"This Passion & Commitment to a Good Cause is What I Love the Most About our Team" says Picnic's CEO

HackerNoon: What is your company in 2–5 words?

Matt Polak: Privacy as a Managed Service for the Enterprise.

Why is now the time for your company to exist?

The number one cause of compromise for organizations is the exposed personally identifiable information of executives and employees that fuels social engineering attacks: 92% of all cyberattacks are crafted from users' public data (source: Jen Easterly, Director of CISA, Engineering Capital Keynote). Recognizing that our own digital exhausts are being used against us and that humans are vulnerable to exploitation, I realized that the solution to the social engineering problem – the way to protect people and enterprises from those who would use exposed personal information against them– is to think like a hacker, to focus on harnessing the power of information for good, and to provide an automated capability to reduce the digital exhaust of the people in an organization. Our company was built to achieve this.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

Our team cares deeply about solving this problem and has built a market-leading technology platform to protect enterprises and their employees from nefarious actors. This passion and commitment to a good cause is what I love the most about our team, and their talent and passion translate into a high-performing business.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

I would be spending more time with my family, but having built a remote-first company culture helps with work-life balance.

In a few sentences, what do you offer to whom?

Businesses invest millions of dollars in building an arsenal of reactive security controls and continuously patching technical vulnerabilities. Yet, threat actors keep defeating these technical controls by leveraging exposed personally identifiable information (PII) available online to target employees and executives with social engineering attacks. Picnic has built a solution that enables a shift toward proactive (vs. reactive) security with zero effort. We do it by offering an automated solution delivered as a managed service that continuously protects organizations from attacks that target people by reducing their personal and work-related digital exposure.

For security teams, this privacy-forward solution covers a big visibility and control gap. At the same time, it enables executives and employees to reclaim their privacy and reduce personal and professional exposure to cybercriminals, which has direct implications for corporate productivity, safety, and security. It's a win-win model in which both the organization and individuals benefit.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

We're scaling at a rate of 100% YoY to address the growing demand for our solution. Our customers love our board presentations that demonstrate how their organization is proactively protecting its employee base and the enterprise from cyber attacks before those attacks ever happen. Watching how this new area of insight reshapes the relationship between security and leadership teams is powerful and validates Picnic’s approach.

Where do you think your growth will be next year?

We are a well-capitalized series A start-up, and we’ll keep investing in R&D and attracting the right talent to take our solution to market as we accelerate our growth. I expect we will continue to grow rapidly across critical infrastructure sectors as we look to keep up with customer demand.