In October 2023, we welcomed Arif Husain to the team as our first Technical Director of Security Solutions. Arif has worked in the bot mitigation space for several years and now for us, he is a key strategic influence, operating at the crossroads between our technical teams and customers. Here we learn why he joined Kasada and what his experience has been so far.
Fun fact – Kasada is his 9th startup and his 5th bot security company!
Why did you join Kasada?
I have known about Kasada since 2017. I first came across the business back when I was selling to a large hospitality and entertainment business and one of my stakeholders there was a big fan of ‘some little company in Australia’, aka Kasada.
Several years later I sent my resume through the Kasada website and here I am. It is a luxury to work with people who are solving real problems that matter.
The people I met with in the hiring process were down-to-earth, honest human beings. There was none of the superficial, self-important, techy culture that many of us are all too familiar with. I was pleased to discover that many of the things I was trying to drive my last company to do differently were already being done here and in far more advanced ways.
All-in-all, I joined because of Kasada’s values, their purpose (to ensure our world benefits from a secure, trustworthy Internet), and the potential to help others with a real problem. Kasada was also going about solving bot problems in a particularly exceptional way that just made sense.
Tell me about the last couple of weeks/your first few weeks at Kasada?
My onboarding experience has been unusually people-centric. Other roles in the past have been focused on learning the tech and reading docs while being thrown almost immediately into the deep end out in the field.
During the first few weeks at Kasada I have not spoken to customers, I have spent most of my time speaking with Kasadians. I have been learning from Threat Intelligence, Security Engineering, Pre-Sales, Marketing, and other teams. It has been great – everyone is so down to earth with impressive levels of competence.
The internal conversations I have had so far have been hugely insightful. Speaking with our Team Lead for Security Engineering he explained things that I thought I knew really well in a way I hadn’t heard before. Their approach is to keep digging, to keep asking questions until you land on the basic truth. For me, this was a great sign of credibility. A customer might be dazzled by lots of buzzwords but this is the opposite of the approach I have seen Kasada take.
The basic challenge in the bot space is blocking correctly while giving your customers confidence about what you’re doing. I have seen vendors tout made-up false positive rates that are impossible to state without external validation. I appreciate that Kasada has a comprehensive approach to ingesting data from the entire threat landscape that can be used to maximize precision. Helping our customers understand how thorough we are at being right is the best way to reassure them we aren’t going to be wrong. That being said, one of our largest customers used their data to grade our false positives to 0.002% – that is the best data point we could have received.
It’s a breath of fresh air, a customer coming to us and saying “I can prove to you that you’re doing a good job.”
What hasn’t been as you expected?
I’ll try and take off my rose-tinted glasses. I’m being somewhat restrained to not overplay the good experience I have had so far. What I can say though is that it means a lot that people here are trying to solve a problem rather than solely for financial gain. Sam (the CEO and Founder) is genuinely aware of what it is he has created a company to do and understands the problem space so well.
What was your onboarding experience like?
This is my 9th startup and I can say I have never had as organized an experience. All my systems were set up for me on day 1 and meetings appeared on my calendar, it was orienting. Literally every other experience I have had has been very self-directed. For example, I’d go onto Slack and after 2 weeks my boss would call me to check-in. That is fine too but I really appreciate that there are people dedicated to the experience of new-joiners at Kasada.
What sets Kasada apart from the other bot mitigation companies you’ve worked for?
I was not interested in being at another bot company that was like others I had already worked for. I was keen to move more into the Threat Intelligence space and spoke to businesses focussing on this. Then when I met Nick (Field CTO) he described what Kasada was doing in terms of threat intel and it was exciting to me, it really resonated with the direction I was hoping to go in.
What advice would you give to someone considering a role at Kasada?
I have learned not to give advice! What I can say is I think there are people here who are genuinely trying to solve real problems and are going about it in an entirely different way from anything I have seen in the industry.
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