of a threat actor or an adversary and thereby shield from detection as well as future interception. There is a really significant depth of technology that again came from some of the DARPA research around the use of sped spectrum communications, which are popular in the radio frequency world. And this communication has been used to avert the jamming of torpedoes after the Second World War, as was developed by the US Navy, and now is the underpinnings of things like Bluetooth and GPS and even 5G. And so we're using similar concepts for obfuscation, for packet dispersal, as well as for securing data in transit across public infrastructures.

You're securing the good guys for the work that they're doing, not in deflecting the bad guys or both.

We're doing both. That's what makes it unique. Okay. So the name of the game is avoidance. We're fundamentally avoiding the good guys' infrastructure from being detected by the bad guys by hiding source destination relationships, by obfuscating traffic lows. Furthermore, if in the unlikely event the bad guys do find you and they launch a man-in-the-middle attack or an availability issue or even a DDoS incident, then we're dynamically able to deflect that traffic away from the edges into the network where it can be better handled. Our deflects are smart in that they can sense that they're under attack and dynamically take themselves out of service and recover the traffic on a different route altogether.

This sounds like something that you'd have to be pretty advanced in your thinking about cloud to really understand. Is that true or do mid-market companies kind of latch onto this as well?

It's a fair observation. I'd say you don't have to understand any of this because we're really a SaaS offering, and all you need to do is to connect into it, and you get the benefits of all of this goodness that I'm talking about.

Okay.

So from our customer and our go-to-market perspective, we really don't like to talk about the technology too much. It's sort of what's powering the solution. But what customers care about is having that extra layer of protection, having that peace of mind that they have their infrastructure in good hands, and that's what we bring to the table.

So will people use this in addition to uh like CSPM and all the four-letter acronym technologies that they have in the cloud right now, or is it instead of?

Yeah, it's a good question. So we certainly see ourselves as a complement to SASE, Secure Access Service Edge, as well as uh Security Service Edge, SSE, zero trust, certainly a key trend in the market that we support. What we have found typically happens is you almost have a binary choice these days as a customer. You either embrace a traditional perimeter-based security approach, which has been termed affectionately as the castle and mode approach, or you go towards the user-centric approach, right? Protecting the user, strong authentication, least privilege, and that's zero trust. What we're giving you is in one product both approaches simultaneously. So depending on the level of investment you've already made in competing technology, you can use this as an enhancer to enhance security for sensitive third-party connections or your remote access, or let's say sensitive geos for multinational organizations. Or if you are a mid-market customer with uh relatively simplistic needs, then we're giving you a one size fits all that can comprehensively cover your end-to-end needs.

And would the driver commonly be mitigating risk, or is there an operational efficiency or cost saving to be had as well?

All three really. And the primary driver for us is obviously we see ourselves as a security company. So enhancing security is the uh key driver, ensuring GRC or compliance. The secondary benefit is resilience, and that's really a function of the architecture. So we're able to impart resilience to a uh wide area network or a cloud infrastructure that didn't exist. And in the process, we're able to also improve operational efficiency and boost performance.

Does that mean the security is the main buyer, the CISO is the buyer, or does it bleed into network as well or infrastructure?

We have uh both sets of buyers. So our entry vectors into most accounts tend to be either via the SecOps CISO organization or through the network security team. If you're seen as a VPN replacement project, because we are considered a next generation VPN, and typically the buyer tends to be the network team. However, we also sometimes tap into the zero trust budget, in which case it winds up uh going through the SecOps uh CISO route.

Okay. And I'm thinking about go to market then. Do you got a sales team in place right now already?

We do. So we have a uh sales team that's focused on enterprise, on our federal customers, as well as on commercial mid-market channels.

Okay. And what did you do first? What was the first few sales hires you made?

Great question. So, again, as you can imagine with the pedigree that we have, the initial traction that the company got was in the intelligence community, military government type use cases. And uh we leveraged that in order to truly hone the product, get it operationalized. And now that we have a strong foothold there, we're expanding more broadly across financial services, across healthcare, across critical infrastructure, and other sectors of the market. The first hire in a situation like this, and this is perhaps uh germane to your other startup audiences, you really want doers, right? The first uh million is always, as we affectionately call it, a knife fight, right? And so you want to bring people on board who have a proven track record of hunting, no real pipeline, and your own Rolodex. And then the company's responsibility is to ensure that positioning is right, the messaging is correct and laser focused, and also that the product delivers against its expectations. So we're very fortunate in that we have cracked the code on all three. We have zero churn at this point. Uh so 100% of our customers have been renewing with us. And so with our new hunters in in uh C2, we're aggressively going across our uh our channel and our customer frontiers and uh closing business.

And are you the stage where you've got a CRO now then?

No, we do not have a CRO yet. That is certainly something we will evolve towards. Right now, my hires are really in the enterprise space as well as the federal and the commercial space. Okay.

I know in the federal space, obviously the channel, SI channel is a key part. In the enterprise space, are you going traditional security channel or are you thinking, I don't know, SIs, MSSPs, things like that as well?

Yeah, so we definitely see this as a channel play. And so we're extremely uh channel friendly and in fact channel first. In the mid-market space, as you rightly pointed out, we're looking to bundle with MSPs and MSSPs and take uh have them take the product as part of their portfolio to market. Within enterprise, we're doing a combination of direct touch, but then fulfilled through their chosen partner. As well as we have certain systems integration partnerships in place, as well as in development, that we're actively uh leveraging in order to get to new accounts. And for them, it's a great opportunity to create a 5 to 6x drag by adding in servers to support our software, adding in the cloud infrastructure, adding in the professional services and the managed services components to provide a full wrapper around our capability and make it a massive revenue growth and a revenue generation opportunity.

So the product itself is at the point where it still needs some expertise to get it going. It can't just be something you download and just start using, right?

If I may clarify, we have uh we offer the product in two flavors. The first flavor is what we call dispersive fabric, which is a converged network fabric that provides any-to-any connectivity. And this is a software-only solution. So that requires the client or their chosen partner, ideally a trained systems integrator, to deploy it within said cloud infrastructure to spin up a dispersive powered environment. The other product that we have launched is what we call dispersive cloud, which is our own hosted and internally provided SaaS platform. And that's something that we offer our end customers, and all they have to do is just connect into us with clients or gateways, and we take care of all of the other pieces, the sizing, the operations, and the ongoing management and patching.

It almost sounds like the best of both worlds, then for your customer, but also your partners.

Precisely. It's uh quick time to value. You don't have to worry about CapEx, you don't have to worry about expertise, you don't have to worry about training. And it's a really quick way to get into the game and start protecting your users and your corporate resources.

Yeah, yeah. So it's interesting you mentioned before, you know, you said ZTNA, Zero Trust, SASE, SSE, SD1. You know, there's a lot of companies in that space, right? A lot of noise, same buzzwords used in different orders to explain what people do. I'm wondering if as a CEO of the company, how you're thinking about how you rise above the noise and get the attention you deserve, despite all that other noise that's going on out there.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's a uh well uh put problem for the whole industry, right? Which has been overinvested uh in years past. My personal philosophy on this is you have to have uh thought leadership and content be your compass. And so we are focused on um doing just that, uh, putting out thought leadership articles, creating a beacon of dispersive as a disruptor and yet not a destroyer in the space. And I take that very seriously. At the same time, the other dimension here is word of mouth referrals. So we're very privileged that our customers are almost 100% referenceable, and those that aren't are not because they're in the intelligence space and they don't want anyone to know what they're doing with our technology. But that word of mouth uh can be viral, that can really help us scale from a bottoms-up perspective. And then the third dimension that I'm looking to invest in is creating uh strategic partnerships and OEM style relationships with others in the industry so as to create better-together architectures that ultimately add value for customers as well as partners and better help uh make sense of the various amazing products in the industry, ours included.

Yeah, the word of math is an interesting one because it is very powerful, but how do you foster that, right? Rather than leave it the chance, how do you think about you know enabling that to happen easier?

It's a lot of hard work. And uh there is no silver bullet per se, right? Certainly the traditional uh ARPR approaches uh can only take you so far. My view on that is to really create a birds of a feather style environment where you create forums that facilitate current and future customers to, in a safe environment, communicate with each other about whatever they desire, right? You cannot try to really control that audience or that conversation too much. And uh if you have done your job right as a CEO and you have a product that uh truly has uh got legs, then the truth will prevail. And through that conversation, you wind up creating a solid foundation of industry acceptance and support that you can very quickly build on top of.

Yeah, yeah. Do you remember the first customer you got after uh you went commercial?

I do. I'm not at liberty to say who they are. However, they're a fairly large uh systems integrator who has uh elected to build a business around our capability. And it was a privilege to getting them on board, and uh they are now off onto their second transaction with us and off to the races.

What a great story when you got someone who's building a business around you so early, right?

Absolutely. I think it's interesting. A past mentor once told me that when you're in that knee in the curve, right, where you're crossing the chasm, as they say, oftentimes your partners find you. And uh the power law is self-evident in those conversations.

That's great. Well, let's say I wish you every success and uh luck this year, and nothing you need luck into next year. If someone wants to get hold of you to continue a conversation, what's the best way to do that?

Absolutely, and thank you for that question. So certainly welcome to look at us on our website. We are at www.dispersive.io, or they can follow us on LinkedIn. We put out some great posts there, and that's uh dispersive holdings.

Well, Rajiv, many thanks indeed for me today, and I hope you enjoy the rest of the RSA show. Thank you. You as well. You know, I really enjoyed that conversation with Rajiv. I know I know I say that a lot, but this one was kind of special. We were in sitting in an RSA, as you heard, uh, was kind of busy all around, but he's a very compelling person when he talks so knowledgeably about what he's doing. I had three main takeaways from the chat with him. First of all, it was a reminder to me about the power of DARPA. You know, tangentially, I knew a little bit about DARPA 20 plus years ago when I was at a company that used to bid on projects and get involved in you know top secret stuff about building things for the future of the armed forces and intelligence communities and things like that. You know, there's a lot of cool stuff that they drive that ends up, you know, many years later being out in the wild being used by vendors. So they really are a powerful organization. And then, secondly, you know, even though that's the truth, things that come out of DARPA need to be productized, right? They need to be adapted to be ready for commercial use. You know, the use cases and how they're used in a research environment and sometimes in the field in quite rugged places is not the same as what enterprises and mid-market really need. So these things still need to be adapted and worked on to be ready for the commercial market. And the third takeaway, I thought Raji was very thoughtful of thinking about what SIs and MSSPs really need to build a business around any sort of technology, but you know, especially this one. You know, he had a unique insight into understanding exactly what they're all about, what they're looking for, and making sure the dispersive are ready to deliver on that. So great conversation, I thought, and uh, really wish Reggie even dispersive well for the rest of 2022 and into 2023.