Jaime Blasco

My name is Jaime Blasco, I'm co-founder at CTO of a company called Nat Security.

So Nat Security is a cybersecurity company we offer a SaaS governance platform that helps organizations protect their employees as well as SaaS applications and AI agents.

So our main ICP is really high growth tech companies. We also have companies in the finance healthcare space. These problems that we are trying to solve really affects every organization out there, which is SaaS and AI adoption. That's happening pretty much everywhere in the industry. We usually sell to cybersecurity teams or IT teams. That's the primary value of our solution.

So I'm one of the co-founders. We started the company in 2022. So it's been three years. We raised our Series A end of last year. So really growing the company as we speak.

Yeah, goals and different strategies after the Series A has been really focusing on our ICP, growing the channel as something that is happening in the industry as a whole, but especially cybersecurity, we see more companies really using channel to discover new products and really solve problems versus going to the vendors themselves. So growing that, it's a priority for us. As well obviously expanding the team, engineering team as well as marketing and sales teams. As you grow, obviously you need to expand those teams. We are also creating new product lines and more things to sell to our existing customers. We are seeing things like 30, 40% attachment rates on new solutions that we sell to our customers. So really a lot of opportunities for us to grow this year.

Yeah, for us really AI has been an amazing thing that happened, which is we created this company just before the AI revolution happened. And what we build that is, we discover all the applications that your employees are using as well as the AI tools that they are using is like the perfect solution for this world where IT and security teams don't have any visibility into what's going on with their employees. We are seeing that traditionally IT teams will procure an application and then use, the employees will adopt that application. But what we are seeing today is your employees are actually buying those tools or it's starting to use tools like Notion is a great example where some of your employees start using the solution and then the whole company adopts that. And that breaks the modern IT and security solutions because they don't even know that that exists in the environment.

Yeah, obviously again, AI has been in everyone's conversations every time I talk to customers or other founders is how that's changing companies and also the relationship with your customers. I think for us is we are able to do much more with less resources. So we are trying to slow a little bit the hiring or the plan that we have in order to really adopt more technology that allows the team to move faster. We are still growing but we are much more methodical to the type of people that we are bringing in the organization. It really changes, you wanna bring more people that are more able to drive projects end to end using AI tools because something that used to take a team of 10 can be done by one person today with the right tooling and AI agents. So that's what we have been investing and obviously starting with engineering and development which is my team, we have really invested a lot. And last year everybody said it's kind of like the year of the agents. I think it didn't happen, right? Like everyone started to adopt AI agents but they were not as good as they should be. And that's changing Q4, right? With like anthropic new models especially things started to click and AI agents started to work even outside of engineering and development tools. We are seeing that working now across marketing, sales and pretty much every team in the organization.

Yeah, for us, it's really about,

I'm looking for people that are,

have a good taste and are able to drive initiatives end to end as I was discussing, which is when you're a small company, you wanna decentralize a lot of those decisions. So you wanna hire people that are able to make their own decisions and be fine with making mistakes but at the same time have enough experience and taste to make less mistakes than someone else that you will hire. On the other hand, I think like what we started to call AI natives, right, which is like developers that have been in the business for 20 years are having a much harder time to adopt new,

things like cursor or cloud code, et cetera, that allows them to write code much faster. But what we see is like people that have been less time in the industry are actually much faster to switch to using those tools because obviously if you have spent 20 years of your life doing something, it's really, really hard to change your workflows.

Yeah, we do a lot of the, and some of the challenges that we encounter when hiring is, there's a lot of competition, especially in our industry and cybersecurity for very good talent, it has been very competitive, right?

There's been a lot of PC investment and companies have a lot of money to spend and there's a lot of wars when it comes to hiring. So, being very meaningful on that and looking for very specific opportunities. The other thing that I always look at in terms of red flags is like if someone has been jumping jobs every one, two years, that's a huge flag for me, especially in this business. In cybersecurity, it's really all about trust. Like we pretty much know a lot of the people in the business and back-channeling is also very important. If you wanna hire in this environment and that's how we really clean up a lot of the questions we have about candidates as well.

Yeah, I think some of the hiring lessons that I learned early on is, the first one is probably like hire slow and fire fast, which is take your time getting the right candidate, but then if it doesn't work, if you have made out your mind, don't struggle. Like fire those people really quickly because I think the bottleneck especially today is,

the weakest link is gonna be the bottleneck in your organization and delaying those decisions to fire. It caused me in the past a lot and I think it's a great lesson for every entrepreneur and any manager out there to be honest.

Yeah, so AI fluency for us is probably number one or number two as I mentioned, which is we're trying to hire people that,

if they haven't learned to use AI tools properly, have the fluency to really do it really quickly and adapt their workflows. As I was describing, like someone that has been in the industry for 20 years and doing the same things, may have a really hard time changing their workflows and maybe bringing some of the younger talent really helps the rest of the team to change their workflows.

So I've been a member of Founders League, I think this is my third or fourth year I can remember, but along those lines.

So some of the unexpected things that I found is, when we first started, I thought it was all about pickleball, but actually I was really, really wrong about that. I think it's all about the community and the amount of opportunities that we have to make, very interesting people and amazing founders. One of the things is being a founder, you're lonely and I have a co-founder, but many people are really, don't have that opportunity. And meeting other people that are going through your time struggles is really helpful.

Yeah, so some of the things that founders they have offer in terms of professional connections, obviously meeting potential customers, meeting potential candidates if you are hiring. And more importantly, business partners, some of the sponsors, some of the people around the community, we have even had some opportunities to do events for them or bring some of those sponsors to Founders League as well. So it's really a great community where you get something and they'll give something in return because people are really great.

Yeah, so the way I got into pickball is very interesting. So my wife worked for a venture capital firm and she went to an upset and her team, one of the activities was playing pickball. A lot of the founders there were playing pickball and she came home and tell me, oh my God, you're gonna love this thing because she knows what I like really well, obviously as my wife.

I tried and I was really hooked since day one. One of the things we were discussing earlier is, pickball as one of those things almost has a drag, you really get addicted to it really quickly. And that was probably three, four years ago and since then,

first time in the morning when I woke up, the first thing that I think is I wanna play more pickball.

Yeah, so it took us a couple of years to really perform somehow well. Obviously, pickball is one of those sports that I think is really easy to learn but it's really, really hard to master. You can play pretty much day one but it takes you a really long time to master and be able to be competitive. This year finally, we were able to win the Beginners Intermediate League here at Founders League. We're really happy about that and next year, I think they're gonna put us in one level up and we'll see what we can do.

I think we will have a lot of fun, a lot of struggles, they'll kick our asses a little bit but we will have fun, so that's important. The important thing is get to meet new people, get to play other teams we haven't had the chance to play and just learning from better players. I think one of the things about pickball, if you get stuck with players that are more or less in your level, it's really hard to get better at it and really playing with teams that are slightly better than you is what really makes you level up really quickly.

Yeah, definitely, I think the level of competition has gotten up within Founders League. There are many different things from many different levels and you get to play people like Michael that obviously kick our asses every time we play him but also as I mentioned, people that are closer to your level and a lot of variety of teams. So being able to get access to many, many teams and many different ways of playing pickball, that's been really helpful.

One of the things that I like to do is getting in my opponent's mind.

Early on in the game, I'll just be very aggressive and try to tag them a bunch of times or just making a mistake so they get mad at each other when we play doubles. That really sets the game, if you're very competitive. It's a mental game, once you get in your mind, it's really hard to get out of it during a game. So explaining those type of things, it's the type of game that I like and you have trust talk all the time. I love to just get in your mind as much as I can.

Not yet, I hope that one day we are good enough to get something like that, but yeah, I think right now it's been friendly competition.

Yeah, so my first partner was actually, so Chris is my neighbor and he's actually, he started like the pickler up north recently. But yeah, we used to play together in the neighborhood and I discovered Founders League through a friend and was looking for a partner, so that was like a great opportunity. More recently, the last couple of years, I've been playing with a Stefan Chenet, which is my partner. He's also a cybersecurity founder. We have known each other for 20 years and he moved to Austin more or less at the same time that I did from California and we love playing pickleball and so it was like a very easy decision for us to make. And we make a great team, we complement each other really well. He's more calm than me and I think that's been really good.

I think Founders League is very welcoming. One of the things that surprised me is a lot of the people here have known each other for a very long time, but it was very easy to get into the community. And I think a lot of the advantages is like if, for example, if you just move to Austin from a different city, it's a very easy way to get to know a lot of people in the community and not just pickleball. I think about Founders League, not just for pickleball, but for access to the community. And they also do a lot of events outside of pickleball itself, right? So there's always a lot of opportunities to even learn about other sports or other activities and give you access to things like that.