Watch this podcast to understand the SAFE way of geeking out on product, customers and “talent density.”
By Jeff Copeland
Curious what really drives a fast-growing cybersecurity company—not just the tech, but the people, values, and mindset behind it? In this episode of the Founder to Fortune podcast, hosted by Vidya Raman, you’ll hear directly from SAFE’s co-founder and CEO, Saket Modi.
This isn’t a standard product pitch. It’s a conversation that pulls back the curtain on how Saket approaches building a company—from geeking out on first principles and AI to obsessing over customers and cultivating talent density. Whether you’re exploring SAFE as a customer, a partner, or even a future teammate, this podcast offers a candid look at the culture and vision shaping everything we do.
Along the way, Saket gives a debrief on first principles of running a successful tech company in today’s business environment.
Watch the podcast now
Key quotes:
“I’m a geek and a nerd,” obsessed with understanding how systems work from first principles. “And when you understand first principles, you can bend and twist that vs. anybody who really doesn’t have that understanding. And that’s called hacking.” Lately, he’s been taking tutoring from a PhD candidate in first principles of machine learning and LLMs — getting down into the plumbing of the AI revolution.
“My simple litmus test is, if you told your customers tomorrow that I’m switching off the product, would your customers beg you to not be able to do that?” Saket said that the foundation of winning and keeping customers is understanding their real problems and solving them.
“Start by giving, don’t start by asking.” Saket said that “I have a long list of advisers, arguably the best on the planet,” experts who are constantly in demand to give advice. He approached them by giving shares in the company (to their surprise) — “then you earn the right” to tap their expertise. That attitude extends to customers who are invited to participate in a “design partnership” on product development.
“At SAFE, we’re obsessed with talent density.” In the past two years, revenue went up 6x but headcount went down from 200 to 190. “The kind of people that come in are very, very high…If I have to spoon feed people, tell them, hey, go learn something, then I hired the wrong person.” Part of the talent density arc is Saket leading by example. “If I expect someone to work 16 hours a day, then I have to work 16 1/2 hours at least.”
“We are building the central cockpit for chief security officers.” Underlying SAFE’s product strategy is the drive to create the one tool that security teams must consult daily, the “layer of intelligence on top of the $200 billion cybersecurity market.” To fuel that, the SAFE One platform pulls in feeds via API from the major cybersecurity platforms and threat intel vendors, and sets that data flow into business context with 50 AI agents, then “runs it through our neural networks to come out with what is the best next step to take in order to reduce risk in the most efficient way possible…enabling decision-making by the most important persona of cybersecurity, the CISO.”
SAFE’s Future: Cyber AGI The big names in Artificial General Intelligence are building generic everything machines. Saket is charting a different, cybersecurity-first course for SAFE in AI. “It’s about a system which can intelligently understand the context of the company’s external threat and internal controls then make sense out of it and not only say this is what you should do but autonomously do a lot of that…We are still not there but we think we have a very good shot to be able to build that.” Read his blog post on Cyber AGI.
SUBSCRIBE TO WEEKLY BLOG NEWSLETTER
SHARE THE PAGE
