So… I’m 30 days in at this new company. I have to say, it’s going well. After two cybersecurity exits, the most recent being SGNL (series A identity security platform acquired by CrowdStrike for $740M), I was fortunate to have a lot of immediate interest from startups, late stage security products, VCs, and recruiters as I looked toward my next move.

The bar for what came next was pretty high. Largely self-imposed… but that’s definitely a career risk to make the wrong next move. But I’ve come to learn the signals of rocketships. And I've learned to trust my gut on those.

When I came across Clearly AI, it had a lot going for it.

Cybersecurity is one of the noisiest, most cluttered markets in tech. Products blur together. Positioning is often indistinguishable. Value props require a glossary and insider knowledge to decode. I've spent years in this space and I still sometimes walk away from a product demo thinking, okay, but what does it actually do? How is this thing different from this thing?

Clearly was different. The problem it solves is obvious. Security and privacy teams are buried in manual review work, chasing down incomplete data across scattered systems, trying to hold the line against frameworks and standards with teams that are chronically under-resourced with no new hires in sight. Reviews take months. Recommendations to engineering teams don't always get followed through. There's no real visibility into whether those changes were made to code... It's painful, expensive, and getting catastrophically worse as developers are shipping code 10x faster and software supply chains get more complex.

I got all of that in the first few minutes. For a marketer, that's a gift. But more importantly, it's a strong signal about the founders. They built this because they lived it. Both co-founders came from security engineering at Amazon. They were the customer before they were the company. That clarity of purpose shows up in the product and in how they talk about the problem, and how they talk to customers today.

Another critical aspect was Clearly’s customer traction. Before there was a sales team, a marketing function, or really any of the infrastructure that typically drives pipeline at this stage, Clearly had already landed several Fortune 500 customers. Global financial institutions, major technology companies, household names in telecom. At seed stage.

That kind of traction is very atypical, and it doesn't happen because of good pitch decks. It happens because the product solves a real problem well enough that security and privacy teams at some of the most scrutinized and regulated organizations in the world said yes.

We're on track to roughly 10x ARR YoY (before my work is really even seeing daylight). We're actively displacing direct competitors who are further along in maturity and better resourced. The customers we're winning are not small experiments. They're meaningful enterprise relationships with room to expand.

The opportunity in front of us, to disrupt and displace entrenched legacy players, is significant. And we're doing it with a product that's genuinely better for the people doing the work.

The last component for me in this decision… I'm a Pacific Northwest native. I've been in so many rooms where posturing is currency. I don't love that. The PNW tends to produce a different kind of professional: humble, direct, more interested in doing good work than being seen doing it. That culture runs through this team, and it matters to me. Who knows how the world will continue to evolve, but I hope that doesn’t change, and I hope it offers a freshness that can permeate beyond our Cascadia borders.

I also want to say something about talent, because I feel it strongly: it's everywhere. There's a lot of imposter syndrome where we live, and I think it holds people back from raising their hands for opportunities they're more than ready for. The team we have at Clearly is deeply impressive. I joined in part because I wanted to work with people like this. And I want to keep raising that bar.

This is why I love coming in at an early stage. We're building, we're moving fast, and there is a lot of meaningful work to do. If you've been waiting for a company where the problem is obvious, the traction is real, and the team is the kind of people you actually want to work alongside every day, I'd encourage you to take a look at what we're building.

We're hiring across the company right now. You can see all open roles on our career page. Early stage is a bet on people as much as anything else. I feel good about this one.