From GCHQ to Darktrace and VC: Dave Palmer on Cybersecurity and the biggest lessons he learned as a Founder

Dave Palmer co-founded Darktrace and scaled it from startup to IPO and a $5.3 billion acquisition. He now backs the next generation of Cybersecurity founders as General Partner at Ten Eleven Ventures. At GBx’s latest Coming to America event in London, he shared what he’s learned on his journey and what he’s most excited about in Cyber today. 

 

What excites you, and worries you most in Cyber today?

Honestly, the answer to both is the same: AI coding agents and how fast they’re getting better.

We’re right on the cusp of coding agents being able to find incredible numbers of software vulnerabilities in existing systems, and while exciting, that’s also going to be a bit of a nightmare. We’re probably going to have to fix and change decades’ worth of software risks. We’ve never done that as a global ecosystem before.

The good news is that once we’re through it, the world will be in a much safer place. But in the meantime, it’s going to be a bumpy ride. A lot of companies and organisations are going to get that wrong. 

 

What lessons did you have to learn the hard way during your time building Darktrace? 

Moving away from describing how clever the product was, or how clever the team was, and learning to tell stories about why Darktrace would make customers successful.

It took me years to get that right, but once we had it was material across everything: selling to customers large and small, and even taking the company to IPO and pitching major investors. The frame is always the same. It’s about telling stories of how your customers can be successful, not how impressive you are.

 

As a VC, what makes you lean in on a Cyber startup pitch?

Founders who are fixing problems for companies and customers, rather than finding more things that a human has to go and fix.

We cannot keep adding items to people’s to-do lists. The industry has spent too long throwing clever ideas over the wall at customers and expecting them to figure it out. That isn’t good enough anymore. The pitches that get my attention are the ones solving problems, not just surfacing them.

 

What separates a good Cyber startup from a global category leader? 

Products and services that deliver outcomes for customers quickly, and in ways that both the customer and their boss can see and prove.

Historically, a lot of great ideas have been handed off to customers who then had to figure out how to apply them and solve problems for themselves. That model is broken, and the category leaders are the ones delivering measurable outcomes, fast. That’s the bar now.

 

Who has had the biggest influence on your career to date? 

Gaven Smith, who later became CTO of GCHQ. He taught me to focus on discovering why things happen, not just how success happened.

You can apply that to any company you admire: Why did they choose certain sales playbooks or go-to-market approaches? What trade-offs did they make to get there? The answer they arrived at may be completely wrong for your business, so copying success stories doesn’t work unless you really understand the underlying why behind the decisions that shaped them.

 

Dave Palmer was Co-Founder of Darktrace and is General Partner at Ten Eleven Ventures, the original venture capital fund focused solely on Cybersecurity. 

By Hannah Holland