BreachQuest’s Gordon on Reimagining the Cybersecurity Incident Response Process
I had the pleasure of interviewing Shaun Gordon, CEO of BreachQuest.
Shaun Gordon is the Co-Founder and CEO of the cybersecurity incident response startup BreachQuest. Shaun brings a blend of entrepreneurial and financial leadership to his role as he leads the company in its mission to reimagine incident response and drive down breach cost. Shaun previously served as founder and managing partner of AGI Partners, a private investment firm with the core objective of building outstanding mid-sized companies. Shaun was also Founder and CEO of Pristine Environments (acquired), a national facilities management company and led its team of 1,000 employees across the United States and Canada delivering specialized facility services to the government, healthcare, higher education, and commercial sectors. Shaun is an active angel investor and advises a number of early stage ventures in the fields of technology and security. He has a degree in Finance from NYU.
Thank you so much for joining us!
What motivated you to launch your startup?
BreachQuest’s mission has always been focused on reducing breach cost and downtime, and reimagining the incident response process. The motivation to launch BreachQuest came from learning how long it took companies to contain severe cyber incidents. The industry average is currently 75 days, and as an entrepreneur this seemed outrageous and unacceptable. Businesses can’t financially and operationally survive after potentially being down for more than two months. In fact there have been a number of reports that show that many small businesses shut down after suffering a data breach. The current approach is labor intensive and that seems incredibly antiquated. We were driven by this to create BreachQuest and dramatically shorten the 75 days of containment time. We believe we can shrink the amount of time required by over 90% and move it into a timeframe that is measured in hours.
Our business has two components: software and services. At the core of BreachQuest’s software business is Priori, our platform that injects speed, scale, and automation into the cybersecurity incident response process. BreachQuest’s services provide a range of cybersecurity solutions that are focused on increasing incident preparedness and helping companies rapidly respond to and recover from cybersecurity threats.
What is it that excites you about what you’re building?
When I look at current industry average statistics, such as the annual Cost of a Breach report from IBM, the containment time for an incident is embarrassingly slow. With all of the innovation and new technology that has come out over the past decade, the fact that incident response is so reliant on labor intensive processes is bewildering. I recently asked one of the world’s leading incident responders “what was the most significant innovation in incident response in the past decade?” His answer, “Google sheets,” almost made me fall out of my chair.
The idea of revolutionizing the incident response process with a software platform and unlocking transformation is exciting to me. Compared to the conventional manual approach, our Priori platform force multiplies the impact of every single responder enabling businesses to recover quickly. It’s been super rewarding to see incident responders react to our platform. Some of them simply raise their eyebrows and smile. It’s always a great feeling to see a favorable user reaction and hear their remarks. Usually it’s something like “It takes me 10 or more steps to do the same task via the conventional, manual way.” Engaging with users is not only deeply fulfilling for us but also gives us great insight on how to continuously develop our platform in a way that transforms the incident response process. Ultimately we know that many businesses and their stakeholders will benefit from our platform by shrinking the time and cost of responding to a severe cyber incident.
What are your future plans for your startup?
We have been working towards the commercial launch of Priori. As we haven’t launched the product yet, I can’t get into too many specifics at this time, but the gist is a much higher level of automation so that organizations are better prepared to respond and contain a severe cyber incident. Priori augments both productivity and capability of incident responders. Of course, being able to resolve an incident more quickly can significantly reduce the cost and impact of a breach. Priori will be available on the market later this year, and we are looking forward to being able to share more.
If you had to share, “words of wisdom,” with a Founder who’s about to start their own startup, what would they be?
Getting to product market fit as fast as possible is a critical success factor for Founders. I wish I would have read the book “Mom Test” by Rob Fitzpatrick earlier in my personal journey. This short book provides instruction on how to quickly determine if there is real customer pain in the market you are targeting that would be solved by your product or service. This is easily the best book on the subject and it provides valuable practical insights on how to ask the “right questions” and mitigate biases. I recommend founders read it as early as possible in their startup ideation process.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
Readers can stay up to date with BreachQuest by following us on Twitter and LinkedIn, in addition to checking out our website: https://www.breachquest.com/
This was very insightful. Thank you so much for joining us!
