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🎈 Customer Obsession, Fundraising Timelines & Why Pitch Decks Suck. An interview with Michael Batko, CEO at Startmate.
🧠 10 Things On My Mind Right Now. Things are on my mind right now, so let's talk about them.
✨ Surviving COVID, PMMC Fit & Scaling To $200M ARR. An interview with Hussein Fazal, Co-Founder & CEO at Super.com.

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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, it was tough to find leadership anywhere you looked online. Hate, lies, deviciviseness on all sides. That is, except for the Governor of Utah, Spencer Cox, who spoke about how both sides need to come together moving forward. He also said something that struck me: “Social media is cancer.”

I found it hard after Charlie’s murder to stay off Twitter. I, like many others, felt the need to understand why the incident occurred. And what were the motives of the shooter? But as the left screamed that he was a Trump donor and the right screamed he’d been radicalised in colleges, I couldn’t help but think we aren’t seeing the forest through the trees here. This happened because social media is tearing at the fabric of our society. It shows us only extremes of each side, and feeds us more and more of our own ideology in tightly defined echo chambers. It is absolutely, positively, as Cox put it, digital “cancer.” The sooner we all realise and come together on this, the sooner we can do something about it. Enjoy today’s post!

INTERVIEW 🎙️

Girish Redekar, Co-Founder & CEO at Sprinto

Girish Redekar, Co-Founder and CEO of Sprinto, is a two-time founder helping fast-growing technology companies build trust through automated security compliance. Sprinto enables startups and scaleups to achieve frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPAA with speed and confidence, turning what was once a manual burden into a streamlined process.

Before Sprinto, Girish co-founded RecruiterBox, a bootstrapped applicant tracking system that scaled to thousands of customers worldwide before being acquired. With experience on both sides of the founder journey—bootstrapped and venture-backed—Girish brings a rare perspective to building resilient SaaS companies, combining his engineering background with a deep understanding of governance, risk, and compliance.

What did you learn from building RecruiterBox? And from its acquisition?

RecruiterBox was a completely bootstrapped company, so we didn’t raise any venture funding. Sprinto, on the other hand, is venture-funded from the beginning, so I’ve seen both sides of the aisle. At the start of RecruiterBox, we had no idea what we were doing. It was like jumping into a pool and flailing our arms, just trying to stay afloat. Because we were bootstrapped, my co-founder and I had to learn every part of a SaaS business by doing it ourselves. First, it was writing code, then building the product, learning design, marketing, sales—you name it. And then, we gradually built the team from the ground up.

If you find yourself in that position as a founder, it’s best to be honest with yourself and give yourself another shot. So we decided to leave it in better hands—with people who could actually grow it. We were fairly deliberate about the transition—it wasn’t incidental. We wanted to build a larger company, and we didn’t think RecruiterBox quite fit those ambitions. So the acquirer kept most of the team, and we went after something that offered us a larger opportunity.

Sprinto was launched about a year and a half later. I’m especially pleased that some of the folks we worked with at RecruiterBox eventually came back to us once they knew we were starting something new. I think that’s a very good sign.

Tell me about the problem you're trying to solve?

If you’re a young startup selling B2B software to enterprises, SaaS means your customers’ data lives on your servers. Naturally, they need assurance that their data will remain safe and secure. The typical way this is handled is through security and privacy compliances—things like SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA, PCI. Depending on the industry and geography, there’s a whole alphabet soup of requirements.

Getting these compliances isn’t optional. They’re the ticket to play at the enterprise table. Without them, you simply can’t close deals. But here’s the thing—compliance on its own is not the end goal. What companies really need is a way to stay continuously secure and resilient, because customer trust depends on it. The problem is that the process is extremely complex, and if done manually, incredibly draining. I had to manage these compliances at my previous startup, and I wouldn’t wish doing it manually on my worst enemy.

What we do at Sprinto is fast-track that entire journey. We automate the tedious, error-prone manual tasks—not just to get you audit-ready, but to help you stay secure day after day. We make it possible for companies to provide security to their customers with confidence, and to build resilience and defensibility without the heavy lift of manual work.

What was the most challenging part of going from zero to one?

Surprisingly, the hardest part wasn’t finding customers. That’s usually the toughest challenge in going from zero to one, but in our case, we already knew this was a high-value, high-pain problem because we’d faced it ourselves. I’d also spoken with plenty of founders who struggled with the same issue, so we knew the demand was real.

The real challenge was that this problem is typically solved as a service, with people. From the start, my co-founder and I were clear that we didn’t want to build a services company; we wanted to build a product company. That meant we had to be brutally honest with ourselves: Is this a service or is this a product? We spent the better part of a year taking each piece of the service and figuring out how to productize and automate it. That process—turning what’s normally a human service into a scalable product—was the most difficult part of going from zero to one.

Who is your ICP, and how did it evolve over time?

Today, Sprinto has over 3,000 customers across 75 countries, so there isn’t a single, exact ICP. We operate across a few different markets. One of our earliest and strongest segments has been technology startups, where the ICP is typically the founder or the head of security. As we’ve moved upmarket, the ICP has shifted to the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) or the head of Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC). At a certain scale, you lose the luxury of having just one clearly defined ICP.

We then worked with a few design partners to ensure we were building the right thing. By the time we started acquiring customers, our understanding of the ICP was consistent—and while it has evolved slightly as we’ve scaled, it hasn’t changed dramatically.

What is the North Star metric today?

Internally, the metric we track most closely is the number of happy customers. That has two parts. First, it’s the number of logos—we’re on a mission to help companies build trust with their stakeholders, customers, partners, boards, and others, so the number of organizations we enable really matters.

But it’s not just about collecting logos like trophies. We also want to make sure those customers are genuinely delighted. So we track NPS and pay attention to whether it’s above a certain threshold. When it is, we know we’re creating real impact. So for us, the heartbeat of the company is the number of happy customers—both in terms of reach and satisfaction.

Tell us about raising your Series B, and why Accel invested?

On the operational side, one of the best decisions we made after our Series A was bringing someone from our Series A investors onto our team. That gave us an insider’s perspective on how VCs think—what they mean when they say certain things, what they look for, and how to decode the process. It was incredibly helpful as we prepared for Series B. We ran the raise as a very deliberate process.

First, we spent time preparing. That work fell into three buckets. The first was research: building a long list of potential investors, studying their past investments, and prioritizing them into tiers—choice one, choice two, and so on. The second was narrative: shaping how we’d tell our story, not just with numbers but with a clear vision of what Sprinto was going after. The third was preparation of data rooms and supporting materials, making sure everything was ready for diligence. We also set a clear timeline. Our goal was to begin on a set date, have all conversations within six to eight weeks, and come out with a result—rather than letting talks drag on endlessly, which is what often happens without urgency.

As for why Accel invested, I can’t fully speak on their behalf, but here’s how I see it. There are different kinds of investors: purely metrics-driven, thesis-driven, and those who focus on team and opportunity. I believe Accel falls into that third category. They saw a strong team going after a very large opportunity, and that combination compelled them to double down.

What is the go-to-market strategy today? What’s working and what’s not?

We operate across different segments, so the go-to-market looks a little different in each. But one truth that holds across all of them is that this is an urgent problem for companies. When a company faces it, it needs a solution right away. That urgency makes inbound a huge driver for us. A lot of our go-to-market is about making sure we’re found at the right moment.

Now that you’re post-Series B, what’s the next stage of product development and growth?

One of the biggest things we think about is how AI is going to impact our space. That has two sides. First, there’s how AI affects our customers. Since we operate in security, privacy, and governance, our customers face two challenges: adopting AI safely within their organizations and protecting themselves from AI-based external attacks. Meeting those demands is a growing part of our product roadmap.

Second, there’s how we can use AI ourselves—AI for cybersecurity. We’re incorporating AI into our tools to make life easier for our customers. Traditional solutions in this space, even with automation, still require heavy upkeep because regulations change, environments evolve, and customer demands shift. We’ve built something I’m really excited about that uses AI agents to make this upkeep almost fully autonomous.

It’s not just about reducing manual work; AI is helping us solve problems that are genuinely difficult even for humans. Seeing AI push those frontiers—and being able to deliver that value to our customers—is one of the things that excites me most about Sprinto’s future.

💡 Note: If you are looking for a handy guide on how to get your company SOC 2 compliant, check this out.

How are you integrating AI into your day-to-day operations?

Beyond how we use AI in the product itself, we also have a company-wide mandate to apply AI across our operations. We’ve identified around 15 internal use cases where we want to integrate AI. It’s not just about saying, ‘let’s use AI.’ We’ve been deliberate—mapping specific use cases across GTM functions, hiring, and other areas. Personally, I use AI daily to write better, do deeper research, and analyze industry reports more closely than I ever could two years ago. So we’re approaching it in a structured way, deliberately embedding AI where it can add real value rather than just experimenting for the sake of it.

Responsibility for this push is partly centralized and partly distributed. We have a strategy and operations team that drives the overall initiative and ensures progress. But each of the 15 use cases we’ve identified is owned by the relevant function. For example, someone with domain expertise in marketing leads implementation in marketing, while someone in hiring leads it there. It’s centrally guided but locally executed.

How do you get the best out of yourself personally and professionally?

Honestly, I’m a bit old-school about this. I focus on doing the boring things right—the daily habits that compound over time. I try to be disciplined and present, which really means showing up and taking as many shots as possible. Startups involve a certain amount of luck, but I believe a lot of that luck comes from simply being there, every day, not losing enthusiasm even when you’re moving from one failure to the next. So I don’t have anything profound to share—just that I stay consistent, disciplined, and focused on showing up. That’s what works for me.

And that’s it! You can follow and connect with Girish over on LinkedIn and Twitter, and don’t forget to check out Sprinto’s website.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE USE 🛠️

Every week we highlight tools we actually use inside of our business and give them an honest review. Today we are highlighting Attio—powerful, flexible and data-driven, the exact CRM your business needs.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

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