Teen Hacker to Founder, Building an Open Source Security Company | Bobby DeSimone, CEO of Pomerium
The Peel with Turner Novak
Turner Novak
4.6 • 11 Ratings
🗓️ 12 September 2024
⏱️ 75 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Bobby DeSimone is the Founder and CEO of Pomerium, the best way to authenticate, authorize, monitor, and secure user access to any application without a VPN.
Bobby explains why access control is so important, how it led to the biggest corporate hack ever, how its related to the day CrowdStrike took down the global economy, and how AI will change security.
Pomerium has a unique open source approach, and Bobby takes us inside the early days of building the product, how he got the first customers, lessons learning enterprise sales as a technical founder, and inside his funding rounds, including a recent Series A led by Eric Vishria at Benchmark.
Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(02:02) Access Control: a sneaky large problem
(07:22) How an unsecure air conditioner led to the biggest credit card breach in history
(10:23) Google’s internal security software inspiring Pomerium
(16:41) Making his first money online selling a WoW bot
(19:24) How CrowdStrike took down the global economy in July, 2024
(22:29) Deep dive on access control and security
(29:39) How access controls impacted Google vs Uber’s self-driving lawsuit
(30:52) Why Zero Trust security is marketing bullshit
(32:09) Advice for building access control
(34:39) How open source built early trust with customers
(41:39) Missing a 7-figure deal because he didn’t use LinkedIn
(44:52) Everything he’s learned about sales as a technical founder
(50:06) Inside Pomerium’s Series A
(51:41) Advice on evaluating potential investors
(56:06) How AI will change security
(01:01:15) Getting in trouble at the first Pomerium board meeting
(01:02:15) How to hire good engineers
(01:04:00) When to scale back IC work as a founder
(01:06:56) Favorite new AI tools
(01:11:09) Why Meta’s open sourcing its AI models
(01:12:32) Life lessons from Charlie Munger
Referenced
Check out Pomerium: https://www.pomerium.com/
Crowdstrike outage post-mortem: https://www.crowdstrike.com/falcon-content-update-remediation-and-guidance-hub/
Pomerium on GitHub: https://github.com/pomerium/pomerium
Follow Bobby
Twitter: https://x.com/bdd_io
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobby-desimone/
Follow Turner
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak
Newsletter: https://www.thespl.it/
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | A lot of these internal tools, you're just trying to build as quickly as possible. |
| 0:05.5 | Dashboards, admin panels, support tools. |
| 0:09.0 | There's this whole set of stuff that's under the iceberg that we kind of don't admit is there. |
| 0:16.0 | Welcome to the Peel. |
| 0:17.0 | I'm your host, Turner Novak, founder of Banana Capital. |
| 0:20.0 | Excited for this conversation with Bobby Desimone, founder and CEO of Pamirium. |
| 0:24.6 | For VPNs and tunnels, there is some authentication, but it's happening at the start of your connection. |
| 0:30.6 | After that, it's almost completely blind. |
| 0:33.6 | We talk all things access control, security, and the biggest credit card breach in history. |
| 0:38.3 | A hacker was able to get on the internal network via the HVacker air conditioning unit. |
| 0:45.3 | We go inside Pimerium's open source approach, plus how Bobby missed an early seven-figure deal because he didn't have a LinkedIn profile. |
| 0:52.3 | We had a huge open source user, you know, Fortune 50 company, powering like their business. |
| 0:58.7 | They just said, hey, yeah, we wanted to pay you for this, but like we just couldn't get in contact with you. |
| 1:03.2 | Bobby shares everything he's learned about sales as a technical founder and takes us inside his recent |
| 1:08.0 | series A, led by Eric Vistria, a benchmark. You can feel a little bit like funds or almost like little mini index funds. |
| 1:16.6 | They're almost making like a sector bed, and I definitely didn't want that. |
| 1:19.6 | Bobby also shares how he thinks advances in AI will impact the future of security. |
| 1:24.6 | Most people don't understand the scale of the problem they have. |
| 1:28.6 | AI and machine learning can help bring it right to the forefront and have the solution |
| 1:33.7 | kind of auto-adoptable. |
| 1:35.3 | Before we jump in, I published new episodes exploring the world's greatest startup stories |
| 1:39.4 | every week across all your favorite platforms. |
... |
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