Christina Cacioppo says Vanta has about 16,000 customers worldwide and about five products.
“Today, we're about 16 zero customers global, with about five products.”
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Christina Cacioppo
1 episodes · 26 quoted claims
Cacioppo says Vanta connects to about 400 other tools and uses the data to power its automation and agent.
“So now you can connect Vanta to one of 400 tools. We pull a ton of data out of those tools and that's what powers the automation, the agent, the AI, all of that.”
Vanta calls its integrated security data the trust graph, which Cacioppo describes as a security data lake broader than any competitor's.
“We call it our trust graph. It's really just like a security data lake, and that is bigger, broader than any other provider”
Cacioppo says she was once a microeconomics professor.
“In another life, I was a microeconomics professor.”
Cacioppo describes the past year's SaaS selloff as the scariest period for Vanta, since system-of-record software was seen as vulnerable to AI.
“The last twelve months, SaaS pocalypse, you're like, Okay, great job building a system of record, you're now screwed.”
Cacioppo gives an example of Vanta's agent offering to write a custom agent that removes account access for departed employees.
“Someone just left your company and you didn't get them out of their accounts. I just wrote a custom agent for you that will go do that.”
Cacioppo says Vanta is absorbing AI model costs and accepting lower margins to push customers toward its agent experience.
“we're taking lower margin and really concentrating on usage. That experience that I just talked through, where the agent is going off and doing things.”
Vanta used former security and compliance practitioners to write evaluation frameworks for its AI agents.
“really invested in using our subject matter experts. So the folks who, like, ran security and compliance programs at other companies, to write the eval frameworks”
Cacioppo says Vanta's choice of which AI models to swap in is driven mainly by quality instead of cost.
“When we think about model swapping, it is mostly quality, it's not cost.”
Cacioppo says Notion is about nine months ahead of Vanta in splitting its code base into modules that AI coding agents can understand.
“And they are like nine months ahead of us on is modularizing parts of the code base.”
Vanta replaced a traditional onboarding wizard with a flow where customers drag in files and screenshots for an AI model to interpret.
“It's basically Claude big canvas. Drag all your messy files in, drag in all your screenshots.”
Cacioppo says the total compensation for a top Vanta person is roughly ten times what it was five years earlier.
“Total comp, it's probably like a factor of ten. I think it actually should be higher.”
Cacioppo says Vanta has not historically held tender offers for employee shares but now feels it must.
“We have not done them historically, but the game on the field is you're doing a tender every time and you gotta do them”
Cacioppo says inference providers told her that post-training a model is justified by cost, not quality, and that much of it is done for marketing.
“the reason to post train a model is cost. Some businesses have that need, but there is not a quality reason to do it.”
Cacioppo argues forward deployed engineers only make economic sense for very large contracts like Palantir's, not for five- or six-figure deals.
“I think we're using all FDEs in a place where there's like five and six figure contracts.”
Cacioppo says that on a visit to France she learned many Paris software companies mainly use Chinese AI models.
“One of the thing that I was very surprised to learn is a lot of the French software companies in Paris are using Chinese models predominantly.”
Cacioppo relays that French software founders said they switched to Chinese models after access to a leading American model was closed to non-Americans.
“We basically all switched to Chinese models when Trump closed Fable off to non Americans.”
Cacioppo says AI models find serious vulnerabilities by chaining together many individually low-severity issues.
“I think what's more so happening is these models are able to chain 17 benign ish or benign on their own things together, and then really find something.”
Cacioppo says the security firm Wiz targets customers that are multi-thousand-person companies, leaving smaller firms for Vanta.
“Wiz's customer base starts at a multi thousand person company, and their pricing count starts at a multi thousand person company.”
Cacioppo says Vanta has Tableau-style reporting generated by its agent on demand, a choice it would not have made in 2021 or 2022.
“We're not gonna put Tableau inside of Vanta, which is probably what we would've done in 2022, 2021, if we would've been building it then.”
Cacioppo says a US enterprise asked Vanta to disable its AI features because non-AI tools are easier to get through procurement.
“Hey, maybe we want your AI features, maybe we don't, but can you turn them off for now?”
Sarah, Vanta's product marketing manager, came up with the slogan 'Compliance that doesn't suck too much' for the company's billboard.
“Sarah, who was our PMM at the time, came up with compliance that doesn't suck too much, pitched it to her head of marketing, who didn't like it,”
Cacioppo says Vanta's marketing team first tried an out-of-home billboard around a mid-summer 2021 conference.
“Mid summer 2021 Sasser Conference, which felt like a big deal at the time, like, thank God, we've all moved beyond that.”
Cacioppo says that after the 2022 market crash Vanta obtained a prime billboard spot where US-101 and I-280 intersect.
“As for 22, market crashes, turns out there's a lot of billboard inventory available on 101.”
Cacioppo says the billboard owner refused her offer to double the roughly $1.5 million he was getting, so Vanta lost its famous spot.
“And he's like, we're actually cash flow positive, so like, literally, I'm an inelastic seller.”
Cacioppo says Vanta has increasingly worked with federal, state and local governments in the US and abroad.
“Over the past couple of years, Vanta has spent more time with government, federal, state, local levels, inside the US. outside the US.”