Dan Lorenc is the Co-founder and CEO of Chainguard, the best way to secure your open source software. Dan and his co-founders Kim, Matt, and Ville started the company in 2021 after spending a decade working together at Google on all things open source and software security.
They’ve since raised $116 million from investors including Spark (led Series B), Sequoia (led Series A), Amplify (led Seed), The Chainsmoker’s Mantis VC, Banana Capital, and dozens of angels in the cyber security and open source communities.
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Topics discussed:
What is the “software supply chain”?
How the SolarWinds breach created the software supply chain security market
The history of open source software
Why open source software makes software supply chains even less secure
The moment Dan and his co-founders decided to start Chainguard
Why they started selling consulting services before even building a product
The reason their first two products solved completely different problems (top-down and bottoms-up), and why the one that didn’t work at first is now their main business
Why Chainguard decided to focus on a broad communications and marketing strategy so early on
How Dan gets quoted in major media publications as an early stage startup founder
Why Chainguard uses memes for marketing
Why Dan thinks startups should “make content optimized for the group chat”
How they raised their Seed round from Amplify a week after leaving Google
Raising a Series A from Sequoia as the market started collapsing in Spring of 2022
Dan’s advice for founders on dealing with investor inbound when not fundraising
Why he wish he hired sales reps sooner
Raising a Series B from Spark Capital to accelerate their enterprise sales process
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Referenced:
https://www.chainguard.dev
https://www.sigstore.dev/
Battling the Trojan Horse in Open Source: https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/dan-lorenc-chainguard-spotlight/
Chainguard Series B Announcement: https://www.chainguard.dev/unchained/series-b-funding
Dan’s favorite open source project: https://github.com/jqlang/jq
Reflections on Trusting Trust: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf
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Where to find Dan:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/lorenc_dan
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danlorenc
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Where to find Turner:
Newsletter: https://www.thespl.it
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak
Banana Capital: https://bananacapital.vc
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Production and distribution by: https://www.supermix.io
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