Proofpoint: The $12B Deal Behind an AI-Driven Cybersecurity Leader

AIR DATE:

January 15, 2026

LENGTH:

41:08 minutes

Andrew Almeida (00:00):

You and I got a call from the sitting CEO on a Saturday, I believe, or no, it was a Friday. It was a Friday.

Seth Boro (00:06):

Friday. I remember where I was.

Andrew Almeida (00:08):

Yep. Yep. When you say Friday afternoon, CEO calls can only mean one thing typically.

Seth Boro (00:12):

Typically, you don't answer them.

Orlando Bravo (00:18):

Welcome to Thoma Bravo's behind the deal. I'm Orlando Bravo, founder and managing partner here at Thoma Bravo. We're back and kicking off a brand new season by looking at our $12 billion acquisition of Proofpoint, what is now a market leader in email cybersecurity. Thoma Bravo managing partner Seth Boro and partner Andrew Almeida are taking us inside the largest software buyout of its time and one of Thoma Bravo's largest investments to date. Thoma Bravo acquired the company in 2001 in a $12.3 billion take private. Since then, Proofpoint has continued to innovate and has transformed from a market leader email security vendor to one of the very few market leading cybersecurity platforms. As a result, revenue has doubled EBITDA nearly quadrupled and margins have risen from 20% to 35%. Proofpoint now works with 90% of Fortune 500 companies and stops 95 million BEC attacks a year. Seth and Andrew share how they started following Proofpoint back in 2012.

(01:30):

They discuss how the investment opportunity came about during the pandemic, what made the company stand out, and how CEO Sumit Dhawan has helped transform Proofpoint into a global cybersecurity leader. Sumit also joins the show to discuss his approach to human-centric security and the impact of AI on modern threats. As CEO of Proofpoint since 2023, Sumit brings over 25 years of experience in building scaled enterprise software businesses and is an advocate for delivering an exceptional experience to customers and partners. I'm excited to share this conversation with you. Listen on for a closer look at the deal, the strategy behind it, and the people driving Proofpoint's next chapter.

Seth Boro (02:17):

Andrew, how's it going out in Miami today?

Andrew Almeida (02:19):

It's great. It's great to be back taking the past few seasons off, so excited to be back on the podcast here and talk about Proofpoint, which is one of our most exciting companies that we own in the portfolio.

Seth Boro (02:30):

It's really exciting to be here today talking about Proofpoint, which I think we would both agree was a marquee investment in acquisition for Thoma Bravo and our cyber portfolio. What do you remember about our initial interest in the investment and when did it seem like it was a possibility, because it was really a game changer for us for many different reasons?

Andrew Almeida (02:56):

Yeah, I mean, we're going to be stepping into a time travel machine and going way back, but I just remember coming in as a first year associate in 2012. The company had just gone public and so, their revenue at the time was around $65 million. They were losing money and they were growing about 30% year over year. So it was a pretty small company when they went public, but they had the market leading offering in email security and they had a really nice growth rate. But when the company went public, they had always just traded at a multiple that didn't make sense in the context of our valuation framework, just because of how well they were doing, how fast they were growing. They were one of the first cloud native cybersecurity companies in the world. And so we track it, but it was more from an admiration standpoint than from an actual due diligence or pipeline standpoint.

(03:46):

We had talked to the CEO a few times about potentially acquiring a couple of our assets and our cyber portfolio, but those discussions never really materialized. But then it was very early on in the pandemic when there was just this huge change in how software companies were being valued. And then on top of that, Proofpoint had some pressures as a public company where it saw its renewal rate go down a little bit because of all the layoffs that were happening in the world because of the COVID pandemic. And so headcount was going down across just basically every company. And so they saw some pressure on their renewal rates, which led to a buying opportunity for us. And so we originally reached out to Gary Steele who was the CEO and one of basically the founding members of the team there. We reached out to him in April of 2020 to talk about potential interest in acquiring the business, and we ended up signing the deal in April of 2021. So it was basically like a year long process of starting conversation with the founder and CEO of the company to actually signing a public company take private. So I know that's a big history lesson there, but that's my memory of the deal.

Seth Boro (04:58):

My memory is thinking that you are absolutely crazy thinking that we actually could buy the business because it was incredibly high growth, innovative cloud native cyber platform that historically for us had been very difficult to buy. And of course that is today our business and our scale has helped achieve that. But I do remember when the idea was something that you proposed and our close partner Chip Virnig was part of it as well. I remember thinking that it was just an absolutely insane idea. And then as we got into it and it started to become a reality, it became really exciting. What gave you the conviction that the business would recover and that it was something that ended up being 12 billion deal of 8 billion of total equity in the deal. Tell us about your conviction on it and what got you so excited?

Andrew Almeida (05:51):

Well, I think that's the first time you've ever called me crazy in a good way in our entire professional relationship. So I appreciate that, but it was just a perfect storm of factors that led us to be able to buy the company. I mean, like I said, the valuation environment changed. There's some very company specific dynamics, but we did get to diligence the business and kind of see those trends that were causing pressure on the stock price start to reverse and unwind real time. And so companies started to bring people back into the office. They started to get back to headcount levels that were more representative of pre pandemic employment levels, and so we could really see this trajectory in the business start to inflect. We saw that we could underwrite an acceleration of that top line in the first year or so of our investment because of those factors that are influential in its top line, normalizing to pre pandemic levels.

And so we were able to really diligence that and get excited about it. And this really raises stakes for us too, because not only was it the largest thing we had ever looked at, I think by a wide margin, but it was also at the time the largest software buyout ever completed on record. Email security is just the biggest threat that any company has to worry about. I mean, every single employee in a company has an email account and every single one of those inboxes is targeted for some sort of malicious activity almost on a daily basis. And so Proofpoint was protecting that threat factor, and especially during COVID when none of us were going into the office and all communication became digital, email was really important and it continues to be so even after the pandemic, email volumes have continued to spike and the whole proliferation of AI has allowed email to continue to be a huge threat factor for bad actors. But the thesis is holding strong here.

Seth Boro (07:43):

You always point out to me on this investment as of course many others that our initial assumptions on the company have basically proven out almost to a T, which of course is never easy to do, but the business has just executed throughout the way with multiple leadership changes. And of course today we have Sumit Dhawan as CEO, we brought him in 2023 and he's been an exceptional leader coming out of VMware following its acquisition by Broadcom. Why do you think Sumit has been such a great leader for the business and what did you see when we brought him on as CEO, just in terms of why his skillset would be the right one, his leadership style to carry the company forward?

Andrew Almeida (08:31):

So maybe I'll address both of those, but just in terms of the initial underwrite of the company, it was really scary because this was the first company that we had bought where all the diligence was virtual, and so we never, outside of one dinner, this was the pandemic. This was like peak pandemic when everyone was on lockdown. We got to spend one in-person meeting with the CEO and CFO. And so doing the diligence here was really important just given we never actually got to have that face-to-face session or those face-to-face sessions that we typically get when we buy companies. So it just made calling the business just that much more nerve wracking. And so to see that we are on our original plan today, despite never really getting a chance to sit down and have face-to-face meetings with the company is something I think we're all proud of.

Seth Boro (09:20):

I remember that dinner, the Rosewood in Palo Alto, and I remember it for one specific reason, maybe two, one, it was freezing outside, like absolutely freezing. We're all sitting outside of course during the pandemic, but two, you had not seen other human beings in a while outside of your family, and it was the first meal I think you had had in a long time with other people and you were really excited to be at a restaurant and I think you ordered everything on the menu.

Andrew Almeida (09:49):

I ordered everything on the menu. It was really good to be back in person and one can only eat so much takeout, so it was really nice to be at a restaurant and I took advantage of the whole menu and I think I had four entrees in front of me at one point, so I must have really impressed the management team though, because that didn't scare 'em off.

Seth Boro (10:08):

That was a good fun deal memory. But you're right, it was completely virtual, which actually in some ways made it incredibly efficient because really no one had anything to do. It was very, very orderly in many ways despite the chaos of the moment.

Andrew Almeida (10:20):

Fortunately for our biggest equity check that we had ever written, we had a lot of free time on our hands to due diligence. So it was a lot of time spent in front of the computer, a lot of virtual management meetings and a lot of time going through the data room and doing customer calls. So it helped us out just in terms of Sumit and him coming into that position and why we liked him so much for the role. So first of all, as a CEO, and this is not Proofpoint specific, it's great to just have familiarity and expertise with every single functional area within a company. And if you look at Sumit's background, he comes from a product-based mindset, but he ran go-to market at significant scale for VMware, and so it's very rare that you get a leader that has that product background but also has a scaled go-to market background.

(11:11):

That blend was just really perfect for this role, and his background also was selling into every single industry. He's a horizontal CEO. He is used to selling complex technologies into every sort of company that exists in the world, whether it's finance, insurance, healthcare, energy, high tech. And so his background was really unique and special for this role. The funny story about Sumit though is we had another CEO opening in our portfolio that we were interviewing him for, and that company was just less interesting to him. It was in a different geography in it required him to move him and his family, and it was a space that he was less familiar with versus cybersecurity where he had spent a lot of time and we had an unexpected CEO change at Proofpoint where Seth, you and I got a call from the sitting CEO on a Saturday, I believe, or no, it was a Friday. It was a Friday,

Seth Boro (12:05):

Friday because I remember where it was.

Andrew Almeida (12:07):

Yep, yep. When you say Friday afternoon CEO calls, can only mean one thing typically.

Seth Boro (12:10):

Typically you don't answer them.

Andrew Almeida (12:14):

And we had been interviewing Sumit for this role and he passed, but I kept trying to get a hold of him over the weekend and he thought that I was trying to call him to get him to rethink passing, but I was trying to talk to him about this other role, and so he just kind of ignored my contacts for the Saturday and Sunday that I kept trying. And finally I think I was so annoying and persistent. I said, Hey, we have actually another company that we'd like to talk to you about, and this is the company. I think it's much more straight down the middle for you and it's actually a better fit. And so we got really lucky that the timing aligned and I mean he's just done a great job in the couple of years that he's been there.

Seth Boro (12:50):

Yeah. What do you think the big strategic moves are that he's made that have been the most impactful over his tenure?

Andrew Almeida (12:58):

When you think about the progress that this company's made in the past two years since he's been here, we've owned the company for four, but it's really reinvented itself in the last two years. First he really focused on establishing a strong second pillar for the business. This business is and will always be known as the gold standard of email security. Now we have one of the largest data security businesses in the world, which is a huge area of importance in cybersecurity, and we continue to try and expand that organically. It's the fastest growing part of our portfolio today. It's running very profitably, which I think he focused the business into different product P&Ls, and so we have this very high growth, high profit data security business, and there M&A pipeline is filled with data security prospects as well. And we think that with the move to AI across the enterprise that's securing your data and where that data flows within your enterprise as you're dumping it into LLMs and using it to make decisions for you, this data security business is just going to become more and more important.

(14:01):

So I think he's done a very nice job there on getting that second leg of growth established and getting that engine humming. And then he is, like we said, he's a product individual at heart. He has an incredible vision for the future and he's done a very good job not only defining that strategy and vision for the company, but also in communicating that vision to his board and to potential investors down the road, whether it's an IPO or strategic buyers, but he's done a great job of saying, Hey, this is why we were relevant and this is why we'll continue to maintain relevancy, especially in this AI world that we live in today.

Seth Boro (14:39):

Yeah, Proofpoint is now, it's one of the largest cyber companies in the world. It's focused on the enterprise, some of the most important companies in the world. They've defined this notion of security. I agree. He's done an amazing job leading the company forward. I mean, the business has more than doubled in size under our ownership at scale. It's super profitable. It generates a lot of cash and keeps innovating, especially in this gen AI world that we're in today. Congrats to you on having the vision and also the courage to sponsor an acquisition of this size. It was a first for us at the time and still among our largest investments in our history, and it's been just another amazing cyber investment for Thoma Bravo.

Andrew Almeida (15:28):

Yeah, well, it's been a great deal to be a part of and watching it grow from 65 million of revenue as an associate, it's been a cool journey to be a part of versus as an onlooker and now as a board member and an investor, and so appreciate the partnership from you as well and fostering that sort of innovation and allowing us to do these types of deals.

Orlando Bravo (15:48):

Next up, Seth sits down with Proofpoint, CEO Sumit Dhawan.

Seth Boro (15:55):

Well, Sumit, thanks for being here today. How are you doing?

Sumit Dhawan (15:57):

I'm doing well.

Seth Boro (15:58):

This is season four, so we appreciate you being here for it. We're well versed in this podcast world at this point. And so in 2023, we called you, we tried to hire you, but not for Proofpoint for another company that was potentially not in your wheelhouse or maybe a company that wasn't quite as good a fit. And then we bothered you enough that we were able to get you interested in Proofpoint and we're fortunate that you're now the leader of that business and it's been a great run. But tell us, what was it that got you excited about the Proofpoint CEO role back in 2023? Because at the time you were at VMware and it was in the midst of its acquisition with Broadcom, you had a lot of great opportunities.

Sumit Dhawan (16:44):

I remember having lunch with you I think almost March of 2023, and that's when we started to get to know each other. I didn't know anything about Thoma Bravo at that point, and I was sort of expecting a transition as the transaction between VMware and Broadcom was closing. And so we started getting to know each other and Andrew and I spoke several times and I remember getting a call from Andrew and I was telling Andrew, Andrew, you're being too persistent. Something must be wrong. So then he is like, no, no, no, I really want want to talk to you. We have a different opportunity. And right away, I think it was a 48 hour or maybe a three day process from me getting to know a little bit about Proofpoint to having dinner with you, and I think Sunday night when we said, okay, we should just grab dinner and just what got me attracted to Proofpoint one, I think getting to know you and Andrew and getting to know just the philosophy of how you invest in a company who's a leader in the market and you just want to make sure you focus and grow the business.

(17:53):

And there was just so many things that checked my boxes in terms of what I wanted to do, and many of them have come out to be true. So it's been an amazing run and a lot of the things that we talked about I still remember two years ago have turned out to be how we predicted together.

Seth Boro (18:08):

Yeah, it's been a great last couple of years and the company continues to perform incredibly well, very strategic. When you walked in, what were some of the challenges that you remember facing just as a new CEO of this really well-established and respected company on day one?

Sumit Dhawan (18:30):

I still remember, I think the hardest thing was the company had done really, really well. I do think whenever there is a CEO transition, there's just a question mark about how will the new CEO do things? And that was one challenge that I had to overcome, just get the team along and make sure that we just keep an eye on the prize. I think outside of that, I'd say just focus. At the point in the last two years, we decided we would focus, we put our mission to be the leader in this human-centric security. We clearly saw that when it came to email security, it's going to keep growing because of just threats growing due to AI and then data loss, which is becoming a bigger, bigger problem all done because of humans who lose data. And we said that this is an area which is our ours to lose if we don't innovate. And the only reason why we wouldn't innovate would be if we lose focus and try to do too many things. And just by being focused and keeping the team who believed in it to be aligned on that mission has gotten us to perform extremely well. So we are quite proud of what we have done. Looking forward to what's next.

Seth Boro (19:42):

Tell us a little bit about human-centric security and also how that has changed with the advent of now Gen AI, which we're really a couple of years into at this point. What have you seen around the world from a threat perspective? Because I think that's obviously one of the, unfortunately one of the huge tailwinds of the business.

Sumit Dhawan (20:05):

Yeah. Well, fortunately for us, clearly it's a nuisance for the market, but we are kind of proud of what we have done with our tech platform to counter against it. So Gen AI, and I think there is something to do with crypto as well because the global threat volume from an advanced threat perspective and just the percentage of actual ransomware that start from simple email or some collaboration based attacks has grown tremendously at this point in time. We are seeing, we process between one to 2 trillion enterprise messages and that growth in number of messages that we process far outnumbered just our business growth. Partly and purely it's advanced threats that are growing. Advanced threats have doubled year over year just in the last 12 months, and that's not going to stop countries.

Seth Boro (20:54):

That's amazing.

Sumit Dhawan (20:55):

And languages, think about it, Japan, Middle East, Korea, even parts of India, and these were protected regions because of languages and a little bit because of currencies. Okay, that's not the case at this point in time. And so we have had to innovate as well. Actually, to be candid, about two to two and a half years ago, we probably had the least we call this efficacy, which is the percentage of threats that escape us and our system.

(21:22):

And our efficacy was down to where we were missing two out of a hundred, which is really bad for us. Our competition is still at two to three out of a hundred that they miss. We have actually used AI in our systems to improve the efficacy where we now can detect the intent behind the messages that our customers are receiving and can filter out the bad ones from the good ones, and now we can protect where we only missed two or three out of thousand, and that's world class, okay. So we are quite proud of it, but it was again, AI as a tailwind, but we had to use AI in a very sophisticated fashion to actually prevent against these attackers.

Seth Boro (22:04):

It's interesting what you say about crypto and is the idea there that just now given with the ability to transfer currency.

Sumit Dhawan (22:11):

Exactly.

Seth Boro (22:11):

because of international fraud.

Sumit Dhawan (22:11):

You know fraud used to be that it would've been too difficult to do fraudulent transactions without crypto, but now with crypto it can happen in any geography and it's just easier.

Seth Boro (22:24):

And plus you now add the language and proper syntax and context on top of that.

Sumit Dhawan (22:29):

Exactly.

Seth Boro (22:30):

What's been your biggest challenge internally that started with the advent of Gen AI? How have you managed that? Because it is in many ways, it's one of the biggest platform shifts, if you want to call it that, potentially of the last decade really since cloud become a big platform shift?

Sumit Dhawan (22:48):

Yeah, I'd say that I think part of it is always comes down to talent and capital allocation. In this role. I do think we had an issue where we were spread a bit too thin. We had put our feet into maybe areas where we didn't have rights to play and rights to win. So just stepping out of that gave me opportunity to double down into areas of investment that required focus for us to sustain our leadership. And secondly, talent. I was a bit lucky there. I did when I came in, we have an amazing AI leader and leadership team. The only issue I saw was that AI leadership team didn't have teeth and accountability and responsibility to actually drive that innovation into the product in the hands of the customers. They were a little bit off on the side. There were two camps. Obviously when you're going through that focus, you had to make sure that you sort of streamlined the leadership team a little bit more in terms of the areas where we had to focus on.

(23:43):

We had to reduce our lines of business leaders and double down in the areas where we wanted to go win, which I tried to do pretty quickly. But once we did that, we actually saw the leadership team commit. They really just embraced the challenge. And today we have, if you think about it, I can't think of any other single system in the world which is processing this much natural language processing through generative AI models real time. We are doing it real time every second. I just want to make sure nothing goes wrong, but the system keeps processing and deflecting all of these bad messages every minute of every day.

Seth Boro (24:26):

It's incredible to see. And one of the things that I was most impressed by is how quickly you were able to put product in market and you are serving some of the biggest companies in the world, right? This is a enterprise company. You have, is it 98% of the Fortune 500? Is it all of the Fortune 500? Where are we today?

Sumit Dhawan (24:49):

They're closer to 90%. There are still that we have to go work on and out of Fortune 1000. We are also majority of them.

Seth Boro (24:58):

It's amazing. One of the things that we talk about often is just the incumbency advantage of being in this gen AI world. How have you and data so important in that? How have you managed through the data rights needed to really be effective given all the information you see and what's that discussion been like with customers?

Sumit Dhawan (25:20):

Yeah, I think customers rightfully so have become more protective of making sure that when the AI is being used, we are not using just proprietary data for training any of the models, and they're not losing control of something that's data that's built their businesses. What we have done is we have made sure whenever we are training and are giving the context to our models, because our models need to be given context. Without that context, the models will take too long. You can actually ask chat GPT today. If this message is a potential phishing attack, it'll be pretty accurate in telling you yes or no, but it'll take 15 seconds to probably give you the response and take a lot of compute and money. We have to do that with very little compute and high speed. And to do so, we need the data by making the model be able to do one thing really, really well at high speed, low cost, and that's our secret sauce and making sure these models run real time as an ensemble of models always.

(26:22):

Okay. That's sort of our secret sauce in the system. And the way this secret sauce continues to get better and better against the competition is by us getting to see all of these bad emails day in and day out. We do that by having large majority of the enterprise customers are the prime targets for all the threat actors for obvious reasons. And when we get this, we filter the information. Anything we miss out from any of our clients, our entire community of customers benefit for that particular threat and more importantly, for any enhancement to our model that the models get fed in. At this point in time, our models are updating once a month and new models are getting introduced once every three to four months.

Seth Boro (27:09):

It is interesting. I mean, it is a network effects business that way,

Sumit Dhawan (27:11):

Total network effect. I think that for all of our enterprise customers, they realize that they're joining a community of protecting each other by contributing not their data, but what they filtered out. That's incredible and such a win-win.

Seth Boro (27:27):

Today, the business is approaching several billion of top line revenue, which puts it really in the very, very top tier. There's not many companies that are bigger today in cyber in the world. Where do you think this cyber industry goes from here and where do you see Proofpoint fitting into this landscape in the longterm?

Sumit Dhawan (27:52):

Yeah, I think cyber industry is maybe or two, one of two tech industries, which has been highly fragmented. And it's been probably because when the whole cloud and mobile came in, there was just too many attack surface areas. So the cyber disciplines got set up, and I do think that venture overfunded just too many startups and just delivering one point solution for one pain point, and that ended up creating a bit of a plethora of tools and technologies in most enterprises. And CIOs and CSOs both are at this point of time making it a priority for them to go lean on fewer technology providers as their strategic partners that build integrated platforms that fit together. There are three or four areas in cybersecurity that really come bubble up preventive solution like ours, defense or detection solutions, maybe someone like CrowdStrike Network Solutions like Palo Alto and Identity Solutions.

(28:56):

I mean, those three or four solutions need to work together at this point of time as enterprise platforms of cyber. So there's a tremendous opportunity for a player like Proofpoint to potentially just keep extending the solution area. And with the emergence of just AI agents that are coming in the surface area of risk grows, not shrinks. So the cyber becomes more important for protecting not just people, but also their digital counterparts in terms of AI agents. And that's getting me excited. I think this is an opportunity where Proofpoint ends up becoming one of the three or four cybersecurity platform providers of the future.

Seth Boro (29:39):

Yeah, I completely, and I think one thing we're seeing today is, I mean, there is so many startups in this gen AI world in every discipline, but in cyber we're seeing it everywhere. And so the reality is it's going to be very tricky over time for those smaller vendors to be standalone companies in many cases. Some of that innovation that's taken place, I think we'll start to see very quickly in the larger platform vendors. But I do see Proofpoint as a big consolidator in this market over time. It's such a trusted vendor to the most important companies everywhere. And one thing that's really interesting is historically the business has been really strong domestically here in the us. Part of that is just due to industry dynamics. To your point earlier, email was just a bigger problem here than it was in other parts of the world.

(30:30):

And now you have this massive international opportunity. I mean, we see it in our own growth rate in the company today. And so I think there's a really long-term growth path here. And I think as part of that, we become a really, really strategic important vendor in the market for a really long time. How do you think about M&A? What's your strategy around it? Obviously we've been active, we've, we've been a strategic acquirers, we see a lot. We have areas to build out that we're actively looking in, but what's your general philosophy and how do you decide on buying versus building?

Sumit Dhawan (31:03):

I'd say number one sort of strategic philosophy we have used is double down in your core. And we've done that quite well. We did an acquisition of a company called Tessian, which has been greatly successful. We brought together this sort of adaptive way of detecting where data may be leaving. We've all done this as people working on email. We type in a message, we sort of write up, let's say if I'm sending an email to seth@thomabravo.com, I know another Seth and Outlook auto fills a different Seth, and now I'm sending the wrong message to the wrong recipient. We've built sort of this AI based technology which detects the context for every communication that humans do. And if we send or try to send something that's incorrect to the wrong person, it would nudge you and ask you that you have another set in your address book.

(31:56):

Do you really want to send this to this Seth versus the Seth that it thinks and it's the right one that you should be sending a message to. So that's kind of like I would say double down in your sort of core areas. And then second thing we have just announced we are hopefully very close to closing is we have been traditionally a large enterprise company. And what we are seeing is the smaller businesses are getting attacked with the same level of sophisticated threats because running these attacks is very low cost now. There are bot nets that can run these sort of real social engineering attacks at small companies, and there is really no solution for this. And their requirements, cyber keep growing, so all the human-centric protection that's needed for the enterprise, they're also needed for small businesses. We found and discovered the industry leader in protecting small businesses through MSPs. So that's what I would say

Seth Boro (32:54):

That's really exciting,

Sumit Dhawan (32:55):

Double down and growing the core because it's kind of adds competencies, either technology or market competencies. I think the second area, which is very interesting for us is this emergence of AI and how you're going to do data security and just the overall AI security that is, again, very adjacent to us and is a natural extension for our platform. And we are actively assessing players, always talking on an ongoing basis. I don't see how smaller startups can really build as successful of a business themselves then joining and partnering with a platform provider like us because we bring all the customer base and a technology incumbency, which is what exactly what CIOs and CISOs need.

Seth Boro (33:40):

And of course you have at its core, Proofpoint is a very innovative company. So it's not like, I think sometimes people often think that these large enterprises with these incredibly talented engineers are just sitting still watching the world around them. I mean, they see the same things. One thing that we know is happening with AI is it's making our best developers even better. And so there's now the ability to really compete at speed and we have that scale. So I think it's different being an incumbent today than it was when we saw some of the first platform shifts. Some companies obviously did really well with those transitions from client server to cloud and others did not. But today what I see a lot of is these really hyper innovative companies like ourselves with great talent internally using these tools to be really powerful and really interesting and doing great things for their customers. Do you think as we go into this agentic world, which is, we talk about a lot, but it's just starting to happen. Are all of these agents going to have email addresses and inboxes, and is that another massive opportunity that we see around the corner?

Sumit Dhawan (34:52):

I think the agents will have email addresses. Copilots themselves will communicate and collaborate on behalf of individuals. So we already have the underpinnings of the technology platform. We actually today allow you, when you're building your agents on any cloud AWS and soon on Azure, you can really just go use our APIs and get all the protection of your collaboration via agents. And we do protection of copilots today. So we think that could be a very interesting opportunity. It is early days, I would say the next 12 to 18 months before the agent communication and collaboration using emails and teams or other forms of collaboration is going to start.

Seth Boro (35:36):

Yeah, it's fascinating to think about the volumes that are potentially around the corner. I mean, it's right. We've been living in this linear world, but that's about to change pretty quickly.

Sumit Dhawan (35:49):

We actually have one of the largest sort of retail client with a lot of agentic based customer service that's sort of really looking at our platform to be the underpinnings of all of that agentic security today. I mean, probably to be rolled out over the course of next few months.

Seth Boro (36:07):

Yeah. When you look forward, 10 years is the goal to be, because we're going to be beyond human-centric security, so what will our leadership be?

Sumit Dhawan (36:16):

Yeah. Earlier this year we sort of put our goal, we call it, there are two aspects to it. We said by 2030 we want to be at a certain size on the business. And then earlier this year at a customer conference, we introduced the extension of our platform from human centric to human agent centric. So it means our platform now can be extended to be able to do everything that you need to protect collaboration and data. Those are the two things that humans and agents work on.

(36:48):

They collaborate with each other and they deal with information that's kind of the digital life of a human, as well as it's the work that agents will do. And when we showed our customers the risks that humans have and the risks that AI have, there's a lot of similarities. Humans get targeted through social engineering, AI gets targeted through prompt engineering. Humans and AI both can run malware. Human and agents both lose data. Why? Because AI is supposed to mimic humans. So it's of course got a lot of similarities. So earlier this year we had a product teams just really think about what will all the AI risks be that are like humans and how you would extend the platform to protect AI just like we protect humans today. And our teams came up with the solutions. We introduced and launched our solutions at a conference, and we said, there's going to be data security solutions, and there's going to be collaboration, security solution for AI agents, which will just be an extension of our platform.

Seth Boro (37:45):

Really exciting. Sumit, you've been an amazing leader at Proofpoint. I mean, you're running one of the most important companies in cyber in the world. You do it with humility, you're very thoughtful, you've built a great team. People want to work for you. You can see it. You've retained the people you've wanted to retain, and you've hired other great executives into the business. Where did that style come from, just as you look at your career? Who were your mentors along the way and how did that evolve and how do you find yourself in this position you're in today?

Sumit Dhawan (38:16):

Well, firstly, thanks for the kind comments, and nothing is taken for granted as you know in this job every day. But listen, I think I've been lucky in having great mentors and you have to go seek people for mentorship. There are two great CEOs. I worked for, one at Citrix and one at VMware. Both of them had esteemed careers as CEOs themselves. I just observed them, and in both cases, they both mentored me as well, pushed me, coached me, told me what I was doing wrong, and just the art of storytelling, the art of empathy, the art of just operational discipline. And there's different things I learned from both of them. There are different sort of type of leaders. I think one thing that was common with both of them was just this, bringing your full self, your energy and be the company will be as big as you are and as big as you can think. So I just feel like those are the two things I have to do day in and day out. Just bring my full self to work. Every bit of energy I have, as well as I have to be the one that have to be thinking as big as I can. Because if I think small, the company thinks small.

Seth Boro (39:32):

And somewhere along the way, also you clearly learned, or maybe it's innate. Their results matter too, because all of that can be true. But of course, if you don't perform and deliver, you're not creating value. And then there's things strategically you can't do to be as great a company as you can be. So that's been really impressive to watch. Also, that that's not an afterthought for you. It's like everything starts with performance.

Sumit Dhawan (40:00):

It does. And with performance, one thing I've noticed is in all the businesses we are living on the edge. It's like 2% or 3% here versus there matters a lot. And so I sort of always try to think about what is that last five to 10% that's sometimes going to need 80% of the time. And usually in my experience, that's what just tilts. Tilts the playing field in your direction in terms of performance.

Seth Boro (40:30):

Especially at our scale. Those 1, 2, 3 percents really add up and matter quite a bit. They do. Well, Sumit, thanks so much for being here today. It's been an absolute pleasure just as it is to have worked with you for these last couple of years and just thrilled about what the future holds for the company and our partnership. We look forward to further discussions on this and kind of getting behind the scenes a little bit in next week's session of Beyond the Deal.

Sumit Dhawan (40:59):

Well, thanks for having me, and thanks for the partnership and support Seth.

Orlando Bravo (41:08):

Listen to Thoma Bravo's Behind the Deal, season four on Spotify, apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.