Kyle Hanslovan: Building Huntress into a $3B+ unicorn by securing the 99%

**Sid Trivedi** (0:05)
Welcome to Inside the Network. I'm Sid Trivedi.

**Ross Khalidud** (0:09)
I'm Ross Khalidud.

**Mahendra Ram Singhani** (0:10)
And I am Mahendra Ram Singhani. We have spent decades building, investing, and researching cybersecurity companies.

**Sid Trivedi** (0:19)
On this podcast, we invite you to join us Inside the Network, where we bring the best founders, operators, and investors building the future of cyber.

**Ross Khalidud** (0:31)
We will talk about the hard parts of the founder journey. Launching companies, getting to product market fit, raising capital, and scaling to an exit.

**Mahendra Ram Singhani** (0:42)
And yes, we will also be talking about epic failures.

**Sid Trivedi** (0:46)
But Mahendra, we're here to make the founder journey easier.

**Mahendra Ram Singhani** (0:50)
That is correct, Sid. But we cannot make it too much easier, because startups are hard.
And of course, you already knew that.

**Ross Khalidud** (0:57)
All right, you too. And now, let's get started with this week's episode.

**Mahendra Ram Singhani** (1:05)
Our guest today is Kyle Hanslovan, co-founder and CEO of Huntress Labs.
Kyle grew up in his own words as pretty darn broke. No money for games meant hacking the DRM to play them. No money for Internet meant cracking AOL, the Internet Service Provider, to stay on it. That's crapiness was part necessity, became an obsession, and sent him into the US. Air Force at 17, where he spent years running classified offensive cyber operations at the NSA, only known as No Such Agency. When he left the NSA, he saw something most of the industry was ignoring. The hackers were not.
Hackers weren't just going after governments and Fortune 500 companies. They were going after the small businesses, the law firms, the dental offices, the mom-and-pop shops.
Businesses like his mother's salon.
The ones with no security teams, no fancy budgets, and no one looking out for them. So Kyle and his co-founders built Huntress. VCs said no. 30 times, the market is too small. The deal sizes are too small. The churn is too high. But Kyle and his co-founders kept going anyway. Customers were paying, and that was all the proof they needed. 10 years later, Huntress is approaching $500 million in revenues. It has 250,000 customers. A unicorn valuation. And the best part, the team has not moved up market once. The average contract values are still $20,000.
How did Kyle, a pretty darn broke kid, pull this off? Welcome to Inside the Network.

**Sid Trivedi** (3:04)
Hey, Kyle, welcome to Inside the Network.

**Kyle Hanslovan** (3:07)
What's going on, Sid?

**Sid Trivedi** (3:09)
Well, we're going to talk about a whole bunch of different things, and we'll get to Huntress. But before we do that, we wanted to chat about your early life and your military service.
Let's start right from the beginning. You grew up, in your own words, pretty darn broke. And we've heard stories that you would pirate your own first video games, you were hacking into AOL chat rooms. Tell us a little bit about this early life.

**Kyle Hanslovan** (3:34)
All right, so you've clearly done some of your work. I appreciate that as a fellow Intel guy. Yeah, I did. Pretty darn broke is probably the literal exact words I used. And with that, you don't have access to as many things. So you can imagine abusing those free, I think they were AOL floppies in the early days.
There wasn't a ton of validation of who you actually were till they caught on later. I think by the time AOL rolled the free CDs, where your time on the internet was measured in minutes, to get really creative. And so to be very frank, my earliest days and my only access to video games was, could I pull apart a video game? Could I figure out how it's DRM, the digital rights management software work? And how could I generate a valid CD key that would allow me to play these offline games? So there was a lot of reverse engineering that quickly teed me up on that hard pivot into real offensive cyber when I joined the service at 17 So I actually give a lot of credit to adversity, kind of motivated a lot of my skills. Thankfully, they were never anything too shady and really teed me up to get into that reverse engineering malware thinking like an ethical hacker.

**Sid Trivedi** (4:43)
Did you catch up with and did you meet any interesting folks during those early days? I mean, we've heard about several hacking groups that have been pretty important later on in life. Doug Song in the past has talked a little bit about some of the things he did and the folks he met as a result.