Rob Lee: Building Dragos into a multi-billion-dollar mission-driven cybersecurity company

**Sid Trivedi** (0:07)
Welcome to Inside the Network. I'm Sid Trivedi.

**Ross Haladud** (0:11)
I am Ross Haladud.

**Mahendra Ramzinghani** (0:12)
And I am Mahendra Ramzinghani. We have spent decades building, investing and researching cyber security companies.

**Sid Trivedi** (0:22)
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 Haladud** (0:33)
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 Ramzinghani** (0:44)
And yes, we will also be talking about epic failures.

**Sid Trivedi** (0:48)
But Mahendra, we're here to make the founder journey easier.

**Mahendra Ramzinghani** (0:52)
That is correct, Sid. But we cannot make it too much easier, because startups are hard.
And of course, you already knew that.

**Ross Haladud** (0:59)
All right, you too. And now, let's get started with this week's episode.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:07)
Every morning, you flip a switch, the lights come on.
Turn on your kitchen faucet and water flows, gas, pipelines.
Invisible to most of us is a technology layer that controls utilities and such critical systems.
Operational technology, or OT, the systems that control the physical world. These are not routers and servers, but TLCs, programmable logic controllers, that run on protocols such as Modbus, not TCPIP. When these systems were designed, they were not connected to the Internet, and hence not considered to be vulnerable targets. Access control, authentication, encryption, all of these were luxuries in this domain. That has changed. Today, utility grids are immanently hackable. Ukraine, Venezuela, Stuxnet, Colonial Pipeline, the list goes on. The big difference is this.
Hack an email server, you lose data. But if you hack an operational technology system, it impacts people's lives. IT security may be a business problem, but OT security is a public safety problem. It is a nation-state problem. This is the new frontier of warfare, and one company is leading the charge in building and protecting critical infrastructure. Dragos. When founder Rob Lee saw this opportunity a decade ago, the market did not have a name for this category. He took over 100 rejections from the best VCs in Silicon Valley. No one thought this was a real problem, but Rob went on to raise over $400 million anyway, built a unicorn, and kept growing steadily. There is much more in this episode than just building a company, raising capital, or making money. It is a story about a founder who brings a sense of purpose, duty, and most importantly, a sense of service. A founder who is not chasing vanity metrics, nor exits, but wants Dragos to keep building for the next 100 years. Because the infrastructure Dragos protects is not going anywhere, and neither are the hackers trying to take it down.

**Sid Trivedi** (3:32)
Welcome Rob to Inside the Network.

**Rob Lee** (3:35)
Thanks. Thanks for having me.

**Sid Trivedi** (3:36)
We're going to talk about a whole bunch of different things today, but we want to start from the very beginning, from your time at the Academy, and then moving to the Agency. Yeah, we're going to go very early first.

**Rob Lee** (3:47)
This is one of those hot ones interviews or something. Okay. All right.

**Sid Trivedi** (3:50)
Yeah. You just weren't prepared. That was the problem.

**Rob Lee** (3:54)
This is what happens when I don't read the questions.

**Sid Trivedi** (3:59)
You graduated from the US Air Force Academy, and you joined the Air Force as a cyber warfare operations officer, and you were also tasked with the NSA there.
What got you excited about cyber security? I mean, it's not an obvious area within the Air Force. And what did you learn in that time?

**Rob Lee** (4:19)
You're just starting off demotivational, the whole thing.
It's basically I didn't want to be a pilot. That's the story. It wasn't like I was super into cyber and tech, and I was a computer science guy. No, I studied African studies, and I spent my time doing humanitarian work and building control systems in places like Cameroon and getting excited about what power and water does. And my parents were 25-year CMAS starters. They were enlisted in the Air Force 25 years, and I didn't like pilots. And I've met nice pilots since then. But growing up, to see some 23-year, 24-year-old talking down to your father, you're like, all right, dude, I'm good without these people. And it sent me to South Korea to fly in a two-seater F-16 to show me. They're like, see? Yeah, yeah, okay. I was like, what? They're like, it's great, isn't it? I was like, yeah, no, I like planes. I don't like pilots.