Exit Interview: Slavik Markovich on Lessons Learned to Scale your Startup

In this exit interview, Deepak Jeevankumar sits down with Slavik Markovich to talk about founding and scaling his second startup, Demisto, from day one to acquisition by Palo Alto Networks and beyond.

When Markovich’s first startup, Sentrigo, was acquired by McAfee in 2011, he found that he and a new colleague (and Sentrigo acquisition sponsor), Rishi Bhargava, had something in common: an affinity for good coffee. The pair started diving into deeply technical conversations over cups of espresso pulled in Markovich’s office every day. Eventually, they decide to bring one of those technical ideas to market with a new endeavor they’d go on to call Demisto.

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Key Takeaways

Solve a problem that matters to your future customers. The Demisto team headed to the 2015 RSA Conference with an endpoint solution they were really excited about. Plot twist – the CISOs they met with didn’t reflect the same enthusiasm.

Build a team you can trust. Markovich jokes that his goal was to build such a talented team that his job as CEO is just to “drink coffee, go to parties, and convince customers.” But to do that, he needed to build strong, decades-long relationships with people whose talents complemented his own.

Focus on execution and impact, not exit. If you build for exit, you’re going to compromise your product or business at some point along the way. Markovich argues that it’s smarter to build for broad product impact, and the right exit opportunities will come.

Evaluating the right acquirer. Markovich shares the team’s thought process going into their acquisition by Palo Alto Networks including how they evaluated the fit for their team and technology. He talks about the importance of planning for customer communication throughout the process and how they dealt with the nitty-gritty details all the way down to what the post-acquisition role would be for each Demisto employee.

Don’t burn yourself or your team out doing this. Determined not to repeat his mistake as a first-time founder, Markovich talks about striking the balance between leading an early-stage startup – he’s onto his 3rd, an auth and identity management platform called Descope – and the non-work parts of his life.