Danny Jenkins, ThreatLocker
How ThreatLocker Created a New Category to Reach $200M
Danny Jenkins started ThreatLocker with a simple, contrarian belief: instead of trying to detect every cyber attack, you should block everything by default and only allow what a business actually needs. The problem was that the market for that idea looked tiny. When Danny sized the whitelisting market, it was a few hundred million dollars at best, and winning it would have cost more than it was worth. So he made the bet that defines this episode. Rather than fight for a corner of an existing market, he used category creation to turn a small niche into a $10 billion opportunity: zero trust for every business, not just the largest enterprises. Getting there was brutal. It took 18 months to land the first paying customer. Danny remortgaged the house, ran the family onto credit cards, repaired a hurricane-damaged roof himself, and considered bankruptcy. When he finally got a customer on the phone, he was so scared to ask for the order that he was shaking. In this conversation, Danny shares how he validated the idea before raising money, why a blunt salesperson outsold a polished one, how MSPs became his wedge into the small-business market, and the two things he says are the only things that matter when you are starting out.
