'Nothing beats in-person interactions for building relationships,' says Ian Yip, CEO Avertro

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

I’ve been in the cybersecurity industry for about 20 years and have worked in a variety of leadership, advisory, strategy, sales, marketing, product management, and technical roles across the Asia Pacific and Europe in some of the world's leading companies, including McAfee, Ernst & Young, and IBM.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

Avertro is a venture-backed cybersecurity software company. We are your cybersecurity headquarters and the world's first SaaS Cyber Management Decision System (MDS) that helps leaders manage the business of cyber using defensible insights to determine what’s essential.

What is the origin story?

Avertro was founded out of the Antler VC incubator program as part of the first-ever cohort in Australia. We’ve since gone on to graduate from the CyRise accelerator and raised a pre-seed round of funding from a consortium of VCs and angels.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

Our team is diverse, and we have a great culture and values that were defined prior to the founding of the company. We all want the right outcomes for each other and genuinely care about what we’re doing. When I was the CTO for McAfee APAC, executive leaders and board members consistently asked me why the industry wasn’t solving the problem Avertro addresses. Our team has the relevant set of experiences and deep expertise in tackling the problem in prior roles. We collectively possess an unparalleled background in business, cybersecurity, and technology and have conducted further validation and R&D. Most importantly, we are willing to think creatively and differently about building a solution to solve the key problems we’ve identified.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

Still working towards reducing the impact of cybercrime on the world, but at the same time being frustrated and wondering why no one was adequately addressing the problem Avertro solves.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

We have a set of revenue targets that we aim for. But we ultimately measure ourselves against the outcomes we deliver for our customers and the alignment of the team to our values and common goals.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

In less than two years of existence, we’ve managed to grow to a team of 15 and onboard customers onto our SaaS platform that most other companies would be envious of. We’re extremely proud of the value we’re able to bring as an early-stage startup to such established large organizations. We’ve also been able to achieve 14x YoY ARR growth between 2020 and 2021.

What technologies are you currently most excited about and most worried about? And why?

I have a love/hate relationship with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). They hold a lot of promise and can definitely bring a lot of technologies to the next level. The promise of AI and ML is exciting. Unfortunately, there are many people who do not understand the concepts adequately and continue to abuse those terms, which is why they’ve become throwaway buzzwords. Even when used properly, there are other considerations that need to be taken into account, particularly around misuse, ethics, and privacy.

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

The alignment with topic areas of interest in cybersecurity, tech, business, and startups makes sense. Putting simply - it’s a great platform to share our story on.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

Things worth doing take time. Be patient.

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

Nothing beats in-person interactions for building relationships, particularly when it comes to business, no matter how many times people insist this is no longer required because we’ve become accustomed to remote working and video meetings.