Ask Huntress CEO and co-founder Kyle Hanslovan how his company has made it 10 years and he might quote Taylor Swift.
“It’s that Taylor Swift song that talks about ‘haters gonna hate’—there’s a reason people don’t go 10 years. There’s a reason why most founders sell early or close up shop early,” Hanslovan said. “You have some weird obsession with rejection or proving people wrong.”
That drive to prove the haters wrong in spite of continued adversity is a central part of Hanslovan’s philosophy, he told IT Brew in a recent interview. Today, Huntress has a valuation over $1.5 billion and has raised hundreds of millions of dollars. A managed cybersecurity platform that focuses on threat detection, Huntress offers products to assist in identifying malicious actors and raising the alarm.
“Thank goodness it worked because now I can tell successful stories about it, instead of ‘hold my beer’ stories that didn’t go so well,” Hanslovan said. “It’s cool, looking back 10 years now and saying, ‘Well, I guess we got something right.’”
Zero Cool. It’s a long way from a Hackers-esque backstory. As a kid in the ’90s, trying to access the internet, Hanslovan found himself in some “shady” places. He went into the Air Force out of high school, focusing on intelligence and computers. Hanslovan then spent most of his 16-year career in the service pursuing threats in the tech space; the same shady approach he had deployed to get online when he was younger served him well in the public sector—and, once he went private, in how to build a threat-hunting company.
“I realized that if I was going to go toe to toe with hackers that were going after not the Fortune 500 businesses, but the real core backbone of global economies, I was going to have to do things differently,” Hanslovan said.
That meant making decisions about how to approach threat actors—and, often, the approach didn’t lend itself to an ethical solution. Instead, Hanslovan told IT Brew, he operated in a way that allowed him to be “slightly in the gray that pushes the boundaries and do it differently.”
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With his public sector work giving him a window into the criminal underbelly of tech, Hanslovan was able to put himself in the attackers’ mindset. In doing so, his skill level increased to the point where he knew he was going undetected as he observed criminals and nation-state actors.
“When you’re gathering intelligence, you’re often sitting on a computer with, sometimes, cybercriminals on the same computer; sometimes it's other nation-state actors,” Hanslovan said. “So imagine me, as a serviceman, looking at these going, ‘Oh man, I know these other hackers are on this computer, but they have no freaking clue that I'm on this computer.’ That's a pretty exciting moment.”
Tracking down. Hacking “semi-ethically” for his intelligence work led to Huntress. Hanslovan credits the confidence he built up as key to putting the company together and as a necessary driver, as the early days of a startup are often fraught with rejection and dismissal.
Now that Huntress is well established—and could go public—Hanslovan and his team need to decide what the next decade looks like. It’s a “spicy thought,” Hanslovan said, but investing in cybercrime at this moment might be a better use of funds given the industry’s state of play. As bleak as that might be, Hanslovan, and Huntress, will continue to push forward.
“The pace of innovation in the cybercrime world is outpacing small enterprises, especially small businesses,” Hanslovan said. “I’m looking at the next 10 years going ‘I got to work just as hard as my first 10 years,’ but now I’ve got a hell of a lot more gray hair. I’ve also got a hell of a lot better lessons learned.”