No show dogs: Cybersecurity CEO talks $3B valuation, potential IPO
Tampa-based cybersecurity firm Reliaquest recently announced a $500 million investment from a slew of firms. The milestone both puts the company’s valuation at $3.4 billion and, executives say, position it for an IPO.
Entrepreneur Brian Murphy founded Reliaquest in 2007 and the firm has since scaled to 1,200 employees across six offices. It emphasizes custom cybersecurity solutions tailored to the customer as opposed to a one-size-fits-all method. The company’s Greymatter platform designed for security teams launched in 2019.
Following this milestone, Murphy sat down with Embarc Collective CEO Tim Holcomb April 16 for a conversation as part of Embarc’s builder series, to discuss how he and the company got here and what’s next. Embarc Collective is a tech startup hub founded in Tampa in 2018. Edited excerpts of Murphy and Holcomb’s conversation:
On hitting the $3 billion mark
“I don’t get too excited over capital raises and valuations and all this stuff. I think that’s an outcome of work that you did (over) two years, three years, in this case, four years,” Murphy says noting that he doesn’t chase capital. “But this is one of those moments I kind of told the team, ‘Look, we pulled over. We’re filling up the gas tank. We bought a Snickers bar, enjoyed it, now let’s get back on and go.’”
On the meaning behind the ‘No Show Dogs’ podcast title
“Everybody here is good. If you’re here, you’re good, you’re smart, you’re talented. Stop talking about it. Put your head down. Do the work like nobody cares. Work harder. We’re hunting dogs. We’re not show dogs. So at the end, I’ve never seen anybody accomplish anything that didn’t end looking like they got beat up a little bit, right?” Murphy says. “Hunting dogs, you see them, they’re running, they’re coming out, they’re muddy, they’re tired, but they’re accomplished, ready for more, right? So we avoid show dogs, the talking heads, the feel good stuff, the hype cycle stuff, it’s just focused on the customer.”
On maintaining focus as a company
“I think of the number of things that in your company or in your life that are simple, like, be nice, be accountable, be helpful — very simple concepts, just hard to do consistently. So simple things are seldom easy. Simple things are almost always the most difficult things to do. So if you can focus on doing the simple things savagely well, then you’re typically doing the hardest things in business well.”
Murphy refers to Publix, where he had his first job and where his brother Kevin Murphy is CEO, as an example — listing its clean aisles, consistently stocked shelves and personalized customer service things as “simple concepts which any retailer in the world can do” that it has done well for over 100 years.
On hard lessons learned
“You kind of fail your way through this,” Murphy says about the mistakes he’s made along the way, referring to instances that have cost the company millions and nearly bankrupted his family. “The discipline of getting the right team in the right place for the right reasons, and knowing when to pull back, when to lean in, those have been the most learning lessons, and I had not done that well over the years, and that’s where a lot of the battle scars come from.”
“I think there’s a right fit for everybody. We’re probably not the right fit for most people, and that’s okay, because we’re signing up to solve a big challenge that’s hard, that doesn’t happen nine to five, that doesn’t happen in this kind of, you know, ‘MBA, graduate school discussion’ of balance and all these things. The attacker isn’t balanced; we aren’t balanced, right? So we have to show up when they show up.”
“Probably people and real estate have been the most painful,” he adds.
On what’s next
“It’s a great moment because of the impact that it has on the families of our team members and our teammates and it sets clear course for us to go march toward being a public company. And so that’s fun for me. (It) gives me the next target, the next thing to go and do.”