A busy and Jon Murchison, the CEO of Blackpoint, caught up with us at the recent Pax8 Evolve conference in Denver, CO. This first time event rocked (must have been an event team with over 100 staffers to pull that off. Blackpoint Cyber is making a splash and also announced its a Pax8 partner at this event.
Watch the FULL INTERVIEW HERE!
Harry Brelsford 00:00
Hey nation nation Harry here on the final day at the Pax eight conference, Pax eight beyond here in Denver, Colorado with the Gaylord if you haven't gotten to a Gaylord, they're pretty nice. And I got to give a shout out to PAX eight for an inaugural event. That's hard. That's hard. And I think they pulled off 1100 attendees. He saw yesterday's blog that speaks towards that. So today's interview day, and I'm with John Murchison. Did I get that right. I've been rehearsing all night. You got it over at Black Point. So Introduce yourself. What's your story?
Jon Murchison 00:33
Yeah. I'm John Merson, CEO and founder over at Blackpoint. You know, my background was tech. I was a network engineer before it kind of got into the hacking game. Yeah. Kind of doing Cisco kind of carrier class type stuff and knock back in the day. But then I ended up with the National Security Agency.
Harry Brelsford 00:50
And I saw your route. You're in the beltway, so to speak. And I saw that,
Jon Murchison 00:54
yeah, I actually split my time. Like, I'm in Colorado, 10 months of the year now. Okay, Maryland. I'm going back to Sunday. Yeah, so I spent 12 years there, kind of computer network operations kind of on the offensive side. And my kind of specialty was kind of nuclear weapons. So I spent a long time doing that. And then, you know, we started also making software because this is really my second company. Okay. My first company, summer name was Blackpoint technologies. That was a national security focused company, I'd left the agency they asked me to come back. I started that company. And then we started making software back in like 2011. Fast forward to now sold that business pivoted when 100% commercial and now we're, we're 24/7 managed text response company, and and really a software engineering company. Everything we we use, we make Yeah, cool.
Harry Brelsford 01:45
And you've recently become a Pax eight partner. Cool. Yeah. So what what's your business model specific to the MSP community that channel partners? Yeah, that Pax eight. I mean, I get what you do.
Jon Murchison 01:57
Yeah. I mean, I'd say like at a at a high level. You know, our business strategy really is, there's a lot security takes a lot of experience, right? There's a massive shortage, both and IT professionals and even worse than IT security professionals that know what they're doing. And so really, what we like to do is we kind of put an ecosystem play of products together, so it's underpinned by MDR. So it's real security, there's real action arm, we're the first company in the world doing live response, Microsoft 365, we do over 40 a week right now. But then we keep adding products, and we're not charging more so people can save spend on other products to standardize on their stack. So that's step one, and convert business strategy. The second part, we recently launched Blackpoint. University at it nation. And that's a good
Harry Brelsford 02:43
that's a good show, by the way, didn't make it to a week ago. Yeah, it was great.
Jon Murchison 02:46
They did a fantastic job. ConnectWise knocked it out of the park. And so, you know, really, with with Blackpoint, this is our partner enablement push, we're gonna invest massively. So it's not just like nerding out on the next security topic, we definitely do a bit of that. But we're doing finance one on one, we're doing maturity models for MSPs pricing and packaging, we're doing, how to set up a structured go to market and selling platform, how to implement metrics and KPIs really. And we even have a leadership course taught by highly decorated combat Special Operations officers, right to help folks just learn how to build those good traits into an organization. So, you know, that's, that's really a lot of what we're doing Pax eight, specifically, you know, first off really well run company, we're huge fans, yeah, they solve one of the biggest pain points MSPs have, which is a 3050 tools, unifying billing, you know, it's, so it makes a ton of sense for us also, you know, there, you know, we integrate with Sentinel, one and CrowdStrike and Microsoft, and so, you know, we're friendly to a lot of all the different endpoint products they sell, and we take over looking at that stuff. And, and also, you know, we've leaned in heavily to support securing the Microsoft 365 ecosystem and being such a massive Microsoft partner that the partnership just makes total sense. Yeah.
Harry Brelsford 04:05
Yeah. I like the business speak. paradigm that you're going down because I come up through the ranks when it was geek speak. Right, right. Windows Server, yeah, back in the day and you know, 2am downloading drivers. So yeah, done with that. So I like what you're doing in terms of the business education i to a fault. I really support that and probably at the cost of being keystroke technical.
Jon Murchison 04:30
Yeah. Well, you know, it's at the end of the day, like when I look at MSP pain points, it's really managing this you know, mess of tools and all the billing and reconciliation, huge pain point from the funnel lead gen. Where's my next customer coming from massive pain? Yeah, right. The other thing, how do I get my existing legacy customers to pay more right? So one, one, so they can add modern tools to it like you know, us or something like that. So one of the One of the successful like, bundling approaches or pricing packaging we've been seeing is we're watching some of the largest, most sophisticated MSPs put a version number, like it's a piece of software on on their offering. And maybe they've two years after first, yeah. And they say you can only you can never be two versions out of sync. And that builds that natural ability to kind of continually upgrade and keep it modern. And when you can do that, and you can standardize security upfront. Now you can focus on retention, you know, post sale, customer success, right, and recruiting and going to market, right, yeah. And that builds a more repeatable business. And when you do it that way, it builds a more valuable business, because there's a lot of m&a going on in the space. So that's why we're doing it. Just because we we see that
Harry Brelsford 05:44
hey, yeah. Hey, finally, let's talk about the company itself. Clearly, like motorsports, I'm looking at Red. Yeah, Andretti Autosport. We're seeing that in the industry. A Cronus is an f1. sponsor. Yeah, kind of thing. So we're seeing one
Jon Murchison 06:00
CrowdStrike is f1. Yeah, yes. Filter is awesome. And JD sponsor
Harry Brelsford 06:04
Exactly. Your investor back. Let's talk about that. Yeah,
Jon Murchison 06:08
yeah. So you know, our philosophy actually, it was kind of interesting one, when rounds in prices were completely off out of this world, like a year and a half, two years ago. We as a, as a company stayed hyper, hyper fiscally diligent. So our SAS metrics are in the top 5% of all SAS companies. And so we went really careful to make sure we built the foundation was instrumented. It wasn't something where we got addicted to growth, equity money. And then interest rates rise, valuations drop, and now you need money again, that's the bad time to go to the market. So you know, we just did a major, major 100 $90 million deal with Bain and excel, which we're really excited about. That's
Harry Brelsford 06:48
real money.
Jon Murchison 06:49
It's in the reality is, but up until that point, we had only raised 26, and didn't even spend anywhere close to all of it. And so for us, we felt like the fundamentals are there, we have a massive product lead on our competition. Now it's time to fix all the go to market continue to invest in r&d, and continue to invest in partner enablement. And that's why we're doing the the Andretti events, we're doing VIP. Like we do a whole pre Dave training. And then behind the scenes, you know, you get to go on pit lane and kind of meet the drivers but experience, you know, marketing and education and we think it's you know, so far been pretty successful.
Harry Brelsford 07:23
Yeah, I saw that last fall, a friend of mine took me to the circuit of Americas in Austin, where I now live, you know, first career in Seattle now, Austin? Yeah. But I went and I I'm not a necessarily a car aficionado. But I sure appreciate it. Yeah.
Jon Murchison 07:39
I raced for fun. I do. I raced in the middle of the road racing series back East. And actually my 50 year old just race this past weekend. He's a racer also. So for us, it kind of hits close to home.
Harry Brelsford 07:51
All right, well, finally, what's next? I mean, acquisitions conferences, where can people expect to see you in the future everywhere?
Jon Murchison 07:58
We've been traveling nonstop. So yeah, we're gonna I think I'm in Dublin in a couple of weeks here for data con Europe. So we're going to be really expanding our shows. But I think the woods, what's really next for your company, we have more major product releases this year that we're just adding to our bundle. We're not charging more. And so stay tuned for those and then a heavy investment in Black Point University and training. Yeah, like that. Yeah,
Harry Brelsford 08:24
that's a big takeaway. Yeah.
Jon Murchison 08:26
I mean, listen, it's if it's going to be a real partnership between vendor, you know, an MSP, like, we have to be helping each other right. You represent our brand we represent your brand and the more education that we can do to help get more repeatable better business practices. I think it's good for the industry, because here's the and I'll leave you with this one last point. Yeah. The the data we have is showing the MSP market is growing projected to continue to grow on its own. It's 12% CAGR advanced security services, MSP are growing at 32% CAGR. This is great news. It means this markets expanding for MSPs. But what it also means is private equity, smart money, lots of investors are coming in, they're going to be rolling up MSPs and putting in all these really good business practices. So if you're sub $8 million, your MSP it's wise to really start professionalizing kind of the offering and your repeatability because competition is going to increase.
Harry Brelsford 09:17
Yeah, well, continued success. Let's, let's stay in touch. We will. All right. Thank you very much.