Christina Cacioppo - Building an Enduring Software Company in the Age of AI

Patrick O'Shaughnessy (0:00)

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So, Christine, I've been so excited to do this with you. I think it's been five years since we last did it. A lot has happened a lifetime ago. You've been very successful in the intervening five years, so I'm excited to catch up. Can you give us like the one minute history of Vanta? I know we've done this before, but just to level set for people. When you started it, why, what it did then, how it's evolved, you know, those now. Quick overview.

Christina Cacioppo (2:07)

Started Vanta about eight years ago. It feels about 8,000. Yeah, exactly. You're like in 17 centuries ago with the premise of, can we help companies build an interest and build trust is like start security programs and compliance programs or mature them, and then go get credit for their customer through audits like a SOC 2 or ISO 2700 and HIPAA, etc. Security questionnaires, trust centers. But basically this idea of can we build a security company by helping companies implement security because it's what their customer is asking for.

So we were initially known for SOC 2 billboard. We do have a billboard on the 101 that we were mostly known for making billboards, I joke. But it started very compliance, very audit centric. The idea was always, hey, that's just one way to get a company started on this.

Since then, we've gone into different areas of security. We've gone into different ways of earning trust with your customers. Today, we're about 16,000 customers global with about five products.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy (3:08)

How did you win? This was a new category when you started, and I'm a ride to go through it. My old business gets SOC 2 compliant and certified in order to win certain accounts or whatever. So it became an important thing in the software era. There were many companies, I could probably name a handful that were trying to do what you're trying to do.

Christina Cacioppo (3:25)

Yes.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy (3:25)

You've emerged as the only major winner. What would you attribute it to over the last, since we last talked, how did you win?

Christina Cacioppo (3:31)

Execution.

Software, the blessing and the curse, and this is more true now even than it was five years ago. You're really only as good as the last thing you shipped. You can be first and you can start it, and it doesn't really matter. It's more true now because it's like someone can vibe code your thing in a weekend. So you've just got to constantly be shipping new products, new features that make the experience better for customers running on that differentiation. There's some feature level. I think the other thing we really invested in when it got competitive that was very good was integrations, pulling in data from other tools. So now you can connect Vanta to one of 400 tools.

We pull a ton of data out of those tools. And that's what powers the automation, the agent, the AI, all of that. We call it our Trust Graph. It's really just like a security data lake. And that is bigger, broader than any other provider, including some of the security providers because we touch areas they don't. And I think, in retrospect, that data foundation has let us build new things faster, software and agent, that piece. And then I think on the go-to-market side, it was like just keep pushing.