How Knox turned a blunt SLA into its entire marketing message | Irina Denisenko

**Irina Denisenko** (0:00)
I'm a big believer in just say what you got to say, and say it as clearly as you can. And if your grandma over Thanksgiving dinner can't understand what the heck it is you do, and why is it useful to people, then you got to work on it.

**Brett** (0:17)
Welcome back to another episode of Builders. As always, this show is brought to you by frontlines.io Silicon Valley's leading B2B podcast production studio. If you're bringing technology to market and want to learn from your peers, we have a library of more than 1200 interviews with venture-backed founders and marketers where they talk all things go to market. Of course, if you want to launch your own podcast, we offer podcasts as a service to more than 80 tech startups. The idea there is very simple. You show up and host and we do everything else. Now with all that said, let's jump in today's episode.
Our guest today is Irina Denisenko, CEO of Knox. Irina, welcome to the show.

**Irina Denisenko** (0:55)
Thank you, Brett, for having me.

**Brett** (0:57)
Of course. So FedRAMP in 90 days for 90% less. I want to talk about how you're able to do that.

**Irina Denisenko** (1:03)
Absolutely. So again, thanks for having me. And the way I always describe this to folks is if you think of FedRAMP, which if you haven't heard of FedRAMP, it is the standard that you have to meet as a cloud company to serve the US government. If the US government or the Department of Defense is going to put data into your systems, you need to be secure against this very, very high level of both compliance and security. So long story short, it's very hard to get. There's fewer than 500 companies total that have this in the world. That's it. There are 500 companies. Compare that to 10,000 plus apps that are listed on the AWS Marketplace just as one benchmark. There's obviously many, many more companies than just even that. So how do we do this in 90 days? The way I always describe it is FedRAMP, you could think of it like a very exclusive zip code. To move into that zip code on your own as a SaaS company, it's going to take you a few years, usually three years, three million bucks. Oh, by the way, if you can get the permit to break ground, and that is the federal sponsor. You need a CISO or CIO from within the federal government or within the DOD to underwrite your cybersecurity risk and give you what's called an authorization, a sponsorship. That's today, and then they need to keep doing it every year from there on out. So no wonder it's such a small group that have gotten it. There's so many obstacles, both financial time and ultimately convincing beyond just them buying your software to underwrite your cyber risk. What Knox does in that metaphor of the exclusive zip code is, rather than you building your own house, you are moving into Knox's already standing on Main Street luxury condo high-rise.
My customers move into a floor, and that means that they inherit all of our sponsors. We have 16 and counting sponsors from every agency within the DOD, Army, Air Force, Navy, to DHS, Treasury, VA, Commerce, all the big buyers of technology within the government. What that means is they're able to do this in 90 days because they don't have to worry about rebuilding everything from scratch, getting it reauthorized, reassessed, etc.
They're inheriting all of that, and that's ultimately how we do this in 90 days.

**Brett** (3:16)
When you were looking at this market, one way to look at it would be like, wow, there's a lot more businesses to try to bring into this, but it would also be looking at the fact there's only 500 companies. Were there any pushback from investors at the market maybe too small?

**Irina Denisenko** (3:28)
I think there is always a set of investors who are going to not get it and not understand just how much of an unlock FedRAMP is. Because the way to think about FedRAMP or DISA for those who are really in this space and know that there's all these nuances and so on, which we sit across all of them. But the point is, FedRAMP doesn't just unlock government. By the way, government's nothing to sneeze at. Federal government alone is upwards of 150 billion a year in IT spend. That's a third of all the IT spend that happens across the United States.
It is no small market. But once you achieve FedRAMP, because you're in such a small exclusive club, your ability to compete as a cloud service provider, whether today we just announced Sierra AI, is now FedRAMP High on Knox, a very exciting, Brett Taylor was on CNBC talking about that. So whether you're in the customer experience space and voice AI space, to Armis is FedRAMP with Knox, and they're obviously heavily in the OTC cybersecurity space. What it allows you to do is not just compete for government business, it sets you apart when you're going in front of financial services, healthcare, industrials, and really what I'll just call the Fortune 500 and beyond. It is as a CISO of, let's just pick on JPMorgan for a second for no other reason than they're certainly one of the biggest financial institutions out there. As the CISO of JPMorgan, would you rather put your data into a pick your tool that has to have your assessment and you got to kick the tires to make sure that it's up to spec from a cybersecurity perspective? Or do you want to put your data into an environment that's been pre-diligenced by the US Air Force, by the DHS, by the Treasury, etc., or all of them?