Season 1 | Episode 10

Chitra: Welcome to the tenth episode of The Tech Icon. Hi, my name is Chitra.

 

Aditya: Hello, my name is Aditya, and we're going to be your hosts for the show.

 

Chitra: Our guest today is Kumar Saurabh, the CEO and co-founder of AirMDR, an AI-powered Managed Detection and Response (MDR) service. The company has recently raised $15 million in seed funding.

 

Prior to AirMDR, Kumar co-founded Sumo Logic and LogicHub, both of which had successful exits. Sumo Logic went public in September 2020, and exactly two years later, LogicHub was acquired by Devo in September 2022.

 

A serial entrepreneur and a leading technologist, Kumar brings more than 20 years of experience in enterprise security and log management. He holds a master's in computer science from Columbia University, and a bachelor's from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. Outside of work, he enjoys public market investing, a good game of poker, and spending time with his wife, Clara, and children, Maya and Arjun.

 

We are delighted to have him on the show. Kumar, you are a technology icon. Welcome.

 

Kumar: Thanks, Chitra. Thanks, Adi, for having me on.

 

Aditya: Welcome to Episode 10 of The Tech Icon, a show that celebrates and honors technology icons.

 

Chitra: Cool. So while we focus on your journey, for the most part, let's take a moment to learn about your current venture. So what's your inspiration behind AirMDR?

 

Kumar: So I have been in security operations for last 25 years or so, give or take. For the first 15 years, we built at companies like ArcSight and Sumo Logic. We built security analytics solutions that were used by human analysts, threat detection engineers, SOC analysts, incident responders to do threat detection and response. And then in the last seven, eight years, we saw the second chapter of automation.

 

But when ChatGPT happened (this was probably a little over a couple of years ago), it was very clear that the next chapter in this journey, the next big shift will be towards AI agents. A year ago, copilots were all the rage, but copilots are so 2024 these days. The latest and greatest is AI agent. And we had the right intuition at the beginning of the company because we did think that in the long-term, AI agents is the way to go, and AI agents can make a lot of difference in security operations. That's what we are seeing play out.

 

Chitra: Cool. So let's dig a little deeper into the AI agent side of things. How is Darryl, your AI-powered virtual security analyst, different from, let's say, a traditional SOC analyst?

 

Kumar: Darryl has a very interesting story. Darryl is someone I worked with for over six years in my last company. But that's not the Darryl we have at AirMDR. I used to joke that if I could just clone our Darryl from Logic Hub, the previous company, 20 times over, many of our customers would have a kick-ass security operations center. But as you know, human cloning is still several years away. But luckily, we have AI agents where you can capture some of the expertise.

 

One of the big things that has happened with LLMs is machines, two, three years ago, if you go back, machines could not read or write natural language, not as well as people do. And that has fundamentally shifted. The interface to an intelligent system is natural language these days. So the core way in which Darryl is different from traditional SOCs or AirMDR is different from traditional MDRs is because we are powered heavily by AI analyst. And 80–90% of the time, that traditional SOC devotes on things that are done manually, or AI analyst is powerful enough that it can do 80–90% of job as good as a real human analyst.

 

What it does is it makes the service higher quality, it makes it much faster, and at the same time, it actually makes it 2 to 3x cheaper, actually. So we are seeing a lot of benefit for companies that want to get security operations as a service.

 

Chitra: So massive productivity gains and cost savings.

 

Kumar: Absolutely. Quality gains, speed gains, and cost savings as well.

 

Chitra: Okay. I'm curious to know, where is the original Darryl right now? And that's a very interesting story, by the way.

 

Kumar: Original Darryl... Every time I go to Vegas to attend Black Hat, I make it a point to have dinner with him. So I did have, even this year and the last year, every time I go to Vegas. He lives in Vegas now. He works at another security company. And he's bit by bit warming up to the AI side of things. He's one of the best SOC analysts that I have worked with.

 

Chitra: Thanks for sharing. Now, like you said, GenAI has been absolutely transformative, right? Are you seeing any emerging patterns or trends that might shape the future of cybersecurity, Kumar?

 

Kumar: It seems to me that we are in early innings of AI agents. On the one hand, I continuously get impressed by how capable the AI agents are even today. And not just the AI agents that we build at AirMDR, but for example, I used to love a little bit of coding over the weekend, right? And now in two or three hours, we can build things that would have taken me a couple of weeks. The AI is making tremendous productivity gains in a lot of different areas of work.

 

Chitra: Yes, well put, so both speed and scale, essentially. Cool.

 

Now for this next section, let's take a walk down the memory lane and celebrate your journey and inspire the world through your story of entrepreneurship. And I will pass it over to Aditya to cover the next two sections.

 

Aditya: Yes, we'd love to know a bit about your early years. So how would you describe your childhood?

 

Kumar: I grew up in India. My childhood was a pretty darn happy childhood. We're not super rich, typical middle-class family growing up in India. But my dad was an engineer, mom was a housewife, and I had great parents, great support. I find myself lucky to have that kind of a childhood where I practically had all the resources I could have wished for. So in spite of being in a middle-class family, I never had a dearth of books. In fact, one of the times, my Principal remarked that I had more books at my home than we had in our school library. So I had a pretty good childhood, parents obviously very supportive, very much in favor of education and making it possible for me to do whatever I wanted to do.

 

Aditya: That sounds amazing. Did you have any idea what you wanted to become growing up? Like, did you have a dream?

 

Kumar: Yes, one of my handles is Kumar1729 and 1729 is famous as Ramanujan's number. Growing up, I was big into number theory, I had done two or three internships in Chennai. And if you had met me when I was 21, I would probably was on my way to becoming a number theorist.

 

I came to the States to do a PhD in theoretical computer science. But after a year, I realized that if I keep doing what I'm doing, I will become a professor. And the core of me is a builder. So the prospect of becoming a professor as a career choice was not very appealing. And the day I realized that was the day I decided I'm going to drop out of my PhD.

 

Aditya: As a kid, were you already hacking on computers or tinkering around with things?

 

Kumar: When I was in eighth grade or so, we had a shared computer lab in the school, and I used to code in BASIC with floppy disks and inkjet printers. One of the things I really enjoyed doing was drawing pictures by printing out alphabets. I would draw all sorts of formulas to draw pictures with ASCII characters and writing simple programs to be able to do that. But nothing much more sophisticated than that. I was into math and computer science and things of that nature. So it did lay a good foundation for me.

 

Aditya: Did those early projects sort of inspire you to want to build things in the future?

 

Kumar: I wouldn't go that far. I actually wanted to do electronics when I went to college. I'm lucky that my dad convinced me to give computer science a shot for a year. And within a year, I loved it so much. I did an undergrad in AI. It's ridiculous to think how primitive those models were back in 1999. And the state of art in AI was primitive compared to what is possible today. I think every three months, six months, we are seeing pretty significant improvements. And so I'm quite excited. In many ways, it is a very golden age for AI. It was pretty dormant for like 20–25 years before that.

 

Aditya: Are there certain values that you all believed in as a family?

 

Kumar: Yes, I think many of the values that I believe as a family, the values that I believe as a professional, are probably two sets of values, if you think, right? As a family, you know, hard work, integrity, the common things. Life is short, have fun, don't take yourself too seriously. I'm a big believer in those kind of things. At work, everything is built on trust, right? So I put a really, really high premium on trust and integrity. Yes, so nothing out of the ordinary. But yes, those are the kind of things I value quite a bit.

 

Aditya: That's great to hear. Next, let's dive into your educational journey and get some advice for students out there. So which high school did you attend?

 

Kumar: For 9th to 12th grade, I went to a really good high school called Nazareth Academy back in India. It was a really good educational experience those four years that set me up with a very good foundation for my college and even the years beyond that.

 

Aditya: And then you did a bachelor's in computer science from IIT Kharagpur and a master's from Columbia University. That's amazing. Were there any striking similarities or differences between the two experiences?

 

Kumar: Big difference. I enjoyed my college work way more than I enjoyed my PhD. No wonder I dropped out of PhD after a year.

 

One of the big differences in college was you get a lot of breadth of knowledge, right? So we did all the way from electrical engineering and metallurgy, even like melting metals and pouring them into casts and making things with your hand, and even welding and using CNC machines. Even though I was in computer science, it allowed me to have that breadth. And definitely going deep into computer science and building stuff, right? Building software programs, even building chips in electronics and all. I was building a lot of things with my own hands, either software or hardware.

 

By the time I got into my PhD program, as I said earlier, it was theoretical computer science. So it was a lot of... For one year that I was in New York at Columbia, I was reading papers for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And as intellectually stimulating it is, you kind of miss the joy in building things. That is at the end of the day, what got me to drop out of PhD. And lucky for me, I found my way into my first startup within a week of dropping out of PhD.

 

Aditya: May I ask how many papers did you end up reading during your time at Columbia?

 

Kumar: I mean, in any week, I would probably read through 20–30 papers, especially if you're in a theoretical side, you read a lot of papers, a lot of proofs, randomized algorithms and so on. Very, very interesting stuff, crypto and all of that, but it's borderline mathematics. You're not building something, and many of these things are very foundational, theoretical stuff.

 

Aditya: I see. With the advancements in the coding capabilities of AI, is pursuing computer science still a good idea, in your opinion? How can students differentiate their work from what AI can already do?

 

Kumar: I'm a big believer in people are very versatile, right? People can do things, and you have to constantly be learning things. A lot of what I do today, I did not learn much of that in my college. I would go and say maybe 95% of what I use on a day-to-day basis is not what I read in college. If you look at the job description that I had in my first year versus my last year, they're very, very different. And every two, three years, what you need to do to succeed actually changes quite a bit.

 

So I think the beauty of going to school and taking a challenging program like computer science is not that the specific skill, the specific language, the specific program that you learn is actually what's going to be useful. But how you learn to overcome challenges, how you learn to work with other people, how you learn to accomplish a goal that might seem hard at first. But you overcome the challenges and achieve those. Those are the kind of things that build the muscle that becomes the foundation for success later in life.

 

So I still think exactly what people will be studying will evolve with time. I was at my sixth graders' school yesterday, and I probably heard AI 200 times in a two-hour presentation. So obviously, the curriculum is changing, right? Computer science is not the computer science that it was 30 years ago. The underlying thing that is very important is the ability to learn, ability to solve problems, ability to work with other people to achieve goals that you yourself found very hard to achieve. I think those will stand the test of time.

 

Aditya: Finally, how do you handle stress? And what would you say to students who find themselves struggling with intense pressure?

 

Kumar: Stress is a lot of how you react to it, how you react to the circumstances. You can either let the circumstances control you or you control the circumstances. It's a hard skill. It might seem like a lot to learn when you are 17, but it's a very useful mindset hack. That's how I deal with the stress. You control the things that create stress. The story goes is like, you know, Nelson Mandela was in a jail for 27 years, with all you get is a little window, you can see sunlight, right?

 

But if people can survive those kinds of hardships... Most of the people get stressed for: 'Oh, I have three tests tomorrow. It's the end of the world.' Most of us are pretty blessed. We stress out at little small things, and there are many, many, many more people that actually have overcome much harder challenges. So always keeping that in mind — this too shall pass. One of my friends used to joke, nobody is going to die because he was in the army for several years, right? There, if you make a mistake, somebody could die. Most of us are not in a profession like that. The mental strength and the resilience is big. How you can manage your own emotions is a superpower.

 

Aditya: Yes, that is an amazing insight. So it's really about how you interpret the circumstances, right? You can either choose to feel stressed about it or take it on as a challenge.

 

Kumar: Absolutely.

 

Aditya: Okay, with that, I'll pass it over to my co-host to cover the next segment: Work and Entrepreneurship.

 

Chitra: Thank you very much, Kumar and Adi. That was great. A lot of cool insights.

 

You started your journey in engineering at ArcSight in 2001, and you've been in the build mode for like 20 plus years now. You've built multiple companies, you've had a couple of cool exits, and you're back at it. So what is it that keeps you going?

 

Kumar: So I think it's probably Warren Buffett who said at some point, I'm not 100% sure. If you love what you do, you won't have to work a day in your life. One of the things I like is I generally start liking what I do quite a bit. So I get into it and I really enjoy the journey. It can turn you to a workaholic, but you got to keep that in check as well. However, if you really enjoy the work, it doesn't feel like work. And actually, that's a very true saying.

 

The flip side of it is if I don't enjoy my work, I try to make a change very, very quickly. Even 25 years ago, the moment I felt myself I was not enjoying PhD, I dropped out of PhD and joined a startup where I thoroughly enjoyed the journey for next eight years. So I have been lucky in the ways that I have been able to work on things that I really enjoy. So it doesn't feel like work. So you keep going. I'm blessed and lucky in the way that I get to work on cutting-edge things these days. When the work is super interesting, it doesn't feel like work. So I'm pretty blessed to keep going that way.

 

Chitra: That's great. Now, you scaled Sumo Logic from $0 to $50 million in ARR before exiting the company and starting LogicHub. What are some of the key highlights and learnings from your experience at Sumo?

 

Kumar: I do want to share my learnings, but I'll tell you that it wasn't just me. I was part of a very talented team. We started the company with my co-founder Christian, a very, very talented team... Stephan, Bruno from the early days of Sumo. And then we hired a lot of really talented folks. One of the first lessons that I always take dear to heart is if you hire and recruit really good people, the job of building a company, building a product, building a business gets much, much, much easier at the end of the day. That is one of the biggest lessons, especially in software. And I would imagine a lot of different areas. The strength of the team that you build around yourself is probably one of the biggest determinants of success and how the journey will turn out.

 

Chitra: Cool. Now, what's the toughest part of being the founder that people generally don't talk about? And then how do you generally handle failures or setbacks?

 

Kumar: I think it's a self-selection mode. I think most people who are founders, it's a qualifying criteria that it's such a risky endeavor to go on. You have to be, in a way, failure immune. You should hate failure, right? But there are micro-failures that get in the way. There are setbacks. Most of the startup journeys are not straight and up to the right. Even overnight success are 10 years in the making, and people don't see all the work that goes in for 10 years before they achieve that success.

 

So it's a lot of successes with a bunch of failures thrown in between, right? And someone said, I forget who's saying it is... But success is the ability to jump from one failure to another failure without lack of enthusiasm. I think one of the universal characteristics of most founders I would imagine is just the grit and the resilience and work through the failures. Failures are part of life. It's going to happen sooner or later. It's going to happen. And in fact, if you're not failing often enough, that might be a sign that you're just not trying hard enough. Because if you're not failing enough, why are you not trying for 10x more? And if you're not even failing then, then why are you not trying 10x even more than that?

 

So at some point, if you're really pushing the edges of how far you can go, you will run into failures every now and then. And you can't let that get to you, right? If you can't get over those, that's what would separate people who would be like, I don't want to be a founder because I don't want to deal with all of these failures that might come along the way. People are very risk-averse. Why do people not start companies? Because they're afraid of what if they fail? In many ways, if you let that get into your head, then you might never start something. So what it takes a founder is to kind of, in spite of thousands of ways it can fail, figure out the three ways it can succeed.

 

Chitra: Next up, we have a fun-filled, rapid-fire-style segment, where you will have 10 seconds or less to answer a question. So Kumar, are you ready?

 

Kumar: Let's do it.

 

Chitra: Very quickly then, the first piece of code you ever wrote?

 

Kumar: A BASIC program to print a picture using ASCII characters.

 

Chitra: The favorite tech you've ever built?

 

Kumar: The favorite tech that I have ever built? That's a hard one. Every product that I built kind of falls into that category. It's tough to choose the favorite one. ArcSight, Sumo Logic, LogicHub, AirMDR. Every product that I built is the favorite product I've ever built.

 

Chitra: Sure. What's the best part about building a company?

 

Kumar: Working with people together as a team to build something that has not been built before.

 

Chitra: Nice. Talking of interests and hobbies, in this short fun segment, we'll have you pick one very quickly. So poker or reading?

 

Kumar: Poker.

 

Chitra: Poker or investing?

 

Kumar: Still poker. Although reading comes very, very close.

 

Chitra: Okay. Poker or travel?

 

Kumar: Still poker.

 

Chitra: Awesome. Looks like you're All-In on poker then.

 

Kumar: Absolutely.

 

Chitra: Cool. What's your proudest dad moment?

 

Kumar: Seeing kids do their own thing is a joy. My daughter and son, both of them, I tried to get into coding and things of that nature. My daughter never took wholeheartedly to coding for one reason or another, but she found her own joy in investing and marketing. Perhaps the most joyful thing is to see your kids do things that are different than what you would have done, but then put their heart and soul into doing a great job at it.

 

Chitra: That's great. Who's someone in tech or outside you've always admired but never met?

 

Kumar: Elon Musk. I'm a big fan for the kind of things he has done. I've never met him. Hopefully, I'll get to meet him at some point.

 

Chitra: Yes, I'm sure. Okay, something about you that very few people know about.

 

Kumar: That is a tough, tough question. I have two birthdays.

 

Chitra: Tell me more.

 

Kumar: My birthday is July 3rd. However, for whatever reason, when I was in high school, my parents decided my birthday should be December 30th. So that is stuck as my legal birthday. But my actual birthday is July 3rd. Close friends and family wish me on July 3rd. Most people wish me on December 30th. I accept birthday gifts on both days. So don't hesitate. If you want to gift me in December or July, you're more than welcome.

 

Chitra: Or birthday gifts both in July and December. Exactly.

 

Kumar: Absolutely.

 

Chitra: Okay. Are you an introvert or an extrovert?

 

Kumar: At the core, I'm an introvert. I can only hang out in groups two hours at a time. If I'm in a group for more than two hours, I find a way to get out of there, kind of find a quiet me time. Over the years, I definitely have become more and more extroverted. So I think at some point ten years ago, I was halfway between introvert and extrovert. At this point, I'm probably leaning more towards an extrovert. But there is still a core of me that's heavily introverted.

 

Chitra: Sure. Anything that keeps you up at night?

 

Kumar: Nothing. I do sleep like a baby. I get a full eight hours of sleep. I'm very blessed that way.

 

Chitra: Okay. That was a lot of fun. Thank you for sharing your personal side, Kumar.

 

Now we are nearing the end of this very amazing episode of The Tech Icon. And I will pass it back to Aditya to get your final thoughts in this final segment. Adi, take it away.

 

Aditya: Yes, so just some questions to wrap it up. So you've built three different companies so far. Do you have a favorite?

 

Kumar: It's like picking your favorite child. No, I don't have a favorite. I love them all. And I'm in the middle of one. Even the first one that I worked at, ArcSight was a humongous foundational step for me. I really have been super lucky getting to work at really interesting companies and building products and so on.

 

Aditya: Yes, that's amazing that you really like what do you do. You've gone from being an engineer to a founder to a first time CEO, and then a second time CEO. What's the difference between these several stages?

 

Kumar: Being an engineer is quite a lot about what you can do with your own hands, right? And you excel at that. Being a founder is really [when] you start something and you want to build it into something much bigger by working with a group of people. Starting something from scratch, you learn how to create something out of nothing. How to assemble all the ingredients and bring something that you imagine into life. That is a very interesting experience.

 

From founder to a CEO, right? Especially if you're a technology founder, you don't actually get involved in sales and marketing and finance as much. At least I did not when I was at Sumo Logic, where I ran engineering and operations. One of the things as a CEO, you realize how big a part sales in particular plays. I would say that if you are having really good sales, it solves a lot of problems. You can get everything else right, but if your sales suck, it's a lot of pain to go through that phase. Realizing the value of sales and marketing, and even finance in the grand scheme of things makes you more well-rounded first-time CEO.

 

As a second-time CEO, you're trying to not make all the mistakes you made as a first-time CEO, and hopefully make some new ones.

 

Aditya: That's a great outlook to have. If you could go back in time, what's one thing you would do differently?

 

Kumar: I would buy NVIDIA's stock about 10 years ago — all of it. If I had the benefit of hindsight, that's probably what I would do. But with all seriousness, I don't dwell on that question. That's why it's a hard question. The way I look at it is, as you go along, you're continuously learning. Most people are continuously learning from things that don't work well. Sometimes failures and things that don't work well teach you as much, if not more, than things that work well. And you definitely want to turn all of those lessons into something that can be even more successful over the years.

 

So it's a continuous learning process. So it's not one big thing that I would have done otherwise, but it's a lot of smaller lessons along the way.

 

Aditya: Yes, that makes sense. Finally, what advice would you give to a young engineer or a student setting out to build something ambitious?

 

Kumar: So one of the lessons that I've learned is... I have a plaque on my board somewhere in my house somewhere that says: 'If you believe you can do it, you can.' If you don't, you can't, right? Either way, you are right. People self-inflict constraints on what they can or cannot do, right? So one of the first steps is (it sounds very cheesy) actually believing that you can do it. Starting with that mindset is a big unlock.

 

A lot of people convince themselves they can't do something way before, right? They could power through. I've seen it time and again, that two people with similar capabilities, one that believe they can do something, they're much more likely to succeed and actually figure it out and make it work than someone who starts with a more negative mindset, I can't do something. If you start out believing you can't do something, most likely you won't be able to do it. I love to work with people who figure out three ways in which they can make something work, even though there are 99 other ways in which it would fail.

 

Aditya: Well, on that note, thank you very much for joining us in our mission of inspiring students and entrepreneurs across the board. We wish you the very best.

 

Kumar: Thanks, Adi. Thanks, Chitra. This was a fun discussion. Thank you for having me on. I'm looking forward to more episodes with other people, of course, over the coming months and years.

 

Chitra: Yes, that was a lot of fun. Thanks, Kumar.

 

Kumar: Thanks, Chitra. Thanks, Adi.