Compliance at scale and why TAM is a distraction, with Christina Cacioppo of Vanta

Host

Cristina Casiopo founded Vanta in 2018 to solve a problem most founders didn't even know they had, compliance. Under her leadership, the company has defined the trust management category growing to over 15,000 customers. Cheers. Cheers. Good to see you. Good to see you. Tell the Vanta story.

Christina

We help companies start or build out their security programs and then get credit for all that work through an audit, through a security questionnaire, a trust center. But it's basically like do all the work to improve your security and then go get credit for that with your customers.

Host

All defensive billboards I see use the word compliance rather than Yes. What's going on there?

Christina

It is one of those where you're like, well, vitamin and painkiller, I think, right? And I think compliance is SOC two is a word that no one knows what the heck it means until they deeply Exactly. Know it and they Yeah. And so it's kind of like And one of the original, like, founding hypotheses of the company is if you want to start a security company for start ups, you should actually start a compliance company. Because your customers never ask you for security, but they do ask you

Host

for So compliance is like the buying moment for start ups. I see.

Christina

Exactly. And then when you're going through that, you have to implement a bunch of like, do a bunch of best practices, maybe buy some tooling.

Host

Yes.

Christina

But you don't, even if you want to, you don't do it before that moment.

Host

Yeah,

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