Material Security CEO: How To Find Your Ideal Customer

**Abhishek Agrawal** (0:00)
Over time, when we secured our first few customers, they had that need, they got it, they had the discretionary budget at the time. As things tightened, as we had to go past those kind of early visionaries and start moving more through the adoption cycle, what we learned is that you kind of have to meet the market where it is before you can take it where you want it to go. And I think that is the lesson for founders that are trying to do carrier creation, because it's really hard to convince a market to move to the position you see it going to without bridging their path to get there, right? Like you have to provide some of the things that they need to do today so that you can take them on that path. And I think for us, right out the gate, we had a pretty different thing, and it could supplement stuff that customers already had. But as soon as they had to be very diligent in what to choose, they had to solve a problem they have right now, not just an aspirational problem.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:56)
What if the hardest part of building a company isn't the product, but knowing exactly who it's for? In this episode, a16z general partner, Martin Casado sits down with Abhishek Agrawal, co-founder and CEO of Material Security, to discuss how an ideal customer profile is discovered, how to manage any type of customer, and how frothy markets can distort real signal. Let's get into it.

**Martin Casado** (1:19)
Abhishek.

**Abhishek Agrawal** (1:19)
Martin, thanks for having me.

**Martin Casado** (1:20)
It's great to have you here.
CEO, founder of Material Security. Maybe just to start, we're going to be talking about finding your ICP, maybe a little bit about going through an economic, I would say, investment bubble and then crash, soul searching as a founder, and then everything in between. Maybe a quick overview on Material Security, what it does, and then we'll dig into it.

**Abhishek Agrawal** (1:43)
Material is a cybersecurity company. It's in the growth stage. Basically, what we do is we help companies secure their Cloud Office Suite. So whether that's Google Workspace or Office 365, and we got our start in email security. These days, we do things like account security and file data security as well.

**Martin Casado** (2:00)
How long have we been working together now?

**Abhishek Agrawal** (2:03)
Six, seven years. I think we've met each other seven years, officially maybe finally six years.

**Martin Casado** (2:09)
It was pre-COVID and it was kind of during a bit of a boom time.

**Abhishek Agrawal** (2:12)
Yes.

**Martin Casado** (2:12)
It was interesting actually to kick a lot of this off. And so I think that you've been one of the more thoughtful founders that I work with when it comes to really refining who the ICP is, going through that journey, identifying it and then adjusting business to it. So we're going to talk through that. I think this is actually very useful for a lot of people to learn. But early on, Material Security was one of the darling companies and you had all of these great logos and you had all this great deal velocity. And we have these board meetings like, wow, it's just amazing to have these customers. So maybe an initial question is, did that throw you off the scent a bit? Like this kind of like wealth of riches and...

**Abhishek Agrawal** (2:46)
Yeah, I think it's one of those things where I'm certainly not complaining. That was a great time and it was a great time to start a company in many ways. But I think to this conversation, yeah, absolutely. In retrospect, one of the hardest things about that time was that the market was so frothy that basically you had a cool new idea. It was solving a real problem that was ubiquitous and you kind of didn't hear no. Usually people had a lot of discretionary budget.
They had a lot of budget to experiment with. And so in the early days we were kind of in that SERP era and not trying to take anything away from our early accomplishments, but it was certainly harder to tell kind of like where there's like a real strong need versus where this is just an interesting take. And especially you think about a market like security where you're never done with security. Like you can always justify more security. I like to make this analogy like in your home, yeah, it's not like a front door lock is enough. Then you can have a camera system, then you can have a fence, then you can always do more. So yeah, in retrospect, it was kind of easy at that time to justify another layer.