KnowBe4 IPO to Provide More Resources for Partner Success
… Germany or the United Kingdom, or South Africa in Cape Town, actually. And so we acquired them to expand on our what we call the ModStore, which is a takeoff on the App Store, with all the training and other awareness modules. So we have almost 1,200 different training capabilities. Call them “artifacts” as an umbrella term because it’s training, it’s games, it’s PDFs with newsletters, etc. That’s the kind of stuff that partners can use to do the marketing to their own as their own go-to-market strategy.
CF: Are there any potential drawbacks, challenges with going public?
SS: Well, you are living in a glass house, so everyone is kept on their toes and we are expected to perform. Now, obviously, we’re a SaaS company, so we do have fairly good visibility into the future. So I don’t expect any actual problems.
CF: What’s ahead for KnowBe4 now that it looks like we’re getting the pandemic potentially under control, vaccinations are increasing, and people can start getting back out?
SS: Obviously in [the second quarter of] 2020, everyone got a dip in productivity because everyone was moving to the house. In our case, people were awareness trained in the office and certainly they were in a completely new environment with often much more distraction. So we came out with a new training module to quickly jump in on that new challenging work environment. And so I don’t expect this to go normal, back to the office any time soon. … There is no old normal.
We expect there will be a hybrid kind of setting where some people work from the house, some people from the office. Or maybe two or three days at the house and in the office. And in any scenario there, you still need to train people very, very well within an inch of their lives I want to say, because the bad guys are now really focusing on that employee and they know that this person is now at the house. So for instance, in the initial stage, COVID-19 phishing attacks went up with 600%. That’s no longer the case, but it’s still the biggest attack surface and then the weakest link. And what we try to do is train those employees because data breaches are the big problem.
If you look at the amount of money spent on information security tools over the last say eight years, it goes up. But the data breaches are going up even faster, and over 50% of data breaches are caused by humans. So you need to train those humans to become a strong human firewall, a strong last layer of defense, and that will drive that those data breaches down. That’s our main focus at the moment.
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