Spring has Sprung and Identity is
in Bloom

My Background

My next step was sales engineering in the threat intelligence industry and my first jump into the startup world. I worked my way up to become the VP of sales engineering for alliances and federal. I even had the opportunity to testify in front of Congress about threat information sharing and to explain to my family that “no, it was not because I was in trouble.”

Fun fact, I have exactly zero formal technical education and am entirely self taught on the engineering side. I just loved learning, however that meant that the most natural step would be joining a competitor. However, after becoming so invested in a company, I simply won’t jump to competitors, so I took a step back and thought about what I really wanted to do next.

I had never been a seller before so I decided I wanted to fill that gap on my resume. A few months later, I was the security specialty sales leader at AWS for the Public Sector. I will always be grateful for that opportunity-I don’t know another company that would have given it to me.  Amazon values technical skills in a way that few other companies do.  I loved my job at AWS and was there during Covid, where I was a part of accelerating so many companies’ cloud journeys to ensure continuity of operations in an uncertain time.

One day, a little over a year into my time at AWS, my fiancé (now upgraded to husband) shared an article with me about this crazy cloud security startup who had just raised $100m and exited stealth. I called one of the publicly announced customers, saw the product, and knew immediately I had to work there no matter what the job was. Every customer I met with while at AWS needed this cloud startup’s product. I still remember telling my friends at AWS I was leaving and the looks of genuine concern, given all the uncertainty of the pandemic.

A $32B dollar deal with Google later, and my decision to take the chance at Wiz in hindsight looks like an easy one. But at the time it was quite possibly the scariest period in which to join a startup, due to what was going on in our personal lives. And did I mention we were in the middle of a pandemic?

However, I made the leap and never looked back. I am so proud of the work my team did at Wiz and the recognition that to grow at the pace we planned, the only avenue was through partners. I saw what it takes to build a company from $3m in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) to $350m ARR in less than 4 years. Thankfully, I got married my first year (before I’d met most of my new colleagues), or I would have bankrupted us trying to fit all the Wizards at my wedding.

After a couple years, I was talking to a mentor who asked me what I had left to do at Wiz. The only thing I could think of was ensuring a promotion for one of my employees and it hit me like a brick that it was time to start thinking about what’s next. I am a builder at my core, and my team and I had finished the build. It was time for someone else to scale it.

I spent the last year talking to more than 50 companies in every space from gen ai to data security. Some became clients of mine where I helped build go to market strategies and advise on partnerships. I also worked with venture capital and private equity firms- learning how to value companies. I read books on building businesses and listened to podcasts, thinking that consulting was my future.  I was having so much fun learning and golfing. Then I met Roy Katmor and the identity space. I am so glad he interrupted my semi-retirement.

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Lightning in a Bottle

After more than a decade in the startup community, one of the most important lessons I have learned is that finding the right startup is like catching lightning in a bottle. Great products and teams are table stakes for success. The hard part is finding the right conditions, Ie… the things you don’t control like timing and market conditions, with which it is simply about execution. If you can find those conditions, only then can you disrupt industries and drive real hyper growth. (Wiz is the ultimate case study in what is possible when you combine execution with timing, team, and product.)

I chose to fully commit to Orchid Security because I know we have the right team and the right product. Not because I am an identity expert, but because our customers are and they keep telling us that.

I want to talk a little about the identity market and why I think our place in it is so special. If you talk to people in the VC community, they say that identity is crowded. It reminds me of the cloud security space before Wiz. Back then, people also said cloud security was crowded. But, frankly, I don’t think either market- cloud or identity- was crowded, I think they were and are fragmented. A fragmented market to me occurs when there isn’t consensus on how to solve the problem because technology doesn’t exist that allows the right solution. For Wiz, this was the graph database, for Orchid, it is the fast maturing Large Language Models (LLMs).

There is a reason that the average identity governance and administration project takes 42 months and remains incomplete, despite organizations spending $3 billion on such technologies last year according to Gartner and another $3 dollars on services for every $1 they spend on products. The application estate, compounded by the innovation in IAM tools and the evolving compliance landscape, is simply too complex. And humans simply couldn’t cut through the complexity easily. It requires the massive intelligence/ processing of LLMs to solve this problem.

Of course, it takes two to Tango. Orchid chose me for two reasons (and neither one is my Guantanamo experience). First, because we are a 100% channel company from Day 1. We wanted to send an absolutely clear message to the market and to the teams that we hire / build- our number one focus is delivering game-changing technology and process innovation through the established identity experts who know the customer challenge best, while also scaling our growth via this channel. Second, because I know what to do when you catch lightning in a bottle. Here is the secret, the hardest part is finding it and recognizing it. If you are lucky enough to do so, then the rest of it is in your control.

Final Thoughts

My greatest pride at Wiz wasn’t when people told me I had the best team, it was when people said we were the best team to work with. How we do something has always mattered to me and I hold myself and my team to that standard. We are building something special here. Come be a part of it. Identity is in bloom.