Jan. 27, 2021

Tim Sadler, Co-Founder and CEO of Tessian on: What All Great Funding Pitches have; Creating A New Category and Why Human Layer Security is The Next Big Thing

Tim Sadler, Co-Founder and CEO of Tessian on: What All Great Funding Pitches have; Creating A New Category and Why Human Layer Security is The Next Big Thing

I sat down this week with Tim Sadler, co-founder & CEO of Tessian, a venture-backed cybersecurity company that stops threats, by securing the human layer. In this episode, I get his thoughts on creating a new category and becoming a category leader a

Human Layer Security

  • [1:7] - What was your journey going from being a financial analyst with no background in security to founding Tessian?  
  • [6:50] - What does Tessian do, how is it protecting people in the remote working environment and what are some of the top security threats your customers are worried about?
  • [13:05] - How does Tessian and what it does for email security differ from what big security companies like Symantec offer?

Go-To-Market 

Category Creation

  • [17:53] - How did you come up with this “human security layer” and do you see this as a new category in security?
  • [21:09] - How did you create this new category and get the industry to recognize it?
  • [23:17] - How do you constantly differentiate yourself in the marketplace when marketing and what you say can be copied easily?

Other questions

  • [26:39] - What does Tessian stand for?
  • [28:51] - Why wouldn’t security teams try to simplify their stack and go with the “good-enough” option from other big vendors?
  • [32:08] - What was your customer acquisition channel in the beginning and how has that changed as you grew?
  • [35:36] - How did you determine pricing for a new category product?
  • [36:50] - Looking back at your go-to-market journey, what didn’t go so well and what did you learn from that?


What all Great Pitches have

  • [42:07] - What was your funding journey like? How did you manage to get Accel, Sequoia and Balderton as investors?  

Links

Company: Tessian

Book:  On Tyranny by Timothy D Snyder

New Podcast: RE Human Layer Security