27. Rickard Carlsson CEO & Co-Founder, Detectify - hacking your way to triple digit ARR growth!
In this episode, we speak with Rickard Carlsson CEO & Co-Founder, Detectify, the Security Platform that helps some of the largest tech companies in the world keep their services secure and intact. Rickard and his team are currently enjoying triple digits ARR growth year over year and it all started with a hack! Literally, they started off by successfully hacking (with their approval of course) some of the most well-known tech companies, helping them understand their security vulnerabilities. Not only did they get paid to do this, but more importantly they were allowed to write about this publicly.......and that was the start of a great PR engine! Rickard walks us through the journey from being ethical hackers on the weekend to productizing their methods and turning this into a product company, leveraging the PR from ethically hacking the likes of Goggle, Facebook among others, and quickly turning this into one of the fastest-growing security companies on the planet. This is an inspiring story of how 4 guys, against the odds, started a global security company out of Sweden. There are great lessons learned from fine-tuning the business model through the years, building a hacker community, running 40+ events a year to get visibility, to leveraging the publicity hacks to get media leverage. Add to that a VC market that didn't initially get their idea and you will understand how impressive this journey is! This episode is for everyone that knows they are on to something big, just go for it!