The Tale of Silver Tail Systems

I have so much respect for people who fought online criminals for eBay and PayPal. There hasn’t been a set of websites more highly targeted by cybercriminals and fraudsters.  The founders of Silver Tail, Mike Eynon and Laura Mather, were colleagues on the anti-fraud team at eBay/PayPal for three years and had a front row seat to the newest attack techniques and the most beguiling exploits. It stands to reason that the team pioneering security and anti-fraud techniques at the tip of the spear would come up with a breakthrough technology. This was the genesis of Silver Tail.

After testing with customers, it was clear that Mike and Laura were on to something special but desperately needed help to scale. The product needed many refinements and it was clear that they should bring in a seasoned executive to help them with sales, marketing, and building a team. Enter Tim Eades as their new CEO and partner. Tim had been a longtime sales and marketing executive at IBM and a CEO at Everyone.net. His aggressive, take-no-prisoners competitiveness, indomitable work ethic, and remarkable ability to enroll customers and recruits made him the perfect fit.

When Andreessen Horowitz first started looking at Silver Tail, they had just been named to the Gartner Magic Quadrant (MQ) as the furthest out on the “Visionary” or “X” axis. This MQ position fairly reflected the stage of the company and the founders’ technical breakthrough.

Source: Gartner (February 2011)

On the “Y” axis however, which measures “Execution,” Silver Tail was still in its infancy. They had a total of 15 customers using the product, with only a few paying, and the rest in beta. That said, customers were not on the fence with how they felt about it: “We’ve never seen anything like it!” and “They are charging too little…”

So, they had a proven technology and a few rabidly fanatical customers. At this point, the company’s future was going to revolve around it executing flawlessly to win the market. And they did that and more. The team’s accomplishments are exemplified by the most recent (May 2012) Gartner MQ:

Source: Gartner (May 2012)

It’s the story of how the team, driven by Tim, deployed the product, acquired customers, scaled the company, and accelerated into a tornado in merely 18 months:

• Almost two thirds of the top US banks have deployed the product or are in the process of deploying.
• A skeleton crew of 12 expanded to a global team of nearly 100, including top notch teams in Federal and European markets.
• Three new, world-class executives joined the team to lead product and marketing, engineering and finance. Each one built a remarkable team of rock stars.
• An irreverent, open-communication, and high-performing culture helped attract and retain top talent.
• Huge success in ecommerce.
• Customer responsiveness became a true market differentiator as the team overemphasized quality and support. In fact, existing customer referrals are Silver Tail’ s largest source of new leads.
• The company was cash flow positive in the first half of their 2012 fiscal year.

This “hockey stick” ramp reflects the disruptive nature of Silver Tail’s Web Session Intelligence technology and the rapidly shifting frame of reference currently underway in the security space. Analyzing “snapshots in time” of network traffic and deploying “signatures” is not keeping up with the innovation of hackers and cybercriminals.

Silver Tail’s success in the market did not go unnoticed. We are announcing today that Silver Tail has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by EMC/RSA. From the very beginning, Tim and the founders had a vision of helping to eliminate fraud and deploying their technology as widely as possible. With EMC’s worldwide presence and resources, they will achieve these goals much faster and integrate into a broader set of security and anti-fraud technologies.

Please join me in congratulating Tim, Laura, Mike and the rest of the incredible Silver Tail team in marrying the ultimate peanut butter-and-chocolate combo: A breakthrough technology innovation with near-flawless execution!

I would also like to thank my partners, Mark Cranney, Jeff Stump and the entire a16z team for all of their extra effort with Silver Tail – it made a meaningful difference…