When scaling a technology company, there’s always a debate of two schools of thought: do you look to venture capital to raise money, or do you scale without the resources of a venture capital firm?
Of course, a lot of this is going to depend on timing, the market, traction, stage, and many other factors that would take a series of blogs to uncover. The reason we chose to raise from venture firms boils down to 4 core principles we still hold today: we want to attract the best talent available in both engineering and go-to-market, we want to adapt fast to market changes and customer requests, we want to deliver a solution at a competitive price, and we want collaborate with experts in the energy and startup space.
In the current Silicon Valley job market, attracting talent to bootstrapped companies is nearly impossible. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it’s less about the money. If a talented candidate wants the highest salary possible, they’re not going to want to work at a startup. The value is in the track record. If a company has no venture backing or backing from firms with no track record, it doesn’t have the ethos to attract incredibly talented people. Smart candidates need some form of evidence of success to build trust, and previously successful investors can give that to you.
In a constantly evolving technological landscape, just attracting talent isn’t enough; your product has to adapt quickly to ongoing market changes. As technology constantly evolves, solving some problems becomes easier, and additional problems are created from those solutions. Just in the last year, AI became reliable enough to automate Tier-1 SOC alert triage, eliminating the need for many tools and services built around manual investigation. This shift created a new enterprise challenge: defining, enforcing, and auditing incident-response decision logic across automated systems, teams, and regulatory requirements. At Interface, we want to be able to adapt quickly if needed and be able to mold our product through customer interactions as we become experts in the space. That takes resources both on a product and engineering front, and it’s important to us that we can tailor the perfect solution for each one of our customers. That means delivering feature requests fast.
“Delivering POCs at an ultra-competitive price allows our industry to dip its toes into the Interface platform without a large risk.”
Price will always be the biggest point of contention when selling any type of product. Delivering POCs at an ultra-competitive price allows our industry to dip its toes into the Interface platform without a large risk. And because a large portion of our cost is model credit, and we know that AI compute costs will decrease by an order of magnitude in the coming years, we can afford to sink costs for enterprise contracts now for long-term efficiencies of scale.
Lastly, the main reason for VC funding is that we wanted the expertise and the vast network of our investors. Unlike most VC-backed startups, we can’t sell through mutual investors. However, many of our investors come from some of the largest software companies in the world, or have built their own companies in Energy, Chemicals, or other heavy industries. Our investors range from board members of Meta, founders of Oil & Gas EPC companies, to execs at Cisco. We're lucky to have investors who have actually been in the trenches and scaled successful companies before. This lets us skip over the common, expensive mistakes and fast-track the building process.