Solving start-up puzzles

Note: Transcripts are automatically generated from episode audio, and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

CHRISTINA CACIOPPO: It seemed like a puzzle, and I wanted to figure it out. And I wanted to be good at it.

JEFF BERMAN: Christina Cacioppo’s love of puzzle-solving is central to her approach as an entrepreneur. She’s the founder of a tech unicorn now. But her first business puzzle was a bit more humble as a kid growing up in Ohio.

CACIOPPO: When I had multiple Beanie Babies, I tried to sell them on eBay, and then, like, ride my bike to Kroger, which was our local grocery chain, and get money orders, and cash in money orders, because, like, I didn’t have a credit card, and I remember when PayPal came out, and you got, like, 25 dollars if you signed up. But I couldn’t sign up, because I was, you know, 12 or something, 13. I never got that 25 from PayPal.

BERMAN: Christina’s Beanie Baby business never quite took off. But now? Her B2B SaaS company Vanta has grown to a valuation of about $2.5 billion. 

It’s a trust management platform that focuses on digital security and compliance.

And if that sounds a little complicated, well, it’s because it sort of seems to be. But, in reality, Vanta takes a complex, clunky part of running a business off the shoulders of other entrepreneurs. 

On today’s episode, Christina shares lessons that she’s learned as the founder of a hyperscaling company with more than 10,000 B2B customers. 

[THEME MUSIC]

BERMAN:  Christina Cacioppo is refreshingly honest about the unglamorous work she went through before finding the winning idea for her company Vanta. 

We started by talking about her first job out of school – at the legendary venture capital firm Union Square Ventures – and what it taught her about start-ups. 

BERMAN: Christina, welcome to masters of scale.

CACIOPPO: Thank you so much for having me.

Copy LinkLessons from Union Square Ventures

BERMAN: You went off to Stanford for college and graduate school. And then you chose to go to a venture firm. Why? 

CACIOPPO: That was dumb luck. It was less of a choice. I think coming out of Stanford when I did, kind of late 2000s, VC was not something you did out of school. I just got really lucky, and the folks at Union Square Ventures in New York had written a blog post saying, ‘Hey, we want to hire someone. If you’re interested, like, fill out this form,’ basically.

And, you know, I mean, I respect a ton of things about those partners in that firm, and one of them is they built their firm off the internet. They hire off the internet. They do not hire off of personal networks or anything. But I first read that post and was like, ‘Well, that’s crazy. Who’s going to get that job?’

BERMAN: Why did you, why did you have that reaction?

CACIOPPO: Who hires like that? Especially a VC firm, right? And it just didn’t seem real, almost, or it seemed like the person who got that job was going to be perfect in all these ways I was not. But I kind of kept thinking about it, and it was on a two-week application period, and literally on day 14, I was just like, ‘Well, what’s the worst thing that’s going to happen?’ Like, everything will continue as it is. And so I filled out the form, and I ended up getting the job.

BERMAN: Why wasn’t VC a thing that you would do straight out of school?

CACIOPPO: I think because it seems like VCs are supposed to provide advice and experience, both in making investment decisions and then also help the companies. When you’re 22, advice and experience usually aren’t your comparative advantage in the workforce, let’s say.

BERMAN: Right. But they wanted someone with your background, with your insight, because what were they looking for at the time? 

CACIOPPO: It’s funny now because it feels so kludgy, but at the time, ‘internet native’ was the term, right? But it was kind of someone who grew up on the internet, quote unquote, and when I knew, especially because this was again early, you know, late 2000s, early 2010s, a lot of consumer social, a lot of new mobile apps. And so it was like looking for early adopters and people who would say, “Oh, you know, Foursquare, do I think that’s weird because I’m just sharing my location, broadcasting my location to strangers? Or is that great and how I’m going to make new friends? “And they were like looking for people who gravitated to the latter. Because I thought that would kind of push their investment thinking and help them figure out what would be next. 

BERMAN: What did you learn at Union Square Ventures?

CACIOPPO: Oh, so much. I think they’re good at a lot of things. They are very market- and idea-driven. And you know, like all investment theses, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But I think their like fundamental worldview to me was if an entrepreneur finds the right market, they will win. And I think it’s different than other firms, which are more like, ‘Oh no, it doesn’t matter the market, it’s all about the person.’

Like the great person theory of investing, and USV was like all market and idea. And a little bit like — the wackier the better. You know, contrarians are kind of overused, but I think they did really like things that seemed dumb. Though what starts as a toy becomes serious. You know, the Twitter investment in 2006 was a great example of that.

BERMAN: Yeah. Why? I mean, 2006, just to situate it, right? Friendster had come. MySpace was on the rise. Facebook was just becoming a thing, was still at universities. It felt like there was a wave coming. Why was Twitter sort of dumb?

CACIOPPO: It was like, what’s different about it, right? You can post 140 characters on Facebook, and you can do more. So why would slimming Facebook down and then not really having a user base somehow succeed? And yet it did. 

BERMAN: Yeah, to mix success.

CACIOPPO: Well, yes. With ups and downs.

Copy Link“I wanted to build things”

BERMAN: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. So, okay. So you spent a few years at USV, and why did you leave?

CACIOPPO: I wanted to build things. I both loved the parts of the job where smart people would come in and you could ask them lots of questions, and they would, like, politely tell you everything they knew, and then you could go email more smart people and, like, it just kind of felt like a racket, and it felt wonderful.

And I really liked those parts, but then, after those conversations, I’d go back to my desk and write an email about it. And it just felt sort of unfulfilling. I wanted to, you know, if I could have believed in one of those ideas, rather than like writing the email to advocate for the investment or whatever, I wanted to go work on it.

And I think I had a bit of, you know, back to the… generally folks don’t VC and it’s not someone’s first job out of school. I think I had a bit of like, well, why would someone take money from me versus Fred Wilson versus Matt Cohler at the time, right? If you want someone who is like an earlier career, but exceedingly accomplished.

And so I kind of felt like, well, I think I want to go try to build something. And again, if I were pitching, I wouldn’t want to take money from me. I would want money from Fred. So that also doesn’t seem like a great path, as shiny and as, you know, many people kind of seem like they want to do it. It didn’t feel right.

Copy LinkQuitting & teaching herself to code

BERMAN: So a lot of people in that situation, when they sit down to write the email would have that, ‘this is what I want to go do. I’m going to email the CEO instead of emailing Fred and say, like, you should hire me.’ That’s not what you did.

CACIOPPO: No, I think the other part of it was like I wanted to learn to build products. Everything was so product-centric because it should be, and I had like a little bit of a programming background, but not really, like I couldn’t go make a website or an iPhone app.

And I think to the puzzle piece, like I wanted to figure that out and wanted to prove to myself I could do that. 

So what I did was I took my bonus, basically lived off of it for two years. So that was kind of my grad student living. And taught myself to code.

BERMAN: How’d you teach yourself to code? 

CACIOPPO: I grabbed a desk at a friend’s company, and so I would wake up every day and go to work. 

And I would, like, go to his company and, like, sit with his engineers, and they would be doing their work for the company, and I would be doing my little blog tutorial. But it was kind of this sort of fake structure, like, I went to work five days a week.

I got up in the morning and I did that. And sort of acted like I had a job, even though I did not have a paycheck. And that structure is actually really helpful. Because you wake up in the morning, you know, and you’re like, what do you do? And you’re like, well, clearly you go to work. That’s what one does.

BERMAN: And I think, I think there’s a lot to be learned from constructing a structure, right? Like, building the routine, the ritualizing of it all. And it must have helped to be sitting with people who were coding professionally.

CACIOPPO: It was very helpful. I’m not really good at question-asking, but when I would ask something, you’d get someone who was like, “Oh, I remember how to do that. Let me sit down and show you.” And it was very nice.

Copy LinkSearching for her big idea

BERMAN: I mean, so it really was you were funding grad school with this bonus. And grad school just happened to be a desk at a friend’s office. So, you spent a couple years doing this, and you don’t go start a company. Why?

CACIOPPO: It was upsetting. Because nothing I was working on was worth starting a company for. And I was both like really, you know, frustrated by this. And I think again at USV, I’d seen that actually starting the company isn’t the hard part.

That’s, you know, shockingly easy. The hard part is like in year four when it’s not really working, but you’ve raised this money, and you have employees, and you’re still doing it, and like, maybe you don’t want to, but you’re not really saying that out loud yet, and that’s actually kind of the median case.

And I think the downside isn’t the thing, you know, it becomes a crater in the earth and just ends, like, then it ends and you can move on. It’s sort of that slog. And so I didn’t want to work on something that I wasn’t really convicted in. 

BERMAN: It took several years, a stint at Dropbox, and a laundry list of misfires before Christina found an idea interesting enough to build into her own company.

CACIOPPO: I think we built a couple things that just no one wanted and then realized, hey, we’re going about this wrong.

We’re building products and then running around and asking who wants them, which is generally very hard to do well. And certainly something I’ve never succeeded at in my whole career of building things. So what we started doing was, we said, “Hey, no more coding, no more building. You just go talk to people.”

And talk to enough people until they start to say the same thing, and you have to find a person with a problem — is the catchphrase. And so I started talking to people in security. Because security just, it seemed interesting, it seemed important, it seemed big. And kind of, to your point, like, I was really lucky, and I could go explore ideas, and if they didn’t work, I could probably get a job somewhere.

And some of the thinking was like, would I want a job in security? I don’t know, that seems kind of interesting, but let’s go figure that out.

And basically through that process, I’m kind of alighting a lot here, but landed on the idea for Vanta and of using compliance as a carrot to get a company to start building out their security program early.

BERMAN: Yeah. It’s really interesting. You all took the approach of really going out and just talking to prospective customers and trying to understand before you built a product, was there product market fit? Where was it best with the biggest total addressable market, and where did you feel called to it? 

CACIOPPO: That’s exactly it.

Copy LinkDiscovering ‘market pull’

BERMAN: And so was there an inflection point? Was there a moment where the lightning struck and you said, “this is what we need to go build?”

CACIOPPO: Yes and no. I think it was like a gradual process over three or four months of just building confidence incrementally. And when I say that it sounds like it was better every day, it wasn’t, right? Like there were ups and downs in that, but the arc over three or four months was upward. And I think there actually was a moment when basically word of mouth got out, actually among former Dropbox employees, that we were working on compliance, and we got this email from somebody that roughly said, “Hey, I don’t understand why you’re working on compliance. That sounds like the most boring thing. We should get a drink and talk about your life. And, by the way, my friend’s company needs this, so, like, you should do it for them, but then you should probably figure out what you’re doing with your life.” And it was this kind of funny email, because, like, should I be offended?

But no, right? Like, somehow this person had heard about what we were doing, thought we were kind of off, but also directly involved, again, this was all word of mouth. Well, we were just kind of fumbling around with start-up ideas, and so there was something there that, like, that felt like market pull, or there was something there that, again, never happened in all the other things I had built.

Copy LinkThe problem that Vanta seeks to solve

BERMAN: Okay, and so just in a nutshell, what does Vanta do?

CACIOPPO: Vanta helps companies build out their security programs, demonstrate compliance, and manage risk.

BERMAN: And the demonstrating of compliance and managing risk before Vanta was largely a manual process?

CACIOPPO: Largely manual process, so that’s why a lot of companies didn’t go through it.

But it was spreadsheets, screenshots, you know, tens of hours with engineers sitting with accountants going through like cloud infrastructure accounts to give the accountants confidence. The company’s security was set up well, and they could issue this report which then all the other customers would trust.

And so it was this kind of very valuable exercise, but it was so costly in terms of engineer time that companies would rarely go through.

BERMAN: Yeah, and the lawyers are then freaking out, right? So, as you hit on this, it sounds like both a simple and complex problem to solve. Is that, is right?

CACIOPPO: Right.

BERMAN: Why is that right?

CACIOPPO: I think, on the simple side, it sounds kind of obvious. You say, okay, well, you know, the company’s security program is probably already in engineering systems. The way we kind of demonstrate that security via these audits and attestations is really manual, but then the report at the end is very valuable.

Okay, that’s kind of simple. I think these regulations are complex and nuanced and they’re actually full of gray and the gray is kind of purposeful so companies can figure out what’s best for themselves, but I think that ambiguity led lots of folks to look at it and say, “Oh, you can’t automate that because what are you automating, right?”

You’re automating this, kind of, fuzzy regulation, and we looked at it and said, “Hey, for a set of companies that are just starting out, best practices actually get them really far. If you make sure that the company is fulfilling all the regulations with best practices and get them to implement them, the company is more secure.”

The process of, you know, kind of generating all the documentation you need is automated and you can actually cut out a lot of time and cost, and they can get this report that’s then very helpful for their customers and building

BERMAN: And my lawyer brain goes immediately to — oh, great, okay, but are you then taking the liability if we get it wrong because we’re using your software? Was that something that came up and you had to deal with, or not?

CACIOPPO: Not really, because of the way the standards body is, the AICPA, the ISO standards body, write the rules.

BERMAN: Okay. So you’re, you’re effectively providing the structure and process for the company to put the data into. Okay. Got it.

And, market by market, I assume there were different compliance requirements, right? It’s different in a highly regulated industry like banking or pharmaceuticals than it is in, you know, I don’t know, an airline luggage business or something like that?

CACIOPPO: That’s true. And we started with SOC 2, which was the closest thing that existed at the time to like a default business software standard. It’s not a law. It’s more of like a de facto standard, but that seemed like the first thing companies get. So the first thing we started with.

BERMAN: Okay. And you’re not a lawyer. How do you become an expert on SOC 2 as you are an entrepreneur with a background in venture and coding now and being a product manager?

CACIOPPO: Sitting down and learning a lot about it, talking to a ton of people, reading the regulations, reading the regulations with people who know a lot more than I do, asking a lot of dumb questions. Early on I did look into getting my CPA. It was like basically an eight-year journey, and I decided I had enough school at that point. I guess I could have had it now if I had started then. So I didn’t do that, but I tried to do kind of everything but go and do that.

BERMAN: Still ahead, how Christina built Vanta into a tech unicorn and what she’s learned about scaling along the way. 

[AD BREAK]

BERMAN: Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more on our YouTube channel.

Copy LinkVanta’s competitive advantage

BERMAN: I love SaaS. SaaS is a fascinating business model, right? It’s also really simple. Ultimately, when you get to committed monthly or annual recurring revenue, and you can start up-selling clients, like you’re predictable and your business is just an incredible thing. It’s also not something everyone intuitively gets. So two questions on that. One: as you’re building a team, how do you recruit people in to come do compliance? Which there may be some sexier things going on in Silicon Valley. And then two: where did you find investors to support the business?

CACIOPPO: Yeah. So on team building, we did have a lot of, you know, ‘you’re working on compliance, you like that?’ And I think, I mean, yeah! And I think what we’d say is -– it’s actually much more interesting than I expected. Even for me, you know, you get to touch all parts of a company and learn about them from their cloud infrastructure to how they hire people to all the kind of SaaS applications or like software companies using.

It’s just actually a very broad domain. And so, to me, there’s lots of interesting problems in it. And it’s actually much more expansive than, you know, just doing a task management software or, you know, document collaboration software. So there was some of that. And then honestly, I think the other part was — we had such strong product market fit, not because our product was amazing per se. It was amazing in that it let our customers achieve something they basically couldn’t achieve on their own. And they were so appreciative and grateful. Because compliance does sit in this intersection of something you might need to do, or really feel like you need to, and something you don’t want to do. And so one thing I found, it’s like when you offer a service or a product in that intersection, customers tend to be so grateful. And more grateful than your product might justify at that point, but again, you’re like getting them to something they couldn’t do on their own. And so, I think there was a lot of market pull, there was a lot of traction, and then our users were just in, in a way where objectively I kind of didn’t think they should or our product wasn’t that good yet. Which was true in lots of UI and UX, and the website could be better and less buggy, and all of that, you know, is painfully true. But like, it got them the outcome.

BERMAN: And you were also solving a real problem. And, you know, good was done, was better than perfect at that point, right? You’re iterating, it feels like you were kind of selling a new kind of product, something that your customers haven’t seen before. What is it like building the sales channels for a product that is really new to the market?

CACIOPPO: Yeah, it was, I think we got lucky in that because it was strange, in basically, again, the way you would get one of these certifications before Vanta, generally, I would approach an accounting firm that has an IT audit practice, and you talk to accountants and work with them.

And, you know, we were clearly not accountants. We were tech people. And where we first really had go to market success was selling to engineers and heads of engineering. And one of our early customers described us as like a babblefish — a translator between engineering and audit. Right? And I think there was something kind of deeply true there, where our pitch to an engineer was like, ‘Hey, you want to go through this? You can go talk to an accountant or you can talk to some engineers.’ Like, which do you want? You know?

BERMAN: Right. This is an easy answer. 

CACIOPPO: Yeah, and that just kind of, that took us pretty far. Sort of engineers and founders, and then over time we’ve gotten much savvier and smarter with, you know, compliance people and security people and just different personas for them. 

Mostly pre-existing IT budgets, although honestly a lot of our early customers just didn’t have budgets because they were startups growing themselves.

Copy LinkEarly-stage lessons of building Vanta

BERMAN: Okay. So you left Dropbox what year?

CACIOPPO: End of 16.

BERMAN: And you came to this vision for compliance software

CACIOPPO: Mm hmm. Summer 17.

BERMAN: Okay. And how did you build the company? You had a co-founder who came with you from Dropbox, right? And so, just take us through the scaling journey. So, did you raise capital in 2017?

CACIOPPO: In 2017, we raised a very, very small amount, just a couple hundred thousand. We actually didn’t want to raise very much because, again, we didn’t know what we were working on, and it felt like having infinite money and infinite runway was actually not a helpful thing when you needed to figure out what you were doing.

BERMAN: Sometimes constraints are helpful. 

CACIOPPO: Yeah, but when we had confidence in the idea, had an early product, had a couple customers lined up, we went through Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley accelerator program, in early 2018, raised a 3 million seed round after that, and then it was sort of off to the races. Which meant trying to hire both engineers, and actually our first hire was a compliance expert, to make sure we did what it says on the tin, and you know, fulfilled what we were telling customers we would do and that was a lot of 2018.

BERMAN: And so having been in through that 10 to 75 engineer journey at Dropbox, what did you learn from your time at Dropbox that you deployed as you were growing Vanta?

CACIOPPO: Yeah, well, I think in the early days, actually, it was a bunch of counter-lessons. I think at Dropbox it was like, oh, we know all of these people. We’ve worked with them. Of course they’ll come work with us again. And the answer is at our stage of, you know, 10 years into our career — yes, but no, by which I mean people hopefully liked us or would work with us. But you were asking someone, ‘Hey, you have this career path at the Silicon Valley company, you have this mortgage, you have this annual bonus, like, do you want to make one third of that amount and, like, sit in a room with us and see if this will work?’

It was like a very tough pitch.

BERMAN: Yeah. 

CACIOPPO: And so, I think actually there was some kind of mis-starts in recruiting in the early days, just because we were going after a profile that wasn’t fit for a super early stage start-up.

BERMAN: So these are people you hired who you quickly realized weren’t the right fit?

CACIOPPO: We couldn’t even hire them. They would just say no. I mean they’d say very polite no’s and some of them ended up working at Vanta later, and you know, it kind of taught me viscerally when people talk about stage appropriateness, what that means. And I think our first engineers who are all kind of wonderful and lovely and so talented were much more people who are like up for a ride.

And like the ride might be the world’s most exciting roller coaster, or it might be a golf cart around the parking lot. You know, people want the roller coaster, not the parking lot, but they were up for either.

BERMAN: Yeah. Did that become one of your big hiring filters?

CACIOPPO: Yea.

BERMAN: And so how would you suss out whether they were up for the uncertainty of, ‘is this a roller coaster or a rocket ship or a golf cart in a parking lot?’

CACIOPPO: Yeah. I don’t think we were very good at it then, honestly. I think we’ve gotten better at it over time, and the way we do it is actually just the questions, the exercises in our interview process are all sort of ripped from the headlines on our show. Like, they are just real things we are thinking through.

And I think repeatedly through the interview process, trying to be very direct and transparent about what we’re struggling to do and what it is like to work at Vanta — in a way that I think sometimes surprises candidates because they’ll say, ‘You know, you’re telling me a lot’ or like, ‘Wow, you have a lot of problems.’

And the answer is kind of yes, but these are the things we’re working through, and you can learn about them now, and opt in or opt out or you can not know about them and then accept a job and then be very surprised later.  And so I think it’s just kind of setting up these interview processes such that people mostly aren’t surprised in their first day, week, month.

BERMAN: How did you build out your leadership team and how do you lead?

CACIOPPO: I think building, it’s funny, when Vanta was about 20 people, this was just before the pandemic seed investor said I should start building my leadership team, and I literally laughed at him because it just felt so it felt like playing start-up. You’re like, what do you mean a leadership team?

We’re like 20 people just scrapping things together like leadership teams are things big companies have and so I sort of, you know, laughed until we were about 50 people and then hit a moment where it was like, “Oh my gosh, everything is single thread or everything feels single-threaded.” It wasn’t, but that was like the lived experience.

And now I feel like we need kind of a leadership team in so many places. And I’m so behind the ball here. And so I think on that, my advice actually to my prior self was like, even though it sounded hilarious, if you are growing and you feel like your product market fit starts at 20 such that you don’t, you don’t have to start later when everything is kind of even more chaotic.

Copy LinkManaging a team of 700+ employees

BERMAN: How big is the company now, people-wise?

CACIOPPO: About 700.

BERMAN: It’s a lot of people. How do you manage a 700 person remote-forward workforce?

CACIOPPO: Figuring it out.

BERMAN: Yeah. What are you doing? And what are you trying to figure out how to do better?

CACIOPPO: I think we do, I don’t know, great, but I think we are a mission-driven company with product vision principles, which are sort of our values, and what we call strategic initiatives.

But like the four big things for the company, we just repeat constantly, like constant repetition. It is a little, you know, I don’t know, strange to me and you’re like, I just said this yesterday. Do I need to say it again? But the answer is yes. And it works. It’s amazing, actually.

BERMAN: Is it Jeff Weiner who famously said like, you have to keep singing until you start hearing it back. And that’s when you’ll know that you’ve maybe upset enough.

CACIOPPO: Yeah, it is as simple as it sounds. 

Copy LinkVanta’s ‘chaotic’ hyper growth phase

BERMAN Yeah. 20 to 70 in 5 years — a lot of growth. Was there a point at which you were hiring dozens of people a month? Was there a point where you were just in that hyper growth phase? When was that? And what was that like? 

CACIOPPO: It was a bit in the second half of 2021, and it was chaotic, and I think you would see the company — what did we do, 50 to 150 that year probably — so tripled, and you’d have these onboarding classes of, you know, at the time, like 15 people, 20 people, and they felt so huge.

And I think it was this moment of like, we’re going to try really hard to, you know, we’re onboarding these folks and teach them what Vanta is and does, and it’s not going to go as well as we want it to, and we’ll try to pick up the pieces, but it was like you’re on the roller coaster, and it is going and you’re hanging on and you’re trying your hardest.

But I think also the sense of like, oh, it’s not going to work as well as we hoped. 

Copy LinkHow Vanta is implementing AI & new features

BERMAN: It’s not easy. Christina, as we sit here in the first half of 2025, we’re all but required to talk about AI. I know Vanta has implemented AI into its products. I want to hear about that. I also would love to hear about how you think about AI as competition? Because what you do sounds perfectly suited for artificial intelligence.

CACIOPPO: I think it kind of is. Or like a lot of what these compliance workflows are — taking information in one format and putting it in another.

So, taking a policy document and turning it into an engineering config — into a rule that’s followed, basically. You know, turning all of this into like a format an auditor wants to see it in, or a customer. But I kind of think that’s great for Vanta. You know, we have 10,000 customers.

We have a deep understanding of these primitives and the data, and so this stuff should get turned into AI, but again, we should be the ones that do it, or we should ask ourselves, you know, very serious questions about why it wasn’t us.

BERMAN: How are you implementing AI right now?

CACIOPPO: So we have a good portion of the engineering team that both kind of builds internal tools for all of our engineers to go and work with AI eval and model quality, and then each product team and engineer on the product team are taking those tools and then using them in their area of the product and building things out.

BERMAN: Hallmarks of successful SaaS companies is that they keep adding new features and products so that the recurring revenue from clients is going up each year — if they’re saying, “oh, yes, I’d like that, too.” How are you thinking about that as you bring new features and products to market?

CACIOPPO: We think about it a lot. So we’ve moved from where we started of automated compliance to what we now call trust management, which is a broader expanse of, we’ll have the automated compliance pieces, we’ll have workflows for security around the people in a company, the assets, so the laptops, and then the vendors as well. 

Okay, there’s compliance workflows, but again, it’s such a horizontal area. It touches the security of so many pieces. And so we started and will continue to build out products there for our customers.

BERMAN: Are you enjoying the 700-person phase at Vanta? 

CACIOPPO: I am. I do think it is a useful founder skill to convince yourself you like each phase. But I also think, again, to the problem-solving piece, it’s just new problems and different problems. And every day is different still, and I just really like that.

Copy LinkWhere does Vanta go from here?

BERMAN: It’s fun being in the steep part of a learning curve. So 10,000 clients. Where does the company go from here?

CACIOPPO: Well, it’s funny. When we started this, people didn’t think the market was very big. I mean, kind of including us, because there just weren’t that many SOC 2s done.

And it turns out if you make something that is compelling, easier to achieve, more people will achieve deeply, truly. And so I think that sort of cracked the compliance market open. And then what we found is again, this was sort of the thesis of the company, but it’s become true is that compliance is this great wedge to all of these other security processes in the company.

And so it does really feel like, or it’s kind of the hard parts of vantage, like, ‘Hey, there’s so much opportunity. There are so many adjacencies, which do, we choose and which order’ versus, ‘Oh, we just do this one niche thing.’ It’s almost the opposite. I think we can really build a way for companies to help like understand and improve their security and do that hard work, and then tie it to revenue and customers so they get credit with the market for.

All of that hard security work they’ve done, which I do think is different than a lot of security companies, which are more risk based or fear based in their approaches. We’re much more, you know, how do we tie this to what customers want, to revenue growth, such that you can invest more in security.

BERMAN: Yeah. Do you think about an IPO?

CACIOPPO: Not often.

BERMAN: How do you think about evolving the company, ultimately providing an exit for your investors? Like, what’s your vision for that?

CACIOPPO: The goal very much is to build a long-term, sustainable, independent company, and so going public — basically the path for that, for all but a very small handful of software companies.

But I think one thing I’ve deeply learned and saw at Union Square Ventures is that a couple of companies IPO-ed when I was there, you know, folks talk about the IPO as an exit, and it is for the investors, but the company still exists after that. Like, you’re still doing everything you’re doing, just almost on harder mode after.

And so I don’t like orienting around financing. So I don’t really like orienting around an IPO because it’s a day that sounds like it’s really fun with lots of confetti and then you get up the next day and still do your job, right? It’s like intermediate milestone versus a finish line.

So anyway, all to say, the goal is very much to run a sustainable company. Perhaps an IPO in the future, but I think it’s a milestone not an end marker

BERMAN: Responsibilities like compliance and security may not be the shiniest parts of running a business – but they are mission-critical to success.

As Vanta continues its meteoric rise, there is little doubt that Christina and her team will keep finding innovative ways to solve problems in this space. 

Her approach is a valuable reminder to face challenges with curiosity and determination – and that others will reward you if you do. 

I’m Jeff Berman, thank you for listening.