The following interview is a conversation we had with Christian Almenar, CEO of Monad, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $19 Million Raised to Solve the Cybersecurity Big Data Problem
Brett
Welcome to Category Visionaries, the show dedicated to exploring exciting visions for the future from the founders who are on the front lines building it. In each episode, we’ll speak with a visionary Founder who’s building a new category or reimagining an existing one. We’ll learn about the problem they solve, how their technology works, and unpack their vision for the future. I’m your host, Brett Stapper, CEO of Front Lines Media. Now let’s dive right into today’s episode. Hey, everyone, and thanks for listening. Today I’m speaking with Christian Almenar, CEO and Founder of Manad, a security data platform that’s raised 19 million in funding. Christian, thanks for chatting with me today.
Christian Almenar
Hey, how are you? Good to be with you.
Brett
I’m good. Thanks so much for joining.
Christian Almenar
Thank you. I’m super excited.
Brett
Yeah. So before we begin talking about what you’re building at Manad, let’s start with a quick summary of who you are and bit more about your background.
Christian Almenar
Yeah, so let’s see. I grew up in Europe and Spain, went to German school, then kind of immigrated to America to go to college to Western engineering and buzz around a bunch of places. Always was very into cybersecurity since a kid. I was always down with the kid, getting a little bit in trouble with computers in high school and yeah, I mean, I basically moved to America at college to New York and Boston. Then I worked at a cybersecurity firm in Switzerland for a couple of years after that. Then I moved to Silicon Valley. Also worked at a company in China in Beijing for a summer, then moved to Silicon Valley in 2013, I think, and was there pretty much till COVID built security company before Monet.
Christian Almenar
We sold the VMware and built Monet during the Pandemic and been all over the place in the world.
Brett
Sounds like it. How many different countries have you lived in?
Christian Almenar
Six, I think. Yeah, I grew up in a pretty big family, too. We were like six brothers and sisters. Originally in Spain, but then also in Germany and was spending a lot of time in England and France as well. In America? Yeah, a lot of it.
Brett
Nice. And what was the company called that you sold to VMware?
Christian Almenar
It was called intrinsic.
Brett
Okay, nice. What was it like when you did that acquisition? Did you have to stay on for a while at VMware or were you done after the deal was done?
Christian Almenar
Not much, no. I stayed a bit in a year.
Brett
Okay. Was that painful for you to stick around and be part of a big company? Was it a fun experience? What your thoughts there?
Christian Almenar
It was the first time working at a big company, to be honest, so I learned a lot about the internals of the big company. I love startups. I mean, it’s really the only thing I know what to do, to be honest. I don’t know. I love the thrill of it. And COVID is starting and we have the opportunity to start a new company. And I was very excited about it. So just happened to be this way and life is short, so I wanted to take a lot of the learnings from Intrinsic and double down on them and kind of start this new company.
Brett
Nice. Well, let’s talk about that new company. So in simple terms, what do you guys do?
Christian Almenar
The way we explain is we want the security teams to do more data driven work. So we want to enable that. And that means a lot of things, but it’s basically allowing customers to do more with the current tools they have. So we don’t try to replace really any particular security tool out there. We want to empower customers to really take the most value out of the tools they currently have, be able to act on the data that those tools generate, and load it in whatever data warehouse they have, and then allow them to do more data driven workflows with them.
Christian Almenar
So really being more efficient with when they think what’s the tool they have, help them consolidate it, and ultimately be more effective in solving, understanding the risk and solving the threats they may have through just allowing them to do more data driven work.
Brett
Got it.
Brett
And in a recent interview, you said security is fundamentally a big data problem. Can you explain why that is and how your platform helps solve that problem?
Christian Almenar
Yeah, absolutely. So the only inspiration to start this company came through the realization as a tech industry, we’ve done amazing work at understanding who’s on the other side of the screen in order to show them ads, really targeted ads, we really understand who’s on the other side and able to sell them a lot of really awesome things. And similarly, companies have done amazing job at understanding how customers are using their products, product analytics, even HR sales data. I mean, there’s been all these amazing companies built on all these other spaces leveraging the most advanced data technologies out there.
Christian Almenar
And what I realized almost painfully in my last company was were very technical, academic based system to protect software and then talking to customers, and then at the MMOR when were trying to build the company is building a whole new business unit in cybersecurity and thinking about the industry from a bigger scope. Really what we kept running into is that customers really what they really struggle is like they have too many security products. I’m sure you heard the story. They can’t really handle all the data these tools generate, yet they can’t really act on the data they generate easily the same way they act on when they get a lot of sales data or product data. They can’t use the most advanced data analytics tools, most advanced machine learning or bi tools.
Christian Almenar
And it came to me, like, really what customers in the industry wanted was help them consolidate all this plethora of tools they use and help them take the most valuable data these tools generate and be able to do very advanced analytics and very advanced data techniques that they already do for other use cases. And it was almost striking that cybersecurity being so critical and so important for the world that it’s not Alipar with other industries. So we wanted to kind of our goal basically is like, how can we uplift the industry to at least be Alipar with what people do for sales data or marketing data? So that was really what we’re trying to do. We’re not a traditional security company per se. We’re more like a data kind of infrastructure company. This just happens to be very focused in cybersecurity.
Brett
Got it.
Brett
And who’s the ideal customer then for you? Is this just anyone in the Fortune 500? Or does it need to be like a cloud first or cloud native company to really get the value from your technology?
Christian Almenar
So in the beginning, our customers are in the Fortune 500 kind of greater larger companies, but our goal is to be able to serve this to really anyone ultimately. That’s why we’re building the product to be as self served as possible. So we want the product to look the way we’re designing it, even like how it looks. It looks more like a segment or a stripe and less than a typical security product. So we’ve been launching a self serve version of the product now that’s in the private data right now, but we want to make it available to really any security engineer who wants to get more value out of the current tools they use. And yeah, I mean, that’s really the goal. Short term, it’s more like larger companies because they’re the ones who are betting on doing more data driven cybersecurity.
Christian Almenar
And we’re a business, a for profit business. In order to make a sustainable business, you need to have large contracts and work. Usually those are the best companies to work with. But as I said, our goal is to be able to make this available to really anyone ultimately.
Brett
Got it.
Brett
And then what’s the model that you’re using for your go to market? Are you doing product led growth or enterprise sales?
Christian Almenar
We’ve been doing enterprise sales even since the beginning because were working with design customers since day one and kind of working closely with customers to make sure we build something that is really valuable. But we want to do more product like tour of promotions, moving forward. And that’s why we’re experimenting with smaller communities but starting to get more bottoms up adoption. But that’s kind of what we experimented the second part of this year.
Brett
Got it.
Brett
And when it comes to market categories, how do you think about market categories? Is this a new category that you’re building?
Christian Almenar
I will lie if I say items exactly. I know exactly where it’s still early in the physical companies also early in the industry. There’s a lot of science into the industry being consolidated and new players coming in that more data warehousing companies playing a bigger role, I think. Is it more like transformation? To be honest, the way I see it, I see companies focusing more their attention and psycho kill it. Out of these five different tools that all kind of do similar things. Let us really understand which tools providing what’s the best ROI we get of these tools and then try to consolidate it and maybe focus only on a couple of them and then use maybe a warehouse underneath or use different mechanisms.
Christian Almenar
So it’s kind of like an architectural shift and a little bit of consolidation that I think is happening and that’s allowing new players, new security. Companies are very doing a lot of innovative work on some workloads by allowing them to use more richer data sets. So it’s a transformation, I would say.
Brett
Got it.
Brett
And then how would this fit into the security stack? Would this replace a SIM or would this be built on top of the SIM or used on top of the SIM?
Brett
What would that look like?
Christian Almenar
SIM is like such a tricky one. I mean, I think the notion of the SIM is being kind of decoupled a little bit. I mean, there’s definitions, but we want to empower new type of SIM. So I believe there’s new companies coming out. They’re just trying to replace strike up to SIM. We not only focus, we can output data to customers that can be used on Sims, but we also ingest a lot of data that’s traditionally enough SIM data. So we kind of see a little bit like a layer a little bit below the SIM. We can enable more advanced SIM kind of features, but at the same time, we more kind of stay at the data infrastructure layer.
Brett
Okay. Makes sense. And you’ve raised 19 million to date. Why do you think investors are so excited about what you’re building?
Christian Almenar
Yeah, I don’t know. I guess you could ask them, but I think what they see we started really incubating this company with Sequoia. In the beginning, we saw the success of the warehousing movement, south lakes of the world, and it is very apparent that cybersecurity is a little behind in everything that the new data technologies have enabled in other industries. So I think they see the signs that customers kind of like reaching a tipping point of needing to do things differently when it comes to handling all the data these tools generate. And I don’t know, I think it’s really hopefully the timing and the customer pool that we’re seeing.
Brett
Makes sense. And if we zoom out into the future, what would you say is the five year vision for the company?
Christian Almenar
This company, we’re really doing it. We’re focusing a lot on having fun doing it and trying to attract the best talent possible. And we really focus on as an industry perspective, trying to uplift industry, try to bring an order magnet to better by upgrading the way people deal with security data. So there’s also like, as we see, there’s a lot of black swan events happening in cybersecurity that people need to adapt to. So I mean, basically we set ourselves to build like a long standing company. Of course we want a company with the public and be very profitable, but we wanted to be a platform for good.
Christian Almenar
So be able to attract the most talented people we can to get people to empower them to do the best job possible when solving, understanding the risks, understand be able to defend themselves against new threats that are coming in the future. So we really like trying to build a company that does as best as possible because as we see more and more, this cybersecurity is more like such a critical piece and maintaining civil liberties and the privacy online and enjoying all the fun things that we do on the Internet. That we take a note of people in the company that came from companies like Palantir, for example. So we’re very kind of mission driven, very values driven, and we want to just be an agent of good for the world. So that’s kind of the kind of company we’re building.
Christian Almenar
And hopefully five years will be like that, just larger, with a lot of amazing talented people, great customers working not just with big customers, but also governments and smaller companies. That will be my dream. It would be super fun.
Brett
Nice. Amazing. Well, unfortunately, that’s all we’re going to have time to cover for today. So before we wrap, if people want to follow along with your journey, where’s the best place for them to go?
Christian Almenar
I mean, our website is monet.com. They can reach out to me directly. Over LinkedIn Christian Almenar over Twitter also Christian Almenar Send me an email. Also anyway, you can ping us online. I’m sure you can find us.
Brett
Amazing. Well, thanks so much for your time. Really appreciate it and look forward to seeing you execute on this vision.
Christian Almenar
Thank you, Brett. It’s a pleasure talking to you.
Brett
Keep in touch. Bye.
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