Fashion to Fintech to Fighting Hackers | Benjamin Netter

Episode Topics:

• Learn why hackers target employees instead of complex systems and how to protect your team.
• Discover how a fintech founder pivoted to cybersecurity after one employee nearly cost him millions.
• Get the real story behind raising $12M by solving human problems, not just tech problems.
• Understand why small businesses are sitting ducks and what you can do about it immediately.
• See how eliminating friction in customer experience can build a multi-million dollar business.

 

Rick Jordan  

What’s shakin Hey, I’m Rick Jordan, and today we’re going all in. I’ve got today somebody who’s in my industry, you know, but he actually created this platform, whereas I’m like the guy that puts the puzzle pieces together in cybersecurity. But even more important than that, this dude likes to get inside the minds of hackers. Okay, and protects employees against cyber attacks through, really, what I think is necessary, which is like virtual crisis mode, you know, kind of planning, as if everything just went to crap. Now today, I’m welcoming, welcoming founder and CEO of riot, Benjamin netter, what’s up? Ben, Hey, Rick, how are you? Man, I’m good. I’m very, very good. So as we were prepping for this, right? I’m pumped, because you’re talking about mock fishing drills and cyber awareness programs, right? I was just on the news the other day about Dallas, right? We know about Dallas and the ransomware issues that were going on there, still going on there, and they were saying that it’s still, you know, like, over a month, and they’re still not completely recovered. I’m like, I wish you municipalities or government agencies ran drills, you know, to not, not like, to where they Hey, this is a bad link. This is a good link, not that kind of thing, but actually took everything down, like shut everything down to feel how it actually needs to have a certain type of response if they didn’t have computers anymore because of a cyber attack, how do you feel, Man?

 

Benjamin Netter  

I think they should prepare everyone with phishing simulation. So I think it would be, it should be a requirement. It’s really a work, an exercise that actually improving the security of the team. So, yeah, tremendous differences in companies that actually use that. Yep, I feel you should be military for those companies.

 

Rick Jordan  

Yeah, for sure. I mean, it’s a government agency, right? It absolutely should be mandatory for them. Oh, what drove you to create riot? I mean, did you have experience with this? Did you click on a bad link one day, Ben?

 

Benjamin Netter  

No, actually, the story is pretty fun or not, but I’ll tell you this story. So riot is actually my second company. I founded a FinTech in Europe. In 2014 we were doing loads for small businesses, so I created a platform that was handling hundreds of millions of euros worth of transactions every year. And I was That’s a lot. Actually, I didn’t sleep well, but because I was pretty sure that the hacker would find a clever way to hijack the money somehow from the platform. So we were investing a lot of money on protecting the platform, you know, the booties and pen testing and so on. And what happened one day is an employee in the team. We were 100 people at the time. One of them ended up receiving the wrong email and entering his password. And so that’s how I discovered that we were focusing on the wrong problem, and hackers are much more pragmatic than I thought. And that’s how riot actually started, because I started as a side project. I thought, if there’s one employee that’s clicking the wrong emails, probably there’s others in the company. So let’s, let’s try it. Let’s, yeah, put into the shoes of the hacker, and launch, launch an attack on the employees. And that’s our riot actually started. 

 

Rick Jordan  

That’s cool. Now when you say that they’re a lot more pragmatic than what you thought, What do you mean by that?

 

Benjamin Netter  

I mean, they don’t want to waste time finding weaknesses in very complex systems. I mean, we were developing this platform handling hundreds of millions of euros, and we were spending a lot of time on protecting those when you you’re a hacker, you don’t want to find loopholes in endpoints and in different APIs, and it’s not something that’s repeatable. I mean, phishing is much more repeatable. You know, you don’t need very technical skills to actually do it. And so that’s what I mean when I say hackers are pragmatic. They want to, to grab the whole new hanging fruit. And that’s phishing. 

 

Rick Jordan  

Right on. Yeah. That’s, that’s 98% of how any hack starts these days, I believe, is fishing right? It’s super high. They like to save the silver bullet for, like, Putin’s laptop, right? All their money into R and D, but they don’t really care about anything else, because it’s such low hanging fruit that 98% because I always say it’s like, you know, there’s always a bob at every single company, and Bob clicks on everything that he sees.

 

Benjamin Netter  

That’s true. That’s true. We’re fighting against bobs. You’re fighting against, preparing Bob’s to face cyber attacks.

 

Rick Jordan  

Yep. That’s awesome, man. All right, so this riot was not your first venture, right? It was fintech. And FinTech, I mean, hundreds of millions of dollars in euros being transacted. You know, how did you start that company? And then, even more importantly, when you were there, how did that lead into riot?

 

Benjamin Netter  

I mean, I’m on the tech side. So prior to the FinTech, I was working in fashion. So, you know, tech is everywhere. You just adapt. I mean, so I met the right person to do the FinTech company, someone who had a strong background in finance and especially financing companies, and we decided that I would be the tech part of that. And that’s how we got started. You know, it goes and, I mean, cyber security is probably the closest to, closest to tech I got. I mean, it makes a lot more sense that I work in cyber security now. I have a strong coding background, so I’ve been coding for like, 20 years now, so it makes a lot more sense that I work for a cyber security company than working for fintech.

 

Rick Jordan  

That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Now for you, though you had a did you? Did I hear you right? That you said you you were in fashion before that?

 

Benjamin Netter  

I saw it in fashion. Yeah, we were doing like a Wikipedia, Wikipedia. I mean, you know, I’m French, so I there’s always fashion involved at some point.

 

Rick Jordan  

Dude, you’re wearing a t shirt right now. I would have never guessed that they are cool. I mean, I wear a black T shirt every day Exactly. That’s funny. That’s a, I mean, I’m interested in that, but so, I mean, the FinTech, cybersecurity, that makes sense, right? Because you’ve got all the, all the the needs for what Riot does right now and preventing hackers from getting in and compromising employees that you need in FinTech, because you’re protecting millions of dollars a year now, or millions of euros a year ends. But how was that transition from fashion into fintech? Where did that come from?

 

Benjamin Netter  

Just meeting the right person. Yeah, I was looking for the next adventure. So I met someone. I thought he was the next the guy I wanted to compound the company with. 

 

Rick Jordan  

That’s awesome. It started. That’s awesome, yeah? Because, I mean, it’s, it’s very easy to make that journey. And, I mean, that’s kind of a true entrepreneur, right? Because you just see the opportunity, and it doesn’t matter if it’s in a completely different industry than yours, because that man true entrepreneurship is just problem solving, exactly right? It’s asking new questions. That’s what entrepreneurship is. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as you know that it helps people. It can be in any industry, because a lot of industries help people.

 

Benjamin Netter  

Yeah, exactly. And I was running this company for like, six years, and at some point so we had this cybersecurity issue with the employee clicking, entering its password on the on the wrong page. And so I started working on riot, waking up two hours earlier in the morning and working on that before I went to my real job. And I launched so my goal was to launch an attack on the team at that point. And the first time I launched the attack, the first person clicked and entered its password. Was the CFO. It was like a wake up call. You know.

 

Rick Jordan  

No doubt. Man, that’s funny. There’s something there. Yeah, no doubt. The CFO is the first suit. The CFO was Bob, right? The Bob in the in every company that that clicks on anything,

 

Rick Jordan  

It was a girl.

 

Rick Jordan  

But that’s nice. You were, like, in my head with that one. I like it. Bob, that here’s a so let’s be real, right? Because, I mean, in the US, right here in Paris, but in the US, there’s a lot of phishing simulation companies, right? They seem to be popping up all over the place, and they’re great, you know? But some of them are Bootstrap. Some of them raise money. I know you raised, what a $12 million series A this year. How did you land that capital. What was your strategy to land that capital?

 

Benjamin Netter  

I mean, we were making money. So, you know, it’s always the same with VC firms. You make money, and you don’t want to raise money, and that’s where they come knocking at the door, hey, this fund that we just raised, and we want to invest in your company. So in that it actually happened. So basically, we were, we were almost profitable at that point. But you know, you know, it’s still a startup. We want to grow and we want to spend more money that we actually earn, and we want, we want to go faster. So we had to raise the that.

 

Rick Jordan  

Yeah, that’s good, though, but you’re able to show cash flow. You’re able to show revenue, you know, even though you might have been operating at a loss because you were at a startup. That’s important for people who are listening to catch on to because so many think that the days of, you know, like in tech, where you have this idea, right, and you’re trying to pitch this idea, but there’s nothing tangible to that idea. Yet, it’s like, I want to do this. It’s like it’s much harder to get any sort of investor, whether it’s VC seed or even friends and family, to get involved in what you’re doing, because there hasn’t been anything done yet. You have, you have no proof of concept at this point. So you weren’t, you were almost profitable. You weren’t profitable, but still you had cash flow. That’s important for any VC firm, man.

 

Benjamin Netter  

Yeah, exactly. That’s that’s how it goes. They don’t really take risks, you know, they look at the money and when it makes anything. But, yeah, absolutely. I mean, that’s later stage. I mean series A but during the precedence round, it was a different story.

 

Rick Jordan  

For sure. That’s a different type of investor too. In pre seed, in in seed, you know, versus VC. VCs needs to have a little more meat to chew on. I think.

 

Benjamin Netter  

Exactly, yeah.

 

Rick Jordan  

Yeah. They also know that they need to exit at some point, very small team, I bet, yeah, no doubt. That’s awesome, man, that’s exciting because, I mean, you’ve got this, I mean, we’re looking at this what? There’s one thing I want to know, and I’m curious about this, because there’s a lot of, as I said, in the US, right? Maybe not in the EU, but in the US, there’s a lot of phishing simulation companies that have just popped up out of nowhere, and all of them pretty much seem to do the same thing. You know, they all have the basic set of features. There’s only maybe one or two that are really differentiating themselves. How are you doing that? How are you rising above the noise?

 

Benjamin Netter  

So there’s a few answers to that. First one is all competitors are pretty, pretty weak in France, so we’re still very we’re growing rapidly because they’re just not there yet. That’s answer number one. And obviously, when I was in my previous company, I tried to sign up for those competitors, and their onboarding process was extremely painful for small companies. So that was another opportunity that I that I saw, was that most, most of those companies, they’re focusing on enterprise customers. And I mean, cyber security is a problem, and you you know that even better than I do, but it’s a problem even for smaller companies, and they don’t have the solution to cover those problems, because if you want to target smaller companies, you have to make a better product. And that’s why that we’re focusing on making a product that can be sent from boarding. Your product has to be extremely good if you want to 50 people company signing up and onboarding themselves directly from the website. Yeah, for sure, yes, that’s the two reasons. So basically, France trans market was not as mature as the US market, and we were targeting a different kind of companies than they were. 

 

Rick Jordan  

Dude, I got to tell you, if it wasn’t for Riot, man, if I was a hacker, I’d be going after companies in France right now. Because if it’s not that mature, I didn’t know that. You educated me today, because, like I said, they’re these phishing simulation companies that simulate these things in the US. They’re all over the place now, you know, so you’re grabbing on it. It’s almost like in France. It seems like it was probably five years ago in the US, you know, if I could compare the timelines there. But there’s one thing that you said, Man, that really caught me, because you said the second part. The biggest thing like, I think you would do well in the US because of this, no joke, because of this, one thing is that you made tech human. You had, you saw a difficulty because of the painful onboarding process. And tech can be tech, but tech, it can be exciting, but still, it’s supposed to accomplish something that matters to human beings, right? The outcome is actually something very human and very relational. And that’s the importance of tech, is that it helps accomplish that tech is not the be all, end all. So you saw this thing, and I’m impressed, man, I want to give you props. That’s the best thing I’ve ever heard from any tech companies that we I saw a pain point with how we interacted with people. It had nothing to do with the tech itself. It had to do zero with actually riot in what it does in the phishing simulations, you saw the pain point in actually onboarding customers and solve that. That’s brilliant, bud. Way to go.

 

Benjamin Netter  

 I mean, I’m not gonna name names, but I talked to this B Company that everyone knows, and they set up a call in like, three weeks,

 

Rick Jordan  

Three weeks, once.

 

Benjamin Netter  

You know you want to be safe today. I mean, when we when we got back, that was like, I want to be safe right now. I mean, I want to target the team now. And. And start the program tomorrow, or something like this, and they set up a call three weeks later, and then there’s the pricing coming three weeks after. And so you’re, like, two months later and you still don’t have the product. I was like, That’s not normal. I want the product. Yeah,

 

Rick Jordan  

no joke, man, yeah. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it, but I just got done watching the movie. Founder, it’s an older movie with, you know, maybe like, 10 years old, with Michael Keaton. It was about Ray Kroc, the founder. Well, really, the person who built McDonald’s, because it was the McDonald’s brothers that founded McDonald’s, but it was Ray Kroc that took it global and started the whole franchise system. But the McDonald’s brothers, because it was back in the 50s, they had these car hops, right? They were drive in things. The idea of fast food didn’t even exist. And it would take like, 20 minutes for the for the server to go out to the car, take the order, them, cook the food, bring it back 20, sometimes, maybe 30 minutes later. But that’s the biggest thing that they eliminated, that McDonald’s is still famous for today in founding the idea of fast food, it’s like, why are we wasting time when people pull in and the only reason they’re here, they stay in their cars. They’re literally here just to eat food. So they eliminated that. And like, here you go, hamburger, french fries, coke in 30 seconds. And that’s the same principle. It’s like they met people where they were. They eliminated the biggest problem in food service, just like you eliminated the biggest problem in tech. You know why three weeks bread? It should be like three hours. Let’s get going.

 

Benjamin Netter  

I have no idea. Maybe we were a small company compared to other companies to talk to. But

 

Rick Jordan  

whatever take, what you have right now, man. Dude, you’ve impressed me today. Where can everybody find you? You know, what’s the website for Ryan? How can people connect with you? Individually?

 

Benjamin Netter  

Try to write.com and I’m Benjamin letters, and you can reach out on LinkedIn, and easily accessible. You can easily find me. I’m everywhere. Awesome,

 

Rick Jordan  

Dude. This was fantastic today, because we hit on some very human things that can apply to any business. Thanks for being on my man. Appreciate you. 

 

Benjamin Netter  

Thank you!