IT for Endpoint Management with NinjaOne’s Sal Sferlazza

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone, welcome back here to techron tv. I've got, uh, a first time guest here.

I always like having a first time person on. We get to know 'em a little bit and know their company. They've got some exciting news and we're gonna talk about it.

Let me introduce you to Sal Sza. Sal is the CEO and Co-founder of Ninja One, and he's here with us today. Hey Sal, nice to meet you man.

I thank you for being on Tech Drunk TV with us. Nice to meet you as well, Alan. Thanks for having me on.

I really appreciate it. Absolutely. So I'm, look, I wanna make sure our audience finds out all about Ninja One, but before we even get to that, let's tell them all about you, Sal.

If you, if you're not embarrassed and then we didn't, you know, give us your story. I'll do my best. Yeah, I'm, uh, born and raised in New York.

Um, started out my journey working in Manhattan many, many years ago. Wound up living all over the country and I've been doing startups for 25 years. So ninja's, my sixth or seventh startup, depending on how you think about it.

Sounds real familiar. I also grew up in New York and did startups all over the country for about 25, 30 years. And, uh, I also also have probably done five or six.

Yeah. So it's crazy times. It's, it's an interesting, it makes for an interesting life though, doesn't it?

Yes, it's, uh, it's high stress, but a lot of fun. I actually was a software engineer, 17 of those years, so they didn't really let me be good, the keyboard word that much. But, uh, now here I am talking to you, Alan.

Fantastic. And are you based in New York now or where are you based? No, I'm based in Austin, Texas.

I, I lived in New York, DC, Connecticut, Phoenix, uh, Austin, Texas, the Bay Area, now back to Austin. So that's A great place. I was with some friends in Austin, out in Paris at CubeCon a couple weeks ago and talking about, I mean, it's just rocking the town.

Um, so that's interesting. So give us kind of the ninja, you know, you're one of the co-founders. Give us the ninja one story.

You know, ninja was the fourth startup that I built selling to managed SER service providers and, and IT departments. Mm-Hmm. And, uh, over the years I learned that customer pain really well, how they wanna grow their business, how they manage their customers, and also familiar, very familiar with internal IT departments, having worked across software in Dell and SonicWall and prior lives.

And I felt that there was an opportunity to build a platform that was cloud first. And that, and that vision sort of came to fruition in 2013, 2014 we started building products. And the way I kind of looked at it is during that time period there was a consumerization of IT products, meaning IT products got, the user experiences got a lot better.

And I felt in the IT market there was still an opportunity to be a disruptor, to build something that was super easy to use, powerful, scalable, with, you know, with high security. And that's the vision by which we started the company. And it's been, it's been an amazing growth journey over the last eight years that we've been, we've been selling, when we shipped product we had 60 beta customers at the end of 2015.

And today we have over 17,000 customers in 80 countries. That's Fantastic, man. What a great story.

Good stuff. So, so are MSPs still at the heart of your, like target with Ninja One or you've kind of gone beyond that? Uh, we'll never go beyond MSPs.

We actually service as both. So we have thousands and thousands of internal IT departments and we also have thousands and thousands of managed service providers. We find that their needs of both of those buyer personas can be solved in, in, in similar ways.

They both want exceptional product, ease of use and phenomenal support, which is sort of the backbone of the whole company, how we think about things. And I'm, I'm actually not a sales centric CEO like I said, I was a software engineer for 17 years and I actually still run product development today. Do you?

Alright, that's cool. So interesting. You know, one of one of the companies I started was a security company.

We were selling, you know, direct and I, after about five or six years, I, I came to the realization security was just too hard for most organizations. And that MSSP managed security service provider was a great model for most organizations to get the most. I mean, they had limited dollars for security and they had to have a minimum amount of decent security, right?

And, and so we really started targeting that market and then eventually we actually bought an MSSP and started delivering security via that kind of channel, that method. I, I just think it worked a lot better for, for many organizations. Um, I guess in your case you kind of came to that realization as a result of previous companies you had done about, you know, the, the efficacy of the, uh, MSP model.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, 'cause I, I had a, I had originally had a DNA in the MSP market, so I knew the market incredibly well. But what we found is internal IT departments both big and small.

We have some internal IT customers with over 70,000 endpoints Wow. That are using today. And we also have managed service providers over a hundred thousand endpoints using Ninja from a single customer.

I want to dive into what Ninja does exactly and how and everything, but before we do, I got two quick things for you, Sal, please, number one for people right now who say, okay, I've heard enough, I want to go see from read about them myself. What's the website? com.

And then secondly, the big news though is you guys just recently also closed a lodge, uh, series C Round. Want to tell us about that? Yeah, I mean we, um, we have an existing institutional investors Summit partners who's been amazing for us.

They actually introduced us to our two board members, you know, Gerhard Watt, Wasinger and N Near, who are both, uh, operational board members. One has tremendous c c-Suite experience and one, um, tremendous go to market experience. And, um, we were looking to raise cash to scale out our, continue to scale out our product engineering effort and, and maintain the exceptional support that we have.

And we're looking for a partner that, um, that could add new value to Ninja. So Icon's been a tremendous partner so far, um, in terms of introduction and advisory and just, you know, and, and in the ninja way, they're, uh, pragmatic and, and a great culture fit for how we do business and, and how we treat our employees. So they're a perfect partner for us and we're using the cash that we raised to basically just accelerate product development, maintain support, and we're also looking for opportunities to build new products and we'll, we'll talk about that, but Ninja is on a journey for tool consolidation and sort of minimize the tool sprawl that's happening in IT departments today.

So let, so first of all, summit Partners was the existing investor. Iconic is is kind of the lead, the new lead. Oh yeah.

It's a new institutional round, basically. Yeah. Right.

And this was a, and this was a 231 and a half million dollar series C, which in today's market, you know, back during Covid we were throwing numbers around like that left and right. But in today's market, that's an extraordinary amount of money. We, we've been really lucky.

Um, our, our growth has been exceptional at small numbers and through pre covid and post Covid. So I think, I think investors generally are excited about two things. That's been an amazing growth journey.

And we've shown resilience, you know, both in economic downturns and also, you know, during the pandemic. You know, and our investors point out that, you know, ultimately someday, you know, if Ninja goes IPO years from now, people will look back to that time and and show that, you know, ninja's growth was strong, you know, throughout the entire journey, you know, of our company history. Fantastic.

Great stuff. And you mentioned this money's gonna be used kind of across the board from product to scaling, I imagine scaling, marketing, sales and everything else as well. Well, yeah, I had a, I had to wait to have an interview with you, Alan, 'cause I didn't have a comms department five, five months ago.

com and that's me directly. But, um, I'm sorry you had to wait man. You well, but it hopefully it was worth the wait for you and, and this turns out well.

Um, Sal what do you, I mean, tremendous success and congratulations to you and the whole team. What do you think the secret sauce is? You know, I think there's, I think there's a few things you could point to towards the ninja secret sauce.

And we actually talked about this sort of talking more about how Ninja does things. Number one is our culture. We're incredibly organizationally flat.

We truly believe like servant style leadership, it's not about egos, it's about getting the right answer. And I think my employees operate with fear. I mean, we'll have any person, any level of organization, we'll raise their hand and, and say what's wrong with the product or give us unpleasant feedback that we don't want to hear, which ultimately allows us to make the product better over time.

I always laugh that my employees yell at me more than I would yell at, yell at anybody in my life. But the more they yell, I know the more that they care. So I think that's one superpower.

I think, um, transformational support experiences, you know, our CSAT scores are approaching 99%. Like if you pick up the phone and call, we pick up. And that's, you know, I'm going to sort of date myself here.

Going back to the days of Rackspace with fanatical support. Like I was, I was their customer and, and would pay for product me too, just to have their support. So, you know, that's what I kind of think about, you know, kind of a outta respect to, to companies in the past, like they did it, right?

So we measure everything. Like if you fi fill a format, wanted to talk to us, whether it's support sales or you're having a problem that we could be assistance of, we always pick up the phone. So I think transformational support experience is another superpower.

Um, humbly, I think having a product centric CO is a superpower because, you know, often the marketing team will say, Hey, when is this product launching? And the answer is when it's ready. You know, we built a wonderful reputation of building products that scale well and are easy to use and, and just generally work well.

And as we build new products, we've had the discipline to wait, um, and make sure that they're rock solid before we ship them. So we're, we don't want to chase, we don't wanna chase dollars and hurt our reputation. So I think that's another sort of superpower.

And, um, there's a lot of interesting things happening in the market right now. The endpoints, there's endpoint sprawl all over the place, much more so than even five or six years ago. You know, in a remote hybrid workforce, you have employees working home employees in the office, they have mobile phones, there's IOT devices, there's just devices, everyone.

And with that, you know, um, presents tremendous risk. So I think for Ninja, the tool consolidation where Ninja might replace like 1, 2, 3, 4 tools to simplify the IT or the managed service provider's job, I think is a superpower. And it's working.

And we've been also really disciplined about, until this, you know, time not purchasing any other companies, everything is built by Ninja from the ground up single stack. So you don't have sort of the SSO glue gun out, you know, integrate 10 different products, right? And then you, it's kind of a consolidated front end.

It's all in the product, right? So if you have a problem, you could fi you could diagnose the problem and solve the problem all in one console, which is, which is really power powerful. I mean, I know years ago everyone said single pane of glass, but we actually think we're getting there.

So you mentioned this though, and let me, because as I said in the outset, I've had similar experiences in doing startups and stuff. Um, you know, and I'm sure your VCs, your investors will tell you this, organic growth is great, but sometimes you really want to, you know, put a little fuel in the rocket. And growth via acquisition can really help because it could be strategic.

It's not just growth in terms of revenue, but it's, it's growth in terms of maybe new markets, new products, new people, right? New talent. Um, with this kind of funding round, you, you have now, you know, even if you're not paying cash, you know, but you could start using your, your, your equity as a currency because assuming you raised the round based upon that kind of valuation, um, is that something that may change now at Ninja One?

You think that, you know, you might have some inorganic strategic kind of growth like that? Yeah, I mean, I think, I think the way our product strategy has been, the products that we're taking to market this year were already being built two or three years ago. And there's another tran of products that's mid-flight that's a year in development that's gonna pop and the next couple years.

So we have a healthy pipeline of products and products that could help our customers, you know, extract more value outta the platform. However, we would be foolish not to keep our eyes open and look for, um, exceptional engineering orgs and products that add value to Ninja. So it's not a, it's not a priority, but we are always on the market looking for folks that have the ninja DNA people that believe in the vision of Ninja, right?

So they'd be willing to take a lot of stock in our vision, a tremendous engineering team, um, and, and, and a and an excitement about working on something larger. So, you know, I've been on the receiving end, sold lots companies myself, and I wanna make sure that if we did that we keep the breasts and brightest minds of that, those engineering orgs for years to come. So the, if we found that sort of persona, then yeah, we, we would be open to acquisitions.

Got it. Um, I guess I gotta ask this, 'cause you gotta ask you too, what about ai? How's ai gen ai, is that already starting to influence your product decisions or plans and stuff like that?

Yeah, I mean, um, AI is a huge discussion internally. You know, we are, um, we're being super thoughtful about, we build ai, we're spinning up a large team, and we think on the long it's going to be, you know, it's gonna be part of our core platform in a large way. Right now, the tools are young, they're getting better every day.

I like to say ninja's not a, a super early adopter of technology. We're a mid, you know, if you, uh, if you think about it, like the tools are gonna get so much better in 18 months, and the people that are absolutely earliest, there's gonna be a graveyard of AI startups that fail or there's something destructive happens. So we wanna be careful.

So right now our sort of approach to ai, and we have some stuff coming out this year is advisory only, you know, advisory with human eyes. So, you know, sentiment analysis of, you know, we have lots of great data that we can help our customers draw conclusions and make educated decisions about scripts that they might upload or patches that might be a risk. But, uh, full autonomous control of AI of, uh, of an endpoint, uh, a cloud-based endpoint management product that has control of millions of machines.

We think that's, uh, we think that's a long way out. So we, you know, we're excited about ai, we think it's an integral part of our future, but we don't want to jump too early and, and we're often serving and, and, and checking in with our customers. And I think there's a lot of consensus around that that leverage AI on early where you could be helpful side caddy to human, but punt on full autonomous, uh, down the line as, as technology can continues to develop.

And that's kind of our perspective. Yeah, no, I, I think that's probably mainstream. I, I think just the real contention becomes is where is that horizon?

Is it 18 months, 24 months, 48 months, or what have you? And with the pace of, of, of, of the evolution of this here, who the heck knows, quite frankly, right? I mean, we'll have to wait and see where that comes out.

Um, what about, you know, 17,000 customers? Is that worldwide? Is it more US North America?

What, what's the kind of distribution there? What's your focus? Have 17,000 worldwide.

Actually amea, we have a phenomenal organization, amea, so about 30% of our customers are actually in amea. We have based operations out of Berlin. Mm-Hmm.

And we do have, we sell, you know, like we do sell globally. We sell in apac, we sell in Canada, south America, Africa, pretty much every major continent, uh, with a heavy concentration in North America. Um, and our customers are getting bigger every day, like we talked about earlier.

So, you know, we started off more in the upper part of the SMB, we're sort of, you know, small to midsize managed service providers, but now we're starting to close, move up into the upper mid market, uh, with lots of product unlocks to sort of support that value to those customers. So we really sell, we truly sell downstream to SMB and now into the upper mid market. So it's a broad range.

Got it. So you look at your entire product suite, what do you think is the, the locomotive, if you will, what do you think is the kind of, must have killers that are, are really kind of driving a lot of growth here? Yeah, I mean, our core product from a day one, you could say endpoint management or RMM, remote monitoring and management, where we have software on all all device devices from Raspberry PIs, Linux, windows, Mac, and mobile phones, uh, doing true endpoint management.

Traditional endpoint management is our sort of bread and butter, but we also do patch management and compliance software deployment monitoring, alerting, scripting, automation, remote support and backup. So, and, and we actually have many more products in the pipeline. So I think the thing is, once you have a strong platform that's easy to use, use and re remove all the friction for customers to consume additional products to help try value and make their job easier, it's a winning recipe.

Absolutely. It, it's interesting, you know, I, uh, we got RSA coming up right in, uh, may and you look at trends and what people are talking about and, and there was a time where everybody just wanted to talk about cloud, cloud, cloud, you know, this and that. We now we're, there's a little bit of a pendulum swing, if you will, right?

Where people are talking about returning to data centers, endpoint stuff, and you know, and, and the work do anything from anywhere kind of environment that many organizations exist in today. You know, it's more important than ever that you, you, you have some endpoint insight into your endpoints managing of them, not only for security, but I mean, but yes, for security too. Um, I would imagine that during Covid though, this really had to be a big, I mean, this was, it was, I mean, it had to help the, and I don't mean this in a bad way.

Covid doesn't help anyone, right? No one wants to get said goodbye. But during Covid, I would imagine this had to be a, a, a huge kind of growth area for you guys, right?

As as people went to become more dispersed. Like that decentralized. Yeah.

You know, I think when Covid started, we were much smaller. So we were 160 employees, now we're like 1200. So if you, if you imagine Rev and that sort of thing.

So at that time we were growing in triple digits prior to Covid. So we're growing incredibly well. And I, I do think Covid opened up more interesting use cases with hybrid work environments.

You know, ninja very early on was a hybrid work environment. We had lots of people working at home distributed workforces. We have, we have a big office in Clear Border near Tampa and San Francisco.

So you have salespeople collaborating cross coast and, and even now, like a lot of our employees do work at home and we have hundreds of people in the office. So I think, I think Covid and just hi, I think instead of Covid, I would just say hybrid workforce is here to stay. It's never gonna change because everyone realize it works.

Everyone, you know, the commercial real estate is weighed down, people, you know, from an OPEX standpoint and enterprises can save cash. Um, so I think it's, you know, I think it's, it's sort of, um, made the pain point higher we were already solving. So I do think, I do think, yeah, I mean definitely it was, it definitely helped a little bit.

But I would say unlike if you think about remote, dedicated remote screen share products were, which were trading at a significant premium like Zoom and others in the market, if you look at the post Covid stats, right, everything kind of settled after. Yeah, no, they more than settled, they'd come back down to Earth, right? I mean Oh, right, right, right.

So That was a little crazy. Yeah, I was gonna say as terms of Ninja, we've been able to maintain that growth several years after everyone's kind of getting back to work and, and things are return to normal, which I think is a nod to beyond hybrid work. It's just managing endpoints is hard.

A lot of people don't even know the endpoints they have in their estate. And now with the distributor workforce that's highlighting those deficiencies, which is ultimately helping us grow even faster. Very cool.

Hey Sal, we're about outta time. First of all, again, congratulations not just on this money raise, but certainly congratulations on that. But congratulations on building a company like Ninja, right?

It's eight years you mentioned, and you know, ha, having been in those in that chair, I know what it takes eight years, day in and day out to breathe life into, uh, an organization and everything. We're we're just 10 years here in, in Tech. Strong March was 10 years.

So, um, I know, I know where you're coming from, man. Congratulations. Keep up the great work whether you have comms or not.

Always reach out to us if you want to come talk. Okay? Thanks Alan, I appreciate it.

I'll see you down there next time down in Florida. For sure. For sure.

I'm, I'm gonna hold you to that. Alright. All right, sir, go check 'em out.

com, that's https colon slash slash dub doub dub ninja one. com. Uh, we're gonna take a break here on Tech Trunk tv.

We'll be right back.