Privacy and Security Industry Trends and Reflections with Bain Capital Ventures’ Rak Garg

The technology industry has changed a lot over the past 10 years with the move from on-prem systems to the cloud. With that came new types of challenges from a privacy and security perspective. Controlling access to data was no longer just about putting up a firewall, but you needed to know who and what was accessing the data at all times for audit purposes. Authorization models had to adapt and become flexible to support more fine-grained access.

With new challenges comes new opportunities. There's been a growth in startups focused on developing solutions that help companies address privacy and security challenges. Privacy is shifting left and becoming an engineering effort. Additionally, there's an increased interest in venture funding available to companies attacking these privacy and security challenges.

Rak Garg, Principal at Bain Capital Ventures, joins the show to discuss his prior work as a product manager working on Atlassian's data security and governance products. He also shares his thoughts on trends he's seeing in the industry as an investor interested in the data privacy and security space.

Topics:

• Can you talk about leading product on Atlassian Access, their data security and governance product?
• What were the motivations for the product investment?
• Prior to Access, how were Atlassian customers managing data security?
• What were some of the challenges with designing and building that product?
• What motivated you to move away from product roles in industry to becoming an investor
• What are your areas of interest in investing?
• How did you become interested in these particular areas?
• How has the landscape of startups focused on privacy and security changed throughout your career?
• Have you seen a change in privacy and security concerns with startups in comparison to when you started your career?
• If so, what do you think has led to this change and how has it impacted the way companies think about building products and going to market?
• What advice would you give to founders building out a new product? Should they be thinking about privacy and security from day one or is that something that can come later?
• Are you seeing more interest in institutional investment for companies working in the privacy and security space versus a few years ago?
• What has led to the interest and belief that this is a potential area of growth?
• What trends are you seeing in the security space that you’re excited about?
• How has growth in cloud infrastructure and AI/ML impacted concerns over privacy and security?
• What do you see as the big challenges in data security and privacy that we need to solve?
• Are there new privacy and security technologies that you’re particularly excited about?
• Where do you hope the industry is in the next 5-10 years when it comes to the challenges of privacy and security? Is this going to get easier for companies?