Kunal Agarwal - founder and CEO of Dope Security

Value Drivers

Kunal Agarwal discussed how he and his team makes cyber security a first class experience for his customers.

Show Notes

[02:19] Kunal shared with the audience his interest and passion in hacking, including an incident when he was in high school.

[04:43] Kunal discussed the genesis of Dope Security and meaning behind the company name. In his view, it is critically important to build the most amazing product somebody could ever use. (UX has to be absolutely beautiful, easy to use, easy to click. No user manual required.)

[07:26] The market segmentation of Dope was discussed. It comes down to the go-to-market strategy. The company provides basically the equivalent of parental controls for the employees. It's preventing someone from having wide open access to the Internet.

[08:58] Kunal shared the key differentiation of Dope versus the bigger competitors such as Symantec etc. Dope's clients do not need a data center, instead the defense mechanism is done at the users' devices (e.g. laptops). The model of rerouting Internet traffic is old.

[13:45] Kunal went deeper into the product philosophy at Dope. It is an amazing product that just works for the customers: it does that by eliminating the headaches of the customers.

[15:24] Kunal shared with the audience his fundraising journey. As far as raising goes, he thinks it is a relationships game. Ultimately, you (the founder) needs to be introduced to the right people, and somebody has to do that for you. He touched on couple pivotable introductions made by his network which led to the funding at GV.

[20:37] Dope's team composition and value driving mentality was discussed. Although the company is a startup, the team has the process and mentality to manage tightly from a P&L and budget perspective.

[21:58] Kunal took a deeper dive on the team culture on value creation. Both he (who worked at PE backed companies before) and Amar have similar value-oriented philosophy which is trickled down to the whole team forming a critical part of the team culture.

[31:23] Kunal closed the discussion by sharing the challenges he sees as a startup founder.

Resources:

https://dope.security/

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