James Foster, ZeroFox | RSA Conference 2023

This is texturung TV. Hey everybody, welcome back. I'm Sharon Florentine managing editor here at techstrong group.

We are streaming to you live from rsac 2023 here in Moscone West. We are having an awesome conversation right now with Foster. Who is the CEO and founder.

Yes of zero Fox and welcome. Thank you so much for spending part of your afternoon with us here. My pleasure.

Yeah, cool. So tell me a little bit about yourself your roots and How zero Fox came to be sure. Well, look I fell in love with security 25 years ago.

I think to say that I started my career off in Fort Meade Maryland working for the Department of Defense. Okay fell in love with the challenge the mission the fact that they were adversaries out there and nation states. Well before it was commercialized right when Y2K didn't blow up the world.

I joined the private sector and move from companies in Boston New York and California and just fell in love more so security because the pace to play was tremendous. Yeah, you know and and enjoy the ride and co-founded zero Fox 10 years ago now 2013 and it's been a heck of a ride so far. All right, cool.

So I know you did an IPO last summer you want to talk about that how it's been going? Um, it was a lot. I mean, we it was a lot of fun.

I think it was rewarding for a lot of employees. You know, it's it's a good day, but the build up, To that day is a ton of work nerve-wracking. I bet nerve racking and people wanted to make sure that it's Perfection and right it's a milestone in our kind of Journey as an organization the last cybersecurity company to go public.

No one's gone public since August the last year, so we still have that kind of that unique spot in history. Yeah, but it was fun. And I think it was nice too for our customers that have been with us for a while to see that they picked a category leader.

They picked somebody that continue to make waves continue to innovate find ways to raise capital and different macro environments and it's been it's been rewarding. Yeah, absolutely and I mean What a macroeconomic environment we are in right now. So awesome.

Congratulations. Thank you. Um, and I know you have some breaking news for us today something with Google perhaps you want to talk about.

Yeah, we did. Thank you. We signed a new partnership with Google Cloud where we are disrupting active threats with zero Fox intelligence now across five billion users.

Oh, wow, when we identify and attack on one of our Enterprise organizations or one of our customers, we now can stream that attack to all of Google cloud and block it instantaneously protecting not only our customers footprint, but the Google Cloud footprint cool and it's a really important extension of our disruption capability and disruption service to where our mission to create a safer digital world is now getting much much further considering there's only about eight. Billion people in the world and we protect about five now. Oh, wow.

Yeah, just that little tiny. Yeah. Tiny sliver.

That's right. and So external cybersecurity as it says on your shirt explain that to me. What what is that?

How does that differ from? Why the emphasis on external? Sure?

Well, look, I think it goes back to when we found in the company. We saw an opportunity 10 years ago that the world was going to change and in general social media was gonna change the the technology landscape and thereby the security landscape because of a couple basic premise and facts one, your data was gonna live outside your organizations control and it was gonna live on platforms. We couldn't install agents and you couldn't put firewalls around them.

Right Facebook and Linkedin would kind of the leading platforms and the external space 10 years ago. So that's gonna be a big big differentiator because the world prior to 10 years ago had communicated via email and you could route email through perimeters and proxies get stored on your own servers. You had a lot more security Flex.

Ability on how you secured that communication and that kind of inbound engagement to your organization and that was going away with the word collaboration. Right? And so our vision back then was social media was going to change the world and it was going to require a shift in the way companies secure their data and secure their footprint and we seize that opportunity.

We are the first major company that go out and say we're gonna work in the external space. We're going to work on problem sets where agents and firewalls can't help you. And today we've turned into the largest organization in the world protecting that external footprint for organizations around the world.

That is fascinating. Yeah, because I mean, you know outside the typical perimeter, you can't you're right. There's no control.

It's no control and the footprint for an organization is so vast now and more importantly when there is a problem one of two things typically figure out like if you're not a zero Fox customer you get instantly. Straight because you want to answer questions that you don't have answers to right who attacked me. What do I do next and you realize these external platforms don't have phone numbers.

It's really hard to pick up the phone and call a social media platform and say my account was hacked. What do I do? There's no one to call and then even if you do get your account back successfully you probably have very little information on who attacked me.

Why do they attack me? What was the level scope of that attack? Right?

We help bridge that Gap. We help those organizations understand their digital footprint and protect the things that matter most so I'm from Philly you are from Baltimore. You're from Baltimore.

Well, I live in Maryland now. Okay. All right, I would say I was from from Florida.

So Florida, huh? Where in Florida Pensacola? Okay.

All right. Text wrong group is based in Boca Raton. I'm jealous.

I had to bring that it's beautiful. It is beautiful it is. cool, well Did you have anything else that you wanted to bring up here today?

Any new features announcements? What what's going on for you here at rsac? Well, one of the big things we just announced at RSA this morning actually.

Okay, we completed our first acquisition as a public company awesome. So we acquired a partner of ours named Looking Glass cyber. Okay, they have been around for better part of 15 years and they are a leader and a tax service management and vulnerability intelligence.

So we've been partners with them for years. We know them really well world-class group of individuals. They've as of this morning Monday morning join the zero Fox platform.

We now got new attack surface capabilities a broader team and new intelligence capabilities that will be able to offer up to our customers. And so we are really excited to talk about that here at RSA and combine forces that Awesome. Congratulations.

Thank you. Congratulations. All right, well Foster, thank you so much for coming here and spending some of your time with us.

Really appreciate it. Thank you to Great to chat and hope you enjoy the show. Thanks Sharon.

Yeah, sure. All right folks. Thank you so much.

Come back soon. We got tons more interviews conversations here at rsac 2023. We will be here streaming live to you all week Monday through Thursday.

Don't miss it. I'm Sharon Florentine. Thanks.

Thanks a lot.