Guy Guzner
Appearances
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
And that's a patent pending technology where we're able to integrate with SaaS applications without the administrator having to create and maintain that integration themselves.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
What we're doing is we're using our browser extension footprint to become not just passive in collecting data, but also active in generating requests into the application backend, reusing the trust that is already created by a user going to that environment.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
And then it enables us to collect data about all the other identities that are being used in that application, the posture of that application, and whether there are any gaps there.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
One mistake that we've done and that there was a big price to pay for it is underestimating the complexity of deployment within an enterprise environment. One of the things that we didn't pay enough attention was the user experience. We said, we need to deploy this browser extension. We needed to authenticate the extension, and that created kind of a pop-up that asked the users for credentials.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
And customers told us, there's no way I'm going to deploy something and that's going to pop up for 30,000 users. You need to go back and fix this. And then we realized that we were naive in our assumptions.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
of how we do the deployment, but that also gives us the opportunity to innovate and come up with another feature that I'm really proud of and for something we call Pathfinder that allows us to learn the identity automatically from signals that we're watching as someone deploys the product. So we don't need to authenticate it immediately.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
And once we collect enough data, then we can do this authentication silently in the background And once we implement it to come back to those customers and do deployments over tens of thousands of users within a day with really no impact or no complaints or no entry calls to the help desk.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
I think that we're in a stage where we came up with the product last year. We went out of stills last July, and so we've built a customer base with a few enterprise deployments. And the future for us is now creating a go-to-market motion.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
One of the things that I've spent the majority of my time in the last few months was building a go-to-market sales team, moving from doing everything by founders, doing a founder-led sales motion, and now getting...
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
more people train them to tell the story train them to demo the product train them to go and scale the company and i think that the future now when i think about the rest of the year next year is how we scale the company to tens or even hundreds of customers because we think there's a really unique offering here that brings a lot of value and now it's let's get this to everyone
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
I think that the people who influenced me the most were my managers in different places. If it was the VP engineering who gave me the in the startup 20 years ago that gave me my first job. position over there. And he was a great technologist and I learned a lot from him. And then later, when I worked at Checkpoint, I spent there 13 years starting as a developer.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
And this is where I had been fortunate to have great managers that were very hands-on, very technical, but also able to manage large-scale development efforts.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
of hundreds and thousands and the ability to both have the focus for details but also not losing sight from the big picture so i think the 13 years they're working under the red door was the vp products gonda was my direct manager you know i i learned so much from them
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
When you look back in retrospect, you can always say you could have done things better. I think that one of the things is taking more time with go-to-market and really thinking through enterprise-grade deployment. Like I told you the story, we went to customers and we had to come back to the drawing board. So spending more time there.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
And I think the other thing, and that's a constant battle every day, is being more focused. And that's really hard because you start something, and you have some idea, and then you test it with the market, and you talk with people, and you hear different ideas in different directions. And it can go in many directions.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
And I think that in the beginning, we tried to win every customer's and started developing in parallel a lot of different features. And what we realized in the end is that we need to choose just a few things and do them really well.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
We realized that and we did that, but I think going back, I would do this just from the beginning and just say some things are off the table and we're never going to touch them.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
First, relax. Being an entrepreneur is hard. There's a lot of pressure, a lot of expectations that you need to manage, but you need to be able also to enjoy that journey. And it's a roller coaster. And it still is for me. And one day you hear something great and the next day something bad happens, but you never know.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
So just relax, enjoy the ride, have the composure and the resilience to take the different turns. And the other thing is that having the idea or building something, that's only part of the journey. And I do have these conversations. I'm doing some investments and I'm working with some entrepreneurs. There's a lot of hard work in getting something out there.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
It's not just enough that you've built something great. You need to invest in how to make it accessible, how to get that to the market, how to make your customers happy. And... It's really hard to do this alone. So you have to have some partners to share that load with you.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
And that's the most important thing, because choosing the right partners could have a material impact or choosing the wrong partners could just end the company. Choose good partners. Take time for doing this. Don't rush it.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
Savvy Security is a SaaS security company focusing on identity. And it's based on the premise that if we think about modern IT, the cloud, then identity is sometimes... That's the gateway to access applications and data because there's no longer... a perimeter out there.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
And what Savvy does, it helps customers find all of their different SaaS identities and then find the gaps where people are misusing identities, weak or compromised credentials, reusing passwords, not using MFA or single sign-on correctly. And then once we expose all those things we call toxic combination, then it's about how We help customers remediate that through automation.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
One of the things that we didn't pay enough attention was the user experience. We said, we need to deploy this browser extension. We needed to authenticate the extension and that created kind of a pop-up that asked the users for credentials and customers told us, there's no way I'm going to deploy something and that's going to pop up for 30,000 users. You need to go back and fix this.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
I've spent my entire career in cybersecurity, so there's a progression here. And later I started working at Check Point. And then 10 years ago, I realized that the threat landscape is evolving and attackers are targeting applications.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
And this is when I started the company in the domain of web isolation called FireGlass, which was protecting the most common used application, which is a web browser. We ended up selling that company to Symantec. And I stayed two years in Symantec building that business, traveling everywhere, meeting with customers.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
And one thing that I realized is that even if we were isolating people and the technology was great, it was never breached, we still didn't prevent breaches entirely from happening because people were still misusing their identities. Savvy was about taking this to the next level and moving from the network to the application, to the user level and to the identities.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
We actually took our time building our MVP. I think that one of the lessons that we learned when you build enterprise software, you don't get that many chances with customers, so you need to be more ready. And we've taken the time to consider different architectures. We went and we visited 10 companies and saw what was the latest and greatest developments.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
And it was a big change because in Fireglass, when I started it in 2014, the cloud, it was there. AWS and Microsoft started with Azure, but actually really developing Cloud Native applications wasn't that easy. We started trying to use containers and dockers and ran into a lot of issues. And 10 years later, it's completely different. The ecosystem has matured.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
We were able to make going to Cloud Native right from the beginning, have a microservices architecture, build our backend on top of Golang, use GraphQL for management, implement a CI-CD pipeline. I think that in every point we needed to make a technology decision, there were new solutions out there that have evolved just in the last few years. And it's just amazing.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
So overall, it took us a little bit over a year to to get to an MVP, but the architecture that we've built, we've built it for scale and resilience, and we hardly had to change that architecture since that first release.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
And then we realized that we were naive in our assumption of how we do the deployment, but that also gives us the opportunity to innovate and come up with another feature that I'm really proud of. My name is Guy Guzner, and I'm a CEO and co-founder at Savvy Security.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
That's a good question because it's hard. I think it's a combination of talking with customers and understanding their pain points, but that doesn't give you everything. Because customers will not necessarily tell you about... what to build or if there's a new way to solve something that they will be looking mostly for kind of the same solutions.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
So it's looking at what customers are dealing with. It's looking at what is developing in terms of technology in the market. the whole ai transition and transformation and a lot of it in the end it's just based on years of experience of building products of understanding trends in cyber security and taking some guesses or gambles and then the thing is to
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
to have some experiments with the product, create some prototype, create some specific features, run them by customers, collect the feedback, have those short loops of deployment and then see what works and take it from there.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
First, I was fortunate enough to start Savvy with a team of three other co-founders that in the end, they are the ones that are doing all the heavy lifting. And these are people that I worked with together, some of them going back. three companies together more than 20 years.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
So it's a lot about knowing who is in the team and their personalities, their strength, their weaknesses, and also a lot of the other people who joined after the company are people who worked in previous companies. So in that sense, we did an experiment. We knew who we were getting.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
But I think that one thing that we learned is when we're building a team is never to be blinded by talent and never compromise fit to the team and personality. No matter how much talent an employee is, if they're toxic to the team and the organization, it's just not worth it.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
And you can get people that maybe don't have enough experience and you can teach them things if they have the right attitude. And that's what's important.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
Scalability was one of our goals. Major pain points in the previous company, I mentioned that we were doing browser isolation and we were running a browser instance, a Chrome instance in the cloud, and that wasn't very scalable. One of the biggest problems that we had in that company was the unit economy.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
when we started this company we really wanted to be scalable right from the beginning because we understand that some decisions that you make early on are very hard to change later so one of the things for example that we did is we created a distributed model where we have our cloud service and we also have but also a component that runs as a browser extension built this in
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
in a way that we can do a lot of the processing and the CPU intensive activities using compute resources that are running on the browser extension that is on a customer machine so we don't need to run them in our cloud. That has been very effective because we were able to add tens and hundreds of thousands of users to our environment and you hardly see an impact.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
Another decision was also based on that, is that we don't want to be in the data path. Because that was also a thing that we did in Fireglass. And once you go in public cloud and you need to pay for inbound bandwidth and everything, AWS, that becomes really expensive.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
So we've built this in a way that we just need to be in the control path of the traffic, just capture metadata, but then transactions and sessions don't really need to go through our product.
Code Story
S10 E6: Guy Guzner, Savvy Security
I'm really proud of the architecture that we've built, taking the best practices from several sources. And then there's a lot of unique IP in our product. One of the things that I'm really excited about is what we call zero touch integration.