Vali Cyber’s Playbook: Building Trust When Your Product Protects Mission-Critical Systems

Building trust in enterprise software is challenging. Building trust when your product protects mission-critical systems that can’t fail? That’s a different game entirely.

In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Vali Cyber CTO Austin Gadient shared how they approached this challenge, offering valuable lessons for founders entering high-stakes markets.

Start with Deep Domain Expertise

Vali Cyber’s journey began with firsthand experience protecting critical military infrastructure. “I worked on two programs. One was called chess, the other one was called Stargate. Stargate was a satellite ground system program. Chess was flight system program, so focused on satellites themselves,” Austin explains.

This experience revealed fundamental problems with existing solutions. “We had issues with portability between different versions of Linux, performance on Linux systems, and instability, efficacy issues, so they weren’t so good at detecting attacks, at least the solutions that we tested.”

Build Trust Through Verification

Rather than relying on marketing claims, Vali Cyber created open-source tools that allowed potential customers to verify their performance claims independently. “We built some tools that make it easier for someone to validate our claims. One of them is called security perfect… Because that tool is open source, anyone can go with the code, you can run it themselves. They know exactly what we’re testing.”

Prioritize Product Quality Over Speed

The team learned the hard way that in mission-critical security, being first isn’t as important as being bulletproof. “I think that something that we did as a mistake was trying to go to market too early,” Austin reveals. “To be able to compete with a mature product like that, your product can’t just be better. It has to be significantly better, and it has to be pretty much error and bug free.”

Practice Radical Transparency

Overselling capabilities is a fatal mistake in security. “I think it was very important to be transparent and truthful about what we’re providing and what our product could and could not do,” Austin notes. “You definitely don’t want to oversell. I think that’s very easy way to lose a customer early on if you try to promise things that aren’t true.”

Tailor Communication to Multiple Stakeholders

Enterprise security sales require convincing various decision-makers. “You have to be able to speak to all those different folks,” Austin explains. “The CISO is typically the person you have to intrigue first because they’re the one that sets the agenda and the overall strategy for the organization.”

Avoid Marketing Hype

Technical buyers are particularly sensitive to marketing fluff. “Technical buyers are not people that respond to marketing hype and fluff… Once they hear that sort of language, I think it turns them off very quickly,” Austin shares.

The key lesson from Vali Cyber’s journey? In high-stakes markets, trust isn’t built through marketing or speed – it’s built through demonstrable expertise, verifiable claims, and unwavering honesty about product capabilities. For founders entering similar markets, this might mean a slower path to market, but it creates a foundation for lasting customer trust.