Sachin Nayyar: Building two cyber giants - Securonix and Saviynt - at once and doing it his own way

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 start-ups are hard.

And of course, you already knew that.

Ross Haladud (0:59)

Alright, you too. And now, let's get started with this week's episode.

Mahendra Ramzinghani (1:07)

What kind of a founder builds two cybersecurity unicorns, both at the same time, and can run both of these companies for a decade as a CEO? Our guest today is Sachin Nayyar, who has built Securonix as well as Saviynt. But valuations is not the most interesting part of his story. Sachin became a millionaire in his 20s when Sun Microsystems acquired his first company.

After a bit of a celebration, he fell into depression.

And years later, he confronted burnout again, this time while running two unicorns at the same time. Securonix, a sim and an analytics company that Sachin co-founded and ran out of Dallas, pioneered UEBA or User and Entity Behavior Analytics. It was acquired by Vista Equity Partners in a deal that created over 50 millionaires across his team. Saviynt is an identity security company headquartered in LA, which was bootstrapped for 7 years and has now crossed over 300 million in ARR, valued at 3 billion. Sachin has made some unconventional choices by building these companies outside Silicon Valley, one in Southern California and another in Texas. What were some of the challenges he encountered while building two companies at the same time? A parallel, not a serial entrepreneur, how did he raise capital outside of the Valley, while bootstrapping a company for 7 years? How did he manage teams, culture, and above all, how did he manage his own recovery from burnout and depression? Let us dive in.

Sid Trivedi (3:06)

Welcome to Inside the Network.

Sachin Nayyar (3:09)

Thank you. It's good to be here, Sid.

Sid Trivedi (3:12)

We're going to talk about a whole bunch of different topics, but let's start by talking about the immigrant founder.

You grew up in India with your whole extended family under one roof before emigrating to the US, and you started out at Ernst & Young. Looking back, what was it like about those early days, and how was the family, the move, and the early EY work? What of that convinced you that cybersecurity was not just a job, but a singular obsession that you wanted to dedicate your entire career to?

Sachin Nayyar (3:48)

I thank you, Sid, again, great to be here. Great place to start, to reminisce a little bit. So yes, I was born in New Delhi, and with a big family, that's quite an experience. I'm very lucky to have experienced that. Uncles, aunts, grandparents under the same roof, unbelievable. So I think that has helped me deal with people from all walks of life and people with different emotions. It's, I think, helped me build the level of EQ that I have. I always pride myself in my EQ.

I always have much more smarter people than me in every room on IQ, but I can connect the dots. That's helped me a lot. Then I came to the US when I was 16, unlike a lot of other folks who come from India for masters. I actually came for bachelors, which has a different impact on you because you're much, much younger. And I did my bachelors here, computer science and business. And through that, I found a job at Ronstad Young, which was the top echelon of companies that came to recruit at my college. And in the UI experience, I mean, I owe a lot to UI.

I was just honored recently to get EY Entrepreneur Award, which was so meaningful for me, because life came a full circle.

And through UI, they introduced me to the world of cybersecurity, to the world of security and compliance. And to your point, you could just see the way where auditors were coming from. So I was a technical auditor, not an auditor auditor, but the technology person helping the auditors. So I'm very uniquely qualified to understand their thought process on what are they really looking for, that they are not adversaries. You know, they are there to help a company and that really helped me. And I was able to also get in front of some of the largest organizations in the world, largest enterprises in the world, which is not easy, and understand problems at scale and how we could really add value to their business. So I'll pause here, but lots of great learnings there, which has really set the right foundation, I believe, for my career.