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Strategic Communications Advisory For Visionary Founders
Actionable
Takeaways
Leverage Diverse Experiences:
Ryan's varied international background contributed to his unique perspective on solving complex problems, showing the value of diverse experiences in tech innovation.
Focus on Core Problems:
Vaultree's success stems from concentrating on the fundamental issue of data vulnerability, underscoring the importance of addressing root problems rather than symptoms.
Importance of Simplifying Complex Tech:
Ryan's explanation of homomorphic encryption demonstrates the power of making complex technology accessible and understandable to a broader audience.
Overcoming Market Skepticism:
Vaultree's approach to overcoming skepticism through demos and clear value propositions can be applied by startups facing similar challenges in educating potential customers.
Building a Team Focused on Equality:
Vaultree's hiring process emphasizes giving everyone an equal chance, showing that a focus on skills and potential over background can lead to forming a talented and dedicated team.
Conversation
Highlights
How Vaulttree Bridges the Gap Between Breakthrough Technology and Customer Education
A CISO from a major bank joined the sales call without even saying hello. His first words? “This is not possible.”
In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Ryan Lasmaili, Co-Founder and CEO of Vaulttree, shared how his company is tackling one of encryption’s hardest problems—and discovering that the technical challenge is only half the battle. The real work? Convincing organizations that what they thought was impossible is now ready for production.
Nine Years of Solving a Problem Nobody Believed Could Be Solved
Vaulttree didn’t start with a typical startup origin story. Instead, Ryan and his co-founders spent nearly a decade working day jobs while spending evenings and weekends solving one of cryptography’s most challenging problems.
“Every single day we have a new data breach, we have data being leaked,” Ryan explained. “Problems are not solved around data literally lying around in plain text and being vulnerable on a continuous basis.”
Even with modern systems and multiple security layers, the fundamental problem remained: data had to be decrypted to be used. Most solutions offered workarounds—better access controls, more encryption layers. But none tackled the core problem: “Data in plain text in readable form, that problem has not been solved,” Ryan said.
So Vaulttree set out to solve it at the source. The result? “The first fully functioning global, fully homomorphic and searchable encryption technology.”
Making the Impossible Possible
Organizations can now share fully encrypted data, analyze it, process it, and run computations on it—without ever decrypting it.
“US being able to share data, fully encrypted with each other and analyze and process that data without ever decrypting that data again and doing this with simplicity,” Ryan explained. The decryption only happens at the very last step, client-side. Ryan calls it “last millimeter decryption.”
“We allow for the processing of fully randomized encrypted data at scale without ever decrypting data again,” Ryan said. “Any organization can use this utilizing their existing tech stacks, utilizing their own databases. We don’t hold any data.”
The Educational Challenge
Remember that skeptical CISO? After demonstrating the technology, his skepticism transformed. “In the end we showed a demo and he was tipping out. He was sitting on the edge of the seat. We were seeing that because he was tipped back and forth the whole time, but he fell off his chair,” Ryan recounted.
This captures Vaulttree’s core GTM challenge: organizations don’t know they need this technology because they don’t believe it exists.
“The biggest challenge definitely is the educational element,” Ryan said. “Every organization that we are talking to, at the beginning, the conversation could be like, oh, we have no use case, or we don’t know, or this doesn’t work, right? But it’s mainly because they don’t understand really that their data and everyone’s data is vulnerable.”
The transformation happens quickly, but requires showing, not telling. “After literally two minutes, it’s like, oh wow, okay, you do this, okay, we can do that, we didn’t even know,” Ryan explained.
Translating Cryptography Into Business Value
The education problem goes deeper than proving the technology works. Vaulttree must bridge the gap between cryptographic breakthroughs and business outcomes.
“The challenge really, I mean, to give you an idea, is that perception, right, of, okay, I don’t need this technology, I have everything else. I have, let’s say 100 security solutions,” Ryan said. “But the educational element here is, yeah, it doesn’t matter how many onion layers you have, your data is still in readable form, so you literally just cut right through the onion.”
The value proposition needs to be immediate. “How you overcome that is by, first of all, demos understanding and bringing a very clear value proposition very quickly to a customer to make them understand,” Ryan explained.
The education challenge varies dramatically by geography. “If you go to Asia, they are more interested in something that is going to help not only their own company, but also in benefit of the country and the people,” Ryan noted. “And then you go to Europe. In Europe it’s more specifically to GDPR and compliance and then you are going then let’s say to the US. For example, Canada and US. It’s more like, okay, how can we utilize this tech to also, for example, sell to my customers.”
Building Inbound Momentum
Despite the education challenge, Vaulttree has found something surprising: “Most of our traction is inbound, which is amazing to see.”
Once organizations understand what’s possible, “basically every conversation usually we have with an organization ends up in us moving this along to either a pilot, a POC and a customer,” Ryan said.
Ryan describes the current state: “I think it’s definitely still sort of a sector that is covered by peculiar. Like, imagine a room full of nerds, right, writing algorithms all day long that are really funky and you have to translate that into a language that everyone else is going to understand.”
Hiring for Cultural Fit
As Vaulttree scales, Ryan has taken an unconventional approach. “We are very unique in the way we, for example, bring people into the organization. It’s not your seven interviews and saying, okay, now you’re going to have to write several tests. Actually, we only do two interviews and we tend not to do a test,” Ryan explained.
Vaulttree believes background matters less than potential. “One of our cryptographers never studied math, right? And she’s one of our most talented cryptographers,” Ryan said.
“We don’t care what your background is, have you been to which college and for how long and which company? No, we care about people.”
The Future Is Encrypted
Ask Ryan about Vaulttree’s five-year vision: “This technology in the space we’re in, right, this is without doubt the future. The future being encrypted. That’s it, literally.”
But Ryan sees a bigger opportunity: “The possibilities of what kind of products and what kind of other potential technologies and startups are going to appear around the topic of encrypted data because it becomes now a possibility of building on top of encryption in a way that we could not have done it before.”
Vaulttree isn’t just building a product—they’re enabling an entire ecosystem. For founders building breakthrough technology, Vaulttree’s journey offers a clear lesson: the technical breakthrough is just the beginning. The real work is helping the market understand what’s now possible.
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