Published 24 November 2022 in Audio articles • 8 min read • 
Audio available
The past year has been an exciting one for Mimecast, the cybersecurity company I founded nearly 20 years ago in London with fellow South African Neil Murray. After more than six exciting years trading on Nasdaq, Mimecast is private again, following its acquisition by Permira.
Entrepreneurs set out to solve problems, and certainly, since founding Mimecast, cybercrime continues to be a large, ever-evolving problem, with growing recognition among business leaders that cyber-based threats are a significant business risk. Five years ago, only 58% of board members considered such threats a risk, according to our latest global report on the state of email security. In 2021 that figure rose to 88%.
Mimecast was built to help companies reduce the risk of malicious activity, human error and technology failure. It was, and continues to be, our guiding principle to enable organizations and their employees to be protected at work.
With more people working remotely than ever before, it completely changes an organization’s threat landscape and leaves them vulnerable to attack. Our report also reflected this: eight out of 10 organizations said they were bracing for the fallout from an email-based cyberattack, and three-quarters had been hurt by a ransomware attack in the past year, up from 61% the year before.
According to (ISC)² there is a global shortfall of 3.12 million cybersecurity professionalsIn fact, 2021 appeared to be the worst year on record for cybersecurity, with no signs that the threat is diminishing in 2022. As the head of a cybersecurity business, the point for me is not whether we can ever solve all the risks, but whether we can develop products and services that chip away at those risks in a meaningful way.
None of us likes criminals. But if you don’t like criminals, you’ve got to dislike cybercriminals even more because they are the hardest to bring to account. Cybercriminals are cowardly and parasitic and feed off the vulnerability of people and technologies. As they say, there is no honor among thieves. Cybercriminals will create a vulnerability and then hand it over to the most horrific state or organization without thinking or caring about the downstream consequences. The truth is that because our work is preventative, we will never truly know the value we create, but knowing the disasters we could be averting is motivation enough.
One thing I have paid careful attention to over time is the curation of the destiny of this organization. This means carefully considering whom we partner with and when. I believe that great businesses take a long time to develop and grow and need effort over a long period from committed people. This includes shareholders.
We were fortunate enough to found Mimecast with our own money, given that both Neil and I had already both built and sold technology companies early in our careers. When we ran out of our own money we brought in angel investors, friends, and family. In doing so we built the business to a point where we had a very strong negotiating hand with venture investors that came in between 2008 and 2012. Maintaining a significant amount of control, I believe, was instrumental in ensuring that we kept the business moving in the direction we wanted.
We grew the company to the point of taking it public in 2015. If you can continue to deliver and perform as a public company, it really puts the board and the management team in a very strong position of control over the destiny of the business. Yes, you are answerable to dozens or even hundreds of shareholders, but in some ways you’re not specifically answerable to any one of them because their individual shareholding is actually very small.
This next step in our journey is a big one. We are going from a listed company into a position where Permira owns 99% of the company. While it’s been a difficult stage for me, I have had to trust the process with the board responsible for making the decisions and recommendations to shareholders. We met a few different funds that were interested in investing in Mimecast.
Thankfully, with Permira I immediately felt very comfortable that they would be a partner that would be a very good custodian of the next leg of our journey. As CEO of a listed company I couldn’t have forced that outcome, but I feel very fortunate that they did end up with a bid that our board found favorable.
“We will never truly know the value we create, but knowing the disasters we could be averting is motivation enough”
So, what’s next for Mimecast? After growing this business for 20 years, and maybe exceeding our early expectations of what’s possible, the question that I ask myself is, how can we use our imagination, creativity and ambition to think about what could be even bigger and broader?
As we have had more and more exposure to different international markets and gained more visibility on the size and the scale of the opportunity, we have realized that having 40,000 customers and around $700 million of annual recurring revenues is by no means the top end of what’s possible in this market and for this company.
We have new technologies and deployment options for new customers to adopt our technology that we think can help us to attract the next 20,000 customers much faster than we attracted our last 20,000. Obviously, over time, there will be more new products, both those that we can build organically and products that we can acquire.
I remain an entrepreneur and an entrepreneurial culture is important to me, but I have also been a CEO for two decades. As the business has grown across geographies and in headcount, we have had to become more corporate and more structured. Thankfully, over time, we have brought in executives who have proved to be excellent at achieving this. That said, I do remain committed to sustaining the entrepreneurial flavor, to keeping the sense of opportunity and to challenging the status quo.
My job is to produce results that nobody could predict
This is something that I am looking forward to harnessing as we go private again. In a public company, predictability is at a premium. I remember clearly in around 2010 one of our venture capital board members with listing ambitions saying to me, “Peter, your job is to make this company’s growth as predictable as possible.” I was a little bit huffy in my youth, and a little irreverent. “I don’t see that as my job at all,” I replied. “My job is to produce results that nobody could predict.”
The reality is that we were probably both right. I learned from him in that moment, and we certainly did take his advice on board, and that, in part, enabled our listing and our growth. However, I am sure that no one at that table could have predicted the growth we have achieved in the past 12 years.
As we move from being a predictable public company to a private one, I am excited about the prospect of being able to think longer term, to being bolder in the way we develop talent and technologies, without having to worry about whether they will pay off quickly enough to satisfy our share price and many shareholders. The reality is that Permira are in in the boat with us, for better or for worse, for probably the next four to eight or so years. Together our ambition is to ultimately build a bigger and better business, and I am excited by the prospect of what the next chapter holds, and to the role that we can continue to play in taking on cybercrime.
Confrontation was always seen as an essential weapon for campaigners, but a new era of cooperation is proving equally effective. With the right approach, everyone can be a winner. ...
Audio available
Scenario planning is more valuable than ever – but what is it and how can executives implement it effectively? Peter Schwartz, author of the highly influential book The Art of the Long...
Søren Toft, CEO of MSC Mediterranean Shipping Company, makes the case for respecting the legacy of a family-owned business when taking the helm....
The diversification of actors and a widening of issues challenges the traditional model of diplomacy. A convergence of skills is needed from the public and private sectors to facilitate engagement between states,...
Audio availableYou have 4 of 5 articles left to read.