 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering RSA Conference 2020 San Francisco, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at RSA 2020, Moscone and beautiful San Francisco. Day four, I think Thursday already. This is a crazy conference. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. I don't think we'll be here for tomorrow. It's been a pretty full slate as it is. We're excited to have our next guest. She is Rose Ross, the founder and chief trailblazer for Tech Trailblazers. Rose, great to meet you. It's great to be here too. Absolutely. So what are the Tech Trailblazers? So the Tech Trailblazers are an awards-led platform which recognizes the creme de la creme of the enterprise tech startup landscape. So we cover the categories from AI through to storage but obviously security is a big part of that and we find that security and cloud are usually our most popular awards to be entered into. Okay, and I assume you're really recognizing the individuals more than the companies? Or is it more of the companies? We do both. We do both. We do the tech categories. So they are compared like for like. Apples with apples, pairs with pairs, security startups with security startups. And then we also acknowledge and recognize some of the key players in those startups. So we have a female trailblazers and a male trailblazer each year. And how long have you been doing this? This is our eighth edition. The eighth edition. So for a while, 2012 was our first outing. Okay, and you said you just gave out this year's awards on Monday. That's right, we announced it, yeah, on day one of our essay. All right, so give us some of the highlights. Who are some of the special people that you called out this year? Some of the special people, well I actually sat down with one of the special people just now, our interviewed CEO of Shift Left who is our security trailblazer this year. Manish Gupta, and yeah, we spent some time chatting about his journey and his challenges and his successes and finding out more about the technology itself. And so what are the criteria to win? So we kind of look at a number of elements. We have an independent body of judges who are from the analyst community, from the blogger community, from industry itself. So we have CSOs, CIOs, and just people who understand the technology really at both the technical level and on what is needed by the marketplace. So we look at a number of things. One is obviously innovation. If you're looking at the startup world, you want to look at people who are bringing new and exciting things that are needed by companies to either secure them or store their data or analyze their data. But we also look at how they're doing in the market. So we will be looking at what their go-to-market strategy is, how they're engaging with the end user community, that type of stuff. Okay, and at what stage in their growth are they generally kind of coming into your radar? So we sort of do the cutoff for a startup as being having not celebrated their sixth birthday yet. Sixth birthday, okay. Right, so and have not gone beyond series C funding. Okay. So we wanted to keep it on the newer end of the startup spectrum. We also have a special award for those that have not received any VC funding whatsoever. So they're either growing organically or privately funded. That could be seed capsules, you know, crowd funding, whatever that might be. And they have to be two years or younger. And they are our fire starters. And those are the fire starters. So those are probably just really a function of life because I would imagine the vast majority of the companies that you recognize eventually get VC funding if you're playing in this crazy technology space. It certainly helps to get to where you want to accelerate, put a bit more fuel in the tank. And so you also announced in your press release the incredible amount of money that your award winners have raised over time. Would you tell us a little bit more about that? Well, yeah, with RSA this week, we thought it would be a great time to reflect back on what our security trailblazers have done over these eight editions. Obviously it's a little bit early for expecting additional fundraising from shift left because they literally only got the award on Monday. But hopefully, if you look at the history of it all, if we look at the people who've received the accolade over the last eight editions, nearly all of them have been within their first two years. Most of them have done at least one round of funding. But have usually gone on to do another significant round of funding within 12 months of having one. We'd love to take all the credit for that, I think you really need to put that on the team. Right, right. And acquisitions have also been quite prevalent. So we looked at the numbers just before RSA and it was 722 million of the disclosed raised just in the security space. Unfortunately, or very fortunately for one of our winners, Zero Fox, they just peeped in with raising 74 million last Friday, which we didn't include. So if we put the undisclosed in, we're definitely over 800 million now. So well done to the Zero Fox guys. Right, so how did you get involved in this? It was an idea that I had, my other life is a tech PR person and we were working on a campaign for a show, somewhat like RSA in the UK. And we thought it would be a great idea to run a startup competition to highlight some new entrance to the market. Unfortunately, they didn't think it was a fit for what they wanted to do, but it was such a compelling idea. I've worked with startups all my life and one of the challenges was always for them, particularly in the early stages, to get recognition and to get coverage. So we thought we can do something about this. And I thought, well, no one's going to listen to a PR person. No one's interested in what I think. You know, I'm not an expert on who's great in this space. So I spoke to Joe Bagley, who's the CTO of the MIR for VMware, who's somebody I've worked with a lot over the years. And I said, look, Joe, if I ran something like this, would you come on board as a judge? And he said, absolutely. I think it's a brilliant idea. And luckily, many other amazing judges has followed in his footsteps. So it's thanks to them. So- Well, how many judges are there? We have around 40. I mean, we have a number of, what a number of categories. So we wanted specialists in those areas. Some cover multiple, like cloud and security or cloud and storage. But obviously, when you're looking at AI and blockchain and all these other categories, you need people who really understand that space. And then what's the process? Kind of how big is the top of the funnel? When do you start it? And then how do you kind of whittle it down to the, because how many wins a 12, 12 categories, so 12 winners per year about? Yeah. So we started off as obviously people enter usually through their PR team or their marketing team. We'll pull together the information that we request, which is quite a lengthy process. It's a big commitment of time. But not huge, but we do want to get to a certain amount of detail to make a decision and give the judges something to work with. Then for that period, we then put it out to the judges to create the short list. So they will come back. They will score on a number of elements, which are things like innovation and the maturity of the technology, the go-to market, attractiveness and their own personal view of how exciting and innovative and how trailblazing it actually is. Right, right. Then we put it out to a public vote, but also the judges then take the short list and take another look at everybody. And it gets a public vote too? Yes, it does. And so does do the judges ever meet with the nominees or is it all done based on the application kind of, the application packet that you put together and any other independent information they find on their own? Well, we certainly would encourage, I know the judges do like to reach out to people and I know that obviously there are relationships because of the nature of the types of judges. Obviously we've got people in industry within the vendor community, analysts and bloggers. So they will have people that they know. So I always encourage people, if they say, you know, what would you do? I said, well, if I was you, I would also reach out to the judges in your area and just make them aware of who you are. And if they have other questions that they should set up a briefing or something like that. Right. So it's a really interesting concept to get the pub into the startup world because it's really, as you know, being in PR, you know, it's really hard to get elevated above the noise, if you will. And you know, we're sitting here surrounded by, I don't even know how many thousands of vendors are in this hall a lot. Well, the early stage expo has 51 just as a starter. 51 in the early stage expo. Which hall is that in? It's up on the second floor. On the second floor. Then there's little like corners of cubbies of not even 10 by 10s, but you know, kind of the classic kiosk. So when you're talking to small companies, irregardless of whether they go for the award, what do you tell them as a PR pro? What do you tell them as someone who's, you know, kind of seeing the challenges of trying to raise your profile as a small company? Do you stick to your knitting? Do you, you know, try to get a high profile when, you know, what are some of the tips and tricks that help little companies rise above the den, if you will, in this crazy space? Third part of validation is always very important. Talk to the influencers in your space. Talk to the analysts in your space. The bloggers in your space. And get that feedback and integrate it into your plan of how you create your message. Cause I think that's one of the hard things. A lot of startups, particularly in the technology space, particularly in enterprise tech, they're really in the weeds with what's amazing about their products and why they put it together. But you really have to put that into very simple terms. I mean, if you look at someone like RSA, we have got a lot of buzzwords kicking around here. You do have to try and put that into the needs and requirements of the end user community. That's always got to be your, your lens on things really. And you also, you, you always have the vendor viability issues, you know, which are tough. And even if you're tech relative leaks, inexpensive, maybe as a PLC or this or that, it still takes an investment from your potential customers to put it in and take that risk. And you know, that's a much bigger hurdle to overcome often than, than simply the pricing or the, the structure of the deal. So it's not an easy, not an easy path. It has to be a partnership. I mean, one of the things we were advocating a couple of years ago is that the bigger organizations really should have somebody who has a role of being a chief collaboration officer for those smaller companies to engage with them. Because even the procurement process can be, obviously kill you. Oh, it'll kill the little company, right? Even the pre-sales, just having meetings and meetings and meetings and meetings and meetings and meetings to talk about the meetings that you're going to have to maybe eventually get to someone who can make a decision. Yeah, it's tough. Very cool. So any kind of significant changes in the program over time? Are you pretty much kind of the same place you were eight years ago? Or do you see, do you see this expanding into different categories? How do you see, you know, kind of the evolution of the trailblazers? Well, we like to review everything and we listen to our judges. We listen to people in the marketplace. I mean, I had a great meeting yesterday with somebody in banking who works with an awful lot of startups. And there is some really good news coming through that the enterprise tech VC community, there's a lot more of an appetite. They're starting to see the value more and more and more of investing in that type of longer, longer term because you can actually scale beyond where you can do sometimes with the consumer technology. You know, the potential unicorns sometimes don't quite make it. Those horses aren't always that reliable in the race. Sometimes too much money is not a good thing. That is for sure. Laura, it's good for you. It's a great way, I think the kind of the award format is a great way to shine a little bit of extra light on some of these companies that are really struggling to get noticed. It's a really difficult process for a startup, especially in such a deep technology field, something that's so mission critical that people, it's just not that easy for people to give you a try, to give you a trial. It takes a lot of investment. So, good work. And before continuing to see the winners raise lots of money and have success. Right, absolutely. Thank you, Jeff. All right, Rose, well, thanks again. She's Rose, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at RSA 2020. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.