Hello and welcome, everybody. Welcome back to our second part of my interview with Jens, CEO of Link 11. Welcome to startupraday.io, your startup podcast from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. You go to podcast for startup tech and innovation insights. We continue our interview with Jens Philipp Jung, CEO of Link 11, a leader in DDoS protection and one of the top 40 under 40 by German periodical capital business periodical, I would say.
If you'd ever wonder how to scale a tech business or navigate tech challenges of cybersecurity in today's rapidly evolving market, this episode is for you. Let's dive into Jens' entrepreneurial journey, leadership lessons and innovations in the cybersecurity space. And please keep in mind, this is part two, so you should also listen to part one, Part one and part two are supported by our enabler, Hessen Trade & Invest and the Enterprise Europe Network.
You can learn more down here in the show notes. Jens, that's it. Welcome back.
Hi, Jörn. Very nice to be back.
Totally my pleasure. We may add for our audience that even for us, it's a second recording. So we had approximately 24 hours in between, but we keep going with our content here. We talked last about cybersecurity and your look on things. And now I would like to shift a little bit more on the focus of risk of your company. Running a tech company like Link11 must come with a fair share of risk. How do you manage and mitigate those risks, both in terms of strategy and cybersecurity?
Yeah, I mean, especially also in the past 24 hours in the cybersecurity space, a lot happened because we basically see every hour many, many attacks, being it on our customers, but also on us as a company, because we are also some kind of high quality target, to say so. And therefore, it's very important to manage the cybersecurity risks and also obviously from a business strategic standpoint.
And as an organization, I mean, we also some kind still of some kind of startup culture and some kind of startup atmosphere. And while you are very young as an organization, you think very late towards risk, right? I mean, you want to build something. You are the pioneers and you want to create something. So risk is something which come a little bit later as soon as the company gets more mature.
But what I see as a very positive involvement currently is that more and more requirement in terms of risk management systems, especially in the cyberspace. So, for example, the ISO framework, what gets more and more famous and more and more required from the market. And such frameworks help generally all companies, but also obviously us in terms of risk management, risk mapping and being it from strategy risk, from cyber security risks and business continuity risks.
We as Sling 11, we not only have the ISO framework, which is like already a lot of work and all who went through this knows that. A lot of paperwork, which also typically is not loved too much from startups and in the startup and scale-up phase. We have also done like cybersecurity frameworks like PCI DSS, which is a framework introduced by the payment card industry.
This is where PCI stands for. or another one, SOC 2, Which is like a very US-centric framework, but gets more and more important in the European sector. And these frameworks help us natively to be more secure and also to risk or also to manage our risks much better.
But even before such frameworks, I mean, we always think about what if scenarios, what could happen and create predefined plans and also often fire drills and tabletop exercises because we operate a 24-7 network and something could always fail. So we always think about, okay, what are redundancy concepts in our infrastructure? What are the playbooks and the fire drills that we need to perform if something breaks?
Actually, I'll be linking the cyber map of Kapersky. This gives you a real-time view of attacks and only the time you've been talking. I have witnesses here on the live map, more than a quarter of a million attacks. So just to give you a sense of that here, could you share an example when you took a risk in the business that ultimately paid off, meaning less in terms of cybersecurity and more in terms of like strategy projects?
Yes. I mean, two big risks what we have taken in the past was our add-on acquisitions. I mean, S-Link 11, we had a strategy to grow organically, but also at a later stage to acquire other companies. And these acquisitions of other companies, obviously, you have to add due diligence and you try to find out what is great and where are some red flags in this company. But Every due diligence report has its limitations and there are always things which are uncertain.
You don't know how sticky is the customer base after the migration. You also only have partially insights into the real production code and various other things. You also don't know or you only have partially insights about what is the stickiness of the people. Do all the key people stay on board? And this is always a kind of big risk because, I mean, making these acquisitions, paying many millions for being the owner of the company. Therefore, also the amount you invest is a huge amount.
And this is always kind of risky situation. And how to mitigate this is that, well, well-defined plans, what-if scenarios, trying to understand the business as good as possible, trying to anticipate potential risk, potential issues as good as possible, Creating mitigation plans, and also in terms of risk mapping, understand, okay, if certain risk actually will be materialized, which we all don't hope, right?
What is the actual impact, right? Is it like from a criticality scale? How serious is it? And this helps you then to also get a good feeling from making such transactions and at the end also signing the deals because you should never sign a deal if you have a bad feeling.
Mm-hmm. Everybody who does not think that a takeover could be a destroyer of value or a company, they should look into some prominent examples like AOL, Time Warner. I do believe you, after some time looking into that, you do get a sense of how this could take down two companies. Talked about companies and takeovers here. What is your approach to competition in the tech space? How do you view competitors? And what strategies do you employ to stay competitive?
Tech is generally speaking a wonderful sector. And why is it so wonderful is because the biggest advantage in the tech sector is that size doesn't always matter. Very often you have small innovative teams which are working like in a speedboat approach, which can develop groundbreaking solutions, which will beat all the incumbents. So this is also kind of our initial start. When we came into the market, I mean, we were a team of basically two people.
It was Carsten and myself. and with the great skills of Carsten it was able to develop a solution, a technical solution and software which was better than everything else that was on the market. And this is a great advantage because if you think in other industries, imagine you want to open a furniture store, right? There are so many entries, various entries to get into this market.
You need a plot, you need many of these maybe distributed network um multiple locations it's very very difficult but in tech i mean basically you can you can Create a company by yourself and now even easier with all the ai tools so generally speaking great advantage is that even it's a fast-moving environment you are able as a very small and capable team to develop groundbreaking solution and beat the incumbents and if you
And this is not only right at the end what we say but also actually the feedback what we get from our customers and even the analysts. So a couple of years ago, for example, we had the benchmark study from Forrester Research who has tested various solutions in our area. And it turned out that Ling 11 is not only the one with the fastest mitigation of Jesus attacks, but only the one with the best wrestlers when it comes to overall mitigation capabilities.
And this was basically a shift with a very small development team compared to our competition.
I was wondering for our audience, how would you approach competition in your industry? Drop your thoughts below and let's discuss. Jens, how does Link 11 integrate AI and machine learning into its cybersecurity solution? And what impact does it have it on your competitive effectiveness? Because I kind of get the feel.
Sometime down the road, not true, how long it'll take, you'll have AIs looking for vulnerabilities, exploiting those vulnerabilities, and on the other side, having AIs trying to act as fast as possible to block those vulnerabilities. We're not there yet, but we can both see it, right?
Oh, it's actually in the very near future. we already see like early attacks designed and generated by AI and imagine like deep fake for example or phishing attacks or calling fake attacks. They are all AI generated. So this is like in the very, very new future. On the same side, luckily or on the good side, we are already using AI for quite a long time.
There is a fun story behind that because Carsten who is like an IT informatic student and also mathematics student, he has a great passion for machine learning, algorithms and AI and all of that. Because we had the issue that DDoS attacks could come on every day and night, Carsten has developed a solution which is capable to detect and mitigate these attacks by themselves. And the reason for it was because he wants to sleep in the night.
And this was then the fact, and this is quite a funny story, right? Because we did not develop machine learning in AI or we did not leverage machine learning in AI because it's fancy. It's cool. Let's get higher revenues or better multiples and fundraising or fancy marketing materials. It was basically because the developer of the solution wants to sleep into the night and not get it waked up by DDoS attacks, which he manually need to adjust and mitigate.
And, yeah, these algorithms are still in place and mitigating thousands of attacks every day, fully automatic and protecting. I mean, at the beginning, it just protected our infrastructure. And now these algorithms are protecting millions of web assets every single day.
Are you scared that somebody would be able to find a hole in your algorithms?
Well, I mean, it's always a cat and mouse game. Yeah, game. So obviously, if we stop at a certain point to improve and to develop ourselves, then it could happen that over the course of time, there will be vulnerabilities and issues.
But currently we are very optimistic that what we have built has a very high quality standard and that there are no kind of big issues which could be which could be used and which could impact the quality of the service so i would say currently not too big concerned, but also because we work on it every day very hard.
Yes, I do believe that something you work on it very hard, but something in the back of your mind, you can never really dismiss it, right?
Yeah, I mean, this is also kind of the motivation which pushed you forward. When you think about, okay, you have solved the problem ultimately, then you usually stop working on it, improving on it. But in cybersecurity, it's like an ever-going evolution. It's like with learning. You can never learn enough.
Going a little bit from link 11 into you as an entrepreneur, and I was wondering what has been the most rewarding part of your entrepreneurial journey so far, and what keeps you going?
Well, you know, in like part number one of our interview, I already said some nice words about my family and this is also exactly the reason why I'm that super motivated and work or try to work as hard as I can. It's because of my family and there is no greater reward you can get than when your wife says Jesus is proud of you or your children looking up to you this is really what what motivates me like hell to to give even more and more that's more worth than any money on earth
Exactly now what do you think of there um i was wondering, If you would have a time machine, I would be wondering when you can go back and give yourself an advice when you start Link 11, what would it be?
Basically, it's two points what I would give my younger self as an advice. And number one is in terms of hiring, don't hire too fast in terms of don't make a decision for a hire if you are not 100% sure or at least very sure that this is the right hire. So really hire the best talent and making there some errors will at the end cost you more money, more time, more sleepless nights than if you would just wait a bit and waiting for the right and perfect match.
So like putting more emphasis on this. And the second point is build a great peer network.
Especially when I founded the company which is like which was 2005 right quite a long time ago I mean nowadays you have much more communities events you have these accelerator programs and so on but this this was something didn't exist back in these days and the peer network is very very crucial because you want to share ideas you want to share perspectives you need a network to get some intros so this could be also over the investor potentially um but the best
advice always build it up by yourself right extend your network meet with people um this this helps a lot
And from personal experience i can say it's it's pretty tough to uh tell somebody who's a teacher to really tell them what you're going through, what drives you. But another entrepreneur, they usually get it pretty fast, right?
Yeah, I would say so. Absolutely. I mean, it's like always if you – I mean, there are these life coaches which say like, well, you actually – the sum out of the five or your character is like the mix of the five persons with whom you spend the most time. And therefore, if you have a great peer network, it's also very valuable from a self-development perspective.
Now, we've been already talking about Time Machine. We've gone back in the question before. Now, let's get a tiny preview into the future. What's next for Link11? then what are some upcoming projects and innovations you're excited about?
Yeah, we have two main work streams. One work stream is about in our product innovation and why we are currently covering very successful the DDoS attack mitigation, which is, by the way, after ransomware, the most second highest attack in terms of amount of attacks on global governments and organizations. We are also, and beside of the DDoS attacks, we are already providing solutions for web application protection being at mitigating SQL injections and database attacks and similar stuff.
But what we now also will introduce or what we are currently working on is more towards network-based solutions, zero trust, as I already explained right at the beginning. Some solutions in this sector and area combined with the great visibility of actually what you have as a threat landscape in your organization. Because many companies don't know what vulnerabilities they have. And we are developing solutions which give them more insights. This is like track number one, our product expansion.
And track number two are some very nice M&A activities what we have in the pipeline. Obviously, I have very hard limitations what I can say here about them because they are all under strict NDAs. But this is definitely a track where we have nice traction, where we speak with a couple of very interested entrepreneurs and companies, great technology, great markets, great customers. And we are working there on building a pan-European cyber champion.
And to get this right, you are the acquirer and you talk to potential targets, takeover targets.
Yes, exactly. And some of them, it's even a kind of a merger situation because companies have maybe this similar size. But you need to know, I'm a strong believer that together you could achieve more than alone. And especially in the European region we have the situation that very often we are fighting against American competition. And while the Americans are usually very large and the European counterparts in many areas are much more tiny.
This is not only in cyberspace so it's also in various other industries but I would say in cyber it's maybe a little bit more extreme. Than others. And yeah, therefore, I'm a strong believer in joining forces and building a larger group of organizations.
I know a lot of investors and consultants and also entrepreneurs are listening right now. If they would like to pitch their company towards you, can they approach you via LinkedIn?
Oh, yes, absolutely. That would be amazing. So whenever you have an interesting startup opportunity, if you are an investor, PE, please reach out to me.
We'll be back after a short ad break and talk about you, your company culture, and your thought leadership. Hey, guys, welcome back. This is the second part of the second interview with Jens, CEO from Link11, a DDoS cybersecurity company. And I was wondering, Jens, you are a thought lever in tech and cybersecurity space. How do you approach public speaking and sharing your expertise with others?
Luckily, I have some help from my lovely colleagues, to be honest. So I have a team member who helps me with organizing everything, arranging everything, come up with ideas and even assist with the content. So this is a great help because it takes some time, right? I mean, this is the true story. It does not come for free. You need to invest a lot of time and energy into it. So it's great if you have some helping hands.
And while we have an internal colleague for that, I also know some of my entrepreneur friends have agencies for that, which could also be a great way. Generally speaking, I think as a thought leader, it's always great. I love it also very much to share knowledge and get connected with others. So it's kind of my natural pattern and what I really like. So this is something which is quite nice. And I hope I could do it more.
The biggest constraint is obviously the time commit you need to put into it.
What is your main channel to distribute your content? Is it that people can follow you on LinkedIn? Is it a newsletter?
Well, I have some LinkedIn followers, but in the past...
Oh, you have almost 2,500. A thousand, that's not some. I would say that's many.
Okay. Could always be more, right? Now, I mean, in the past, this was more like quite classic on conferences, industry conferences, cyber conferences, and similar stuff, including coverage in newspapers, large media articles. So for example, FAZ and similar stuff. But indeed nowadays gets more shifted and focused towards social media channels. In my case, I only use LinkedIn because of the time constraints.
Yeah, that's a nice channel, and I think it's very, very comfortable and could only encourage others to also use it and even use it much more than I am.
Great. Of course, we link your LinkedIn profile if somebody wants to follow you or pitch you a startup, as we said before. We've been talking about mergers and acquisition, and I was wondering, how do you maintain a culture adopting or merging with another entity? Do you already have a playbook? Do you have some methodologies you like to do? Because I could imagine it's quite difficult, especially if you're both about the same size.
Yes, absolutely. I mean, size definitely makes it a little bit complex, but not only if it's the same size, also if the size is very different from each other, because if one company is like in a typical startup mood and culture and the other one is already organized, that this could also create some tension. Another level of complexity comes when we speak about cross-border transactions. And, yeah, you need to know our first transaction was in Canada,
Vancouver, with nine hours time difference. The second one was in Israel, which is also not around the corner, obviously closer than Canada. But this makes it also, this brings also an additional level of complexity into it. To be honest, I think the best way of what we have as a kind of playbook is trying to merge also the kind of cultures.
Because if you try to put over 100% of the culture you have currently and erase everything what they have built over many years locally, this will end up in no good scenario. So what we always try is like keeping nice local culture and combining it with the culture of link 11.
What we also try to achieve in all of our targets because we know culture is such important we always do some kind of culture assessment before we sign the deal so looking in i mean there is some old sinned research but you can do some desk research to find out what is the culture of the company you speak with former employees you speak with actual employees and trying to understand okay what is the culture and how how we can integrate this culture into ours and also if there are some red flags
in terms of culture it's very important so yeah and and this helps us to understand the culture in advance and then having like a nice playbook how to integrate this culture what of their components do we want to keep locally and what what are the global link 11 culture components we want to roll out um
I was wondering how How important in terms of evaluating the culture of company is for you to look into boards, forums, and websites where employees can evaluate their employer?
Well, unfortunately, very often you only read in these forums the bad things. So you need to be quite careful about putting too much emphasis on it.
And you only read the frustrated comments and very rarely like wow that was amazing that was amazing so but it's it's um it's a puzzle it's a piece of the puzzle um which you want to look into it what what we like more is really like trying to speak with former employees and to understand hey what was the motivation why you have left how was it what was good what was negative like in these one-on-one conversations.
I would say like the the desk research where you look into forums and reviews It helps a bit, but not too much.
I was wondering how you deal with the moments of doubt because every entrepreneur knows that. What usually helps are peers. What personally helps me is quite some time of silence just thinking about it. I was wondering, how do you deal with that?
I mean, in such moments of doubt, your family is always a great source and a great help to give you motivation and maybe the necessary push also to make a decision. But as I mentioned earlier before, it's important to have a peer network, peer group network.
And this could also help you very much, right? So if there are other situations, reach out to persons who potentially already were in the same situation, who have experienced the same situation, usually everybody's very happy to share his knowledge. And you would be surprised actually how happy some people are to share their knowledge and how easy it is to get some good advice from people who had been in the same situation and ask about how were you able to solve this situation.
And yeah, that helps to get good ideas. It has to give you confidence that you are on the right way or also open you the eyes that you are on the totally wrong way, which is sometimes even more valuable than confirmation that you are on the right way
We should make an inside joke in German you say if you are on the wrong way you are on the wood way, not being on the wood way what do you think are the most important skills and quality an entrepreneur needs to succeed a will to an idea what do you want to reach and a will to work very hard to get there?
I mean, you cannot achieve any great outcome alone. So people, management, identify talent, motivate talent, and so on.
This is like one of one of the key skills you need to have at a certain stage so and it's quite sad that i mean such things you don't learn in school or at least not in the schools i was um i mean if you go to an nice a grade business school they will teach you such things right and they are super super important and i would say the next next super important thing is about you need to be able to have some kind of capability to sell your solution.
Because there's a saying which is like selling solves basically every problem, right? If you are able to sell your solution and you could save every problem, you have enough revenue, you have enough growth and with enough revenue and enough growth, you also get into profitability. So this and great things. So my recommendation, yeah, be very good in talent management, talent identification and hiring, be very good in selling.
And yeah, beside all of that, I mean, obviously you need to have sector and product expertise. It's difficult to sell something where you have no idea from and it's difficult to build a company with something where you have no idea from. So for me, for example, be very difficult now to build an insurance startup. Even if I know how to find talent and manage them, even if I have some kind of talent to sell something, I have zero experience in insurance sector.
So this would take a long time and I would be definitely the wrong person for such a startup ambition.
I would add one piece. Either you're talented to sell something or you get a co-founder who is.
Oh yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Which comes back to point number one, right? Finding and identifying talent and getting them on board.
We now went through a lot of questions. Finally, the last one. What is the legacy you hope to leave behind with Link11? And how do you envision your company's impact?
I would be very happy if I'm able to inspire some people to found their own business or to improve their entrepreneurial life career. So this would definitely make me very, very happy. And beside of that, I mean, we are on the mission to building a European cyber champion because we are very sad that there are so few cyber companies in Europe. It's definitely an underrepresented sector compared to other countries. And we have great engineering here.
We have huge demand for such solutions. We are in uncertain times. We're facing global geopolitical threats. So this is our mission to build this Japan European Cyber Champion. I would be super happy if we are able to succeed and to build these organization within the next five years and having there at the end some kind of really legacy organizations which is able to achieve and be successful over quite a long time. I think this would be very nice for a German startup and ecosystem.
If you, our listener or viewer, enjoyed today's interview with Jens Philipp Jung, want more insights from the world of startup tech and entrepreneurship, don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe. What's one lesson you've learned in your entrepreneurial journey and think that is crucial for success? Share with us below and we'd love to hear thoughts. Jens, that's it. Thank you very much. Best of luck by building a European cybersecurity champion.
And, of course, I hope I'm on the press distribution list for everything you do in the future, right?
Thank you very much. And, yes, you will be, absolutely. So looking forward. Thank you for your time. It was great being your guest.
Totally my pleasure. Have a good day. Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.