Charlie Thomas Podcast Transcript
Charlie Thomas joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive podcast.
Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Charlie Thomas. Charlie Thomas is the Chief Executive Officer at Mitiga. Charlie is also seasoned startup and growth stage executive with a proven track record in leading software and technology companies. Through all phases of expansion as CEO, he has successfully scaled two startups to approximately 100 million in annual recurring revenue, guiding them through critical areas as capitalization, branding, product development, sales channel strategy, marketing, team building, and corporate vision.
Before joining Mitiga in January of 2025, Charlie was the founding CEO of Deep Watch, a leading managed detection and response provider. Under his leadership, deep watch emerged as a prominent player in the enterprise security, delivering cutting edge threat detection and response solutions to organizations worldwide.
Well, good afternoon, Charlie. Welcome to the show.
Charlie Thomas: Good afternoon, Brian. It’s nice to be here.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely my friend. I appreciate it. Appreciate you making the time this morning. I know it’s early. You’re on the East coast there in dc. I’m in Kansas City, but do appreciate the time. Love traverse in the globe.
So Charlie, jumping into your first question, you’ve scaled two startups to a hundred million plus in annual reoccurring revenue experience as a board member and investor in 14 plus cybersecurity and tech companies. What common traits do you see in the startups that truly succeed long term?
Charlie Thomas: Yes, that’s a great question, Brian.
And there definitely are common traits. I’d say first and foremost is the management team that is leading the company. So I learned very quickly, I know there are a lot of capabilities and skills that I don’t have, so I always make it a priority to recruit either as co-founders or as senior executives, people around me.
That have great skills and talents that I don’t, that compliment mine. In the case of Mitiga joining here, we already had three co-founders who are very strong technically and really built a, a phenomenal product. But the first two companies I’ve built, we had a really great team. Of course there needs to be the right timing and the right market opportunity.
The first company, we were going through a period of deregulation in the broadband sector, and that created an opportunity for new entrants competing against the giants in the B2B broadband space. But you could see it coming for several years, so you could anticipate and then launch at the appropriate time and, and that company took off.
And then more recently it was. Not driven by a regulatory, uh, move per se, but within the cyber sector, you could see that managed security managed services was going through another evolution. It was going through that evolution driven by new technology, new ways, more efficient, faster, better ways of doing things.
And so the MDR, the managed detection and response. Industry was born, if you will, in circa 2017 18, that window, and you could see that the legacy approach of MSSP was going to be outpaced by MDR, leveraging technology in a platform to automate a lot of things that historically had been done manually.
Thereby giving a much better outcome from a security lens to the end customers and also doing it more economically. So those companies have grown nicely. The common trade across the board was each of the companies I’ve been involved in, we’ve had an exceptional kind of founding team, if you will.
Brian Thomas: Thank you.
I appreciate that. Really do. And at the end of the day, what brings things together are the people, and you talked about hiring that best management team. You know, if you hire the experts, let them do what they do best and uh, obviously your company will be very successful. But what I’d liked, Charlie, you mentioned, is you had that vision to anticipate market shifts.
You saw emerging technology and cybersecurity changes on the horizon, and you leveraged automation, those sorts of things because you again, trying to anticipate the next step of where the market was going. So I appreciate that. Charlie, you’ve mentored founders whose companies later exited for over a billion dollars.
What’s your philosophy on mentorship and how do you help founders unlock their full potential?
Charlie Thomas: I take great pride and pleasure in being able to do that actually at each company I’m with. I really prioritize the company culture and, uh, really prioritize a winning mindset and, you know, really focus on go to market excellence as well.
That’s one thing that some companies struggle with. It’s never easy, but it’s a really important factor no matter how great your technology is without the proper go to market plan. It’s difficult, but along the way in mentoring and creating those great cultures, I’ve been fortunate to watch a number all the way back to my very first company, one that we actually took to an IPO watch.
A number of those colleagues of mine break out and start their own businesses, several of which have been very successful. And so, you know, I get asked or invited to be on boards of advisors, the full board of directors, to invest as an angel. And I’ve watched several of these companies grow. Some, you know, are become lifestyle companies where they’re growing.
They call it 10 or 20 million, but the founders own the business and they’re making a, a very nice income and they’re just continuing the business that way. And that’s fantastic. And that’s kind of their goal and objective. And I know a number of those others have gone bigger. I have raised outside capital and have gone for a much bigger play, and as you mentioned, I know more than one of them who have exited the business for over a billion dollars.
They really scaled the company extremely well, but it’s always rewarding to me, even within my current company, to watch people grow. It’s one of the more rewarding things as an entrepreneur, you get to see. You know, here at Mitiga, we’ve got a super talented research team. It’s been fun to watch them grow and expand and, uh, build their own brand and their own reputation out in the market.
It’s fun to see these people on our team evolve and and advance, and I, I have no doubt. That we have in the ranks at Mitiga today. People in the future have their own company, and I, I would love to be involved somehow. So it’s, it’s an ecosystem that keeps producing new companies and certainly that happens now.
We have a big footprint in Israel that is a real hotbed of startups, particularly in cybersecurity. So I anticipate this trend will continue.
Brian Thomas: Thank you so much. I really appreciate that. You obviously do take the pride in the work that you do. As you mentioned, focusing on the company’s culture, that golden market strategy, what I heard is very important.
What’s really cool is you actually saw some of your good work in action with previous colleagues and proteges that you’d mentored, that have started great companies and that have exited very large companies. I know a lot of people, including myself, that love to be part of your, I’d say the Charlie ecosystem, so thank you.
Charlie now at Mitiga, how are you approaching cyber resilience differently and what excites you most about the company’s mission and technology?
Charlie Thomas: Yes, I got super excited When I first learned about Mitiga, I really did not have any intention of going back into a full-time CEO role. I’m still on the board of directors at Deep Watch and had a really great run as the founding CEO there and the new CEO there, John d Lulu’s, doing an outstanding job of taking the company to the next level.
And I was, you know, seemingly retired, uh, for six plus months. And, um. I was talking to Jay Leak at Send Ventures. I co-invested it alongside him and another startup, uh, another person that used to work with me who’s launched a, a startup. So it’s super exciting and when I was talking to Jay last year in the fall, he started mentioning a few of the companies that he was invested in.
He’s invested in many, and again, at that point, the timing wasn’t right, but around. November, I think it was Jay and I talked and he mentioned pending investment in a cloud security company told me the size and stage of the company, and I said, that sounds very interesting because I know firsthand from being in the managed detection and response I.
The managed soc managed security industry for six plus years at Deep Watch. I know that cloud is where everybody is moving their applications, their sensitive data, and oftentimes it’s multiple clouds like AWS or Google or Microsoft. We’re now Oracle and um, it’s complicated and securing that is a really tall task.
So I was excited by what I was hearing about Mitiga. So I went up to New York, met with the founders, loved the founders, just awesome folks, and really talented. And they had really built an impressive product that in fact. I think Brian, they were probably a little bit ahead of their time in some respects, and the market is moving toward us as we speak.
So the ability to detect attacks or anomalous activities across multiple clouds, but also do it across hundreds of SaaS applications. And the related identities in a single platform in real time, and stitch all of that together into a single attack vector. And single view is something that just didn’t exist in the market and is really resonating with the security teams that we’re talking to, the ciso, the security operations teams.
It’s really filling a complex and immediate need for the market, and I’m super excited by the growth potential here at Mitiga.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. I appreciate that. You know, you seem like you might settle right back into retirement, but knowing you and your background, just based on what we’ve talked about today, you just wanted to get back in the game.
I just knew it. You may not have told your that self that consciously, but I really love the story and of course, Mitiga piqued your interest. You got excited meeting the founders. That sort of thing. Truly the technology that Mitiga has presented here, you know, having that real time single platform and single view to manage all those SaaS platforms and applications is simply amazing and, uh, just really love it.
So thank you Charlie. The last question of the day, looking ahead, how do you see the intersection of AI and cyber cybersecurity transforming the enterprise threat landscape over the next five years?
Charlie Thomas: I could talk to you about that question, Brian, for another hour. But, um, at the highest level, if you think about cybersecurity and what it really boils down to, it’s a math problem.
You’ve got an extraordinary amount of data. I. That only continues to increase by the month, by the year for any enterprise because they are putting increasing volumes of data into cloud infrastructure, which is incredibly complex and difficult to manage, and often it’s across multiple clouds, like I said, AWS, Azure, et cetera.
They have literally a midsize to a larger organization, has literally hundreds of SaaS applications, and they’re not all centrally managed or controlled by IT or security. They have a lot going on with identity as well, and a lot of sensitive data at risk. But ultimately it’s the attackers and the defenders, effectively an arms race, and one is always trying to stay a step ahead of the other.
And the software, the applications are really analyzing extraordinary volumes of data. And so. AI was, of all the use cases, cyber is one. That is one of the better use cases that you will find for machine learning and ai because cyber is about analyzing significant volumes of data and finding needles in haste acts, finding the anomalies, and that’s what AI and machine learning do that extremely well.
So. For us as defenders, we’ve been able to, for example, take all the manual tasks that a traditional SOC analyst would do, and there are a lot of manual processes and you definitely still need a human in the loop. Most people will acknowledge and say that, but we can make those humans a heck of a lot more efficient and a heck of a lot more effective.
When they’re backed by AI and the power of AI and AI can go through petabytes of data and really surface the one to five anomalies that exist, uh, much faster and much more accurately than humans doing it, doing that type of triage manually. So there is tremendous value in leveraging AI in the SOC and in cybersecurity overall.
Conversely, the defenders also are getting very creative in using ai, and I saw there was just last week, five calls made by a fake Marco Rubio. To either world leaders or cabinet members of Congress. And so the deep fakes and the phishing and, um, there are so many things now that the attackers, the, the bad actors can use AI for that increasingly look.
Legitimate and increasingly look very real. So there’ve been some significant breaches of late that entailed a social element to the attack, but they also can use it, just the sheer power and the automation to scan and get credentials and then use those credentials to. Log in. They don’t have to break in.
They can simply log in, and then once they log in, it appears they’re a legitimate user. Then they can move laterally across your environment. Ultimately access data that may be stored in an Amazon S3 bucket or data and Salesforce or data in a financial system. So you have to be more vigilant than ever.
AI definitely helps. In that battle. Again, you’ll always have a human in the loop, but just they’re a lot more effective. I’ve had some surgeries, some sports injuries and so forth, and normally when I go and have a surgery, an orthopedic surgery, the surgeon themselves, they show up, uh, you know, when everything is prepped and ready and, and they come in and perform the surgery and do their mastery.
A SOC analyst can do the same thing when they’re backed by ai. AI can do all the prep, all the setup, and then the SOC analyst can come in. And use their expertise in their mastery to decide what is really legit and needs attention.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Appreciate that. Really do having insights from, uh, experienced folks like yourself is very helpful for our audience.
You know, you mentioned cybersecurity is really a math problem due the amount of data that continues to grow and the petabytes, if not zettabytes soon, right. But the arms race, as you mentioned, is really between the attackers and defenders here, and I totally agree with that. You know, cyber might be one of the best use cases for ai, of course, for faster, better, smarter ways to go through all that amount of data, but also to protect it and alert the good guys of things that are happening in their environments.
But the attackers are also leveraging it, so it’s something that we definitely have to stay ahead of. And I appreciate we’ve got folks like you working hard to keep the world safe. Charlie, it was certainly a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Charlie Thomas: Thank you, Brian.
I enjoyed talking with you and I look forward to doing it again. Take care. Have a great day.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Charlie Thomas Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
