The following interview is a conversation we had with Mykolas Rambus, CEO & Co-Founder of Hush, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: Mykolas Rambus, CEO & Co-Founder of Hush: $7.5 Million Raised to Build the Future of Data Privacy
Mykolas Rambus
Very well. Thanks for having me.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. Super excited for our conversation here. So I see you started your first company in 2000, so I’d love to use that as a starting point. Take us back 2000. What was going on in your world?
Mykolas Rambus
Oh, gosh.com. Gold rush, right? Companies were exiting never having had revenue, never having had a business plan. And so there was great opportunity. Funny enough, the opportunity that exists most was around the beginning of mobile making a way back. This is palm Pilots and Compaq ipacs and the rest where no one knew where mobile was going to go. So myself and several friends, several classmates decided to get involved and take the plunge.
Brett
And what was that company? What did it do? And then what was the outcome there?
Mykolas Rambus
It was called Lobby seven. We started off as a mobile app development shop, basically a boutique consultancy, until the market fell out first right from the.com eradic. In fact, it’s funny, the e services consultancies were the first ones to go. Big blow ups like March 1 and Us web. We changed business models twice and eventually got it right, being a markup language that developers at telecommunications carriers could use to build apps because they’re the only ones that had money to do anything. Right back in 2003 around tech, what.
Brett
Was it like navigating that storm when the.com bubble burst? How did you navigate that and what did you learn from that experience?
Mykolas Rambus
One of my favorite expressions is failure is not an option. And thats exactly how I, how the team felt during that time. We didnt know how were going to solve the problem, but we knew that we wouldnt somehow. And frankly, just following the money, following the opportunity, following the conversations, keeping an ear to the ground was the most important thing. And so we took whatever assets we had built as consultants and figured out what would be worthy in the marketplace that was a time where Microsoft had just gotten into the speech space, was acquiring some assets, and we knew we’re in the right zone. The only issue was, can we compete effectively against Microsoft? The answer was no. Let’s sell this thing as fast as possible. So that’s what happened in 2003.
Brett
And then let’s talk about your second company. What did that company do?
Mykolas Rambus
Wealth X. So Wealthex was a reaction in many ways to the global financial crisis in 2008. So many banks, right, shuttered, certainly prop trading. They had minimized investment banking activity, and it was all about wealth management, right? UBs, Citi, all the big names are talking about wealth management in the future of where that was going. And so that was our idea, to equip those organizations to be a successful as they could, with data, not rocket science. We observed, and having come from force media, that there was no Bloomberg for private bankers, right. It was this sort of black book world where you had a little, literally, notes written in a notebook. And so perhaps we could be that version and create that opportunity. That was the idea.
Brett
Brute force.
Mykolas Rambus
Build a Bloomberg for private bankers.
Brett
Where did you get that data from?
Mykolas Rambus
Public Internet. Open source intelligence, I suppose the industry term is called. But it’s all over for those who know where to look. And not just in the US, right? Wealthex was initially launched from a couch in the upper west side of Manhattan, but quickly moved to Singapore, where we covered over 60 jurisdictions. And so whether it was Indonesia or Brazil or Russia or the US, all of this was public record, right? Available on the Internet, if you know where to look.
Brett
Do people realize that all of this information is just out there in the open like that?
Mykolas Rambus
Most have no idea, right? Most presume that the donations they’ve given or the quotes that they’ve made, and certainly information about their wealth or how they’ve created wealth are not as easy to find, right? Those who’ve googled themselves have some idea. Occasionally someone will invest money to know and econ. Themselves, but very rarely people think that they’re being private. The reality is they are an open book.
Brett
And I know you sold that company. Talk to us about the decision to sell that company. Was that hard decision to make or was it just obvious? The time, now is the time to exit, Jeff.
Mykolas Rambus
It was. But also, having started my career in the.com bubble, there’s this notion of let’s always wait and let’s go public. I just never know what’s going to happen. And so I saw companies that had amazing opportunities crash and burn a year, two years later. And so when the opportunity came up for us to sell the organization as a result of one of our investors basically dissolving that entity, that allowed us to go to market, see what was out there. And that was a great time. And so why not take advantage of that opportunity? Because who knows what’s around the corner?
Brett
And did you take any time off before you started hush, or did you just immediately get to work and build a new company?
Mykolas Rambus
I did take some time off. I did my obligatory 18 months right after the sale, took a proper vacation after a six year march, and went to Equifax, actually. So I was at Equifax running the consumer data division before, during, and after they went through the big breach. Not my division. I always say that just to be very clear. But I really wanted to stick it out and see my division get back to growth and then record growth and then moved on and then took a little bit of a vacation. But at that point, I very much had the itch for a few things. One, to build what was next. Two, to do that in my hometown of Detroit, where I’m based now.
Mykolas Rambus
And three, solve a problem which we had personally dealt with at Wealthex and which I saw no one solving yet, which was surprising.
Brett
Even still, that’s a perfect segue to talk about hush. What does hush do today?
Mykolas Rambus
So hush is a data privacy company, but if we think about who buys and why they buy, they’re mitigating risk, right? People are trying to figure out how they can stem the tide of constant cyber attacks. And there’s the billions of dollars that have gone into the toolset, right, that most companies use to manage and to protect against cyber. The criminals know this as well. And so they’ve taken the easy route, right? They go after the humans who are the soft underbelly of any cybersecurity strategy, were all susceptible at the right time, the right place, the right message to clicking or doing the wrong thing. And so weve tried to make learning about those employees extremely difficult, because thats what the bad guys do, right? They reconnaissance the employee. They figure out what their triggers are.
Mykolas Rambus
Just like a con artist figures out a mark, they do the same thing to us. And so if we can remove their information, the employees information, off the Internet at scale, whether its the CEO, whether its the call center rep of the new sales leader, that much more difficult for those hackers, those social engineers, to do what they do well.
Brett
And I think it’s in the news this weekend. I think I read it, that it was WPP the big agency that CEO had hackers go and clone his voice and then try to defraud the company. And I think he was able to prevent it. Are you seeing a rise of attacks like that where these criminals are using AI and other technologies?
Mykolas Rambus
We are. There are a lot more impersonations than there ever have been. The toolset is increasingly inexpensive. We’re talking $20 worth of software and a laptop in the world. And it used to be the nigerian prince email. Right. Or even the Amazon gift card scam we hear about. And those you could probably figure out because the person on the other end sounded a bit odd. Their english maybe wasn’t as polished. AI is making that a lot easier.
Mykolas Rambus
Right.
Mykolas Rambus
Even this voiceover technology to be able to impersonate someone on a call or even on a zoom.
Mykolas Rambus
Right.
Mykolas Rambus
If you saw that scam that happened out of Hong Kong and someone was eventually conned into sending over $20 million, it’s becoming much more prevalent and it will be. This is going to be one of the biggest issues around online identity and safety in the next 15 to 20 years.
Brett
And is the idea behind hush that you try to eliminate that problem by going to kind of step one of getting that data off of the Internet in the first place so they can’t even use it? Or how would you think about, like, where you are in that chain of information?
Mykolas Rambus
So we’re the proactive approach. You’re spot on. How can I eliminate contact information about family, any points of leverage that someone’s going to look for?
Mykolas Rambus
Right.
Mykolas Rambus
One of the first things a social engineer does is try to figure out what kind of mark this is and how do they respond? Is it about sympathy and charity? Is it about someone who is responsive to authority? What’s the way that they’re going to do? How can they line up the research, the psychology of what they find online about a person and then create the scheme? Right. Usually the Amazon gift card things, those fail.
Mykolas Rambus
Right.
Mykolas Rambus
It’s the ones that are very targeted to a controller or financial controller at an organization or an it professional who’s just joined the company. That’s how they work. So, yes, we’re in that anti reconnaissance. You could look at it as techniques that perhaps have been applied to those in government, those in law enforcement over the years, but we clearly need those now in corporate America. Got it.
Brett
So it’s almost democratizing stuff that’s been in the public sector and then moving into the private sector very much, or.
Mykolas Rambus
Looking at it from a billionaire perspective. People ask, well, what about billionaires do they have this? How has this happened for them? In the past, they would hire folks who used to work at three letter agencies, who were on retainer, who would look for information about the principal, the billionaire, remove it off the Internet. That was tens of thousands of dollars per year, if not more. And so we’ve definitely democratized that process, making it accessible for any given employee at a company to have that level of protection.
Brett
So what does it look like? A company says yes. What do you do next? How does that go forward?
Mykolas Rambus
The first thing we do is talk about the process, the journey.
Mykolas Rambus
Right.
Mykolas Rambus
We talk about the carrot and the carrot, if you will. Yes, this benefits the company, but the most likely RiSK that an employee is going to face is identity theft.
Mykolas Rambus
Right.
Mykolas Rambus
One out of 17 americans a year. And so we help them with the communication to say, hey, we’re doing this for the company. Companies benefit, but were also doing it for our employees.
Mykolas Rambus
Right.
Mykolas Rambus
And heres how you benefit. Heres how you win. Because the last thing employees want is yet another thing pushed down from it that theyve got to deal with. Everyones sick of that. We help them with the communication journey, but then the employee gets their membership invitation to hush. We require very little information when they onboard. Its antithetical to say, well, whats your date of birth?
Mykolas Rambus
Whats your address?
Mykolas Rambus
Just give us some fragments and well do what the bad guys do and find your digital footprint. And then we present them with their dashboard. And this is where it gets interesting, where theyve probably never seen that in black and white. Maybe theyve googled themselves and gone to page one or two, but theyve never gone to page eleven or beyond, which is what we do. And said, heres your entire digital life, by the way. Here are your vulnerabilities. Did you recognize that? Here are the top 50 answers to bank challenge questions. And youve got ten of those out there on the Internet about yourself. The last thing and probably most important thing we do is the removal. They can literally click and hush each individual item or as bulk and get those things removed off the Internet.
Mykolas Rambus
That’s what people buy when they buy from us.
Brett
And is it continuous? I have to imagine there’s always new stuff coming on, things going offline, like, is this a continuous process?
Mykolas Rambus
It is. And I’ll give you an example where people will say, well, gosh, I removed my address off. And there’s lots of reasons why we can talk about addresses and last address and how that’s a vulnerability. But the next time they buy something on, and I hate to pick on a company. So I won’t use an ecommerce retailers name, but any given company, right. Lots of those companies, the majority resell, write their customer list. And so lo and behold, that address pops back up. One month, two months, six months later and it’s back out there and we’re yet again whacking it down with our technology.
Brett
This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media podcast production studio that helps b two B founders launch, manage and grow their own podcast. Now if you’re a founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast. I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit Frontlines.io podcast. Now back today’s episode. Talk to us about the marketing philosophy. What’s the approach to marketing?
Mykolas Rambus
So there’s a few two things happen in our world, referrals. No surprise, right? There are corporate security leaders, cybersecurity leaders. And when things go sideways, when a leader is threatened, when they’ve had an incident, that’s when they message one another, right? That’s when they pick up the phone and call each other as peers industry. And so we’ve got to be known to that community. So part of this is just time making sure that we’re a trusted party and we are highly responsive and able to act that part of it. The other is email, right? So we often say you may not need us now, but almost guaranteed, in 18 months or twelve months or six months, you’ll probably want to give us a call back. And so just being aware and peace of mind when the time is right is very important for us.
Mykolas Rambus
That’s why we do the email campaigns that we do.
Brett
Are companies aware of this? It seems like they have to be aware by now. Or do you find some companies who think maybe we’re too small for this to be a problem? Like do you see that people are problem aware now? What does that look like?
Mykolas Rambus
Increasingly, and I thank the retail data deletion industry for doing that. Right. Super bowl discover ad about removing your data from the top data brokers in the US. I love it, right, because they talk about it now, the issue is they removed from the top. I think it was ten data brokers and the reality is there’s 2500 data brokers in the US, so, but at least it’s a start. And so most people at the leadership level have heard of something like this. And if not, they’ve definitely heard about Lifelock or related. And so we explained to them, well look, that’s a, thats feel good activity. It doesnt necessarily protect you, but lets talk about how to enhance that. So yes, that world is becoming more visible to more leaders.
Brett
I think Lifelock was the company that put the Social Security number of their CEO on billboards and drove it around. Do you have any crazy marketing campaigns like that coming?
Mykolas Rambus
No.
Mykolas Rambus
Plants as a brand named Hush and thats literally our name have this tension between how visible do we want to be versus those who know to call us.
Brett
What about the market category? So you mentioned there it was what data deletion companies? Whats the landscape look like? What are some of the other categories that are out there? And then how are you thinking about your market category?
Mykolas Rambus
So theres three that ill point to. Theres the retail data deletion services. You can google right now and find people who will delete your data off of the top 5000 and so forth, data brokers. And thats great right. There are a lot of those companies out there can be signed up in a few minutes. Thats not who we are.
Mykolas Rambus
Right.
Mykolas Rambus
There are ways to access us if someones a prosecutor, a judge, a celebrity, or just someone whos had an incident.
Mykolas Rambus
Right.
Mykolas Rambus
But we’re not a B2C company.
Mykolas Rambus
Right.
Mykolas Rambus
We’re B2B. But those are out there. We love them. Then there’s the enterprise category for which we sit in, and they’re a handful of companies in our realm. And some of those consumer companies are coming toward the enterprise realm as well because I think they see the opportunity, the ability to scale and lower costs of acquisition. Then there are the adjacencies, right. It’s the cybersecurity awareness training companies, for example, the email filtering companies, the folks who are trying to stem the issues around social engineering, but going at it a different way. And I think that’s where we fit. We often say, look, we’re the third leg of the stool. It’s great that you’ve got email filtering. They know, right. The cisos, the buyers know that those folks are being targeted at home.
Mykolas Rambus
Right.
Mykolas Rambus
You mentioned the CEO just as much as they’re being targeted at the office. And hey, awareness is great, but the reality is it’s not effective 20% of the time. So what else can you do in this day and age?
Brett
And who are you typically selling to? Is that the CISO? Is it corporate security? Who is that?
Mykolas Rambus
It’s both. It’s oftentimes the corporate security folks who are increasingly responsible for dealing with issues relating to politics, relating to a position that a brand has taken. Gosh, the amount of hate mail and vitriol that’s out there, whether it be around an election or reproductive rights or DEIJ, you name the issue. Companies are right in the thick of it, right. In ways that they haven’t been before. But we also sell to the cybersecurity leaders. Often they are the person who is coordinating the conversation, the activity, even if corporate security, HR and others get involved.
Brett
Trey, do you see that as a different style of communication, like what resonates with corporate security? Is that very different from the CISO, or is it the same message applies to both?
Mykolas Rambus
Its pretty similar. CISOs and corporate security leaders are both very skeptical communities.
Mykolas Rambus
Right.
Mykolas Rambus
They’ve seen a lot. They dont believe a lot of vendor pitches. Right. And so we recognize that what comes through is authentic communication, facts, referrals.
Mykolas Rambus
Right.
Mykolas Rambus
Case studies. And thats not dissimilar from a lot of the technology landscape in general. But I think its amplified in CISO land and corporate security land.
Brett
How do you get someone to say yes to a case study like this? I’ve worked with a lot of other companies in cybersecurity. It’s always hard. This almost seems like the next level of hard. How do you get someone to say yes to this?
Mykolas Rambus
We often talk about our diagnostic, and this is something we do outside in is if we’re a threat actor and say, look, here’s all the information about your employees. Here are the vulnerabilities, and here’s a list of those names and whether that ten employees or 10,000 employees, we can do that. And that’s an eye opener. Next is what we call golden nuggets. And so we are in the data analysis business and we often say, look, there’s those golden nuggets that really change the conversation. Its the fact that they thought that their CEO was locked down. And turns out that the CEO’s dogs account on Instagram is where all of the information about their life, their movements, their family vacations is leaking from.
Mykolas Rambus
Right.
Mykolas Rambus
And so we find that if needed and not always needed, but those golden nuggets make a very big difference. And so that might be a trial.
Mykolas Rambus
Right.
Mykolas Rambus
And were happy to do that to show people the risks that they face and the kinds of information thats out there about themselves and their employees.
Brett
Now, as I mentioned there in the intro, you’ve raised 7.5 million to date. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this journey? And how has it been different from the other times you’ve gone through fundraising?
Mykolas Rambus
Oh gosh. The landscape has changed enormously in fundraising since we started the business. We started in, I’d say the best of times, found ourselves in the worst of times from a fundraising perspective. And now I think today we’re probably somewhere middle of the road in terms of the investor landscape. We’ve been fortunate to have great investors from angels who have backed other technology companies, as well as institutional investors and also some family offices. I can go into each of those categories in depth, which I wont do, at least to begin with, but I think rightfully so. Investors are very skeptical, as they should be regarding a companys prospects. Theyre looking for outsized returns, as they should be companies that can return the fund.
Mykolas Rambus
And so is the idea big enough and is the approach to go to market distribution model thoughtful enough and fast enough with enough velocity to be able to capture that kind of market? So, look, I think investors are asking all the right questions. I think theyre just doing more of that and less of the fluff that happened three years ago.
Brett
As I told you a couple of months ago when we first spoke, I grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I hope revealing that doesn’t make me get hacked now. But I did spend some time in Kalamazoo, Michigan, so I love Michigan. You mentioned Detroit. It’s important for you to be building here in Detroit. What’s it like building a technology company in Detroit?
Mykolas Rambus
So make sure none of your bank challenge questions have that in there. Right. Building a company in Detroit has been great. It’s a burgeoning community. There have been a number of articles out there about how Michigan is one of the fastest growing tech ecosystems nationwide. Yes, of course, ive been fortunate to build in Boston, in other jurisdictions like Singapore, New York. But the reality is theres a special kind of grit that comes from not only the midwest work ethic, but also, I think here in Detroit, finding talent and introducing people in some cases to the startup journey and startup world has been great fun. I often joke its the red pill versus the blue pill. For those who remember the Matrix, which way do you want to go? But its good fun and theres great talent here to build organizations.
Mykolas Rambus
And there have been a very successful stories that have come out of not only Midwest, but also Michigan and Detroit area and Ann Arbor.
Mykolas Rambus
Right.
Mykolas Rambus
Great institution in University of Michigan state.
Mykolas Rambus
Right.
Mykolas Rambus
KZU is well nearby. There are great bodies of talent that we can pull from. The trick, of course, is keeping them here for their next startup.
Brett
Now, I know that you’re a private company, so you don’t have to tell us anything that you don’t want to talk about, but can you give us a taste of the growth or tease us a little bit with the growth that you’re seeing?
Mykolas Rambus
Sure. So last quarter was a good one. We think there’s more of that to come. We doubled our revenue quarter over quarter. We expect to do the same now and as we get toward end of the year to keep doing that. But like you said, back to go to market and referrals. A lot of thats coming from people who are connecting the dots, right, who love what we do. Were still surprised that our NP’s scores are as high as they are. We got a 92 NP’s. And if you think about Apple in the seventies, thats shockingly high. And we havent really done much to activate that. So we think theres a lot of opportunity.
Mykolas Rambus
And again, as we head into what is likely to be at a very personal level for most people, one of the most stressful, if not anxious or anxiety inducing periods around the election and year end, its unfortunate for the world, but its good for our business and so well capitalize on that.
Brett
Trey, what do you attribute to that success? Im sure any founder listening in is nodding their head thinking, yeah, I want to grow like that. What have you gotten?
Mykolas Rambus
Right?
Brett
What have you really nailed, Trey?
Mykolas Rambus
Theres an advisor to us who said, fine, fast water.
Mykolas Rambus
Right.
Mykolas Rambus
If you think about people who do rowing or even if you think about sailing, you look for the wind and you get in front of it. And so part of that is, I think, I dont want to say luck, but I hope that we are tuning the business to the opportunity as we see it at scale. Thats what many of our investors see, too. They recognize this bigger opportunity and this macro story for which were bet to place within that. The next, of course, is, I think, solving the problem.
Mykolas Rambus
Right.
Mykolas Rambus
So its great that we can be there, but if we cant actually solve the problem for the corporate security director or the CISo, then thats an issue. So weve invested a lot of money, $7.5 million in building our platform, making sure that it is world class so we can solve their problems when the time is right.
Brett
If we just look back at your career, it seems like you are very good at finding fast water. This is what, the third time? Maybe there’s some other times that we haven’t even talked about. So it’s not something that happens on accident to you. It doesn’t seem like you really stumble into this. How do you find that fast water?
Mykolas Rambus
Listening as much as possible. I try to listen to where things are going. And yes, I’ve been fortunate to have experience in certain industries which allows me to listen a little better and probably more importantly, just have a wider set of relationships where I can ask, what do you think is going to happen? Where is this going? What do you experience the next two years? What do you forecast in the next five or ten? And look at those trend lines and tie those together with personal interest, right around data, around understanding in former life, very affluent individuals now securing and protecting individuals and families and companies, but just listening very carefully and trying to forecast where things are going to go.
Brett
Final question for you. Let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision here?
Mykolas Rambus
I would love, and our company would love to see the nature of privacy change, not only in the US, but also globally. US is one of those societies where people are waking up to the fact that there have been privacy issues. Apple is capitalizing on this in their sales and marketing. If you go to Europe, for example, privacy exists at a very visceral and emotional level. I don’t know that we’ll ever get there in the US, but I do think it’s a reasonable expectation for any American to know that when someone drives down the street and types in their address, types in a address, they won’t be able to figure out who lives there, all about them, in two minutes flat.
Mykolas Rambus
Right.
Mykolas Rambus
That should change. So our hope is that at least in the next 35 years, 20% of the american workforce is protected by something like hush. Whether it’s us or. That’s fine. We hope to own the market. But we believe that this has to happen if we’re to stem the cybersecurity issues and the general population safety and identity theft issues that we hear about every day.
Brett
Amazing. I love the vision. We are up on time, or over on time, I should say. So. We’re going to have to wrap here before we do, if there’s any founders listening in that want to follow along, where should they go?
Mykolas Rambus
Go hush.com or our LinkedIn page. We’re old school that way. Those are the two places to find us.
Brett
Amazing. Well, thanks so much for taking the time. It’s been a lot of fun.
Mykolas Rambus
A pleasure. Thank you.
Brett
This episode of category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio.
Mykolas Rambus
If you’re a B2B founder.
Brett
Looking for help launching and growing your own podcast. Visit Frontlines.io podcast and for the latest episode, search for category visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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