From KPMG to Startup: Cranium’s Unconventional Path to Product-Market Fit

Learn how Cranium leveraged their unique KPMG experience to build an AI security platform, transforming enterprise insights into product-market fit in an emerging category.

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From KPMG to Startup: Cranium’s Unconventional Path to Product-Market Fit

From KPMG to Startup: Cranium’s Unconventional Path to Product-Market Fit

Most startup stories begin with a founder leaving a corporate job to pursue their vision. But in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Cranium CEO Jonathan Dambrot shares how taking the opposite path – joining KPMG after a successful exit – ultimately led to stronger product-market fit in the AI security space.

The Counterintuitive Move

After selling his previous company, Prevalent, Jonathan made an unexpected decision: he joined KPMG as a partner. “I got a lot of that when I first started there,” he recalls. “‘What do you mean you’re going to KPMG?'” The move puzzled many, but it provided crucial insights that would later shape Cranium’s development.

Finding Entrepreneurship in Big Four

Contrary to the typical perception of large consulting firms, Jonathan found KPMG surprisingly entrepreneurial. “My experience at KPMG was great. I know some people think about it differently than I do, but my experience was extraordinarily entrepreneurial environment,” he shares. This environment allowed him to explore emerging technology opportunities while understanding enterprise needs at scale.

Discovering the Market Gap

The genesis of Cranium came from firsthand observation of a critical market gap. While running KPMG’s third-party security business globally, Jonathan noticed a blind spot in AI security. Over “the course of a couple of years, I spoke to probably 100 CISOs, and I couldn’t get a positive answer to the question of how do you get visibility into the machine learning and AI systems.”

Building with Enterprise DNA

KPMG’s enterprise experience shaped Cranium’s approach to product development. As Jonathan explains, “If you want to solve really big problems, there’s no better place than a big four. You see big problems at the largest scale and you get to get involved in them.” This perspective influenced their focus on scalability and enterprise-grade features from day one.

Understanding the Innovation Timeline

The KPMG experience also provided valuable insights into enterprise adoption cycles. Jonathan notes that while “people want to talk to me about this today,” that wasn’t the case “two years ago, when we started this process.” This understanding helped them time their market entry and product development phases.

Leveraging Enterprise Relationships

Being incubated within KPMG provided access to enterprise design partners, helping ensure their product addressed real needs. “We had to meet really strict standards at KPMG for both software development and security,” Jonathan explains, which helped build enterprise credibility from the start.

Building for Rapid Change

The enterprise perspective also highlighted the need for adaptability. As Jonathan observes, “We moved from basically a linear innovation environment where AI had penetration rates of about 20% to, like, an exponential AI penetration rate of 80% to 90% in a six month period.” This insight influenced their product architecture and development approach.

The key lesson from Cranium’s journey is that sometimes the best path to product-market fit isn’t the most obvious one. Their time at KPMG provided crucial insights into enterprise needs, helping them build a product that addressed real-world problems at scale.

For founders building enterprise software, particularly in emerging categories, Cranium’s experience suggests that deep understanding of enterprise dynamics can be as valuable as technical innovation. As Jonathan puts it, “In most cases, if you build AI and ML systems appropriately and you do it the right way and it’s for good, and you’re solving big problems, we can do things that we could never have imagined in the past.”

The future challenge will be maintaining this enterprise understanding while keeping pace with rapid technological change. But with their unique combination of startup agility and enterprise DNA, Cranium seems well-positioned to navigate this balance.

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