Christina Cacioppo

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy · Christina Cacioppo - Building an Enduring Software Company in the…

• Why Is Pay for Vanta's Top People Up 10x?

  Christina Cacioppo says total pay for the top person at Vanta is probably ten times what that seat paid five years ago, and she thinks it should be higher. Her rule is that you never pay the top people enough. You should always try, and you will not get there. Comp bands are a joke, because the survey data is already wrong. The number that matters is whatever those people are being offered now. What she is paying for is a high-context person who knows the company, the customers, and the domain, makes reasonable decisions, fixes the bad ones, and keeps moving.

  The rate is still accelerating. The brake would be investors pushing back on dilution and stock-based pay. The industry had that argu

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• Why Is Vanta Paying for Customers' AI Tokens?

  Christina Cacioppo says Vanta is eating the AI token cost and taking a lower margin. Customers notice a markup and compare it with the model itself, so marking tokens up is a comparison the product loses. About 25 percent of customers are already in the flow where an agent goes off and does the work, and she wants that at 75 percent. Retention and the experience come first. Price can wait until the usage is real.

  The end state she wants is outcome pricing, getting paid for the result. Everyone she talks to wants that, and she likes the alignment from her years teaching microeconomics. Patrick O'Shaughnessy separates a closed support ticket, an output, from the outcome the customer actually

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• How Did Vanta Lose Its Famous Billboard?

  Christina Cacioppo says Vanta lost the billboard spot the company was known for because the deal was a placement order, not a multi-year contract. She had told podcast listeners the contract was locked up for years. It was not.

  The billboard got famous, and people kept asking how Vanta did billboards. Referrals to one agency contact added up to millions of dollars of business. Years later, at a dinner, a startup friend said they had just signed the same spot. The supposed contract was written in crayon: there was no real contract. The contact called it a placement order. The other company paid more, so the spot was swapped out underneath Vanta. She went to that founder ready to pay almost a

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• Why Does AI Help Security Chiefs Get Budget?

  Christina Cacioppo says security chiefs are much more likely to get budget for an enterprise risk overhaul today because the request is attached to AI. Over the past couple of years, Vanta has spent more time with government at the federal, state, and local levels inside the U.S. and outside the U.S. There is an appetite for modernization. It is a big stated priority of the current U.S. administration, and the same appetite exists outside the U.S. AI created more FOMO in government officials. They may have always known they did not have modern processes or modern software, but the gap feels more of an imperative now.

  The conversation around AI has changed the priority and raised the priorit

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• How Do AI Models Change Security Bug Priority?

  Christina Cacioppo says AI models are far more persistent than people, so issues that look low severity on their own get chained into a real finding, and teams have to fix problems as fast as they find them.

  Models will try nine quadrillion things where a person would give up after 9000. Some of what they surface are zero days people had not found before, or had not found in public. The bigger change is chaining 17 benign or only benign-ish issues into one real result. An OpenAI talk at RSA about Hugging Face showed the same pattern: persistence, then joining items a person would call low severity and plan to fix in 90 days. Someone would still wait 90 days and do other work first. Machines

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• Are French Software Companies Using Chinese Models?

  Christina Cacioppo learned that a lot of the French software companies in Paris are using Chinese models predominantly. She was with customers in France a couple of weeks ago, and the pattern surprised her. She first thought the reason was nationalism, maybe an anti-American feeling, and she suggested that out loud. Someone corrected her very quickly: absolutely not.

  The companies had all switched to Chinese models when Trump closed Fable off to non-Americans. They realized there is a huge business continuity risk. They cannot trust that if they build a business on one American model, the model will always be available. So they stopped doing that.

  French software companies in Paris describ

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• How Do You Get a Team to Adopt AI?

  Christina Cacioppo says the hard part of adopting AI that has paid off is simply getting people to use it, with personal use coming first.

  Building something for the company on your own does not matter. What matters is knowing where the models are good, where they are bad, and what a harness means, and doing that check at least every two weeks because the tools change so quickly. A visceral sense of what works and what does not is what lets a leader answer when someone says they will fire all of the SDRs because they built one agent, and press on where that claim is true and where it is false. The aim is to get as many other people as possible into the same hands-on work.

  A year ago, peopl

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• Why Is an 80% Growth Software Business Worth Less Than a Faster One?

  Christina Cacioppo says a business growing 80 percent with 80 percent margins returns more cash over a long stretch than one growing 160 percent with 30 percent margins, yet the faster business is valued at three or four times the multiple, and the gap can reach ten times. She calls living through that cognitive dissonance.

  Patrick O'Shaughnessy sets up the market side: Vanta is still growing very fast, with the high margins that looked like the best model four years ago, and nothing about that got worse, yet the multiple on a business like it is a third or a quarter of the old level. She still wants to do what customers want, which may or may not be token pricing that pushes a company towa

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• What Does Vanta Do for Companies?

  Christina Cacioppo started Vanta about eight years ago to help companies build and earn trust. Building trust means starting security programs and compliance programs, or maturing the ones a company already has, then earning credit from customers through audits such as a SOC 2, ISO 27001, or HIPAA, plus security questionnaires and trust centers. The bet was that a security company could grow by helping companies put security in place because customers were already asking for it.

  Vanta was initially known for SOC 2. A billboard on the 101 led her to joke that the company was mostly known for making billboards. The work started very compliance and audit centric. The audit was always just one

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