We started WitFoo because we were moved by the pain we were seeing on the faces of our customers in previous endeavors. We knew that there had to be fundamental changes to how security software supported the craft. We decided we would study, listen and follow the needs of our front line investigators. We would build what they need to win against adversaries and to communicate with their broader business.
Why of WitFoo
Loving our Baby
WitFoo is a tech company with some brilliant minds regularly coming up with ideas that have never been uttered. As a group of proud nerds we fall in love with these ideas and nurture them as we see the ideas become tangible features. The hardest question we ask each other and our customers is “Are we solving our heroes’ problems or are we loving our product??”
Losing my Religion
The first patent I filed for WitFoo is around our Temporal Link Analysis (TLA.) It was created to reduce the number of investigations, increase clarity and reduce investigative cycle time. Over a year into working with customers I woke to a terrifying realization: it wasn’t enough. We had spent months trying to force TLA to solve all problems. It is awesome tech. Why was it not working?!?
Fork in the Road
I remember staring at my the ceiling in utter despair pondering that I had started a company built on IP (intellectual property) that was interesting but potentially ineffective. I was paralyzed. As we discussed internally, we had two choices. We either had to monetize the patent by finding ways to make it useful or get back to the drawing board. After some somber conversations, we reminded each other that WitFoo was founded to deliver victory to the good guys in cyber-warfare not to sell cool tech.
Customer Centric
At WitFoo we have deleted 5 times the code we kept and support. We fail quickly and learn from those failures. We have great ideas that turn out to be cool but not useful (at least not now.) Staying grounded in a mission to give cybersecurity heroes what they need to win keeps us from pitfalls of tech hypnosis. When we build features, content, pricing or programs we ask “is this furthering our mission?” If the answer is no, cool tech goes into the git vault for another day. It is great to love our tech but we have to keep our eyes on our heroes.
