Why I Joined Abstract

I was planning to retire.

That is the honest starting point. After my last role at a great company, my wife and Idecided we were going to hang it up. Four daughters, a farm outside Houston, chickens, summer in Alaska. We had done well in our prior roles and the plan from there was a quieter one. Then I met Colby and Chris, and Aaron at Abstract.

What this team has built is not the pitch deck version. Customers renew and then buy more. To the tune of 300%! Practitioners bring up our threat research unprompted when they meet us at conferences. The platform has become materially more stable over the past year because someone owned that problem and fixed it rather than explaining it. A recent Fortune 20 prospect asked for 3 features, and they were shipped to them TWO DAYS later.

Two decades in enterprise security will teach you how rare that combination is. Plenty of companies can tell a compelling story. Far fewer can show you what happens after the contract is signed and something breaks.

Every security team I’ve talked to is having the same internal conversation, and it is not just about detection. It is also about which logs they can afford to keep. The bill goes up, the budget does not, so they trim their data, and trimming data means seeing less. Nobody in that room thinks it is a good idea. The architecture does not offer them another option.

AI raises the stakes, because AI only knows what it can see. A model working from telemetry that was dropped to survive a renewal will still sound completely certain about its conclusions.

Abstract took a different approach. Detections run in the stream, so you hear about a problem before the data has landed and before anyone has billed you to store it. Data goes to whatever back end a team is already using. Astro puts AI into the workflow without making customers rebuild their data strategy to get it.

As for what I am here to do.

Colby and I just set the next major milestone at one hundred happy customers. That’s our journey for right now. Then 500. Then 1000. I get measured on quarterly numbers and they matter, but nobody gets out of bed for a quarterly number. The word that counts here is happy. It means customers expand because they want to. It means the best players in the industry want to come work here. It means our partners bring us real deals and we earn their trust and mind share. It means that when a security leader hears the name Abstract, they already know what we do. Abstract will be a household name.

That is the company I want to help build, and it is why my retirement lasted about 2 glorious fish-filled months.

One last note, convenient for someone based in Texas. Abstract is the headline sponsor at Cybr.Sec.Con in Houston on September 15 and 16, and Justin Borland from our threat research team is speaking. I will be there both days.

If you are heading into a renewal (Splunk, Cribl, other) and already doing the math on which logs you can afford to lose, please come find me!

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