Fly-Direct Architecture – Kunal Agarwal, Dope Security

This is Textron TV. Hey everyone, welcome to another text drunk TV segment. I got a new company to introduce you to they just came out of stuff the name of the companies dope security and I'm here with one of their co-founders Canal Argo wall.

Hey Canal, welcome to text on TV. Hey, how are you? Thanks for having me.

It's a pleasure to have you on man. Hey, we're always happy to hear about new security companies and meet new people in the community. Before we jump into the story on dope security.

Let's hear a little bit about you if it's okay. Yeah, definitely. So I've been into cyber security my whole life right since I was probably eight nine years old didn't ton of hacking from a very young age.

And as I kind of grew up you kind of get out of the black hat side of things and kind of move to the more. Let's just say better side of things and I joined semantics. So I was at semantic for almost a decade between that and forcepoint so or web sense a lot of people know it as web sense and from those two companies.

I've learned pretty much a lot around how customers use cyber security technology is to how we actually develop them how we should be developing them and then finally founded dope security last year. Absolutely, very cool. So did you found it yourself?

You have co-founders. What's the deal? Yeah, so I found it at myself about May.

Well, it was May 4th of last year. So that was kind of the whole Star Wars omage May the force be with you. May the fourth be with you kind of thing and but a big part of leaving these bigger companies was around trying to do it in a different way with a team and the team of people that we brought on or I brought on was everyone that I work with from the other organizations that were super passionate super driven and they liked making really cool technology that they were passionate about and so a lot of the people in in the company, they're not really need a cyber security.

They've all been into this industry for a really really long time. Absolutely. All right.

So let's jump into the company you guys recently emerged from stealth announcing initial funding. And you know, let's get that out of the way first. Why don't we talk about the funding?

Yeah, so I mean in the funding was kind of a byproduct of things that happened about a year and I've almost a year over a year ago now right but for me, the the idea was always around building the product. Right and the funding is a side step of that and we raised the money from a company called bold start VC call bold start. They were one of like the more prolific VCS that went in and just love the idea because of how passionate we were about building it and that's what the name comes from is dope security dope means like very cool and I'm from the Bay Area.

So whenever we say dope it means that hey, this is awesome and security obviously because of cyber security and so you put the two together and dope security comes out. Okay. What's So Dope of God well, I mean you can kind of see it in the visual on the back but the the ux is one of the biggest parts of the product right like just starting at experience was what we did so with myself when we first started was myself and Erica who's our head of design and both of us were kind of drawing out building out the flows of what this product should look like and all the different experience flows came and stem from how do we make the user experience for an admin as good as possible and I've seen this at semantics seen this at Forest Point it's like you come in and then the first thing you get to the product like, oh, wait, hang on you can't use a product yet.

You have to have a meeting first you have to have a customer meeting and then you have a second meeting and a third meeting and then four weeks later you finally get access to a pre-production version of the product and that's just it's not the way the world should work anymore. So with us it's in one click instant trial. So you just log in using your Office 365 or Google account and you're in and you're able to start using the product instantaneously and that's the difference.

We make this look good feel good and the customer experience first class? Absolutely. Now look I've been in security.

I'm not going to say my whole life because I got a really long life. But you know, I've been in security a long time, right and Security's matured and changed and and Evolved over the 30-plus years. I'm doing this, right?

specs and facets of security today what exactly does dope security kind of focus in on here right, so Most of the different areas like one of the biggest ones that are core security of course is like I am and things like that but there's also endpoint security like an EDR Epp kind of vendor and one of the other ones is like a data loss prevention and things like that, right? So a lot of dealers casbe type stuff, but then if you kind of cross over into this world of what today they call SSE or sassy is really web security network security and that's what we work on is I want to build a Secure web Gateway we call it which is a very familiar term to probably a lot of you out. There is an ability to restrict or control what you have access to on your device.

com is accessible in Google or in Office 365. So we've gone the full spectrum of web control Cloud application control and then visibility into everything that your devices are doing. So, you know we used to call this privilege access.

What what what's the difference between sassy and privilege access? Yeah, I mean a pan solution. Yeah, like a Pam solution like a cyber Arc is really around Access Control to provisioned Applications.

Right? And that's like hey should should person X have actual access to application y we're kind of looking at it more around. What is the full holistic amount of web traffic that you can have access to so this is something that was really big with blue coat which was acquired by semantic Websense again, Forest Point and then zscaler with the zscaler internet access.

These are the three kind of main players in this space and I worked at two of those companies and product management for a couple of those as well. And so those experiences are what drove the existence of dope security is. Like, how did we help reduce the customer issues?

How did we help make the experience better? And that comes from what we call as our fly direct architecture. Got it.

And you know, so how is this kind of organized package? You know how to use those companies is it like per user per device kind of thing that it's it's regulating or yeah, so the way it works is is not any way to similar to how you be using a technology like this today, except the under the hood. It's very very different.

So what you do is you install the dope security endpoint to all your different devices in the in your environment. And so once you've done that maybe it's Mac or Windows doesn't matter once you've installed it then the user has to log in using their Enterprise credentials, of course just once and now they have access to the the website or the URLs or the categories that they are supposed to be accessing as part of their work control policy, but this isn't very good. These scale these scalar sandbox.

that you're going so that's the differentiation right and you hit it on that on the head. Is that right now when you're using like a as an example of secure web Gateway from a legacy vendor you reroute everything from your device from your from your laptop all the way to their data center, which you were calling a Sandbox like your point of presence. And then from there it goes to its destination.

And so if you think about it, you're almost taking a stopover route so I can airplanes go. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's like I like looking at the airplane analogy.

Like why would you take a flight from New York to Boston and stop over in San Francisco? Like that makes no sense and the same thing as time. We're just go to La and stop over in New York.

And so what we do differently is we allow you to fly direct and the way we do that is the software that's on your device actually does the the capabilities so you don't have to reroute any of the traffic to a data center anymore. Very cool. And and what about the hit on the ice with that Yeah, so it's it's interesting.

Like I think that if people were looking at this even 10 years ago 15 years ago there was obviously a much difference in computing power. There was then now and also the the operating systems themselves didn't offer the same level of integration capability that they do today. Like I'll give you an example on Mac.

They provide the full spectrum of apis you need you don't have to build a kernel extension anymore. Right? And the same time that promotes reliability of the actual product itself.

And also if you're building this from scratch today, you can actually achieve a super super duper low memory profile CPU profile and that's what our customers say to us all the time like, you know, to be honest and all that. We'd rather use this technology because visuals are amazing product works incredibly. Well the fly direct architecture work, but most importantly the impact the user is invisible.

You don't even know it's there. Okay. Can Windows what about mobile devices?

Yeah, mobile devices have always been interesting. I mean Chromebook is definitely on a roadmap and like iOS Android is something that is always in the back of our minds. But to be honest like the usage of these mobile devices in this context is just getting less and less I mean one because everything on on mobile devices is is become less and less governed by the organization.

They'll put an MDM software on there for sure, but I don't see that that the main primary device again from customers is those mobile devices? It's really those desktop laptops those kind of use cases. got it, and also I think Your most mobile phones, let's call with what they are.

Right? Yes. They enjoyed iPhone.

There are a lot more secure by Design than I think our laptops are. Right. It's it's generally.

You know, we we see many less incidents though. It's look it's still it's still a vector, right? It is it is.

I mean, it's it's just the deployment from an Enterprise perspective. It's it's like an anticillary problem. Right?

Like it's if you have a mobile device and you get a fishing page on a text message and you type in your corporate credentials, it affects the Enterprise, right? But like is it the first and foremost form of attack and it's like, you know less so right and and that's why I see Enterprises focuses on the devices that they own and ultimately mostly the device they own are their employees laptops and and sometimes that stops Got it, which makes sense? Right?

It makes sense. No. No, it always has absolutely, you know, look we where I sit right?

I sit in a different seat. Now. I said here I feel you're the second.

Sassy vendor actually, I interviewed today to tell you that you'd so obviously this is a up-and-coming area that people are looking at but you know, we were being told a year or two three years ago. Oh all traffic's going mobile 60% of traffic 70% of traffic is gonna be on mobile devices now and you got to start developing for your mobile devices. You got to start securing these devices and And I'm not saying that's not right.

I'm telling you when I look at the stats of all the sites we manage. com container Journal Etc. Mobile is a sizable portion of traffic, but it's not 60 70 percent right?

We still get a majority of our traffic on on. You know, it's called traditional Computing devices PCS laptops. What have you I don't think all the traditional yet, but sure.

All right, you know but not not on phones is what I'm trying to say and you know, but but sometimes when you live in the tech bubble you are always. you think everybody is at that, you know early adopter phase when really the early adopter phase is only 15% of the market, right the other 85% of the market may not be as far out there right in adopting these so still You know. Sees laptops are still a predominant way people access information on the net on the web.

Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't 100% agree. I think there's there's a little bit of a self-serving nature to it.

Right? It's like if I'm a mobile security company and I'm trying to sell you something and obviously the vendor the apple and Samsung's job like at Apple they're big job is to secure their their mobile platform because they don't want it to turn into a wild wild west and the same thing is if you're a cyber security vendor for mobile like devices, you're obviously gonna say that this is the biggest Vector, right? So it is self-serving.

Um, but also I think that's a nice people have blinders on right like, I mean, I'm again I'm from like born and raised in Silicon Valley, but at the same time a lot of organizations here, it really realize that you have to take off the Silicon Valley lens, right? Not everyone in the world uses the Mac. I have to be honest with you if you're talking to a company outside of like a Up in the Bay Area.

They're not using a like a Mac. They're using Windows and the world runs on Windows devices and I use a Mac. I happen to use one in our company is Mac first in a lot of ways like we had a Mac and a Windows component at the same time because we know that while not every organization uses exclusively.

There's still five 10 15% that do and that's what we want to hit. It's like let's make sure that we are honest and really have a lot of Integrity with how we're going to our customers. Let's be very realistic.

And that's what I think makes dope security different. Very cool. Hey, you know what?

We're running out of time for people want to get more information. What's the website? security and then you'll be on there and I would really encourage all of your, you know, audience and everyone listening in just to give it a try because that's the difference with our technology that you can actually go on the website and trial it instantly.

And I think that's what makes us a little different in this is that no one really has things like that. If you just go in give it a try and this helps all types of organizations, whether it's upgrading yourself from DNS filtering to a proper secure web Gateway or reducing costs from your existing secure library to what you use today, which is going to become dope security like I love and encourage everyone just give it a try and you'll see a huge performance increase Excellent, man. Hey congratulations Canal.

This is a you know, it's something to be really proud of we're gonna be watching dope security and hope and hope for big things from you guys. Yeah. Thank you so much Alan and like looking forward to talking to you again soon anytime you want could not log a wall founder dope security here on Tech strung TV.

We're taking a break. We'll be back in a minute.