🚨 Episode 42 of the Startup Field Guide podcast by @Unusual_VC features @abhishek0918, CEO of @material_sec, an email security startup for enterprise workspaces. Last valued at $1.1B, Material has over 100 enterprise customers, including Doordash, Lyft and Fox. Listen/watch: Spotify: spoti.fi/3Ph6J82 Apple: apple.co/3wN2vPf YouTube: lnkd.in/g58XyqU3 Lessons for me and @weiliendang from this fabulous interview: 1️⃣ Abhishek and his co-founders were exploring several ideas in 2016 and landed on email security the 2016 election hacks. They methodically validated their ideas with security experts in their networks and focused on an ICP they could easily find outisde-in. 2️⃣ The team would show potential customers a bullet-point list of problems and potential features to see if the idea resonated with them. Abhishek would mock up landing pages in Figma as a way to pressure-test how to describe and market their eventual product. It forced clarity around their headline, messaging, and market category even at the concept stage. 3️⃣ They decided to lead with the most novel part of their product: putting sensitive email content behind an additional MFA layer. This differentiated capability was the first product that they put in front of potential customers first. 4️⃣ Material Security has expanded beyond email security to tackle data protection challenges across the broader productivity suite - including tools like file sharing, chat, and collaboration apps. By consolidating capabilities across this suite, they are building more integrated platforms rather than disjointed point solutions. 5️⃣ AI has had a significant impact on the defensive side of security and helps in leveraging data for better protection, but Abhishek believes that good controls in security products should be attack-agnostic, whether the attack is AI-generated or human-generated.