On October 13, 2016 Startup Grind DC had the privilege to host Ron Gula, cofounder, Chairman and former CEO of Tenable Network Security at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLC.
As is per tradition, the fireside chat started off on a personal note as Ron explained his background. Originally from upstate New York, Ron was an alleged "Air Force brat" having a father in the U.S. Air Force and a mother who was a nurse. Growing up he found himself working in a lot of different positions, but working at U.S. Internetworking in Annapolis, MD where he witnessed a startup go public. That certainly sparked his interest in maybe one day starting his own business.
While working at BBN, Ron did work in IRND where he saw how to rapidly build a product for the U.S. government customer. This experience helped him learn a lot of the inner-workings of building and running a company and/or product, even if it were more government focused.
During his time at U.S. Internetworking he was familiar with a company called Internet Security Systems (ISS) that had an intrusion detection system called RealSecure that only ran on Windows. This was around the time when Unix and Linux OS were getting popular, so Ron was inspired to write a intrusion detection system on Unix, which he called Dragon. Eventually the market went from intrusion detection to prevention products, which Ron lead the charge on. Eventually he was seen as a competitor to ISS, but with this newfound recognition was always aware of possible competition from other vendors in this ever changing market.
As a self-taught programmer Ron is very comfortable with technology. When he and his cofounder Jack Huffard started working together Ron wanted to be CEO. Jack being much more business focused, Ron believed that one can be CEO and CTO for a company seeing how it is possible to easily navigate between both roles as necessary. The more technical leaders can be, the better the decisions they can make. One word of advice from Ron was to always to hire people better and smarter than you.
Following his work with Dragon Ron began on his next project following Dragon with help from Jack Huffard and Renaud Deraison who had worked on the Nessus project, they together combined their efforts and formed Tenable.
Networks had been evolving much at this point and Tenable was able to look into networks and detect their security levels based on vulnerabilities and protections in place, thus creating a risk management system. This continuous network monitoring became the crown jewel of Tenable. While Tenable doesn't apply a patch or change the source code or automatically update your network to remove vulnerabilities, Ron states that "it lets you know what you should be doing today to be better."
As Tenable continued to grow they found themselves needing to acquire capital to sustain their growth. Tenable was able to secure $300 million dollars worth of funding from sources like In-Q-Tel and Excel Partners over the course of a few years. Tenable was in a good position seeing that they were always turning profit, but their marketing was almost non-existent so meeting with investors required conversations promoting the reach that Tenable had. In regards to In-Q-Tel investment, while it is venture capital overseen by CIA, the people working there have backgrounds in banking and tech. Investment in Tenable wasn't entirely far-fetched.
According to Ron, Tenable, as well as SourceFire, are referred to as companies that "really made it." Ron really believes that cyber firms in this region are really in a good place to succeed. Ron believes that companies will be successful if they use containers, Amazon infrastructure and secure management of email.
In terms of running a business, Ron advised that one should work in what they want. It may sound overly simplistic, but what he means is that one should not be coerced to move in a direction that he or she feels like they do not want, whether it's running a company after it goes public or being pushed to emulate a competitor or encouraged to do something else by an advisor. As long as you like what you do and the employees you have and you keep your customers happy, keep doing it. As Ron stated, "there are a lot of paths to success, so if you're smart figure out what you want and reverse engineer how to get there."
Credit: Cedric Craig