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Conversations between the venture investors and operators at Dell Technologies Capital and the people who are building what's next in enterprise technologies.
DTC (00:01)
From the early days from Humio, we wanted to be able to get Humio and the products that we were building out to the world as fast as possible. And then the very early discussions with George and the team at CrowdStrike, it was clear that that was what this relationship was going to help us do. And again, the fantastic ability and success of the CrowdStrike organization and team, it was pretty clear that this was like a rocket that you needed to jump on to get there.
Welcome to the DTC podcast, a series of conversations between the investors and operators at Dell Technologies Capital and the people who are building what's next in enterprise technologies. In this exit interview episode, DTC Managing Director Deepak Jeevankumar talks with Geeta Schmidt, co -founder and CEO of Humio, a company that was acquired by CrowdStrike in 2021. They talk about what Geeta and the founding team set out to accomplish with Humio, how they accidentally became a cybersecurity company,
and the experience of being acquired by a rocket ship company like CrowdStrike.
Geetha, welcome to the DTC podcast series titled Exit Interview. Great to have you as our honored guest. It's great working with you when you were the CEO of Humio when I was on the board. Thank you. Thanks for the invitation. I'm looking forward to it. Great. So why don't we get started by talking about how did the company Humio come about? How did the founding team come together? What does the name Humio stand for? And what was your world domination plan when you got started?
Yeah, that was a lot of questions into one. I think we really started with the simple idea of really building something for ourselves. And I think oftentimes I see when good startups come about, they actually come from some type of pain that they felt themselves and wanting to change the world with either a new service or a new product or new technology. And we really wanted to bring a new product to deal with all of the logs that people have been dealing with.
a lot of log data that we were running in our jobs ourselves and trying to understand and get insights for development environments and security environments. And through that expertise, we realized none of the tools really worked as well as we'd like them to. So when that happens, you really start to get creative as to what you'd like to see in a product. And I think that's really where the synergy came about.
when we started looking at competitive products in the market and realized nothing really was fast enough, can manage the amount of data that we wanted to manage and didn't give us the results in real time. And I think in many of these critical environments and scenarios where it's DevOps, SRE land or security, time is of essence. So we just really started on a mission to build this from the ground up.
and build it based on new technologies, which some of our competitors hadn't really taken into account. So we started just building a new product to take over the world, very naively, I would say. We felt the pain. We thought we could build something better. And we started to do so. And we started to really realize how powerful something like this could be. And we started telling others about it. And then when you realize that we weren't the only ones running into
extremely high logging bills and or the inability to log all the data you wanted or really struggling with getting to the insights that you need in a timely fashion. All of those things weren't just our problem, there were others that were running it and that really gave us the energy to build Humio and build the product and get it out to market. So the validation very early on was incredibly important to us. Humio,
has a interesting name, I guess when you asked about the name. Humio is essentially putting two things together, the human, HU, H -U part, human, and then the IO, which is more of like the technical side of things, the human and the machine kind of coming together. And this was sort of our way of thinking of how do we bring humans back to really understanding how these machines are working? In the old days, you'd have your computer and you'd be,
building an application and you could actually see that you're, you could actually feel the machine or you could actually get a sense of, you know, is it working? Are there things wrong with the product, you know, or the application? And suddenly with cloud and with the way that we're running very distributed computing environments, microservices, very sophisticated.
security landscapes that we have to manage. Everything is just very, very far away or almost you can't touch it anymore. So we wanted to bring this human sense back to the machine. So it is a bit of a play on words, I would say. And we came up with the owl as well in terms of just a fun idea of like trying to build something that had a face and a recognizable kind of identity in an animal that's got really big eyes that's observing all the time. So.
That's a fun story. So how did the founding team come together? What's the story behind that? Yeah, we have all worked together. So Creston, Christian and I kind of started in the early days. And then we had the addition of Morton Graham, who also helped us on all the commercial side.
We met in a earlier company called Trifork and it was mainly consulting work that we were doing. So I think this whole understanding of customers and consulting projects versus product was where we met. So we really all had this very keen sense of making sure customers were happy at the end of the day. And I think that energy that came from our founding team really kind of...
built a lot of the structure or the values that we actually adopted when we built Himya, when we became bigger, et cetera. So this customers in our DNA was very much part of our learnings from being in the consulting organization. We met and we have very different backgrounds. And I think these days when I actually talk to younger startups, I think that is something that I actually held very dear, that we had a founding team with very
different backgrounds and very clear roles, I would say. So my side was very much a commercial side. My two technical founders were very much on two sides of the technical pillars. One was, Khristian was very much looking at the future and enhancements and also kind of very keen on being the person out there with customers. And Khristian was really the one who was helping to run our architecture.
day -to -day, what do we need to build, fix, think about where a product is going. And then a commercial lead in Morton, which really came with a strong enterprise sales background. And putting all of that together, we really had a set of experts all of a sudden, right? And I think oftentimes with a startup, it's really, really hard to do everything right. And very rarely have I seen...
like sole CEOs be able to do this well. And I think that that's something that I think is really important, maybe very unique to Humio. But I think other companies do this. It's just that I think we were lucky to have that early. That's amazing. And when did you know that the technology was something very unique and world changing? Was there a particular moment or?
KPI you are looking for when you are like, okay, you know what? This is something unique. I don't really believe in KPI's in that sense. I don't think KPI's are going to show you what the value your product actually delivers to an end user or a customer. A KPI is usually after the fact. It's more so like, okay, you've hit your number milestone that you're tracking. I think that if you're an entrepreneur or you're building a product, it's like you
you know you're on the right track. You can feel it, you can feel it instinctually. I knew when we were on the right track when customers were willing to bet on our product, bet on the fact that maybe we hadn't built everything out that they need or want, but they were ready to put the investment and the time and the interest in helping us.
And so we really had a design, a lot of times design win customers in our early days that really helped us build our product set, our features, our focus to help drive the focus of our teams. And that feeling is very, very valuable, but it is also very fulfilling. So it's fulfilling not only for your commercial side, but it's also fulfilling for the team that's building the product at the end of the day. So I would say,
KPI doesn't cut it or a number oftentimes doesn't cut it. When your customer calls you back and says, you know what, you saved my day yesterday, or I could go home and spend time with my child because I know that we've got this covered now. And these are things that are also almost invaluable for the customer, right? And if you can get to that point with your product, then I think that's a home run. And when you feel that over and over again, then you start to feel like, okay, there is a direction here.
and the confidence comes with that. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm sure each and every one of those early partners and design customers were a great event for you. But is there one that you were like particularly proud of? I think in the early days, Bloomberg was probably one that we were early on very proud of partially because we really enjoyed working with them. It was also one of our first marquee customers in the United States, given we are
We started, I'm American, but the team, essentially, early team is all Danish. So we've got a customer that's over the Atlantic, very large, very recognizable in terms of a financial service versus company in the United States. And we were able to pull something together and give them a solution and a platform for their development organization. And we were incredibly proud. It was a very proud moment for our team when we were able to deliver that and they were able to go live with Himyo.
And those are things that I remember from, you know, oftentimes you think about like later on you get other deals and they happen, but the early deals really do make such an impact to the team, because then you can do the next one, right? Yeah, exactly, exactly. No, one of the unique things I remember when we started talking late in 2019 about partnering on a series B investment was that,
you had quite a few cybersecurity customers and use cases, although you never intended to sell to cybersecurity users to begin with, and it just so happened. How did that come about? How did the Humio, the logging company become Humio, the cybersecurity company eventually? Yeah, that's a very good question. I think early on, interestingly enough, our customers recognized the value of what
Humio could do for security and for large security environment socks. We did not understand enough about these environments. Most of our background and our use cases were more on the developer side or DevOps side. So we really spent a lot of time with the customers in security early to understand what is it that they could get from Humio and what could we improve upon.
And that innovative sort of almost taking it as a science project, I would say, saying like, okay, we do not know what this use case is, but we're gonna gosh darn it understand what is required here. And at the time we didn't really have a security expertise. I think when we met, you were always a bit surprised that we were in some fairly large security use cases and customers without having a really strong cybersecurity.
let's say background or reputation. I often find that we're solving a problem right at the end of the day. And if we're able to solve a problem for a particular user better than let's say our competition can, whether they're cybersecurity users or whether they are developers, in general, our user was fairly technical. So I think in some senses, there's that that's the same.
The pivot really started when more and more of these security customers started really coming to us. And we really saw this change that where we needed to really turn and start to focus on the segment, find more expertise, work with someone like yourself, Deepak, that has a ton of expertise and understanding of the market. And that was very...
valuable for us at that point in time, because when you came on board, you did open a lot of doors where we had conversations with individuals to really understand what is top of mind for CISOs, what is top of mind for security teams in large organizations, which for us was, I would say we took much more of a grassroots coming up from practitioners and operators versus
you know, the top down. So that was definitely helpful from our relationship with Dell. Thank you very much. And so talking about that relationship, we invested and in one year you got acquired by CrowdStrike. It was probably my shortest tenure on any board. So that was good in so many ways. Never actually had a physical like face -to -face board meeting because it was Corona.
That's right. That is right. We never had a face -to -face board meeting Yeah, so the extent you can talk about it like so how did this this happen like one year of After the series B was closed you were a quiet and that question was closed within the year Well, look at how well you got us to pivot into security, but I guess you know, it isn't we did have
quite a few security customers by the time we started working together. We also had joint customers with CrowdStrike. So in those particular scenarios, I think we were taking large volumes of endpoint data into Humio. So they're actually seeing it in customers where they're curious. And I think what happened was there were a number of...
customers where CrowdStrike was coming more and more up as, you know, let's work together, let's have Humio work together as a partnership. So we did have partnership conversations as many companies do in terms of integrations early on, but it wasn't until the latter half of the year where we started getting into pretty serious conversations. And I think it is also a bit of a landscape discussion. On the horizon, there was a number of
new products coming to market in the space with XDR coming more and more from the segment and from Palo Alto and others that are coming up with these solutions. So for CrowdStrike in particular, there is an interest to have a solution like ours in their portfolio to be able to expand the stack and their ability to provide a data layer, essentially a data storage layer for their customers up until
Then customers needed to work with another vendor to let's say store, retain, or use a logging solution of any kind. It's a massive opportunity, still is. I mean, I think this is one of the best kind of stories when you talk about exits. When we started talking, it just sort of made sense. It made a huge amount of sense. So we started talking about sort of our joint customers. We started talking about...
where the complimentary technology and platform plays are here and where we could really grow the existing business. And from the early days from Humio, we wanted to be able to get Humio and the products that we were building out to the world as fast as possible. And in the very early discussions with George and the team at CrowdStrike, it was clear that that was what this relationship was going to help us do.
And again, the fantastic and very amazing ability and success of the CrowdStrike organization and team. It was pretty clear that this was like a rocket that you needed to jump on to get there. It's always a funny story because I think every exit or acquisition has its own like, you know, kind of reasons why, why did this happen? I think for us, we actually had other offers, but said no to them.
And George was able, and team there, was able to convince us that it was the right choice. So. Yeah. No, I think CrowdStrike is an amazing company and they have built a great brand name and great trust with customers. So I'm glad that worked out well. And how did you pick CrowdStrike, you as an humio? What was the main reason?
I think the main reason was number one, the keen interest from the executive team. I think the tenacity of the team. I mean, think the first call that I had with George Kurtz was the day before Thanksgiving, where he'd set up a very quick call. We had a very quick chat. It was a preliminary chat, nothing serious, but he was very keen on having.
the next discussion and I said, well, it's Thanksgiving. Okay, let's set something up. Great. You know, maybe something will happen or not. And, and we were not in a position where we needed to sell or we had any, you know, any reason to exit at the time. So for me, it was more like, okay, if he responds, we'll, we'll have the conversation. So it's day before Thanksgiving, the day after Thanksgiving, George got the entire executive team on his side and set up a four hour meeting with us.
to go through everything that we could go through in that period of time to get a note for a few. And it was pretty much like that the whole time. So we had, I would say in terms of the timeline and the intensity and focus to get this done, that was very impressive and also easy in terms of conversations. I think we also learned more and more about each other's companies.
And it is very different when you're working with an entrepreneur who is interested in acquiring a company versus a large M &A team that's looking at that. And we really like the idea of working for someone who started his own company. It's a very different, if it's a different place. Yeah. Yeah. So post -M &A, how was the experience of announcing this to the world and more important to your own employees? How did they...
Well, I have to say if anyone has gone through this whole process, because many things can go wrong. You can start this and what doesn't happen is you've also seen with some recent large startups that haven't actually followed through on their acquisitions, but you have to just keep a face that
you're just running business, just day in and day out, just as if the day is the same. And then also at the same time, run a parallel kind of discussion around the possible acquisition. So CrowdStrike is also public. So there's not a lot of people that know that this is happening. So it feels very much like a shock when you kind of announce something like this. I would say...
It was also surprising on both sides. So surprising or new for CrowdStrike, because this is something that they hadn't been expecting or heard of or known much about. And then the same on our side. So for our side, I would say that it's exciting, but there are many, many questions for a team.
And when you've started a startup and you've kind of gotten people to leave their maybe cushy jobs to join a startup and work really crazy hours and live the dream, and then it sort of is announced that the acquisition has happened, it's a wake up to say like, okay, wait, this is a completely different place. What is this? Do I fit in here? And those are...
are real real questions, right? And I think part of our job was, meaning the executive team at CrowdStrike and our executive team was to make sure that we could make that transition as smooth as possible. So when we did get acquired, we were essentially working as our own unit under George. And so we had the ability to sort of keep moving as we were. There was no interest in like,
you know, slowing things down and spending a whole heck of a lot of time taking the team apart and moving them all around, which I think really, really, I appreciate it. I think the team's appreciated. There's a, there's an amount of time to just understand each other. Again, and also the majority of our company is not.
cybersecurity individuals again. So coming into cybersecurity and that industry pretty, well, of course, CrowdStrike being one of the leading cybersecurity companies, if not the leading company in cybersecurity these days, it was a big change. We have to get used to, you know, new email systems, new security requirements, et cetera. That takes some learning, I would say.
So may I ask you this? So what did you personally learn the most from CrowdStrike? What was your biggest learning experience at CrowdStrike? Yeah, I think I learned a lot about what and how a company scales at an incredibly fast pace. I mean, so I think CrowdStrike is still a very young company. And so...
In that sense, the amount of kind of growth and the ability to, let's say, be all over the world and have these very, very large Fortune 100 customers. The way that the company has scaled the sales organization, the way that the product is scaled to fulfill, let's say, much more than end point, adding to the portfolio. And I think they were just very, very focused on execution.
which I think at the end of the day, that is their competitive advantage, is to be able to execute faster. And oftentimes I think there's a lot of companies that talk about very grandiose strategies or visions, but are unable to, let's say, get the ball over the line. I think that there is an intensity at CrowdStrike to get the ball over the line. And I think that's...
what helps them win. And I think that was something that I didn't really understand in terms of the scale that CrowdStrike was or we didn't. We had some growing up that we had to do, right? I mean, these are many more customers we were handling, a very large cloud infrastructure that we run at CrowdStrike. I mean, everything was just kind of thousand or hundreds, thousands times bigger than we were running. So I suppose it was growing up very.
Yeah, I'm sure it was an amazing learning experience. So what is next for you, Geeta? How are you spending time post -CloudStrike? So yeah, I really enjoyed my time at CrowdStrike. I think one of the wonderful things that has happened for our team is that our technology has really become a pillar in the portfolio of the product.
So I'm very proud of that. I'm very proud that it was what we wanted or what we were hoping for from the early conversations. So with that said, probably a year ago, I started looking at, OK, it's probably time to move on and do something else. And now I'm interested in kind of starting back to those early days. So right now, I'm working with early stage startups.
advising and investing and helping either here in Europe. Because one of the things is I find Scandinavian companies really interesting. Kumio started in Scandinavia and Denmark. And I think there's a wonderful combination if we can put together sort of this teamwork and the ingenuity and creativity of what comes out of many Scandinavian companies and also help to get them over to this.
international kind of Silicon Valley way of thinking. And we can combine the sort of focus, sort of business mentality to the Scandinavian management and the Scandinavian teamwork. It's a really compelling and enjoyable kind of journey. So I'm working with a couple of companies on that, investing and enjoying them. Yeah. Yeah. So how are you putting into practice what you've learned?
as a founder yourself and CEO, what are the top things you look for when you look at founding teams today? You know, one of the hardest things is to, and it's very hard to gauge, is how much can the team handle? I find that like in the early days, you have a lot of dreams, you've got probably a great idea and a great product and...
You think you're going to change the world, but unfortunately the world sometimes doesn't feel the same. So like, it just starts being difficult and can you handle the grit? It's basically getting back up and doing it again. So I look for that. I look for, as I talked about these teams that come together, I like to see diverse teams, whether it's diverse backgrounds, diverse kind of perspectives, because that actually ends up being the start of.
building a very diverse company in terms of thinking. So I really like to see that. I also love to see this obsession around customers. I really like when founders are just, you know, really, really doing as much as they can to get that extra stickiness or the extra, you know, put the extra mile in. And I look basically for teams that were like us.
So that's probably hard to explain, but you can see it. I can usually feel it. Yeah. How do you draw a balance between founders who are obsessed on technology and founders who are obsessed with customers? What is more important in your perspective, from your perspective? I think you need both. There's not one or the other really. I think there's founders that...
need to realize both are important. So the technology side, I think right now there are a lot of companies, for example, building new AI companies, et cetera, that are looking at a market segment and trying to make the solution. I find in those scenarios, if there isn't a customer obsession, that it becomes too much of a technology play and may not actually be a commercial.
success. You know, you can also have very technical founders who do have a, you know, customer driven approach. It just may seem like they're doing something that's very different or outside of their comfort zone. But I just love when that happens. Like I love when technologists go and try to be customer facing and try that because they don't have to do it oftentimes alone and you can hire help and get, get people that are really good at it. But.
It's okay to be out of your comfort zone. Ideally, you are out of your comfort zone if you're starting a startup. Also on the commercial side, there are a lot of folks that would just like to sell things that are ready. It's usually not the case with early companies. You need to be more creative. You need to understand what is the product today and what will it be in the next few months and be able to understand how to articulate what the value of that is.
So I would say it's not an either or. There isn't like a founder that's going, and if they are only singularly technology focused or sales focused, oftentimes it ends up being, it catches up. Something catches up there, right? And you trip. So. Yeah. No, no, that's, that is very insightful. Thank you, Keita. Keita, it's been a pleasure.
hearing your perspectives and sharing your next phase of advising and investing in startups. And I want to say thanks. I mean, I think this is a topic that isn't often covered. So there's a number of us that have, let's say, exited and been really happy about how that's gone and want to share this with others. So I'm glad you've put a podcast around it. It's very useful, I think, for founders. Thank you very much. And thank you for joining us.
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