Happy 8th birthday to The Vertex Project!
8 years going on ∞ ( in a good way )
Happy 8th birthday to The Vertex Project! 8 years seems like a long time, but I just know it’s gonna be 10 in a blink. A friend recently asked me what my thoughts were on the journey and, as usual, I had a much easier time expressing my experience to him than I normally would writing a blog. So, today, in light of the company’s 8th birthday, i’m going to dust off some history 🙂
In 2016, Whippit (aka John Rodgers) and I had a crazy idea. We wanted to build a nation-state caliber intelligence analysis platform that could be forward deployed (on premise) to private sector customers to allow their analysts to solve a growing number of interdisciplinary intelligence challenges using the combination of 3rd party commercial data and their own most sensitive internal information.
Having recently developed Nucleus (the analysis platform still in use, as of today, at Mandiant/Google) we had a whole bag of lessons learned. Like any good engineers, having built and shipped it once, we now knew how we SHOULD have built it.
The DARPA “Enhanced Attribution” program came along and it was kismet. Their “DARPA hard” goal was to completely automate the attribution of cyber threat activity (ROFL) but we saw the opportunity to build the next generation intelligence analysis platform of our dreams. For those of you who don’t know, one of the cool aspects of certain DARPA contracts is that they will pay you to build something and let you retain ownership over the intellectual property! So for the first ~5 years of Vertex, we built and subsequently scrapped yet another iteration of our “central intelligence system” concept.
A little more than 3 years ago, the last bits of our DARPA work were coming to a close and it was time to take the plunge. We had built Synapse Enterprise (2.0) and a war chest to provide a (hopefully sufficient) runway to facilitate our commercial transition. We even had a couple interested potential customers. Believe me, pulling yourself away from the government contracting gravy train requires focus and determination.
In only 18 months, we were profitable again. We had hit on an underserved audience with needs that were not being met. That was a bit more than 3 years ago now, which is when I personally “start the clock” in my mind for the impact we are trying to achieve.
In the last 3 years, we have become the premier “central intelligence system” (ok, we’re still mostly the only one) by giving analysts tools they have been missing. And hopefully giving the myopic “TIP” market a much needed wake up call. A bit dramatic, but I've got a whole rant about how TIPs and their hype have been net negative to analysts. I’ll save that for another day…
It’s not ALL sunshine and rainbows. We still occasionally battle misconceptions about our “central intelligence system” concept, but that’s a small price to pay for the impact we are having on the work being done by some of the best analysts at the top tier intelligence producers and consumers in the world. Oh, and our sales cycle is a little long, but that’s just the nature of being a super sticky enterprise product in a rarefied niche ;)
So, to come full circle, the journey has been amazing. Being the masters of our own fate and not beholden to investors, or a board of directors, has allowed us to prioritize customer impact over buzzword bingo and make decisive decisions and fast course corrections. Our growth has been organic, stable, and almost entirely driven by analyst word of mouth, which is exactly the way i like it 😁
Not too bad for a company of 12, right?