Lacework co-CEOs’ combined leadership sets the course for accelerated growth as the company aims to solve cloud security for developers

We recently spoke with the chief executives of companies that participated in the recent AWS Startup Showcase: The Next Big Things in AI, Security & Life Sciences to find out what drives them and learn about their visions for the future. This feature is part of theCUBE’s ongoing CEO Startup Spotlight series.

Neither David Hatfield (“Hat” – pictured left) nor Jay Parikh (pictured, right) planned on becoming co-chief executive officers at Lacework Inc., the cloud native data security platform company they are leading together. 

“I was having lunch with one of our investors, talking about board composition, and asked him who is the best cloud technology executive he knew of,” Hatfield said. “He asked if I knew Jay, and before he could barely say his name, I immediately said, ‘I love Jay. We’ve known each other for 25 years!’ After lunch I reached out to him and arranged for us to talk.”

Parikh previously spent 11 years at Facebook as vice president and head of engineering and infrastructure, and had recently decided to leave the company and retire. During his tenure at Facebook, he grew the engineering team from 300 members to a global team of 30,000 to build and scale its software and hardware infrastructure and platforms. 

After reconnecting with Hatfield, Parikh was intrigued by the promise he saw in Lacework and he signed on as an advisor to the company in May 2021. As he gained a deeper understanding of Lacework’s approach to security and the more he learned about the technology and the team, the more excited he became about helping to build and scale the company. 

Hatfield and Parikh had previously worked together and experienced a strong partnership at Akamai Technologies during that company’s hypergrowth period in the early 2000s. After the .com crash and the market got tough, they spent a lot of time together developing Akamai’s West Coast office, growing the team and company culture, building up its engineering and planning its go-to-market strategy. 

With Lacework on a hypergrowth track itself, it made sense for the relationship to evolve, and in July 2021, Hatfield and Parikh joined forces as co-CEOs to accelerate the company’s expansion through their combined leadership. 

Hatfield, who is also chairman, leads business strategy, business development, market expansion and operations. Parikh, who is also on Lacework’s Board of Directors, is leading the company’s innovation engine, including the company’s product, engineering and infrastructure efforts.

“Contrary to the idea that consensus-driven decision-making slows things down, it’s absolutely the inverse,” Hatfield explained. “We can get much more done faster and in a higher quality way because we each have the domain expertise that comes together, along with the trust that comes from having a long-term relationship.”

Parikh underscored the value of their co-leadership, adding, “The company is scaling very rapidly, and while this may be an uncommon executive configuration, it’s helping to grow in a way that delivers impact and value and delights customers who are struggling with security problems as they themselves are trying to move faster and achieve more flexibility in the cloud.”

Data science meets cloud security

Security remains the unsolved issue as businesses migrate to the cloud, according to Hatfield and Parikh. Companies are using dozens of point solutions to try and secure their cloud infrastructures. 

“Some are legacy based, some are stitched together like duct tape integrations and some are homegrown and very fragile,” Parikh said. “It’s very clunky and expensive for an average customer to work with all these solutions. They may have 75 different tools to login to everyday, followed by viewing multiple dashboards and processing a lot of alerts. Companies are trying to move faster with the cloud, but the complexity of using point solutions goes against what they’re trying to do.”

Lacework is a cloud native business that runs on Amazon Web Services Inc. The most important thing to remember about Lacework is that its technology is automating this complexity with a platform built around data, Parikh pointed out.

“We’re ingesting many different types of data, bringing it into our engine, processing it, and from there we’re driving different types of actionable insights for customers,” he said. “We can detect and understand what the baseline is so that if something changes, we can send an alert. It’s very much like finding that needle in the haystack, because we understand what normal is in their environment compared to before when customers may have been getting a ton of alerts and lots of false positives.”

The more data that is put into the platform’s machine learning algorithms, the smarter it gets and the higher the efficacy. It can dynamically morph as a company makes changes, such as launching new applications, or hire more people. It continues to adjust the baseline to determine what “normal” means at any given time. When deviations are detected, alerts are sent and customers can take action to mitigate them. The company says that businesses can reduce false positives by up to 98% and investigation time by more than 90%. 

Lacework’s foundation is based on its patented Polygraph technology, a context-rich baseline built from collecting high-fidelity machine, process and user interactions over time. This technology develops a dynamic behavioral and communication model of services and infrastructure that understands natural hierarchies (processes, containers, pods and machines, to name a few) and aggregates them to create behavioral models at scale. The Lacework Polygraph monitors the infrastructure for activities that fall outside the model and dynamically updates as behaviors change over time. 

A mission-based vs. mercenary-based organization

In January, Lacework announced a $525-million growth round with a valuation of $1 billion. The company said it will use the investment to accelerate the strategies driving Lacework’s 300%+ year-over-year revenue growth, expand its go-to-market and partner ecosystem operations, and build out its engineering and R&D teams across the U.S. and Europe.

In a conversation with John Furrier of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s livestreaming studio, Hatfield said the finance round, led by Sutter Hill Ventures, is one of the largest rounds of financing in the history of the security business.

“Sutter Hill doesn’t invest in 400 companies and spray and pray, which is what most venture funds do,” he stated. “Their focus is to find a really big market and find a catalyst for change. In our case, it’s moving to the cloud and then building a modern approach, one that is 10x better in every dimension.”

Creating and scaling a winning team and company culture is always a challenge for any company that is rapidly growing and expanding globally. Hatfield and Parikh are aligned on being deliberate, setting expectations, maintaining accountability, and keeping the company’s core values front and center. 

“We really want to protect digital businesses and think we have the right approach,” Hatfield said. “So we have to be a mission-based versus mercenary-based organization. We want to win, but we also want to do something that is profound and impactful over the long term. Building a group of people that have a shared vision, shared mission and shared practices is key to getting it done.”

One of Lacework’s core values is to put customers first, a few of which include cloud-based businesses Brightcove, Lendingtree and Pure Storage. Working backward from problems that customers face allows them to think through how to best leverage the underlying platform, any integrations that need to be done and other problem-solving measures that may be needed. This helps bring the whole team together, according to Parikh.

“It’s not a sales thing, or an engineering thing, or customer support thing,” he said. “Instead, we look at the customer’s problem, determine who needs to be on the team, and then work together to solve the problem and deliver real value. We take the learning and development from that experience, codify it and add it to the platform so that other customers can benefit from it as well.”

The process, starting with putting the customer first, reinforces continual learning inside the organization, which makes for a more engaging environment, Parikh added. 

“You get to solve problems, have a line of sight view of work and how it’s helping the customer and the impact it’s making,” he said. “And the team is learning from those experiences, which makes them hungrier for even more new experiences. We’re all developing and learning new skills and challenging ourselves to solve a new set of problems that our customers and the industry at large are facing.”

Empowering developers to do what they do best

Security concerns have typically slowed the development process down, which has a push-pull effect. Businesses want to innovate faster, but are held back by risk factors. It’s a tradeoff. Hatfield and Parikh want to flip that paradigm on its head. 

“With risks that are becoming more deliberate and better funded, we want to deliver outcomes for customers that improve their security posture and allow them to move their business online with confidence,” Hatfield said. “We want development teams to do what they do best, which is to write code, build customer experiences, get to market and differentiate their businesses through innovation.”

Going forward, the company’s goal is to rapidly expand their attack surface area and increasingly replace existing point solutions, consolidating them into a high-trust, high-efficacy, high-value platform. 

“We don’t want businesses to feel they have to make a trade-off choice anymore,” Hatfield concluded.

Photos: Lacework