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Jon Oberheide, co-founder and CTO of Duo Security
Jon Sakoda and Marty Roesch, founder and CTO of Sourcefire (upper right), at a dinner for founders in San Francisco.
For example, Duo co-founder and technology chief Jon Oberheide, who sold his company to Cisco for over $2 billion last year, is already working with the CMD team, while Bhaskar Sunkara, chief technology officer and co-founder of AppDynamics, is advising Blameless.
Earlier this month, Cisco hosted a dinner during the RSA Conference, a major event for the cybersecurity industry. At Credo, an Italian restaurant in San Francisco’s financial district, Oberheide and about 35 founders came together for what Sakoda called a “founders helping founders” event.
Martin Roesch, founder of Sourcefire, spoke to the crowd about his early days in the security industry and building a business that was ultimately purchased by Cisco in 2013 for $2.7 billion.
“It was an awesome mind meld of talent and brain power and passion,” said Oberheide, whose co-founder, Dug Song, was also there. “Just out of that dinner alone, I was making connections to other Cisco teams, resources and founders. It was very different than what everyone expected from a VC RSA dinner.”
Last week, Sakoda hosted another event at the One Market restaurant in San Francisco for about 80 engineering leaders who work in the AppDynamics ecosystem. The company’s technology is used by developers to monitor all of their applications and pinpoint bugs as soon as they arise.
It’s all part of building a different kind of brand for Cisco, one that revolves around supporting entrepreneurs and developers, as opposed to a company that just sells big expensive boxes.
“There was a period of time when the pace of innovation was such that large tech companies felt like, ‘we have it all covered,'” Sakoda said. “When a company decides that what’s going on outside its four walls is as interesting as what’s going on inside its four walls is when it has the opportunity to partner with entrepreneurs earlier and together invent the future.”
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