How to Win Lighthouse Deals in a New Market - Felix Knoll COO/CRO Cranium

Andrew Monaghan:
I'm always looking for the non conventional path, the path less traveled to starting and growing a cybersecurity company. And that's what we have for this episode today. This company started inside the incubator of one of the big four consulting companies. They target the biggest companies in the world, not mid market and not any logo counts. Their pipeline building was not through SDRs and AES, war dialing and email plastic. And they did this in a market that largely did not exist five years ago. And joining us to explain all this today is Felix Null, the co founder, COO and CRO of Cranium. I'm Andrew Monaghan and this is the Cybersecurity Go to Market podcast where we tackle the question, how can cybersecurity companies grow sales faster? Well, Felix, welcome to the podcast.

Felix Knoll:
Andrew, great to see you. Thanks for having me on.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah, I'm looking forward to this. There's a very unique story here that I think is going to be interesting for the audience, so let's jump right in. So you built or helped build cranium inside KPMG's incubator, which is, let's just say, not the normal startup path for most founders. What made, what was the story about why that happened and then why did it work so well when perhaps other companies or other people going down that path might have avoided it or had it failed for them?

Felix Knoll:
Sure. So first off, we are not accountants who code. So it's definitely kind of a different path. You expect to be inside an incubator, kind of, let's call it the Y combinator of kpmg. This whole thing started, Cranium started as the idea of my co founder and CEO Jonathan Dambrot, 40 or so years ago. So he was actually running third party security at KPMG and in the process of introducing AI machine learning models to all of his large clients, when there was time to push to production, he was like, okay, where's the last, you know, last mile for security testing and checking? They're like, oh, it's all good, it's all AI. Don't worry about it. He's like, what do you mean don't worry about it? Like, no, don't worry about it.

Felix Knoll:
It's AI. And this is prior to 2022 when generative AI really had become a real thing. And that was the moment then he realized, kind of just like network security, application security, cloud security, AI security is a thing. So he actually went to the leadership of the firm and told me about this ID had for a business, said look guys, I really would like to pursue this myself, but if you guys agree to back me and help me, give me the money to actually build and pay the product, I'll stay and make this work. And within three days, which is warp speed for a firm like kpmg, they gave him the money for the mvp, said go hire team and go build this out.

Andrew Monaghan:
Three days, that's nuts.

Felix Knoll:
Three days off off the backs of probably the worst pitch deck you'll ever see. But, but I had known Jonathan for a long time. We worked together my prior life, mantech and he read me in on what at that time was called Project Stealth. And I said look, this is the most amazing idea I've heard in a very long time. How could I help? And so KPMG brought me on board give my startup experience to help run go to market for the studio with the intention of building out all the go to market engines for Cranium and spinning at ultimately which we did in March of 23.

Andrew Monaghan:
Now, the incubator inside KPMG is it just like any other. Are there any constraints or supportive things inside the firm that others wouldn't have?

Felix Knoll:
So I think there's some superpowers, there's also some super walls to get over. So I think the superpower side is when you're working inside a very large professional service firm globally, you have access that you wouldn't normally have. So we were able to pressure test our ideas with hundreds of CISOs and talk to them about the needs we were actually building for around the need to have visibility, security compliance across your AI systems. And with that we also had to build a software company that would stand its own two feet but also meet the obligations of very large professional service firms. We actually probably had, I would say a higher bar to build than most startups coming out of the gate. The other side of it was we had to teach firm about things like independence, we had to learn things about how do you actually help a firm understand how do you spin a business like Cranium out? We're the first ever technology to spin out front from kpmg. So it was a tremendous blessing to be able to work with them. Super helpful for us.

Felix Knoll:
And, and I think it also, when we fully spun the business out and separated, I think it really set us up for success in a way that we had had to meet these obligations of a big firm and we knew the conversations we had had, the product we built was going to stand a scrutiny.

Andrew Monaghan:
When you say meet their obligations, let's go into That a little bit. What does that mean?

Felix Knoll:
Well, typically if you are coming out of a normal incubator, you're working with a cohort of people who are like minded developers. We had technologies working with, we were building our, we were building our capabilities. The difference was we had to take this and we had the scrutiny of KP&G, CISO, their leadership, the advisory team, all these are folks. So we were getting pressure tests because the firm itself was not going to allow us to have conversations with their clients unless in fact we actually had built a product that was built to scale and last. So those are the obligations we had to build towards.

Andrew Monaghan:
Did you feel like you went to talk to customers then a little bit later perhaps than maybe some other startups might have done because of that or there was no difference?

Felix Knoll:
No, we were early. Before we even started building, we already had. So like I said, my co founder and CEO, he'd already had the conversations with those different cyber leaders. He knew there was something there and then that allowed us to go ahead and start building, focusing on what we think was the right kind of design principles there. So we didn't wait. We started working on the design process with our key design partners that became our customers when we spun out.

Andrew Monaghan:
In terms of employees, then as you're attracting talent, did you take talent from inside KPMG into the firm or did you go from outside?

Felix Knoll:
So initially there were four of us that spun out and so we had folks who had worked in kind of third party advisory. We had another person like myself who joined the firm to help build Cranium, who was our technology lead and then myself and then our CEO. Those are the four of us. But after that we attracted tremendous talent from folks like Mitre, Atlas, like tremendous AI security talents. We had a world class AI team we brought in. I think also we track tremendous talent when it comes to our customer success approach. We have folks who have kind of come through that kind of KPMG approach of young, aggressive, excellent communicators, super switched on and highly customer focused. So you feel like you're getting a world class implementation team whenever you deploy Cranium?

Andrew Monaghan:
I'm wondering, Felix, in those early days as you were incubating, were there moments when you were kind of tearing your hair out a little bit about being inside kpmg and was there a moment where you're like, oh, thank goodness we are.

Felix Knoll:
I think there were. Look, it was. That's a good point. I think there were moments when we were basically having to finalize spinning, spinning, you know Cranium out of kpmg. Those were difficult moments because we had to ultimately negotiate what the final structure was going to look like. We had built Cranium independent of any kind of IP from kpmg. So it's fully free and clear, no ownership issues there. But when you're convincing a firm there's value there and having them, they'd already agreed to let it spin out.

Felix Knoll:
But the terms of that, we actually had to work with them and understand how that's actually going to be practicable. So a lot of time was spent. And the real story, Andrew, is we were running money. We had gotten a certain finite amount of money from the studio to kind of build and run. We were running money. So we're kind of getting down to. And I think sometimes when you're kind of running money, it focuses you in a really intentional way. So we were confident the products, we're confident that we had a market to go after, but we had to also spin the business out a certain amount of time.

Felix Knoll:
So we're very fortunate that with about 30 days left, we got a term sheet for our seed two from a fantastic cyber investor, Send Ventures, who really kind of broke things open for us. They've been a fantastic partner since. And so, yeah, sometimes those moments focus you in a way that you hadn't always expected, but it's been for the best.

Andrew Monaghan:
Must be an interesting moment as you're sitting there running out of money. What do we do? Where's the money coming from next? Was there any way to get more money from kpmg or was that you got your bit, now you have to extend on your own?

Felix Knoll:
I think there could have been ways to go that direction, but honestly, we knew the time was now to accelerate and go. So we knew that the Eiffel moment for us was in November of 2022 when ChatGPT hit. Because at that point everyone understood that AI is going to be across every line of business. There's going to be massive pressure to go and build internal systems. And how do you actually look to accelerate safe adoption of AI across your enterprise? That was our whole. Our whole reason to be. So I think we knew if we stayed longer and continued to drive, continue to drive around leverage, resource and form, which were great. We were going to miss an opportunity window.

Felix Knoll:
So we decided, now's the time. We've got the partner, we don't want to ask for more cash. Let's go, let's push. And it worked out well, I would imagine.

Andrew Monaghan:
Felix, with the backing and ecosystem around kpmg, they used to work, they're used to working with large companies right now if you're a standalone, let's say separated startup, you'll take logos as they are, right? Usually more mid market, let's say. So I'm wondering, you know, your approach was the opposite of the conventional startup approach of just getting low level logos. How did that play out in terms of how you thought about go to market in those early days?

Felix Knoll:
So, so you know we judge on success whether it was genius or suicide, but I think it really, we kind of went for the rare air and I think we focused on, we, we were very confident like look, this is people jumping the space quickly. We believe we can secure the revolution, we have the team, the technology to do it. But we're going to go after lighthouse accounts. We want to be able to dominate in financial services and life sciences and telco technology, energy. That would, that's a hard path to your point. Like you know, a lot of times you can go after kind of similar mid market companies, your peers, you know, sell to them. Early days you can get logos, get ARR. We took a different strategy.

Felix Knoll:
We knew we could get to ARR. We had to get to large accounts first and build with them because the market was moving so quickly. If I can solve for the world's largest banks, the world's largest life science companies, I feel I'll understand where the market's going to evolve and we know we can support and scale which I think that we hadn't seen other companies doing in our space.

Andrew Monaghan:
The downside of course is then deals go for longer. There's more scrutiny from legal, from security, from name your compliance group inside these big companies. Did you feel all that like everyone else would or was there some way perhaps that you, you're able to get, get run that or short circuit it.

Felix Knoll:
We, we definitely felt the pressure. I think that in the early days, in 2023 when we spun out, there's going to be a handful of innovators, say you know what, this makes sense. I've got to go back to my board and explain to them what are we doing to secure and cover all this AI innovation And that's going to be creative. But there are a handful of those CSOs who are forward leaning and we thankfully had relations with them. But then you've kind of got, once you've got the early innovators, people jump in the market, you've got to press forward. So we really were intentional on making sure that we could land and expand in our, in our early accounts, but also go after those, those other kind of, you know, big accounts in the hill and get to them. And that took time. So I think that as our go to market evolve, we look to build out our channel, strategy, look to build out kind of how do we not just swing for the fences but be able to bring in kind of the, you know, kind of the smaller tier accounts that can grow with us.

Felix Knoll:
But it took a lot of effort and focus, Andrew, to be able to get to those large accounts first. And I think that sometimes that strategy felt painful. But, but the, the, the outcome of that is we've been very successful and intentional about that approach and I think it's worked well for us because if you can serve those large lighthouse accounts, it signals the market. There's something there. And we've been also another area we focused on was as we're building to build communities. So we're not just selling a platform, we're selling we call an AI Trust Hub. So how can get like minded, you know, bank, banks and insurance companies together, how we get like minded farmers together, Kind of talk about these problems in a way that we knew early days it was important to be able to get these teams and leaders together because for them they wanted to make sure that they were ahead of the curve and not get impacted by other kind of technology. Waves like cloud had caught a lot of people by surprise in terms of security risks and landscapes.

Andrew Monaghan:
There you used the phrase Trust Hub, Felix there. Is that another name for an advisory board or is it a lot more than that?

Felix Knoll:
So Trust hub has like many different terms for us. So we call our AI security and governance platform our Trust Hub. We also have built this community which we call the Trust Hub. And we've done it around some of our largest clients in particular sectors. So around our largest clients in financial services, in life science, at Pharma and also in telco. So we think that it can be a product but it can also be a community as well. And I think often what you find is sometimes internally people call their own AI development teams hubs as well. The term just kind of fit.

Felix Knoll:
We wanted to be all the way to kind of separate and stand out from everyone calling their software product and platform.

Andrew Monaghan:
And if I'm in your Trust hub because I'm from some big financial company, what's my involvement? What are you asking me to do as part of the deal?

Felix Knoll:
So we get together quarterly and so a chance to basically we have one coming up in early Q1 of 2026, where one of those trusted members will host, all their peers will show up. We try to do it in person. There is a virtual option, but the idea is let's talk about issues that matter to them. What are we seeing in terms of what are the regulators asking when someone goes and meets with the Fed and occ for example, what are they talking about the programs are building? What are ways they can agree on common standards definitions around risks that they can understand both internally but also if you have a shared definition of AI risk across your industry, that makes it easier for the industry members to respond. It also makes it easier for your suppliers and third parties to respond as well. So those are the topics we focus on and we also bring in suppliers to those, to those, those different groups. We also bring in speakers in terms of, you know, security speakers, governance speakers. So we try to make it.

Felix Knoll:
It's driven by the community, we just help facilitate and host.

Andrew Monaghan:
So it's a lot more than just an advisory board member who talks to the product management team once in a while. Right. It seems like a whole thing you're building there.

Felix Knoll:
Exactly. We do have an executive advisor board who are fantastic, but that is separate from AI trust hub that we have built across the different industries.

Andrew Monaghan:
For other sales leaders who are, you know, as many are struggling with pipeline right now, has that been a really good source of, of leads and if they bring in their friend leads into the, into the trust, how you get in business, business from that we are.

Felix Knoll:
So that, that's part of the benefit of that I think for other leaders I would say is like you want to own your category, you want to be, you want to be seen as the company that is able to actually properly define and own the problem. If you own the problem, chances are you probably have a good idea what the solution is. So we've been very intentional about that from the get go and I think also building out a fantastic trust admin community. Plus our advisory board has been a great source of leads for us.

Andrew Monaghan:
Let's rewind. Felix, that first order, first real customer, not a friendly friend of a friend kind of thing, but someone that you targeted Fortune 100 or 500 and they got in. Take us back to that moment. What was it like? What can you share to us, Share with us about the type of company, the size of the deal. Help us relive that moment with you.

Felix Knoll:
I remember that moment vividly because the deal closed on my son's birthday. So it was the end of our first fiscal year. So I'll Rewind the tape on this one without naming names. So we approached a very large global bank that we knew was struggling with the ability to provide. Basically what they're concerned is like right now, every software company has become an AI company full stop. And so whether, so no matter the investment you made in your team or technology or tooling or processes, none of it can keep up with the pace. Innovation AI. So if you are leading and responsible for third party programs and supplier management programs across a vast ecosystem, how do you provide evidence of how these different vendors meet your obligations? So we had an idea on how we could approach these different organizations and this one particular global bank in particular went to them with, hey, we have a way to help you solve this.

Felix Knoll:
And so we designed a program for them that was going to allow them to bring in their top vendors across a variety of sizes, from global software companies down to startups, and run them through a process with Cranium that will allow those vendors to be able to share not a questionnaire, not a survey, but an actual way to provide evidence of how they're going to meet the obligations for this, this key global bank. And we, it felt, it felt slow and fast the same time. That makes sense. So we got this deal done in probably about 4 or 5 months. The deal size was 6 figures, it was 100k, wasn't a million, but it was a very good, healthy six figure deal. But what felt really good is the fact there was a sense of shared ownership. So when, the fact is when our partners at this particular bank called us on the day that the DocuSign came over, which is about 10:30 at night. I know this because my wife's holding the cake, the birthday cake for my son, like, and she's, and like I'm on the phone with, with my CEO, with our client.

Felix Knoll:
We're kind of celebrating. She's like, look, I'm like, guys, this is great news but I have to go. My wife's going to divorce, my kids pay me. So it's. But I think when you have that feeling, that sense of shared success, that is the greatest feeling. And so, so we, we know like all deals are earned. But that deal, which has been a tremendous partnership for us, felt very special the last year, fiscal year and they set us up. Jack, we know we're onto something special here.

Andrew Monaghan:
Four to five months is fast though, especially for big companies. Was there any particular reason why it was so fast?

Felix Knoll:
I think the main reason was we were selling to the procurement team, actually own the budget for this and so we, we had, I think we had unique insight having given some of our team. Our founder and CEO had a very strict, probably like the leading authority on third party security. He had an idea on how we're going to solve this problem. He felt like hey, his last coming he sold for going to kpmg, had been one of the leaders and called prevalent, had been one of the leaders in third party security. So we had a good sense of the market and what the next step evolution was. So I think we spoke from position of knowledge here and I think that there was once there was shared vision alignment with the executives bank. We knew it was going to make sense and they pushed as hard as we did to get it done.

Andrew Monaghan:
What's the standard length of a deal right now for you?

Felix Knoll:
I would say probably anywhere from three months to nine months for our large enterprise accounts.

Andrew Monaghan:
Does this sway more towards a 9 or sway more towards a 3?

Felix Knoll:
I'd say it sways more, it depends. So here's the test. Every company now is running you through an AI governance process. So we actually help accelerate that once we're a vendor to those businesses. But oftentimes it takes, and this is part of the conversation we have with cyber and governance and risk leaders is that it's taking you so much more time to be able to actually go through and evaluate use cases even with all the existing processes you have right now. What if you could provide evidence to help you sign off because you've got everybody from compliance to privacy to procurement to technology to legal and cyber risk all involved. How do you accelerate that process? So, so we have found that in certain cases it can go extremely fast. Like three months in some cases can take longer because you've got different stakeholders involved.

Felix Knoll:
I think it's trending for us more towards a six month gate. But we know, but, but on average it's been, I'd say probably about about four to six months for us.

Andrew Monaghan:
And today are you mostly still focused on enterprise or are you, you do mid market enterprise of the whole gamut.

Felix Knoll:
Now we've segmented so now we've got, we, we've gotten very large beach, you know, beachhead accounts in these kind of key industries we'd be able to kind of move, we call it down market into kind of, you know, kind of tier two, tier three financial services. You know, companies are taking their drugs to market, you know, kind of different, different kind of regional telcos and technology companies and nature of our business is because we're providing a capability for, for third party AI Risk management. We can serve both the customer but also their vendors. So their vendors can become clients to Cranium as well. And that motion is incredibly quick. That motion can be in under three.

Andrew Monaghan:
Months when you're going after the bigger accounts. At the start, I'm wondering what that meant for you. As you look at your capacity model for sales, were you able to keep it very lean and small, perhaps longer than maybe another company who might be going after the volume of logos or were you just adding people as the, as the business was coming in?

Felix Knoll:
It was a lot of founder selling, definitely a lot of founder selling. So there are so a couple, couple people we had join early days. But at that point, being a founder, every dollar you spend is important, impactful. Where do you put your dollars? And so our dollar went to our AI team and our AI security team. So we wanted to keep building to be able to meet the needs of these clients. And so the majority of the go to market was focused on. We had a phenomenal marketing team, a phenomenal sales team, but we were to lean to me. So that really was, it was going to be on the backs of the founders first and the product was going to be the star of the show.

Andrew Monaghan:
And what did you learn about trying to hire big enterprise sales reps into quite a small team at that time? It seems like, you know, the, the, the ones that go after the big deals might be, I don't know, the least risk averse in the stack of salespeople. Was that what you found or not?

Felix Knoll:
I did find that. So I think there's, there's a certain mentality that it's definitely an art form to be able to screen that because for people who have tremendous track record who sold to the account you're targeting. But a lot of it is if you're selling a product that has a very defined market, it's much easier to leverage what your typical sales process to go drive, whether you're looking to beat a competitor or letting yourself something new. What the challenge we found was making sure, can someone go in and have the conversation peer to peer with these executives when the conversation changes almost daily, like their version of AI security was evolving rapidly and we needed to make sure that our sales team could have that conversation. We were obviously as founders part of that discussion, but it was things are evolving rapidly and you couldn't get stuck on a pitch. You had to be able to sit down executive and talk about, hey, what, what, what is AI governance and what does AI security mean to you? How do you think about this and then be able to talk about whatever our large clients were doing. I think that was a great way to kind of frame the conversation. Here's what we're seeing in the marketplace.

Felix Knoll:
If you're thinking about what to do here, what the first step is, why don't you come and join Wire Trust up? Why don't you sit with your peers? They're going to, they're going to invite you anyway. You should sit down here. What we're talking about, discussing that kind of opened the conversation for us to be able to set ourselves up. Whether we were a good fit at one point in time or six months later, that's how we made sure we were staying top of mind with different executives. And I think you have to have sales teams that understand how to be part of that because it is not easy to do.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah, I think one of the tough things to do there is the knowledge sharing internally. We assume that, you know, a small team will be all so easy to catch up and talk about what's happening in deals, but often it's not how it happens. Right. I'm wondering if you guys found a way to continually communicate that you would think could be useful for other sales leaders at early stage companies like that.

Felix Knoll:
Well, we leverage things that are basically like Gong. Like we've been big believers in Gong and I think that was really kind of a. I had not used GONG at prior companies, but for the, for the first time here at Cranium, like the sales, sales rep. Selling Gong did a great job on me and we leverage that aggressively. Whether it's like, you know, hey, we have a good call, or, or we have a meth call or a complete belly flop. I think those kind of ways to ramp up our sales team, but also our customer success team or someone, hey, I want our CTO to listen to a call we had. What do you think about that? How would you have answered this? It is a great way. We basically share across the entire company and highlight calls that go well and again, calls that don't go so well.

Felix Knoll:
It helps us ramp up people across everything outside of go to market, including our product team, our engineering team and our science teams.

Andrew Monaghan:
One of the things that I hear from people a lot over the last five years, time to value is important for buyers. Right. I want to make sure that they can, you know, within days, not within months, have, have the product working and get the value from it. Another concept I've heard is time to delight as well, because there's so much vibe coding out there. That is kind of sloppy stuff, right? So can we get our stuff in to give value but also delight as well? I'm wondering how you're thinking about that as a company and approaching your customers to make sure you're in alignment with them.

Felix Knoll:
So from the get go, we want to make sure that Cranium is going to be easy to try, easy to buy, easy to use. And so if you focus on that, we're solving a complicated problem that's multifaceted. But we have to end the first three days, deliver value for our clients like we're selling to initially very large enterprises. And so even though they signed off on our project and these are moving to, these are seven figure deals, it's important to understand we know how to show value in the first 30 days. So part of our sales process, we, we will walk them through what onboarding looks like. We'll walk them through the program that needs to be set up around this. We'll walk them through, they understand what we're gonna be able to deliver in this first three days. And I like that time to delight because if you, if you don't agree on that vision and you're not laser focused on that, then what happens is the sponsors who put a lot of professional capital into your success, they're gonna lose confidence in you.

Felix Knoll:
We have not had that happen because we've been so laser focused on making sure out of the gate they understand what's gonna happen in day 30. And also you can give a roadmap over 18 months or 24 months as well. I think that that approach has worked well for us. So there's a shared vision of success, but also a timeline for results that executives can understand.

Andrew Monaghan:
I feel like, you know, value in 30 days and large enterprises, a bit of a junky moron, right? Their own process has probably held them back a little bit on the whole idea.

Felix Knoll:
Well, I think we typically go through proof of value, so there's a way in understanding of how Cranium works. We'd be able to deploy in their environment and call it a dev environment to go prove what we do. And so we built capabilities, allow us to go quick. So one of our largest global pharma clients, their challenge was they had over 100,000 code repositories that it would have taken them probably six people in 18 months and about a million and a half dollars to do manually. We create a capability we call detect AI that allows to go scan all those repositories at speed and scale, do those in hours and so there's an immediate cost benefit savings right there. So we knew like quickly how to wait to show value. But we deploy into new clients, they're amazed. Like literally in two weeks we could scan across their entire code base that are larger than what I described and we're finding things like models I thought they decommissioned were still active agents that are proliferating they didn't know about.

Felix Knoll:
So I think the ability to provide that initial way to confirm things. And also there's going to be some surprises. I think that early days, if you kind of frame that out the right way, we know that's going to be part of what we're going to show in the first few days. Those aha moments allow them to go collaborate with their peers, say in development who are going to be not initial use of cranium, but they're going to be beneficiaries of what we provide.

Andrew Monaghan:
You said the aha moments there. I think this is an interesting area. How soon in the sales process can you introduce the aha moments or the wow moments to the prospects? So they go, they sit there and go, oh, now I get how this is going to be life changing for me.

Felix Knoll:
It's usually pretty quick and it's pretty binary. Like if they don't get it then you can kind of tell like, you know what, maybe this is not the, we're not the right fit right now. Because some organizations just may not be ready to embrace this because they're on a different stage, their AI journey. And so we kind of talk about, all right, look, if we can't be helpful right now, how can I be helpful? And so we have actually invested in building our own kind of online learning platform. So if you're still like, look, I've got a million problems right now. AI security is one of them. That's fine. We do have for you is a way to go to our learning environment to go train you and your team around what ASCARE actually is at a basic level and then take your top red teamers today and train them how to actually be AI red teamers so we can provide some value and benefit free of charge that they're hopefully going to remember.

Felix Knoll:
Hey, Crane provided this to me. I'll come back around because they had a pretty thoughtful approach to Marketplace. It maybe wasn't the right time then, but maybe now is the right time to reengage because now we've actually budgeted for this. I think it's happening quite a bit and we're now ready to go and actually kick off this project with them.

Andrew Monaghan:
So they stay in the family. Right. Even if they're not a fully fledged paying up member of the family, you know, they're still getting some benefits from it.

Felix Knoll:
I mean there's got to be mashed energy. Like if there's no mashed energy and there's no aha moment, we shouldn't try to create that because then you're basically just kind of. You have this kind of like sugar rush and then when you leave there's no, if there's no excitement, no match energy, then it's not going to be a successful project. There's like it's not going to commit that time and resources to it.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah. As I was thinking about how your journey started and how it evolved, one of the things that goes with working with big clients, big companies is they're very demanding. They need things that are perhaps a bit more unique to them. The way their repositories are distributed, for example, might be different because they're massive or they're a financial institution. How did you approach that where you obviously wanted keep them happy and get business. But you can't be doing custom code projects for every big client you bring in.

Felix Knoll:
No, we make sure we're not building one offs. Like I've seen that story before and that's a road to failure. So I think the way we do it is we bring the team in and the team understands what a roadmap is. So part of when you're going, if you're selling a large deal to a large enterprise, they want to understand, hey, you're effectively buying the team as much as you are buying the technologies. They want to understand, okay, we have competency roadmap these robot the line to all our plan and we built out a vision to secure ML and AI across our enterprise. Is Cranium going to be the right partner? Have you directionally aligned your roadmap and capabilities over the next 24 months? Is that aligned? That, that is very much part of, of doing large deals. So I think that gives them the confidence to work with us. And also we as a leadership team understand that if there's a new requirement that we're seeing persistently across our customer base, we know how to have that conversation around prioritization.

Felix Knoll:
But I think it's, it's we. If you, if you do get in that kind of a call, that doom loop of building just one offs that aren't repeal the marketplace, then it's gonna, you're never gonna have a product that scales and we have thankfully stayed away from that because we have seen consistent commonalities across our customer base. Like a large bank has the same requirement that a large farmer will in most cases. And we can kind of see those points of intersection.

Andrew Monaghan:
I wonder how much your role is, you know, CRO, coo, co founder. That's not always, you know, not that common to have someone on the business side like that as a co founder. I wonder if it gave you a different perspective on those tough conversations. Right. Do we really need this business? Even though we're hit some numbers, you know, are we willing to say no to some things to and potentially risk things? I wanted to give you a different perspective and perhaps just as someone who's just hired a VP of sales, let's.

Felix Knoll:
Say I think you come with your experiences, your scars. I think that helps inform you because you know, you get, you have a lot of different choices to make and decisions to make. I think that one of the things that I was for fortunate to have is that like look, I knew we were talking about Cranium. What was Cranium going to be? I remember asking the question, I said, oh, so I have to understand this. I was asking Jonathan about this, said look, is, is Cranium going to be, is, is the leading edge of the sword going to be the fact that we are coming from kpmg? Is going to be KPMG or someone else building service around this or is it going to be the product? And the answer was the product. And that was the only answer. The product had to be the star of the show. And so and I had experience and the founding team had experience where if, if it's, if you're effectively buying executives as a service or you know, if you're, if you're buying a capability isn't really there, if you're buying something that isn't product focused, then it's not really going to be a successful scalable solution.

Felix Knoll:
And so, and I had seen this from prior experience where I'd seen where you have a client like your early design partner writes such a big check for you that it almost just like you're kind of beholden to them, they're beholden to you. And so you can build this incredible solution, but it's scalable and it's important to be scrappy in the beginning because you want to be nimble enough that if a household name account comes to you and offers you a bag of money and says build this for me, you gotta be able to say no. Because if you that could consume all your resources. So we were fortunate we didn't, we weren't faced with that problem first off. But I think we're fortunate enough to know that if that did come, we were going to go and say look, we want to be able to go have the high ground with these key large vertical markets that we're going to be defining what AI security and governance means for the industry.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah, you said easy to buy. I think some people might conflate the two right. People pleasing, prospect pleasing all the time. Let's make it fiction less rather than fiction full which some people might perceive to be pushing back on product requests. It's a tough thing to really get right.

Felix Knoll:
It is. I think that you. And that's a. And that's in that your pricing models, your how you people can consume and buy you evolves and changes. Like we start out in the beginning, like kind of an all you can eat model and eventually evolve to different life strategies that don't inhibit consumption. But the goal is we never want to sell more software than your client needs. That's a bad place to be. We want to be able to sell the right amount and grow with them as you're successful.

Felix Knoll:
I think we've been intentional about that and our models reflect that.

Andrew Monaghan:
So right at the start you had the ultimate partner. You had kpmg. As, as you know, you're joined at the hip with KPMG. I'm wondering as you go into 2026, Felix, what your partnership model looks like and what you're really trying to, what value you're trying to drive to it, through it and with it.

Felix Knoll:
So we have got a phenomenal channel team and we've been very intentional about finding who are the right partners that could support us but support our vision. So what I think has really worked out well for us, we've got great partners. I'm not allowed to name them, but obviously the largest account resellers in the world. I think we are betting with them that they can take a Cranium offering and build advisory service around that. So we are not a service company, never have been, never will be. But we have built Playbooks on how do you go address third party AI risk leveraging Cranium? How do you build a program around taking phenomenal AI red teamers, support them with the Cranium AI red team capability and build a program that basically kind of turbocharges an AI security team. Like we have those Playbooks and we share those with our partners so they can feel that for every dollar they Sell in Cranium, there's two, three dollars they can sell in advisory services. That's a win, win proposition.

Felix Knoll:
And so we are very excited about driving that into the marketplace in 2026. And I would say right now, another plug for our channel partners. Those investment, we're driving 75%. We want to drive north of that in terms of business that goes to the channel for us.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah, that's such a interesting area about how soon you can build up a channel program and what they expect and whether you, you know, startups ready for or not. It sounds like you've been quite thoughtful about the approach there, looking back, Felix. Well, if someone came to you now as a sales leader at a earlier stage company and they said, look, we're thinking about doing something through some sort of incubator, let's say maybe not KPMGs, what's one piece of advice you would give them that would say, yeah, this is how to actually really make that work for you?

Felix Knoll:
I think the main advice I would say is be flexible. Actually, I heard this saying once, it might have been from Marc Andreessen, like, I have strong convictions, but they're loosely held. I think that's probably the best way to kind of guide yourself through an incubator. You'll get a lot of advice, you'll get a lot of support, but ultimately you have to make the decisions. You have to be able to understand how much experimentation can you tolerate. And you probably have to launch before you feel ready because a little bit of discomfort goes a long way. Because that sense of being hungry, getting out there, if you wait too long, your competitors will pass you. So I would say just be flexible.

Felix Knoll:
But ultimately it's okay to have a little bit of discomfort in the system, especially if you leave the, you know, the warm embrace of a good incubator.

Andrew Monaghan:
Well, on that note, let's wrap things up. Felix, you've been on a interesting journey, you're in an interesting space and I wish you every success for 20, 26 and beyond.

Felix Knoll:
Thank you so much. Great to see you. It.