Raising $61 Million to Fortify Open Source Software with Dan Lorenc, Co-founder & CEO of Chainguard

The Peel with Turner Novak

Dan Lorenc is the Co-founder and CEO of Chainguard, the best way to secure your open source software. Dan and his co-founders Kim, Matt, and Ville started the company in 2021 after spending a decade working together at Google on all things open source and software security. They’ve since raised $116 million from investors including Spark (led Series B), Sequoia (led Series A), Amplify (led Seed), The Chainsmoker’s Mantis VC, Banana Capital, and dozens of angels in the cyber security and open source communities. — Topics discussed:

• What is the “software supply chain”?
• How the SolarWinds breach created the software supply chain security market
• The history of open source software
• Why open source software makes software supply chains even less secure
• The moment Dan and his co-founders decided to start Chainguard
• Why they started selling consulting services before even building a product
• The reason their first two products solved completely different problems (top-down and bottoms-up), and why the one that didn’t work at first is now their main business
• Why Chainguard decided to focus on a broad communications and marketing strategy so early on
• How Dan gets quoted in major media publications as an early stage startup founder
• Why Chainguard uses memes for marketing
• Why Dan thinks startups should “make content optimized for the group chat”
• How they raised their Seed round from Amplify a week after leaving Google
• Raising a Series A from Sequoia as the market started collapsing in Spring of 2022
• Dan’s advice for founders on dealing with investor inbound when not fundraising
• Why he wish he hired sales reps sooner
• Raising a Series B from Spark Capital to accelerate their enterprise sales process

— Referenced:

• https://www.chainguard.dev
• https://www.sigstore.dev/
• Battling the Trojan Horse in Open Source: https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/dan-lorenc-chainguard-spotlight/
• Chainguard Series B Announcement: https://www.chainguard.dev/unchained/series-b-funding
• Dan’s favorite open source project: https://github.com/jqlang/jq
• Reflections on Trusting Trust: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf

— Where to find Dan:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lorenc_dan
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danlorenc

— Where to find Turner:

• Newsletter: https://www.thespl.it
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak
• Banana Capital: https://bananacapital.vc

— Production and distribution by: https://www.supermix.io — Want to sponsor the show? https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSebvhBlDDfHJyQdQWs8RwpFxWg-UbG0H-VFey05QSHvLxkZPQ/viewform