How Calamu Turned a Golden Retriever Into a $20M Cybersecurity Insight

How Calamu Turned a Golden Retriever Into a $20M Cybersecurity Insight

The best startup ideas don’t come from market research or competitive analysis. They come from moments of clarity that reframe entire problems.

For most founders, those moments happen in front of whiteboards or during customer interviews. For Paul Lewis, CEO and Co-Founder of Calamu, it happened on his porch watching his golden retriever bury a bone in the neighbor’s yard.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Paul shared how years of frustration in cybersecurity, combined with one unexpected observation, led to creating an entirely new category: cyber storage. The story reveals a critical truth about innovation—breakthrough insights require both deep domain expertise and the ability to see familiar problems through completely new lenses.

The Frustration That Precedes Breakthrough

Paul’s insight didn’t emerge in a vacuum. It came after years of watching the same problem unfold with the same failed solutions.

“Prior to Kalamu, I was an incident response. I was a practitioner. I was working with multi global corporations that were just getting hammered in cyber attacks, like over and over again. And I thought there had to be a better way to do this and there had to be a better solution,” Paul recalls.

The breaking point came at security conferences. “At the time, I was going to all the security conferences, and really, quite literally, I got tired of seeing like, 3000 companies selling the same ten things, and none of those things really were working.”

This is where most people would stop. They’d accept the constraint that everyone else accepts: protecting data means building better walls around it. But Paul couldn’t let it go. “I thought there had to be a better way. We have to think about how can we protect the data in a way that we’re not doing so today?”

The question consumed him. “I was giving this a lot of thought, every waking moment for a couple of years.” He wasn’t just looking for incremental improvements. He was searching for a fundamentally different mental model.

The Moment Everything Changed

Then came the evening that would define Calamu’s entire approach.

“I was sitting on my porch literally one night, and my dog, my golden retriever, was sitting next to me. And he got up and he picked up his bone and he trotted across the street and he buried a hole in my neighbor’s yard and put his bone there and covered it up and came back, and I could swear he was smiling,” Paul remembers.

What happened next is what separates founders who build incrementally better solutions from those who create new categories. Paul didn’t just see a dog burying a bone. He saw a complete inversion of the security model everyone else accepted.

“And that was the moment of inspiration that I had that said, wow, he just put his most prized possession in the public domain, and he’s cool with it. He’s not worried about anybody accessing it.”

The insight was immediate and profound. “And that really was the change in mindset that I needed to start thinking about how can we put our data in the cloud, which really is the public domain in a way that makes it truly safe? And that was the beginning of Kalamu.”

The company name itself became a permanent tribute to that breakthrough moment. “My dog’s name was Kalamuchi, so Kalamu was his nickname, and I named the company after him.”

Why the Insight Worked: Domain Expertise Meets Fresh Perspective

What makes this story more than just a quirky origin tale is understanding why the observation resonated so powerfully with Paul—and why it wouldn’t have meant anything to someone without his background.

Paul had already built and sold two cybersecurity companies. His first, MC squared, was “a network monitoring company” acquired by a Fortune 500. His second, PG Lewis and Associates, was “a data forensics incident response company, really one of the first companies in the space,” also acquired by a Fortune 500.

Through these experiences, Paul gained what he calls a “first hand look at the cyber problem, how bad it was and how bad it was getting.” This wasn’t theoretical knowledge—it was scar tissue from being in the trenches.

That expertise meant Paul understood the fundamental flaw everyone was working around: “I think one of the core problems that we’ve got, all of us, is that this whole cyber world started without security in mind, right? So it started all about ease of communication, and then we had to kind of interweave security after we realized we had security problems.”

The industry’s entire approach—layering security on top of infrastructure—was addressing symptoms, not root causes. Paul had spent years seeing this fail. He just needed a different mental model to articulate the alternative.

The dog provided that model: what if security wasn’t about controlling access to where the data lives, but about making the data itself secure regardless of where it ends up?

Translating Observation Into Category Definition

The gap between insight and execution is where most breakthroughs die. Paul’s genius wasn’t just seeing the parallel—it was translating it into a viable market approach.

“We’re in a category called cyber storage. So it’s cybersecurity, but cyber storage is the way that we think about storing data in a way where we’re protecting the data itself. And it’s actually a new category. So Gartner recognizes this as a new category. Just recently, they recognize it as an emerging category,” Paul explains.

The differentiation from existing solutions is stark. “Instead of putting layered security on the infrastructure, and instead of trying to protect the network that holds the data, Calamu protects the data itself, regardless of what infrastructure happens to be on.”

This approach directly addresses what Paul identified as the real threat: “We have double extortion where data is actually stolen from the network and that data is then weaponized back against the company and used against the company and threatened to be released. And that’s really where we see the biggest growing kind of pain that we’ve got around ransomware.”

If the data itself is protected—truly unreadable even when stolen—the entire extortion model breaks down. Just like Kalamuchi’s bone buried in the neighbor’s yard: visible, accessible, but useless to anyone who finds it.

The Broader Lesson for Founders

Paul’s story illustrates several principles about unconventional problem-solving that apply far beyond cybersecurity.

First, breakthrough insights require deep frustration with existing solutions. Paul didn’t just casually observe that current approaches weren’t working—he spent years watching companies get “hammered” despite massive security investments. That frustration created the cognitive pressure necessary for a mental model shift.

Second, the best ideas often come from analogies outside your domain. The cybersecurity industry wasn’t going to solve its own problems by looking at more cybersecurity. Paul needed to see the problem through a completely different lens—one provided by a golden retriever’s instinctive approach to protecting valuable assets.

Third, breakthrough insights are only valuable if you can translate them into market language. Paul didn’t just say “we should do what my dog does.” He translated that observation into a new category (cyber storage), a clear differentiation (protect data, not infrastructure), and a specific pain point it solves (double extortion ransomware).

Fourth, timing matters. The insight about protecting data in the public domain only makes sense in a world rapidly moving to cloud infrastructure. “When you go to the cloud, you’re actually putting your hands, your data into the hands of a third party,” Paul notes. “For the first time, you’re taking it out of your complete control…And that’s scary.” Calamu’s approach addresses a fear that didn’t exist when companies controlled their own data centers.

From Observation to Execution

The real test of any insight is execution. Paul’s vision is characteristically ambitious: “I’d love to see some of these cyber problems like ransomware completely eliminated, just a thing of the past, part of our history and not something that we’re still talking about.”

When pressed on whether this is realistic, Paul remains committed to the fundamental insight from that porch moment. “People think I’m crazy because the bad guys are always smarter, the mouse is always faster than the cat. But I think in this case, I could see a difference because we’re changing the battle surface. Right. We’re kind of changing the attack vector.”

The lesson for founders isn’t that you need a golden retriever to build a successful company. It’s that breakthrough insights come from combining deep domain expertise with the willingness to see familiar problems through unfamiliar lenses. And sometimes, the most powerful business insights come from the most unexpected sources—if you’re prepared to recognize them.

Paul spent years preparing for that moment on the porch. When Kalamuchi buried his bone across the street, completely unconcerned about who might find it, Paul saw what others would have missed: a completely different way to think about protecting what matters most.