Our Investment in StackRox: A Simple Idea
- Venky Ganesan, Partner at Menlo Ventures @venkyganesan
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” Leonardo da Vinci
The Genesis story of some of the most successful companies in Silicon Valley have started with a simple idea. For Google, it was better search through pagerank. For Uber, it was a car at your fingertips. For Roku, it was over-the-top streaming.
In February of 2020, I met Kamal Shah and Ali Golshan of StackRox. They, too, had a simple idea. They believed that the best way to protect applications running on Containers was to be “Kube-native.” In the preceding few years, Containers, led by an open-source project called Docker, became the dominant architecture for enterprises to run applications. While there were many options in the beginning to manage your container environment, eventually, the industry standardized on Kubernetes. The first generation of security products for this area was built very differently: They focused on providing controls at the container level so they could work with multiple container orchestrators. These controls have to be proprietary to be orchestrator agnostic — as a result, these container security tools create conflicts with the orchestrator, don’t scale effectively, and are hard to run, particularly at any kind of scale. And sometimes they just don’t work.
By being “Kube-native,” StackRox believed you could do the following:
- Install and secure your Kubernetes environment seamlessly with a click
- Leave enforcement to Kubernetes itself, gaining all the speed, scale, and portability of Kubernetes
- Retain active security policies even during a failure scenario, so apps keep running, safely
- Take full advantage of the context and controls native to Kubernetes to improve every container security use case, including Vulnerability Management, Regulatory Compliance, Network Segmentation, Configuration Management, Threat Detection, Incident Response, and Risk Profiling.
The proof in the pudding is in the eating, not in the talking. Check out the customer reviews in both Gartner Peer Insights and G2 to make up your own mind on this architecture.
Successful Startups are hard, and the journey is never straight forward. Still, the core ingredients are the same — an important growing market, a unique approach, differentiated technology, a missionary team with relevant experience, and a simple but elegant idea.
For more on StackRox and today’s news, please read StackRox CEO Kamal Shah‘s post here.
