Christina Cacioppo - Building an Enduring Software Company in the Age of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.496]
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'ShaughnessyShow Notes
My guest today is Christina Cacioppo, founder and CEO of Vanta, which helps more than 16,000 companies manage security and compliance.
Five years after our first conversation, we discuss how Vanta became a category leader, what it takes to reinvent a successful software business in the age of AI, and why Christina is betting on agents to do the work rather than simply assist users.
We also explore the changing economics of software, the war for exceptional talent, AI's impact on cybersecurity, and what it takes to build an enduring company in Silicon Valley's rapidly changing environment.
Please enjoy my conversation with Christina Cacioppo.
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.
-----
Become a Colossus member to get our quarterly print magazine and private audio experience, including exclusive profiles and early access to select episodes. Subscribe at colossus.com/subscribe.
-----
Ramp’s mission is to help companies manage their spend in a way that reduces expenses and frees up time for teams to work on more valuable projects. Go to ramp.com/invest to sign up for free and get a $250 welcome bonus.
-----
Trusted by thousands of businesses, Vanta continuously monitors your security posture and streamlines audits so you can win enterprise deals and build customer trust without the traditional overhead. Invest Like the Best listeners get a special offer of $1,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta.com/invest.
-----
WorkOS is the infrastructure B2B and AI-native companies use to sell to enterprise. It covers everything enterprise security requires: SSO, SCIM, RBAC, Audit Logs, AI governance, and more. Trusted by 2,000+ fast-growing companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Vercel.
-----
Rogo is the AI platform for finance. They're building agents for Wall Street that are trained to understand how bankers and investors actually do work: from diligence and modeling, to turning analysis into deliverables. To learn more, visit rogo.ai/invest.
-----
Ridgeline has built a complete, real-time, modern operating system for investment managers. It handles trading, portfolio management, compliance, customer reporting, and much more through an all-in-one real-time cloud platform. Visit ridgeline.ai.
-----
Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant.
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) How Vanta Won a Crowded Category
(00:03:12) Living Through the Software Selloff
(00:05:41) Building an Agent-First Product
(00:07:39) Why Vanta Eats the Cost of AI
(00:10:35) The Search for Outcome Pricing
(00:14:31) Getting People to Actually Use AI
(00:17:46) Why Comp for Top People Is Up 10X
(00:22:13) Valuations, Tenders, and the Endgame
(00:24:20) What’s Overhyped and Underhyped
(00:27:54) The Problem With FDEs
(00:29:34) Why French Startups Use Chinese Models
(00:30:22) Vanta as a Security Company
(00:36:57) What Makes a Great Talk
(00:40:14) Where She Would Invest Today
(00:45:19) The Billboard War
(00:49:35) The AI Trust Crisis
(00:51:39) Security Five Years From Now
More from Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
David Vélez is the founder and CEO of Nubank, which serves 140 million customers across Latin America.
Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist and professor at Stanford, the host of the Huberman Lab podcast, and the author of Protocols.
My guest today is Noah Shinn. Noah is the founder of Instinct, a personal assistant that you text, call, or email the same way you would a person. It has its own phone and its own computer, and it can do almost anything on your behalf that you would do yourself online. Instinct is about a year old, still invite-only, and growing roughly 10% day over day without any marketing spend.
Gabe Stengel is the co-founder and CEO of Rogo, the AI platform for finance. He believes the best investors will spend the next several years reinventing their firms around AI, and Rogo is trying to build the infrastructure that allows them to do it.
Michael Moritz led Sequoia Capital for nearly two decades and backed some of the defining companies of the internet era.