Business Momentum in FY23 – Clint Sharp, Cribl

This is texturing TV. Hey everyone, welcome back to Textron TV. I'm really happy to have Clint sharp back on Tech strung.

I don't think we've had Clint on and it's been too long ago. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a year. Hey Clint, how are you?

It's good to see you. I'm doing great Allen. It's nice to see you as well.

Thank you. You know what? I said Clint sharp, like we're friends talking.

I didn't even mention the company. It's cripple Clint, of course is the CEO. It's a Founder co-founder of cribble and he's gonna bring us up to date Cripple.

Of course is a great success story burst on the scene. What was it about two three years ago now Clint. I think yeah people's first started really hearing about us.

Then the company shipped its first product and in 2018, but super small then right so, you know that yeah, we're an overnight success story five years in the making. Most of them are know what you know, they're very few. But I do I do remember right around the beginning of covid is when I remember it really thought, you know, really cribble coming hitting my radar screen.

So it's been it's been a minute. So Clinton, I guess I should ask you first. Let's let's get a quick cribble update what's happening?

Well, I think you know we are doing fantastically. Well I and I think that's a that's a testament to a number of different things. First of all, you know, our customers first attitude and and being their advocates in this space to try to I mean tough times ahead.

Right? I mean that's what everybody in the news is talking about them. There's a real flight to value in the market today, which is we've got to do more with less and if you look at kind of the fundamental problem that we solve which is this tension between data growth and budget your data is growing due to no fault of your own.

You just you're hiring more people, you know systems or outputting more data Trends in the industry like zero trust and remote work all these things are driving significantly greater volumes of it and security data and budgets are not going up. And in fact what we're hearing from our customers is just a major major squeeze. And so I think you know, we are in a really really good spot in terms of the value that we provide when people are looking to do more with last and so, you know, that's that's resulted in a really really phenomenal year.

We've had triple Your growth we've doubled our customer base. We raise 150 million dollars last May those our second round and 12 months. We had a number of you know, great Awards and recognition this year that we're super proud of like the B of A Tech Innovation Summit and the CNBC top stars for the Enterprise.

So, you know, we've been we've just been on a terror we can talk about the the pro we release multiple new products last year, which I think is which is super super exciting and you know, I think those that kind of growth is really an output of of what we're doing for customers and and helping them find Value in in a really busy Market. Yep, you know what? Let's start fundamentally look.

If you are about digital transformation in the world certainly seems brought into the whole digital transformation and all of its many flavors and colors and shapes. Digital transformation. I think a byproduct of digital transformation is data.

Right because when you do things digitally you generate data. And and now the question is what are you going to do with that data? Do you throw it away?

Well, that's not very smart or useful, right? You got to figure out how to use how to store that data so that you can make use of it and I think You know at it's very simple core if I was explaining this through my mother-in-law or someone. That's how I would explain what you know cripples real.

I mean, what's the reason for this fantastic success data's exploding and we got to figure out ways of storing it and managing it economically as possible. Otherwise, it'll eat up the entire it budget, right and and in some cases it has even but on top of that, you know, we do have these other Mega Trends some of the covid related some of it economic macroeconomic factors. that are really Kind of creating that perfect storm if you will of hey, it is all about the data, but let's be smart about how we do it guys or gals.

Well, that's a lot of what I say Alan is you know, what got you to 2023 is not gonna get you to 2033. I am when you look at the marketplace, I think there's no I think you're exactly right. There's a number of Trends which is I you know, I think you and I are both old enough to remember traveling before cell phones and smartphones.

Right? You're you want to make a change to your airline ticket. You called up to the person you waited in line.

Hopefully you had some status so that you could you know, cut. Yeah to the front of the phone line and actually get the change done that you need it but next now all these interactions are all happening digitally same thing with your bank. I can't remember the last time I went into it into a bank branch, right like everything I do is is completely online.

And so that really is leading to the explosion of data and for our customers the data that they're looking at. Is not the human data like I did this thing and so the transaction happened that that's one scale of data, but then for every one of those transactions we do with that application there is orders of magnitude more data being emitted about using the application itself. So did I have a good experience the clincharp have a good experience with you know, X Airlines app or why Banks app and that's really what observability data is.

And then on top of that we also need to secure all these applications. So I need to understand whether Clint is actually Clint or somebody else pretending to be cleant and be able to look in detail and investigate all of that. So all that's leading to a massive explosion of data and really most of that data is destined today for systems that were built really in a data center era.

And so we think that there is a massive opportunity to build natively for the cloud and that's what we're doing now with purple search is really exploring. How can we process a lot more data cheaply and so stream kind of Started by hey, how can we you know kind of tune up the data that's going to these more expensive destinations and then help you put a full Fidelity copy of that data someplace you can afford and in general that's object storage, right? That's the kind of bigger megatrend of the cloud.

Is that really S3? And Azure blob store Etc are drawing people to the cloud for really really cheap storage. But then for it and Security Professionals, the problem that we saw was well, then you got to move that data out of cheap storage and to some other solution in order to analyze that what if you could just do that right where it's at.

What if you could just analyze that data cheaply where where it sits and that's really what I mean by 2023 won't get you to 2033 is that we're really trying to rethink from the ground up using Cloud native Technologies the ability to give customers access to massively greater quantities of data. a great but it I think that's what it's going to take and you know. I couldn't I'd be remiss if we didn't mention like chat GPT and and Ai and these things.

Where do you think that is playing in with you? Yes, I think the AIS are really really interesting topic and and we we don't yet know kind of where large language models. You know, it's a fast moving area.

So we're keeping a very very close eye on it. What areas that seem obvious are. Hey, how do I ask questions of my data?

So, you know, how do I you know articulate myself in natural language? That's that's not a simple problem to solve because no, you know as an example, we add a lot of context to our natural language. So you may have an application, you know, call it the you know, the food bar application that's inside of your Enterprise and only exists inside of that Enterprise.

And so you go ask your data. Hey show me all the relevant security logs for you know, user Allen and the food bar application. Well, the llm has to know what Fubar is and foobar may only exist very specifically in your organization.

So I think they'll be a lot of work to try to be able to handle the context that is you know, organization relevant context. I think where we're not going to see much this year, but I may be wrong and I'll go ahead and go on the record for it is AI is still not going to be good at solving unknown unknowns and what we mean by that is that If I if it hasn't seen the problem before so if you're trying to say hey AI show me this all the outages that that we have except for the outages never existed before. Is really hard for machines to learn without trained data set saying like hey, here's a problem.

Here's how I had the machine go find another problem. And so I think still we will we will continue to see kind of disappointing, you know, noisy results hard to explain results out of sort of anomaly detection sort of areas of AI but I think we will see a great advance in the ability to ask questions of things like documentation and question and answer sites and Community forums. I think it's gonna make everybody way more productive.

Where are you seeing this like GitHub copilot, you know developers who are sitting with an AI next to them riding code are significantly times more productive. And so I see really the admin of AI is being a huge Advanced to human productivity and kind of like giving them more Tools in which to go be, you know better at their jobs and kind of take away the toil of writing repeated code and things that aren't providing a lot of value. Agreed agree.

You know what? I I've actually seen Clinton people advertising as as consultants to help you write better prompts for you for your AI. So it's like all cottage industry already.

You can only imagine where it goes but you know, you mentioned security and you know, fantastic momentum and and 2022. A year for cribble, but as I look at 2023 and I look as you say to 2033 never in my career, and I've got 20 plus years in cyber almost 30 in Tech. Never have I seen security really at the Forefront like this in every I mean, we've always said security is important, but generally our arms didn't reach our pockets.

Right when he came to actually doing it. Let's change out security truly is. Like sort of a top priority, you know it at RSA this year we put on our deaf SEC Ops event every year and RSA with in partnership with them at Moscone on Monday of RSA week and this year the theme is devops is devsecops.

Right, you can't do devops without the SEC. And it sounds like it's the same thing you guys are seeing. Yes, we're so we're seeing the absolute.

First of all, absolutely. I think security has to be integrated at the core of whatever Enterprise is doing anything. We're seeing several.

We're seeing the government way in here there have been multiple executive orders out of the Biden Administration related to to government agencies, but that's starting to extend now into people who are doing business with the government and I I think the we are waking up to just how much these types of breaches Etc are costing. Organizations and so those costs are becoming very very real. I think you know as the way cribbles fits in is the need that we're seeing from security organizations is for access to all the High Fidelity data that they need in order to truly understand their environment and that data is massive.

So truly if there's if something goes wrong and I think the hard part about this problem is that the value of this data is basically nothing until it isn't and so I don't use it. Like I'm not it's not helping me until I need to go back in time and I need to go back by the way a lot of times many more months than than I would have planned for so, you know, I find out, you know, nine months 15 months 18 months after you know, the the perimeter has been breached and there are malicious actors working inside my my organization. Okay.

What did they do? Well answering that question requires a lot of High Fidelity data, I need data from their in-point detection and and their actual the end points itself where they probably got in. I need data from the applications that they've accessed.

I need data from the systems that they've accessed and all the inter-system communications. So did they come from this system and make their way to this other system all of this requires very very high fidelity data at massive cost and a lot of organizations today really only have the capability of storing 60 90 days of this type of data and that's that's a real big tension that we're seeing in the marketplace and one of the things that were that we're particularly trying to help people on is make sure that you know, if in the event, you know the worst thing happens and they have to go start looking through all this that they haven't actually like aged out the data already and delete it the data already because the date is too expensive to store. Yeah a great and that that's kind of the ultimate kick in the butt.

Right I had it but it was so expensive and I decided I was just going to keep x amount of months. And of course the first thing I need is X Plus 1, right and I and I don't have it. Yeah, and then what and then what do you tell and then there's a lot more kind of pressure coming from Boards of directors auditing firms Etc to push on having these capabilities.

And so I think we're definitely seeing you know, a rise in power and the security organization internally and and their the spending going up. You can see the market growing rapidly. There's also a number of really exciting new categories and security a lot of innovation from startups.

I'm excited for RSA this year to you know, go see you kind of what's new out there on the market but as I've been introduced recently to several, you know, kind of security related startups and Silicon Valley, I'm seeing a lot of innovation around, you know, how to pretend prevent against fishing attempts how to know when those things have happened how to detect better, you know, when when you know, security incidents have happened. I think you know Cloud security posture stuff is growing very quickly security is a very happening in space right now, and I think it's it's being driven a lot by by you know fears of what's a lot of organizations and nobody wants to be next. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean you mentioned the Biden Administration and the most recent cyber security. Orders that came out but there's also a it's actually believe it or not a bipartisan. Bill that's already through committee before Congress.

Kind of not our gdpr, but the next level if you will have data privacy, which look if they pass that. I know even though it's just a us. It's it's as good as a worldwide one as gdpr is because everyone, you know, it's that intertwined and that's gonna that's gonna drive a whole new level of of compliance and security.

So I agree with you it is I'm looking forward to it as well and RSA. I I questioned look in in tough Economic Times people innovate more they have to but what is a Necessities the mother of invention right? And so I I think this may be one of those years where we see a lot of innovation how many of them will stick.

I wish I knew I wouldn't be doing this. But well we shall see that's for sure. I think one of the things that's almost certain Allen.

Is that the You know with with a Titan funding climate, I think part of the problem over the last three to five years especially in Silicon Valley and startup plan is that raising money had had gotten a lot easier and so a lot of ideas which were more dubious god-funded and so it's really hard to separate signal from noise when there's you know hundreds of startups coming after you with you know, like what might be a good good okay ish idea, but but you know that but they have plenty of money and so they can kind of keep okay if ideas running for a really long and so I think a Titan environment means that only the best Will Survive and I think as a person who's trying to figure out hey, what what's interesting here the Market's definitely gonna help us sift out a lot better than it has to last several years. That's for sure. com.

This was Child's Play. That was calm you'd go with a three power slot three PowerPoint sliding you get funded now you needed at least five. Anyway.

Hey Clint. It's been great catching up with you on here. I look forward to maybe seeing you at RSA.

Keep up the great work at crippled. Don't don't be away a year. You know, we'll get back soon.

Probably will all right. Clint sharp CEO of cribble here. Oh, you know what?

com. Right? What you will find us that icon here on textrug TV.

We're gonna take a break. We'll be right back with our next guest.