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The Decibel Podcast: Founders Helping FoundersAuthor: Jon Sakoda
The Decibel Podcast brings together founders from diverse backgrounds to share their personal journeys, words of wisdom, and lessons learned from the earliest years of their now successful startups. Creating something out of nothing is always a hard and messy process, and we demystify the most thrilling and challenging phase of every startups life: the very beginning. Hosted by Jon Sakoda, Founding Partner of Decibel, we go deep on how every founder survives the moments of crisis that kill others, overcomes personal challenges and adversity, and ultimately finds their way through the twists and turns on the winding road of a startups journey. Along the way, we debunk conventional wisdom about the VC and tech industry for first time founders. This podcast is produced by Decibel, an independent venture capital firm created in partnership with Cisco to push the conventional boundaries of early stage investing. Decibel combines the speed, agility, and independent risk-taking traditionally found in the top Silicon Valley venture firms, while offering differentiated access to the scale, entrepreneurial talent, and deep customer relationships found in one of the largest tech companies in the world. We invest in software startups at the earliest stage - visit www.decibel.vc to sign up for our newsletter, view more content, and learn more about our portfolio. Language: en Genres: Business, Entrepreneurship, Investing Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it Trailer: |
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Casey Ellis, Founder of BugCrowd: When Known Vulnerabilities are Life or Death
Wednesday, 13 August, 2025
Casey Ellis is the founder of BugCrowd, the first open marketplace for vulnerability disclosure and commercial bug bounties. On today’s episode, Jon Sakoda speaks with Casey on the early economics of paying people to hack companies, why ethical hackers are an amazing source of criminal creativity, and why every founder needs to ultimately fix their known vulnerabilities:Why the Economics of Bug Bounties are 20x the Status Quo [11:23-14:42] - Casey had global access to talent around the world and saw that there was a huge opportunity to empower the best and brightest hackers to be paid for finding vulnerabilities. This was a 20x improvement on traditional pen testing and opened the floodgates on bringing traditional hacking out of the dark and into the light. How the Best Hackers and Companies Find Success Together [15:04-24:30] - Bugcrowd early on attracted some of the best hackers onto its platform, but ultimately needed to teach companies how to engage. Setting the right reward incentives, the right targets, and offering responsive feedback were key to getting the right level of engagement on the marketplace in the early innings. Now, most high value tech companies have successful programs. Why Prioritizing Health Fixes is Life or Death [32:45-39:18] - Like many founders, Casey prioritized his startup ahead of other important health issues, which ultimately led to a cardiac emergency requiring open heart surgery. He is now back in action but has an important lesson to share with founders on the importance of taking care of your known vulnerabilities and investing in proactive and preventative care in advance of real issues.
