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Hari Ravichandran: The GTM Story of Aura ($2.5 Billion Valuation)

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Hari Ravichandran: The GTM Story of Aura ($2.5 Billion Valuation)

The interview traces the journey of Harry, founder and CEO of Aura, from his early fascination with technology at age ten to building a billion-dollar digital security company. His entrepreneurial path began during the dot-com boom when he left Stanford, captivated by the startup frenzy. His first company faced near-collapse during the 2001 bubble burst, surviving through severe cost-cutting and a strategic pivot to profitability. After leading that company to a successful IPO in 2013 and stepping away, Harry was inspired to found Aura after experiencing identity theft, recognizing a lack of accessible solutions. Aura now serves consumers directly and through enterprise partnerships, with Harry emphasizing the importance of launching products quickly to iterate based on user feedback, the patience required for B2B sales cycles, and the strategic focus necessary to scale effectively. The conversation highlights the resilience, adaptability, and continuous learning central to his entrepreneurial philosophy.

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[MUSIC] This is Unicorn Builders, where we tell the untold stories of the founders who've defied the odds and built billion dollar companies. Here's your host, Brett Stapper, CEO of Frontlines.io. Now let's jump straight into today's episode. [MUSIC] >> Hey founders and thanks for listening. Today our Unicorn Builder is Harry, CEO and founder of Aura, a digital security company that's raised over 500 million in funding. Harry, thanks for chatting with me today. >> Thanks, Brett. Thanks for having me. >> Not a problem. So I understand your life changed a lot when you were 10 years old. So take us back to those days, what was going on and what happened? >> My dad got me this board, this electronic board that had an 8085 micro-poster on it. And you could actually program this thing and the way you did that because you actually didn't have a full keyboard on it. You would actually have to enter in the hex codes, which would then convert into binary. So you'd have to figure out the programming to actually do interesting things like light up an LED. If you had a servomotor, you could actually program it with that. And I just found this absolutely fascinating and was obsessed with it and just spent all my time playing with that. Yeah, that was my first introduction to computing and I've been in love with it ever since. >> And at that point, were you thinking about building companies? Was that on your mind or was it more just you were so excited about the power of this technology? And you weren't even thinking about company building or anything like that? >> Definitely not thinking company building. Again, this was a ten years ago I was living in India a long way away from Boston, Massachusetts. And it really, I mean to me, it was just all the things you could do with this. And the fact that it was very discreet, you could have put in a set of commands. And if you did it the right way, then the response you got was in line with what you were hoping for. And if you didn't, you'd have to go back and iterate through it. So it was much more just the learning part of it than sort of commercialization, I would say. >> I want to skip forward a little bit now and let's talk about your time at Stanford. You're at Stanford and then something else big happens in 97 and you drop out. Talk to us about that decision to drop out and what you decided to do after you dropped out. >> Yeah, it was a nutty time, Brett. I mean, 1997 again, I think at some point probably like in 1995, when it was '94 and '95, I'd gotten my hands on the Bosaic browser. Back then you could literally search the entire internet in like a night. I mean, there were five, like 200 websites in total. It was just absolutely just fascinating with this and the fact that you could get content and you could get information that quickly was incredibly sort of stimulating for me at the time. And I was in California at Stanford during a time when everybody was starting a company. Like, yeah, who had just started? There were an excitement, which is a different search engine had just started. Up mail had just gotten acquired by Microsoft. There's just a lot happening. And to me, you just felt like, I have to be in the action. There's just so much happening. There's so much energy. It felt like a once in a lifetime opportunity that if I missed it, it would never come back around. And it just got like it was the right thing to do at the time. >> A lot of our listeners were building companies in the late '90s there. So I think for them, we always hear these things about what it was like. But I think just having some context or maybe like a comparison. How does the mania around startups in the late '90s compared to like 2020, 2021, when funding was going crazy with startups? How does that compare? >> It was a whole 'nother level, who would say definitely should have been buckets. Like now, you hear a lot around sort of the funding friends around AI based startups, right? So it's happening in pockets. Obviously, we've been in a bull run until 2020 for decade plus since after that, but we had financial crisis. And there's been some correction. And now there's a search backup back then. Just to give you context, like my first company, I think we got to like a million dollars of revenue. And we had bankers coming to pitch us about taking the company public. And the valuation would be a billion plus dollars. Again, you're talking about sort of a company that's doing a million dollars of revenue, getting value to a billion dollars. Where now, I don't think you can access the public markets unless you get to about a hundred million or so of revenue in surrires. So it's definitely sort of a very exciting time to be in tech now. But that kind of a bubble that we had in the late '90s, to me, I would not say that we're at that level at the moment. >> What was it like when the bubble burst? And what was it? I probably two or three years into the company. >> Yeah, I mean, 1997, so the, you know, '01, I remember, I think like March of 2001, we're starting to think about sort of taking the company public. Really, we had no sustainable business model, be honest. And we did not have a path to profitability or anything like that. And you know, it started very softly. You know, you could hear a little bit of tremors around, like, you know, somebody just pulled a term sheet and, you know, some financing didn't come through. Oh, we heard that this VC shop was having some trouble with this stuff and other thing. And then it just accelerated pretty quickly. And so at some point, you're looking around going, well, we at that time had a business that was burning a lot of cash. We had a lot of employees who were burning like a million bucks a month. And there's this perfect storm. We had a business model that relied on revenues from advertising. We had a lot of burn and all of the access to capital was sort of going away. So the combination of these three things, we're looking at going, I don't know if we're going to make it. I'm not sure it's going to go through. So yeah, it went from the sort of frenzy, I would say to adjust this abysmal sort of, you know, are we going to even survive within a matter of, I'd say three, four months was pretty quick. And how did you survive over those times, likes? And then there isn't asking you a lot of founders right now are going through some hard times, especially the last couple of years. So what does you do to survive and then eventually thrive, which we'll get into here in a minute? Yeah. For me at the time, when you know you can't make rent and you can't pay your employees, the world becomes very clear. In some ways, I've always thought that a real sort of a challenge for leadership is when things are good, not when they're bad because when things are bad, a lot of options get taken away. So you've got to do what you got to do to kind of survive and get to the next day. So having a real sense of, you know, we want to survive this was a very important thing. And then more tactically, we had to look at all the resources we had at the time to try to figure out how to get the lines to cross where the amount of revenue we were generating and the amount of cost we had was in line. And that's probably one of the hardest things I've had to do. I think we took our company down from 250 people down to 14 people. As you were saying, hey, now you have to actually pay for the service. And that got us to about about $2 million in revenues and our cost had gotten down to 2 million bucks and that gave us the opportunity to survive and fight for another day. And then we had to come up with a bunch of strategies and the back end of it. But really, there just was not that many options. And so a lot of life, because very clear, when a lot of options are already just taken away. And I'm making you go through a lot of the more painful moments that I'm sure happened in between the IPO day. But let's fast forward here to IPO day. So October 2013, you go public, what's that day like? Every founder, I think or every founder and tech at least does dream of IPO day. What was it like? I mean, from a rational perspective, and when you're going to think about this for your team, et cetera, you tell everybody, look, it's just another financing day. Like all it is, it's just a source of financing. And there's a lot of hype built up around IPO day and how it's sort of a big thing. In typical IPO, you probably sell 10 to 15% of the company and a 5% is not strong. Maybe you can even take that down the commodity race. So it really is just a financing day. And it's not something that the most founders can actually even sell stoppers, it's one of those people are locked up. Even with all that said, as a founder that had been through a journey for a long time, it was pretty exciting. I have to say, it was fun. It was, you know, you had a road show that was sort of 10 days long, and I'll leave it to it. You had your family, your friends, people that had been part of the ride for a decade plus all there. And it felt like a hallmark moment, like, you know, it's not something that even if you can rationally say, hey, this is what this all means, emotionally, it was quite awesome. I would say. And were you already thinking about what's next on IPO day or were you still thinking about operations in day to day and still being involved in the company? No, I was still very involved with the company. I ran the company's public company CEO for four plus years. When you're taking the company public, you're really thinking about the next three years as a public company because it doesn't matter how good a private company you are. In some ways, every time you go to new ecosystem, let's say you're in the venture ecosystem, you get to private equity, then you get to the public markets, and you kind of have to re-prove yourself inside that ecosystem, even though you may have a lot of success in a different ecosystem. You have to come out there and say, look, we can actually be a good public company. We can deliver numbers, et cetera. So we thought a lot about what the next three years were going to be like, what was the good going to come, draw out how do we plan for it? How do we think about capital allocation? All those things were pretty critical elements to think about. We were very much in the throws of, okay, we got to make sure we keep delivering quarter on quarter. So that's really where our mindset was. When did the idea for Aura start to percolate inside your mind? I would say that was probably about 2014, 2015 timeframe. It was a personal incident. It's oddly, I think we were doing some sort of a refinancing or a mortgage type of thing for our house, and I was denied for mortgage, and I was curious why this had happened, so I started looking into it. It turned out that my identity had gotten stolen, and someone had set up a bunch of fake accounts in my name, which I had no idea could even happen. And I spent about two weeks trying to understand how this had happened, and frankly, on the back into fit, I came up with a lot more questions than answers. And I thought, well, I'm a fairly technical person. I kind of understand how the stuff works. I honestly thought there should just be like a pretty simple piece of software that should take care of all these issues and not have to go to deal with it. And it just didn't exist. And that's why I remember thinking, well, for someone technical like me, this was this complicated. I wonder how many people are out there that go through the same kind of stuff and may not be technical enough to go sort of, you know, self-solve the issue. So that's really where the idea started. Was there any part of you that just wanted to chill? Obviously, you had a lot of ups and downs with endurance, emotionally exhausting and draining. Did you just want to chill for a bit or no? Was it, you know, immediately you're ready to build something new? You know, I took a few months off in the middle, and I think it was actually a shocking experience to me, because I never actually taken any time off. One day you get up and you look at your phone, it's not littered with like any seven messages that came overnight that you have to deal with. And the first couple days I thought, wow, this is great. Like I can do whatever I want. And then by the third or fourth day, so I don't know what I want to do. I have no idea how I'm supposed to spend time. And you know, I went through and reorganized our spice cabinet once and then a week later I did it again, reverse alphabetical order, the third time I did it by country. And my wife said, you need to go find a job because you're driving as crazy. And I thought, yeah, without having a sense of purpose and waking up every day, feeling like I was building something, I just felt very lost. And so that was my wish to go start something that would have the first three to six months look like. So mine was a unique situation. But by the time I had left and during, we built it from basically no revenues. And I think that year we did about a billion two in revenues. We were obviously not very profitable in the early days, but the year I left, well, I think we generated close to four million of cash profit in the business. So that got and we had 4500 employees with working offices. But it got to some level scale. So going from that into a brand new build with the four or five people that are sure to come along with me as I'd left endurance, it was definitely sort of startling. I remember I think the first week I pulled up in the parking garage of our very small office that we set up for this new company and sitting there for a few minutes thinking, oh, wow, like I got five people upstairs. We have no product. We have no capital. We have no real sort of strategy or direction yet. And we're going to have to go back and do all that stuff. And that I would say for several days and weeks after was a very frightening thought. And then, you know, just like anything else, you take one step and then you take another step and then it starts building up momentum and you start focusing on the things that you know you can do well. And it's sort of the build up of the momentum. But the first few months, it was a real adjustment going from a company that had had some scale into something else completely a garage startup. And just so we have some context on aura today, how big is the company or what kind of scale can you talk about? Yeah, sure. We're sort of a combination of a couple of businesses that's who are sick inside the aura umbrella. So habitation of those two will probably do about three and 15 million or so revenues were profitable. We're almost a thousand employees or so across the two and we're going fast. And so we've gotten some good scale and grant. How long did it take for you to get a product to market? Was that six months? Was that 12 months? Was it three years? How long did it take? Yeah, I mean, I think in our space, the way we always thought about it is once you sort of had the vision, we want to get a version of our product out the door within nine months. So we think we were about 10-ish months when we got the first product out the door. And it's one of those things where you get the product out, you learn a lot very quickly from actual users and you enter it really fast. So the first version of the product really did not look at all like what the current version looks like. And frankly, I'd say five years from now, what our product would look like, you know, it's going to be a lot more handsome, but it is today. But a lot of times I talked to founders that are brilliant product people and have incredibly high standards and they spend in order to amount of time getting the first product out the door. And it doesn't matter how it looks in your head. I've learned this the hard way like at the end of the day, when you put it in front of customers and customers start using it, it's always a humbling experience because you feel like, wow, this thing is amazing. Like you should love it. Yeah, it's just terrible. Why do you have this stuff in here? It doesn't make any sense. And so I think the better approach for me has always been trying to get the first version of the product out the door as quickly as possible, learn as quickly as possible and iterate and make it better and better and better and don't worry about what it looks like on day one. Think about what it looks like on two years after you've launched the first version and then five years after the first version. Are you progressing and getting better with the product? I know there's a B2B play here and a B2C play. Can you talk to us about those two different models? Sure. Yes. We sell our product correctly. Obviously a customer can come in to the offshore to a website and buy the product correctly, which is about two-thirds of our business. And about a third of our business, we sell the product through large partners. So we'll offer our product up as a voluntary benefit or an employee benefit for large companies. And so during the open-to-the-cycle employees will go through and buy our product for their personal devices to get to a safety security that they need for their personal lives. And the sales motions are very different. I mean, the direct consumer side, you have to get the positioning right, you have to get the channels right, you have to think about sort of the human economics, etc. Which you have to think about the economics on the B2B side as well. But there's more relationship building, gets longer term sales cycles. It takes a long time for it to ramp up and then when it ramps, it goes really fast. And so the time scale is a little bit different for us. From day one, did you have both of those in play? You know, obviously we did not. We thought about direct consumer, those are going to be our primary channel. And we had sort of a view that would be a good way to approach it. Also because with my previous company, we've done a lot of direct-to-small business, marketing, so we're pretty familiar with that motion. The partners that's all been new for me, to be honest, that the last five years have learned a lot on how to actually build that, how to communicate with partners, etc. And at some point, I think we had three go-to-market motions. And then we said, well, it feels too complicated and it's too expensive because every go-to-market motion, you have to invest behind a team, invest behind what it's going to take to get that to revenue, etc. So then we got it down to the two sales motions. And now they tend to be very tough synergistic with each other. So we've kind of gotten that right. But definitely do not have sort of the thoughts that we would go into anything beyond direct-to-small or we should start it. You mentioned some learnings there from the partnership model. What are some of those learnings? The partner side, it always takes longer than you think. The ramp in the first year, you always build these models and we say, we think we can generate this much revenue, etc. It's always lower than you think. You really have to look at that as a multi-year journey versus a direct-to-consumer. Once you get the marketing spend optimized, you put in a dollar, you know what you're going to get back and it's fairly deep. So kind of learning the patience is definitely one thing. Then you know, try to figure out where can you get leverage because sometimes even when you sell to an enterprise, you can go directly to the enterprise or you can find somebody that's a panel partner in the middle that can also provide you more leverage. So in our case, benefits brokers ended up becoming a great channel partner for us and then we started a partnering with that life. It has been a great partner for so that couple of years. So you find these other inflection points where you say, okay, well, I know how long it's going to take me to sell correctly. But if I have these partners in the bank, I can either increase a number of partners like itself to where I can reduce the timeframe and this has all been incredibly awesome learning experience for me. This show is brought to you by Frontlines Media, podcast production studio that helps be to be founders, launch, manage and grow their own podcast. Now if you're a founder, you may be thinking, I don't have time to host a podcast. I've got a company to build. Well, that's exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host and we handle literally everything else. The set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io/podcast. Now back to today's episode. Do you consider yourself like a marketing guy? I do. I can't. It's so hard with on worship. You're everything from when the company needs you to be like with my first company. I was actually writing code for many years and then I was doing some of the finance work and then I was doing marketing work and then you can actually work with people a little better. All the way from taking the trash out to part of your Hollywood research capital and you're kind of wearing all the hats. My natural inclination, I would say is product and some degree of marketing. That's where my heart usually kind of tends to have to figure out how to either work a little bit inside from the other areas or at least know enough to know who is a lot better than you in those particular areas so you can hire really good people to help. So, business. How would you describe your marketing philosophy? My view is it really has to address customer problems. You can have companies that in some ways are building what I think of as vitamins, like proactive solutions that customers may know they have or may not know they have. There are companies that build painkillers where there is a real customer pain point. If you can get your product to fit a customer pain point very correctly and the job of marketing really then becomes how do you articulate that in a way that the customer can understand. But for that to work, for marketing to be really effective, the product does need to fit the problem. Like you need to have a real problem that people are facing. You need to have a product that actually fits the problem and then marketing is telling the story and building the story arc over time for how the problem is affecting the person and how this particular product can actually help solve that particular issue and drive the value for the customer. So, you sometimes see companies that start out with marketing and have a lot of exciting sizzling kind of materials and what you actually use the product in your way. This is not what I thought I was getting. So, or you're like, wait, I'm going to think I had the problem or I don't have the problem. So, we see all these flavors. My view is find a real customer pain point, build a product that really solves that in a very authentic way and then use marketing to tell the story of how this is all fitting together. I'm a huge fan of grill marketing and I've studied a lot of grill marketing and one of the famous examples that I remember everyone talking about was life lock and their CEO putting his social security number on billboards and then he ended up getting hacked. I believe, maybe that's just what I brought on the internet, but I believe that's the case. Have you done any grill marketing or anything like that? I mean, no, from our perspective, we think of it as a very long company. I think you're talking about sort of the sides of buses with the social security number. I think that was the honor to you there that had that strategy and it was a brilliant strategy because that category was completely unknown and people had no idea that your identity could get stolen. So, they spent a lot of sort of time energy going to educating the market that, hey, this is a problem. It's so big that I can actually put this to other and I thought it was a brilliant strategy. We have taken much more of a longer term approach. We'll say, look, we're going to keep making the product better and better and better and we're going to keep telling the story in a way that makes sense to families across the US. We've got a lot of brand marketing now. We just started our national campaign. Robert Downey Jr. is on our board. He came on as an investor. So, we've been building a big series of television campaigns with him at the center. The first series that went out in January and there's more of that coming, but more methodical than sort of one big blast type of campaign. Unless we thought of a brilliant idea like the Landlock folks did, which, where you have to come up with one that's sort of similar to that. So, they had to come up with one that's similar to that. Did you have that feeling at all when it comes to brand marketing? a brand for a consumer product that's trustworthy and to, it's very, very critical. But the distance top is from getting very stressed out from all the money that goes out the door. You feel like it's all going one way, which is out, and there's nothing coming back in. And it's anxiety-cold looking. But you kind of say, look, it's the right thing for us long-term. And we're going to keep at it. And we'll learn what we can't ask quickly. So we can just like we do with products, and we can, we can, our brand can't pay and get better and better at it. But certainly going into it, it's very anxiety-cold looking. For sure. Something else I want to ask about is category. So when I did the introduction, I referred you as a digital security company, which I hated, but that was the most broad term I could find to describe it. I couldn't find a good way that really captures everything that you're doing. So I went broad. How do you think about your market category? And maybe we can focus first on the consumer side, and then we can focus on the partner side if you view those as different categories. But on the consumer side, what is that category? So on both sides is the same category. We think of it as family safety, that's the category we play in. Really, when we started the company, the field curve that we had is when you look at the intersection of technology and safety for families, what does that look like? How is technology actually influenced to the good or bad safety inside a family? And when we looked at it that way, from the example I was telling you about sort of my editing and soul, what was very visible is there's a whole lot of these transactions, financial type of fraud, scam, spam, ransomware, any buyers, all of these different items that affect your devices, your financial security, et cetera. And the big problem that we saw there was these things were very fragmented. There were a product for each one of these different things. And most families were saying, well, I don't know, do I need this? Do I need that? You know, donate some of these or kind of these. And we really looked at it and said, look, families just need an easy button. I give them a thing that they can put on their devices and don't worry about it because we'll take care of everything on the backend. And it's got to be affordable. It's got to be global. It's got to be something that's very accessible to everybody. And interestingly, as we've gone on the journey, we started there. And the bridge item, I would say one of the things we did was when we were thinking about the safety of family and how technology affects it, we added in parental controls, which are basically ability for parents to moderate or look at content that their kids were viewing and make sure that their kids were being kept safe. And the more we dug into that, the problem that took us to a different place, which is the next version of the product is going to have a lot more around this, which is just, you know, mental wellness, emotional wellness of kids are being very impacted by the kind of content they're consuming. A lot of time they're spending online, the sense of isolation that a lot of them are feeling, et cetera. So how do we use technology to actually help families with that problem? So you start in one place, the problem keeps leading you down a particular path and you keep kind of kind of solving issues, which is why you want to define your category broadly, right? If we said, hey, we're in a tech company and now we're building something else that's much more family centric, it doesn't fit, right? The customer doesn't give you a rule to actually step out of what you tell them that you are. So the thing that you want to tell them that you are when you start needs to be broad enough. And then you have to be authentic about the problems of your solving kind of underneath that. And for us, both for consumer and for the partnership channel, it's the same product. It's the same messaging. Our sales motion is different in each, but we've been very obsessive about making sure the product is the same product to both because it's a different way to reach the audience and it's not two different audiences. The way we think about it. If we zoom out five years, what do you want that split to be between consumers and partnership? You said it's two thirds consumer right now. What do you think it's going to be in the future? My sense is it's going to end up being a little bit more partnership oriented out there because our partnership size is growing over 100% a year. And so it's ramping up pretty quickly. So I would venture a guess it's maybe 40, 60, 40% of the consumer size, it's the person on the partnership side. But we were here. My take five years from now. As you prepare for that shift, what's the top of mind? What are you going to be putting into the partnership side? So we continue to keep ramping up the team there. The ability to keep integrating with multiple different kinds of partnership. Like for example, we started with work site. We've expanded into automobile. For example, so when you buy an automobile, some dealers now are offering our product as something that people can get as part of the solution set. So there you have to figure out how to integrate with the back and providers off that to their vertical P and C or insurance carriers. We're starting to work with now. We just rolled out a partnership with Chubb Insurance that went live in January. And so now you have to figure out how to work with those kinds of carriers. So identifying verticals, identifying how we can play inside those verticals, the positioning, the messaging and then what the salesman's and the integration is for each of those particles. It's very specific to that particular vertical. So getting good at being able to replicate this across multiple verticals becomes a very important skill of the team. I do a lot of work in early stage B2B tech. And with all the clients I work with, a big part of what they have to do is educate the market on the problem and make people problem aware. This sounds like it's a pretty unique product, right? Because consumers know about the problem. You have to just really focus on making them aware that your solution works and how it works. Do I have that right? I think you're mostly right. I think the one small caveat I would have is people know they have a problem, but between knowing you have a problem and actually acting on it, there is a divide. In some ways, like, for example, I come to you and say, Hey, I think that multiple of your passwords have been compromised and you're at potential cyber risk. If you were like most of our potential customers, you'd say, Yes, you're absolutely right. I should go do it. And then you will probably likely not do very much at all because it's overwhelming. It's like a lot of work. So making sure the product actually solves that particular part of the issue is very critical as well. And taking away friction where we can say, Brett, all you got to do is go do this and click the box and set it up. And it's going to take care of all the stuff. That would be the best way to bring because even if you understand the problem, the current solutions create so much friction. The option ends up becoming very difficult for families today. As I mentioned, they're in the intro you've raised over half billion dollars to date. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this journey? It's not answered that in a couple of different ways. So again, you know, I'm now 48 years old. I was 43 when I started this company. If you're in your 20s like I was, you know, if I could go back to that time, I would tell myself to wait as long as possible to race capital. I've never met an entrepreneur that's been successful. That says, Oh, I wish I don't mess up my company. Like everybody wants to own more of it. So give it yourself the opportunity to build enough organically that can be risked the plan so that you can end up only more of your own company is ideal. For me, it was a much more calculated thing that somebody that was sort of the older side starting a company time was very much a best since and I scale was very, very important to me as well. So in that kind of a context, the only way to get both those in for me was to basically have access to capital because you can actually accelerate both the timing and can drive higher scale. So in that particular situation, raising more capital than you need it was actually important kind of fine pockets in the market where you can actually race capital fairly efficiently because you know, at some point, it always sort of ends up evening out. I do think that everything's sort of going up up up and then it's not and we went through that in the 2000s. We went to that in no 708 and that's kind of what's happening now. So raising more than you need when you have the opportunity and not worrying too much about massive amounts of pollution, but this is already made the decision to say, look, what I value is scale and I value time. So in that context, whether I own X percent or 2% more than that or whatever it doesn't matter like this is absolutely different. Again, if I had been in my 20s, having more ownership did matter to me quite a bit at that time. So then you can say, okay, I'm going to take longer. I'm going to raise less money because I'm going to prove it out more more so I can own as much of my company as I can. Final question for you before you wrap up here. So I found a lot of podcasts interviews you've done. I see you wrote a book. You're very much out there. What role does founder-led marketing play in your general go to market approach? I mean, you're the main storyteller, right? So at the end of the day, you're telling people a story of what the problem is and what the solution can be and how do you fit inside the ecosystem. So nobody can tell that story better than the person that's passionate about building the business. It puts the CEO of a company and it's a founder and a company. I mean, that is sort of the job that they set out to go do. So to me, being able to tell that story in places that gets the biggest reach for the business, it's not really, I wouldn't have been saying it's not like an ego play or it's not, oh, like I want to be out there. I think, frankly, my preference is not to like at my last company, we didn't have a PR department for like 10 years. Oh, frankly, I never did an interview. It never was sort of out in the media. But in this particular situation, given that it's a much more consumer-centric problem, trust is very important. The storytelling is very important. I have done their amount of podcasts, et cetera. But I would say it's not my natural, motivating, I'm much more eager to learn it and it's not something that I did very much open the last company. So. Well, you're an awesome guest and we really appreciate you taking the time. We are up on time here. So we're going to have to wrap before we do if there's any founders that are listening in, they feel inspired, they want to fall along with the journey. Where should they go? Actually, we are at Word.com. We're on pretty much all of the social media stuff that's out there. My email is [email protected]. If we drop in line, I have a chat with any belong workers. Amazing. Thanks so much for taking the time. Thanks, Brad. Great to meet you. [Music]

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. Harry's passion for technology began at age 10 with a programmable electronic board, sparking a lifelong interest in computing.
  2. He dropped out of Stanford in 1997, driven by the dot-com boom's energy and the fear of missing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
  3. His first company survived the dot-com bust by drastically cutting costs, reducing staff from 250 to 14, and pivoting to a sustainable business model.
  4. After a successful IPO in 2013 and subsequent exit, Harry founded Aura following a personal identity theft incident, identifying a gap in digital security solutions.
  5. Aura employs both B2C and B2B models, with lessons emphasizing rapid product iteration, patience in partnership development, and focusing on a few effective go-to-market strategies.

Summary:

The interview traces the journey of Harry, founder and CEO of Aura, from his early fascination with technology at age ten to building a billion-dollar digital security company. His entrepreneurial path began during the dot-com boom when he left Stanford, captivated by the startup frenzy. His first company faced near-collapse during the 2001 bubble burst, surviving through severe cost-cutting and a strategic pivot to profitability.

After leading that company to a successful IPO in 2013 and stepping away, Harry was inspired to found Aura after experiencing identity theft, recognizing a lack of accessible solutions. Aura now serves consumers directly and through enterprise partnerships, with Harry emphasizing the importance of launching products quickly to iterate based on user feedback, the patience required for B2B sales cycles, and the strategic focus necessary to scale effectively. The conversation highlights the resilience, adaptability, and continuous learning central to his entrepreneurial philosophy.

FAQs

At age 10, his father gave him an electronic board with an 8085 microprocessor, which he programmed using hex codes to control LEDs and motors, sparking a lifelong passion for computing.

He was inspired by the early internet boom and the startup excitement in Silicon Valley, feeling it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity he couldn't miss.

They drastically reduced costs by cutting staff from 250 to 14 and shifted to a paid service model, aligning revenue with expenses to stay afloat.

While rationally viewing it as just a financing day, emotionally it was exciting—a milestone celebrated with family, friends, and team after a long journey.

After his identity was stolen and he struggled to resolve it, he realized there was no simple software solution, motivating him to create one for others facing similar issues.

It took about 10 months to get the initial version to market, emphasizing rapid iteration based on user feedback rather than perfection from the start.

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