From VMware to Pandemic Startup: What Christian Almenar Learned Building Monad

From VMware to Pandemic Startup: What Christian Almenar Learned Building Monad

Selling your company should feel like validation. For Christian Almenar, selling Intrinsic to VMware in the years before COVID led to something more valuable than an exit: a painful realization that would define his next company.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Christian Almenar, CEO and Founder of Monad, a security data platform that’s raised $19 million, explained how his time inside VMware revealed a fundamental problem with how the cybersecurity industry approaches data. That insight became the foundation for everything Monad would become.

The First Time Inside a Big Company

Christian’s path to VMware wasn’t conventional. After growing up across six countries and always being “very into cybersecurity since a kid,” he’d built his career entirely in startups. “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,” Christian says.

The acquisition required him to stay on for about a year, and while many founders find post-acquisition roles constraining, Christian used the time strategically. At VMware, he wasn’t just maintaining the Intrinsic product—he was building a whole new business unit in cybersecurity and thinking about the industry from a bigger scope.

That broader perspective revealed something he couldn’t have seen while focused on building a point solution. The problem wasn’t what most security vendors were trying to solve.

The Painful Realization

Working at VMware gave Christian exposure to how large enterprises actually operated their security programs. What he observed was striking—not because of what was broken, but because of the contrast with how other parts of the business functioned.

“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,” Christian explains.

Marketing teams could attribute every dollar spent. Sales teams had comprehensive analytics. Product teams understood user behavior at granular levels. HR had sophisticated people analytics. All of this was possible because those teams leveraged modern data infrastructure.

Then Christian looked at cybersecurity: “What we kept running into is that customers really what they really struggle is like they have too many security products. 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.”

The gap was almost offensive. “It was almost striking that cybersecurity being so critical and so important for the world that it’s not Alipar with other industries,” Christian says. Here was this critical function—protecting the entire business—and it couldn’t do basic data operations that marketing had mastered years ago.

Why This Insight Required the VMware Experience

Here’s what’s important about this realization: Christian probably couldn’t have seen it while building Intrinsic. When you’re building a technical, academic-based security system, you’re focused on the specific problem that system solves. You’re not thinking about the broader data infrastructure gaps across the industry.

But inside VMware, building a business unit and talking to customers at scale, Christian could see patterns. “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.”

The VMware vantage point provided something founders rarely get: macro-level visibility into customer problems across segments, combined with the operational experience of knowing what modern data infrastructure enables in other domains.

The Decision to Start Over

Despite learning about big company operations, Christian knew where he belonged. “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,” he says.

When COVID started and the opportunity arose to start something new, Christian had a clear thesis. The question became: “How can we uplift the industry to at least be Alipar with what people do for sales data or marketing data?”

This framing—uplifting an entire industry’s data capabilities—became central to how Monad would be built. It wasn’t about building another security tool. It was about bringing cybersecurity up to the data sophistication level of other business functions.

Christian wanted to “take a lot of the learnings from Intrinsic and double down on them and kind of start this new company.” But the learnings weren’t about product features or go-to-market tactics. They were about positioning and market opportunity.

How the Insight Shaped Product Strategy

The painful realization about cybersecurity’s data gap determined what Monad would be at a fundamental level. “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,” Christian explains.

This identity shapes everything about the product. Instead of building detection algorithms or prevention mechanisms, Monad focuses on data operations: “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.”

The goal is enabling “more data driven workflows” rather than providing another point solution. This requires completely different technical architecture and product thinking than what Christian built at Intrinsic.

How It Shaped Go-to-Market Positioning

The VMware insight also drove a counterintuitive GTM strategy. While most enterprise security companies design products that look like enterprise security products, Christian made a different choice: “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.”

This wasn’t about aesthetics—it was about signaling that Monad operates at a different layer. Data infrastructure companies look different than security tools because they serve different functions. The design reinforces the positioning.

Christian’s target customers started as Fortune 500 companies because “they’re the ones who are betting on doing more data driven cybersecurity.” But the product was always designed for eventual self-service because the goal was to “make it available to really any security engineer who wants to get more value out of the current tools they use.”

How It Shaped the Company’s Mission

Perhaps most significantly, the VMware experience influenced how Christian thinks about Monad’s purpose beyond just building a profitable business. “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,” he explains.

This mission-driven approach attracts specific talent: “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.”

The mission isn’t separate from the business strategy—it’s core to it. Uplifting an entire industry’s data capabilities is both the market opportunity and the broader purpose. Christian describes the company vision as being “a platform for good” that can “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.”

The Sequencing Lesson

What Christian’s journey illustrates is the value of seeing a market from different vantages before diving in again. Building Intrinsic gave him deep technical expertise and credibility. Selling to VMware gave him exit experience and validation. Working inside VMware gave him the macro perspective to identify the bigger opportunity.

When he started Monad during the pandemic, it wasn’t a reactive move. It was a deliberate decision based on a specific insight that could only come from having occupied multiple positions in the ecosystem.

“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 says. The five-year vision is “just larger, with a lot of amazing talented people, great customers working not just with big customers, but also governments and smaller companies.”

The Underlying Principle

For founders navigating their own journeys, the lesson isn’t “go work at a big company after you exit.” It’s about extracting maximum learning from whatever position you occupy in a market.

Christian could have stayed focused on technical execution at VMware and missed the broader insight about data infrastructure gaps. Instead, he used the vantage point to understand customer problems at a different level of abstraction.

The painful realization about cybersecurity lagging other industries in data sophistication became the foundation for an entire company. That realization was only possible because Christian had the perspective to see it—and the conviction to build something new around it rather than just accepting it as how the industry works.

Sometimes the most valuable thing about an exit isn’t the money or validation. It’s the vantage point it gives you to see problems you couldn’t see before.