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dnsUNFILTERED: Ken Carnesi, DNSFilter
Podcast > Episode 26 | April 28, 2025
In this episode of dnsUNFILTERED, Mikey sits down with Ken Carnesi, CEO and co-founder of DNSFilter, for an unfiltered conversation on entrepreneurship, DNS filtering, company culture, competition, and what it means to protect real people from real threats. From solving sketchy hotel Wi-Fi problems with DNS to acquiring threat intelligence tools like Webshrinker, Ken shares how DNSFilter went from startup to one of the fastest-growing players in cybersecurity.
Mikey Pruitt
Welcome, everybody, to another episode of DNS Unfiltered. Today, I'm joined by a very special guest, Ken Carnegie, the CEO of DNSFilter. Welcome to the show, Ken.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Thanks Mikey, good to see you.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, glad to have you here. I've been trying to get Ken on the pod for a little while, but as you can imagine, CEOs get a little busy. A little bit. Yeah, that's okay. That's okay. We won't tell the audience that. So I kind of wanted to start out talking to Ken about...
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
You're happy to be here. Little bit. Think we rescheduled this like three times now.
haha
Mikey Pruitt
How you kind of developed into DNSFilter because you've not always been the CEO of DNSFilter. Like you did things before that and somehow all of your experiences led up to a very important company in the DNS space. I'm curious about that backstory a little bit.
Ken - CEO, DNSFilter
Yeah, yeah, definitely. mean, so well, yeah, before DNSFilter ⁓ back in in school and in college at Boston College in 2007, ⁓ I started a company called Anaptics to design, deploy and maintain large Wi-Fi networks. So I would say it's a hybrid between like an MSP and a a Wisp like a wireless ISP.
Probably more closer to the MSP side, I think, because we only would do singular properties and stuff like that and locations, as opposed to letting anybody sign up. yeah, it actually started off just with like, I was living in a pretty dumpy apartment building in Boston, and I convinced the HOA to let me put an antenna on the roof. So I invested like 800 bucks in a
Mikey Pruitt
You
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
and a big wire Wi Fi antenna with a heated, you know, Wi Fi router and put it on my roof. And, and I went around the town around the blocks in the town, and put like those flyers up with the pull off stickers that if you want internet for 30 bucks a month, I'll hook you up, you know, so yeah, yeah, so, so it started off there, you know, and it took it took
Mikey Pruitt
I'll beam it to your building.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
three, four years, five years maybe or something like that. But, you know, I was, I started off doing, you know, that I didn't really do many situations like that, but it started being like apartment, condo buildings, hotels, resorts, things like that. ⁓ And ultimately I'd say in the 2010 or 11 timeframe, I started deploying more government type networks. So that could be state or federal.
like libraries, courthouses, naval base, ⁓ naval hospitals, military bases, things like that. those, ⁓ those types of networks, they required us to have filtering on them, you know, to block inappropriate content. So that's kind of, that's kind of how I got into it. I started using this product, OpenDNS ⁓ at the time to do it. I didn't want to have any
Mikey Pruitt
Mm-hmm.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Any any hardware or anything like that. So I always felt that DNS was the path to do it. And that was really my first like. I guess introduction, you'll say to it. The interesting part was I didn't have to use it at it. I didn't understand though the power of it yet. Actually, it was it was just a requirement that it had to do so. I'd say when it really clicked for me that this was like a useful technology.
was actually back at the hotel type networks and the apartment complexes and things like that. I was having bandwidth issues like there was always network congestion and everything like that. And I never had to do filtering at it. I mean, you could imagine you don't want to block inappropriate content at hotels. People wouldn't return probably.
Mikey Pruitt
Right.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
So, but ⁓ I put open DNS on those networks and just started looking at the traffic that was going through. And I saw there was a lot of stuff that was ⁓ classified as threats coming through. So I was like, well, you know, no reason I shouldn't be able to block threats on these networks. don't, nobody wants that happening, right? So I blocked those threats and not only did I see it made people safer, of course,
It also stopped a lot of the copyright notices. was getting people doing pirated content and everything like that. But the interesting fact was it solved actually all my network issues. All these people bringing infected devices into the network that was dragging it down, it all just went away overnight. So I'd say that's the moment where I noticed how powerful filtering, especially at the DNS layer, without needing any equipment could be.
Mikey Pruitt
And that kind of leads me into my next question about this OpenDNS software that you were using, really great at the time. Kind of one of the first in the space to do like a no hardware type of firewall type of thing. And now at DNSFilter, we go right up against what is now Umbrella that was OpenDNS. I'm just curious, like from, let's just say like a CEO perspective, you know, what is it like to go up against those industry giants?
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
It's challenging for sure. I there's actually a kind of funny story. I don't even know if I told you about it, but Well, I'll kind of say like what what made me start DNSFilter, but there's a funny story about open DNS in there so
Basically, you know, they called me out one day and they said that they thought I was overusing or, you know, I was basically a different type of customer, even though I went and went through the proper channels and everything. And they said, we're going to have to raise your price. I was generally OK with that. But this price increase is going to be like seven hundred ish percent as far as I recall. So, yeah. ⁓
Mikey Pruitt
Just a slight 700%.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
So you can imagine on government networks, those are fixed contracts. So I can't just find budget. And then on the the hotels and stuff, like I said, I didn't have to do it. It was just something I was doing out of my pocket, you know. So that was a quick no. And and I looked around and I briefly landed on this product called Internet Guide from Dine that did an OK job, but there were no statistics or analytics or anything like that. So that's kind of what drove me to start, ⁓ it wasn't even drove me to start DNSFilter truthfully. It was really just, I started making and I made an MVP of something for myself for my own use case. And that was the only intention I ever had here. ⁓ Then a few months into that, it was like the summer of 2015, I saw an article in TechCrunch that, ⁓
Open DNS had been acquired. was now Cisco umbrella and it was a $635 million acquisition. I was like, that's a lot of money. You know, I can't believe that there's, I had no idea that they were like being used that much and that prevalent, but I figured, Hey, there's gotta be a lot of people. And now it makes sense why they tried to raise the price of me. There's gotta be a lot of people in my similar situation where
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
They either had to say no and couldn't find something good or said yes, because they couldn't find something good. But now is the time to try to make a go here. So we went for it. We got some like beta users at first. I wasn't even charging for the service. We just got three or 400 people using it. A bunch of those people came over from Internet Guide, actually from Dime, because they happened to sunset.
their service as well and some of their support people sent people our way. And it was funny, I guess, you know, we got to a point where I'm like, I guess we got to start charging here. So we just we just turned it on. think I think I just picked twenty dollars a month. Just pay twenty dollars a month. And we turned it on. And this is like mid to late 2017 and almost everybody stayed. So was like, all right, well, I guess we got a business now.
Mikey Pruitt
You
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
And, decided to go for it. So I remember the funny part about open DNS part is the first day that I, I was still working at, at anaptics at my MSP, but I decided I'm going to, I'm going to go full time. Right. So I needed an office. So was really still in my office. just, went across the hallway and went to this conference room and I sat down and I was like, beginning of the day, I'm like, all right, I got to go start.
getting some customers now. And I was like, how do I do that? Well, our competitors, OpenDNS and everything, I went to the OpenDNS website, looked at all their customer testimonials, and I just started firing off emails to all their customers that had the testimonials like, hey, you want to try this out and everything? By the end of the day, before I left that conference room, I had an email from ⁓ from David Yulevich, the who is the CEO and founder of OpenDNS. Like, what the hell are you doing here? You know, like you shouldn't be saying these things. What are you know, they're not true. And I was like, I forget what they were. It was probably something about. I really don't recall. It could have been up. Yeah, it was that we were better at something. I can't remember what it was, but I was like, well, here's the proof. It is true, you know, and he was like, all right, well.
Mikey Pruitt
Price increase, lack of innovation.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Whatever, just don't be emailing our customers. that was when I was like, wow, okay, it's that easy to get them rattled. Like that fired me up. You know, I thought there's opportunity here. now though, you know, bringing it back to your question, it's crazy because, you know, it's went a lot beyond anything I anticipated it could at the day that I started it. And
I don't know, man. It's not, I would say it's not actually that hard to compete against them to be, to, yeah.
Mikey Pruitt
Well, you kind of proved that on like day one, you're
like, wow. And instead of like extinguishing your fire for this for DNS, which you now had like ⁓ a pretty good solid respect for the power that it could deliver and having him, you know, try to put your flame out, just like made a blaze. And you're like, this is this is happening.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Yeah, I mean, if anything, I think I just I thrive on competition. So I always want to be the best and I want us to be the best. I feel really passionate about it. So having competition, just all it does is fire me fire me up. You know, but the reality is we got a lot of really passionate people here who know a lot about it. You know, I care and I think a lot of others do about protecting people for real. ⁓ You know, everybody here has equity in the company, you know, it means something to them. So I feel like when you're doing that work and you're doing threat modeling and hunting those threats and trying to build the product, it just means a lot more to us than I'll say a company of thousands of people where it's kind of just a job.
Mikey Pruitt
So since you brought it up and I wanted to bring this up later, but since you kind of hinted on it, let's talk about competition for a minute. And I believe the recent Zorus acquisition kind of started from a cease and desist as well. Something that Brett told me about a day or two ago. I'm curious what your take on the cease and desist is and how the Zorus / DNSFilter unification started.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Okay.
That's exactly it. I mean, it started off. Remember they had this marketing tagline that we were old hat and they were something else. I was like, come on, like whatever. And, ⁓ but that was years ago before Brett was there. And, and yeah, it did. This did start off as a cease and desist. It was pretty interesting because they had a, ⁓ competitive, ⁓ like a comparison page against Zorus versus DNSFilter.
I can't recall exactly what the items were, but they said we didn't do things that we did. and, know. Exactly. And honestly, again, this goes before Brett had it all, but like they had a history of doing that. So I took a really aggressive stance with them, fired him a letter from our chief legal officer, you know, got on the call, was prepared to just be.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, like no iOS client. It's like, actually, we do have one.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
a total ass to him and I think he was prepared to do the same with me. I don't know what it was. He made me laugh or something like that on the call and I was like, this guy's not, he's not a dick. can't be, yeah. And we were like, all right, why don't we meet up at IT Nation? So we sat down there and we talked for, it was.
Mikey Pruitt
He's not the evil person I thought he was.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
probably just supposed to be a little bit. think we ended up talking for like three hours, you know? And it just became apparent that we were like almost the same person. and yeah, and then, and then here we are today. I mean, it just became that apparent that, you know, DNSFilter, we've grown so much doing so many different types of customers. MSPs is where we started and where I started. It's really important. I felt like we were.
I don't want to say, I don't know if losing touch is the right way to put it, but more that, you know, we, had, we didn't have anybody specialized in that anymore because of the wide variety of things and customers that we had. So I was like, Hey, this is a great opportunity to take a team of people who have lived their whole lives in MSP. ⁓ and, and I know that they're going to take really good care of the customers that I care about. So why don't we bring them in?
And let them run the whole MSP part of the operation. It's kind of where it started. And also they have a great, I think they're really well known for their endpoint agent stability. We were having some trouble with that. That's definitely top of my mind. so, yeah, I think it's a great fit. It's crazy. I go down there and it just feels like I don't know how to explain it. It feels like...
I obviously haven't worked with them for years, but it just feels like I have, like the level of connection you have when you come in with everybody who works there.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, it's a natural fit. I was talking about the same thing with Brett that the teams are really matched very well. Like we've been like cracking jokes at each other, even making fun of like us lurking on their stuff and them lurking on ours. And like, it's, it's kind of funny how it's, how it turned out really, really well that has turned out really
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Yeah, it's almost funny going through, you know, the discovery and like there's stuff you can talk about before a deal closes versus after obviously we are competitors. So we couldn't go super deep if something was to have fallen apart. But it's funny now, once it's closed and you go down there and you start going through everything and you're like, how do you guys do that? And like, we do like this. And like, we knew you couldn't do that or whatever. And then they give it back to you and.
And it just, makes it actually fun to go through it and combine the two because you get there and we're finally like, okay, to be fair, you do do this better or, know, and you guys do this better. And then it's just exciting. It's exciting to not compete against each other anymore and instead combine everything. And everybody's really honest about like, who's good at what, who's better at what.
Mikey Pruitt
Concessions.
Well, let's talk about one thing that DNSFilter is really good at, which is our global network. So you, you know, starting a DNSFiltering company, I guess you assume like, I guess I have to have an Anycast network at some point. Like how did something like that come into existence? It seems like a very hard thing to solve.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Yeah, it is because it's like it's a super unique technology that not that many people have, right? I'm trying to think about the name. can't. I won't. no, no, I won't look it up now. But it started off. had this hosting provider. I don't I don't even know if they exist anymore. ⁓ But they.
Mikey Pruitt
Anycast?
packet.net
and netactuate.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
No, no,
they might have, they ran our interstitial infrastructure for a bit. They had limited any cast locations. You might remember it. They had only like three or four when we started with them. They were based at a Netherlands or something.
Mikey Pruitt
Yes, I know the one you're talking about. And FYI, used to be the one to deploy our network.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
No,
no, I don't. Yeah. Well, no comment. No comment. But anyway, it started off like we use that like this out of the box provider. It's going to kill me that I can't remember who it is. But like, but yeah, it only had three, four or five locations and it wasn't enough as you got global and everything like that.
Mikey Pruitt
I can't even remember. Kids like, I'm glad you got a microphone. Just stick to that, buddy.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
⁓ so it became apparent really quickly that we were going to have to figure out how to do this ourselves. And my co-founder at the time, this guy, Mike Scherl, he knew, he knew networking pretty well. He had started a hosting company. I knew it pretty well too, but like, you know, BGP and in cast is completely different beast. It's, very rare. Not many people know about it. So I remember him sort of freaking out a little bit, like, how are we going to figure this out?
And I have this different approach, I think, where I'm just like, there's nothing that there's nothing that you cannot achieve is just how I feel like it just takes time and research. So what I did was I started Googling and I saw there is this, they have these O'Reilly manuals, I'm sure you've seen about various things. So there is an O'Reilly manual about BGP Anycast. And I was like, okay, I'm going to look up who wrote that book.
And the next day it was this guy in Austria. The next day or a day or two days later, we're on ⁓ Skype with him in Austria and we were, we just paid him. I don't even know that he charged us at the end of the day, but we were like, Hey, can we just ask you questions for an hour or two? And by answering all those questions, we could just kind of get a lot of our stuff solved and start on it and just learn, know, that, that was really though, truthfully, I had.
little involvement after that stage in that. was definitely more, yeah, that was really Mike and I guess ultimately you too back then, you know. So, but yeah, it's crazy what it's grown into now.
Mikey Pruitt
You're like, Anycast, I got you your resources, go do it.
Yeah, I was the.
So I'm really glad you told that story. I wasn't trying to pry it out of you, but I'm really glad you did because it really to me tells tells a lot about your personality can that ⁓ you saw a barrier and your co-founder was like, I don't know, like super stressed and then you and you kind of said like, well, if you could learn from anybody about this technology, who would it be? It's like, well, the person that wrote the book on the technology.
and you've moved everything out of the way to find this person, contact them, get them to agree to a few hour session to coach you guys on how to do it. Like that is just impressive mental fortitude. First of all, it really, it reminds me of that movie, uh, men of honor. think it's like Cuba Gooding Jr. And he's like a sub mariner in the Navy and he like loses his leg. And at the end he's in the, uh, in the courtroom trying to prove that he can still do his job.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Thank you. Thank you.
Mikey Pruitt
and his drill sergeant, who was never nice to him. I think he's played by Al Pacino, not Al Pacino, one of those guys, doesn't matter.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilterI reme-
I remember what you're talking about, yeah.
Mikey Pruitt (21:11)
So he's like doing like a, you know, chanting almost like you, like he finds things in the way and he moves them and he like keeps going forward and that's what you do. And that's, I think why DNSFilter is as successful as it is like kudos to you. You're welcome. Right. Both legs intact. Awesome. So there's
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Yeah.
I appreciate that very much, thank you. And thankfully I still got both my legs. Thanks for that
too.
Mikey Pruitt
There's another kind of core technology to DNSFilter and that's our categorization. ⁓ and back in the day, Ken and team decided to purchase another company to kind of bring that technology in house. Talk about that.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Yeah, that was another, I mean, I feel like all of these things are just really happenstance sort of serendipitous things that have to almost hit, you know, in our situation. And we got a really unique once in a lifetime opportunity, I guess. this was, yeah, I mean, obviously to block DNS, you know, to block domains.
You need to know what's what like even just at a simple not even the threat part just even at a simple ⁓ Content category piece if you want to block porn for example. Well, you got to have a list of all the sites. They're porn ⁓ Same for news or any other category, right? So You know we started off like most of our competitors are today where we were like we're just gonna go buy a list from somebody and But we couldn't actually afford the real list, but we couldn't afford like a Zvelo list or anything for five grand a month. So we went to this company, Web Shrinker, we were a customer there. I think we were paying like $500 a month for the list. And it was actually really good. Although we couldn't afford the other list, of course, we did testing to see what would it be worthwhile to even try to somehow afford this. And Web Shrinker was still consistently better. This guy, was the Adam Spotten, the founder of it. ⁓ He built a bunch of machine learning that was able to do this on the fly, and it was really, really accurate. So ⁓ as I learned more about it, it became apparent that, like, hey, it's not just like to be a DNS provider and have a network and a service that can block. mean, there's clearly lots of people.
that do that. ⁓ You can't just be that otherwise you're just a commodity. Like we need to be better. We need to be able to identify threats and do all this in house and have control over this and make it better. So decided to approach Adam and say, Hey, you know, would you be willing to sell your company and like actually just come work here with us instead. So that's essentially what we did. ⁓
you know, brought Adam on pretty early bunch of, you know, equity and stuff like that. And, and yeah, now we had this web shrinker technology. So today, obviously at that time it was just doing content. The piece that really got me fired up is he's like, I got this machine learning set up to be able to do this for threats actually too. So that's, that's the piece that fired me up. ⁓
So bringing him on board was big and now here it is, you know, we've got this proprietary technology and, it's doing two and a half million requests a second, right. And, we're identifying last time I checked over 70 % of the threats through that technology in-house. So, um, yeah, it was a cool story, but it proved it out and Adam stayed on board for quite some time and now it's, it's pretty advanced.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, it is really impressive. We'll do like checks between like our list, so to speak, keep it in very generic terms against others, using, ⁓ what's that website, I can't remember.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Virus total, probably.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, virus total. like, does the virus total say? What do we say? And usually we're ahead of virus total, like meaning that we will label something as malicious in some way and virus total will not. Nothing on virus total will say it's bad or malicious. And then a few days later, one or two of those are like, it is malicious. 10 days later, more of them, it's malicious. And then, you know, two weeks later, everyone's in agreement with us. So that was a, just a key.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
⁓ huh.
Mikey Pruitt
a core piece of technology. And just like you said, blocking is like, it's less than half of the equation. The bigger piece is actually knowing what to block. And I think that's where a lot of people, it's hard to kind of prove. And a lot of people, it's hard to believe in the same manner, but anyway, it's true.
Ken - CEO, DNSFilter (25:59)
Yeah, truly,
man. mean, it's like the world, it's crazy. You know, it's not even that long ago. mean, DNSFilter isn't even 10 from like the actual first day, you know. ⁓
really, let's say eight years since the first paying customer, not even, but like in those eight years, I mean, it's great that we know how to do the NKS stuff. You don't even really need to know how to do that anymore to set up a network. Like that's how we get the fastest network in the world. But to have the 10th fastest or something pretty fast, like you can just kind of buy it off the shelf. Now people really underplay, I think.
⁓ and I'm just going to say it, especially on the Reddit forums, you know, in my opinion, they, they, yeah, yeah. Hey guys, a lot of them, they always just throw us up against other people. They completely devalue the, the, the value of having that threat stuff in house. Like it touches so many things, even acquiring Xorus learning how, like, for example, one of their big complaints is, ⁓ people would.
Mikey Pruitt
IR slash MSP.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
You know, something's miscategorized. I don't know if that happens a lot, but let's say it even doesn't, right? But things get miscategorized. It happened with us occasionally too. that somebody submits a ticket and they're like, it takes weeks to get an answer or something like that. Well, that's not on Zorus. I mean, it reflects on them, but at the end of the day, they were using a third party feed. So they're beholden to that provider changing it.
And if that doesn't happen or takes a long time, know, whatever with us, we have control over that to do it immediately. you know, and, and then, so there's that there's the, the threat blocking effectiveness. mean, it just touches on so many different levels that people don't really think about that having an in-house is a huge advantage.
Mikey Pruitt
Exactly. The list is really the core technology. But you also mentioned, go ahead.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Yeah. then,
no, no, sorry. I'll just say too, like the other thing is while for a time people may have thought at least in the MSP space, you think, ⁓ like DNSFilter. I know we're showing commitment with the source acquisition now, but you might think, you know, they're doing all these larger fortune 500s and stuff like that. But the reality is to doing that is.
why we are 10 days or more faster. Like we have millions and millions of homes using us. We have entire countries that use us. We have Fortune 500 company, like this whole mixture of a wide variety of locations combined with learning from an in-house is that like having that is not a negative. Like being an MSP using us, that's a positive because you're getting access to a data set.
that really, yeah, I mean, it may exist with Umbrella to be fair. They're pretty big too, but they don't have the in-house talent that we do on the machine learning.
Mikey Pruitt (29:11)
Yeah. So let me clarify that what you just said. So typically there's like a patient zero, like, uh-oh, this is a new threat domain or some domain is now malicious. We know it's malicious. And Ken is saying, if you have a 20,000 employee enterprise, they are more likely to hit that domain before the MSP customers would. Therefore the MSP gets the benefits of those enterprise customers being on the front line, so to speak.
I've never heard it put that way.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Yeah,
well, or there's so many. mean, we could go deep on this if you want. There's but there's like, I mean, the same could happen for a home, right? Like, opposite wise, there's a lot of threats that we see that being in we're in like six million homes right now being in all those homes all over the world ⁓ through, you know, ISPs, things like that.
you'll see stuff that happens in a home first and then it gets brought into a corporate network as well, you know, or somebody doesn't. And I don't know why that is. I suspect it could be maybe somebody isn't using DNSFilter for or something like DNSFilter at work. I mean, they're using it at work, right? But then maybe they don't have roaming protection and they take that work machine home and now they're unprotected at home.
and I let something through or whatever, right? But now that thing got through and you bring that net, that laptop back into the, to the corporate network. What do you think happens? Like that's, that's how it goes. But, ⁓ I could go deeper if you want, there's some pretty cool threat hunting stuff that we've seen, but yeah.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah.
Well, you mentioned something else that I wanted to touch on, which is Reddit. And I don't want to talk about Reddit, but I do want to talk about the really customer-centric values that you can have instilled in the entire company. And I remember when I started, like six years ago, we were very attentive to customer feedback. And that has never stopped. And I'm curious why you always thought that was important.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
⁓ Honestly, that's part of, well, there's multiple layers here. For one, starts with, I guess it's probably, it could be a bad ⁓ personal quality or something like that, but I want everybody to like me, you know, is one thing. So for one thing is it really matters to me to make as many people happy.
Mikey Pruitt
Hahaha!
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
⁓ as possible in kind of every aspect of my life, but certainly with the product that we make. So it really matters to me and so does reputation too. you know, ⁓ I just don't, ideally, I don't want anybody being able to point at us saying that we ever didn't listen or don't care. Like I want them to have a really, really high opinion of us, both in terms of ethics, morals, how the product's built, how we treat people.
Both internal, external and all that. So that's kind of like number one. And number two is I think like a lot of times, you know, somebody may ask like, how do you make a successful product or something? I mean, there's a lot that goes into it and starting a company and all that. But I'd say to start with, you know, for me, I knew I knew the core of what I needed.
In the product to start it, right? But like, that's just me. That's just me. As far as, as what it means to be for a larger audience, for them to be happy with it. There's lots of founders or people, I feel like this happens maybe when you're really technical too, is that they're, they'll, they'll think they know best. And they want to like, I guess Steve Jobs, I mean, he's a bad example because he's so damn good at his job.
But like he had that line that like ⁓ something like, you need to, the customer doesn't know what they want. You need to tell them like that essentially. Like, and that's true. Maybe in some cases when you're doing something really innovative, I guess, you know, I'd say, but when you're trying to build something better and make people happy and then, and then usually the innovation comes later. Why? I don't know why people sit and they think about like how they should build it.
You know, like in other words, there's a whole, yeah, I would just send out before we even had like candy and these feedback tools and stuff like that. I would just send out a survey monkey survey. I would try not to do it too much to, know, get people upset with like my emails, but I just send out a survey monkey survey to 500 customers or 300 customers and
Mikey Pruitt
You're like, there's a whole group of people that will just tell you.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
and whoever answers, cool, I'll get like 50 answers, you know? And I would just build what they say. I mean, not always, like sometimes honestly, people have some pretty stupid, ⁓ some pretty stupid suggestions, but generally, you know, there's people agree on things and you find the trends and you just build it. And I accomplish making them happy, giving them a product that does what they need. ⁓
I also get a deeper connection with them. They feel more invested because they literally, I how cool is that? You got to say, I think it should have this. And to know that you're one of the five customers, 10 customers, or even maybe you're the only one behind why this product has this feature, which is then being used by 35 million people around the world. It's just cool. So I don't know. That's why.
Mikey Pruitt
Your input is important, so keep sending it in. And it's funny, there's like a, there's like, can kind of measure this, like, ⁓ 50 people voted for this thing and, you know, a hundred people voted on this thing. So we do the hundred person thing. It's like, well, let's like, let's like read the comments. Cause when you.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Yeah, super important.
Well, it depends. think
A good example is like dark mode. know, like, yeah, I want it to honestly, I want it cool, too. I think it's super cool. Like I want that on my screen on a wall and just to look bad ass like I actually that's why the whole front dashboard page is the way it was. I was like, I just want something bad ass that I can put on my wall and the MSP.
and make it look like something out of the born identity or something like that on my screen. So I get dark mode is cool. And there's a lot of votes. It's probably the most voted or top three, I'm guessing right now features in terms of upvotes. like, know, truthfully, when you got a limited set of resources, you can't just always go at the top vote.
It's like, well, we could make something more stable. We could roll out something that's going to protect more people, make an improvement to the machine learning. It's all of that. And then eventually we'll get there. But right now the mission is to protect real people from bad things happening in the real world. And ⁓ anything in dark mode doesn't really further that mission, to be honest, even though it's cool. Yeah, I try to do it for like a hackathon or something, you
Mikey Pruitt
It does look cool.
Pro tip: the dark reader plug-in actually makes the dashboard look really good in dark mode. Just a little pro tip for the audience.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
It's also not that easy to be clear by the way, too. It's not like we're just lazy. I mean, it's actually a very large undertaking to do dark mode. It's like a several month project. No, it's way, way more than that. It's like several months of work.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, it's like it's just another style sheet. It's like, actually, it's a little bit more.
So let's talk about this, like the company culture that you built at DNSFilter and now incorporating Xorus, which turns out matches really well. You were working alone at anaptics. had a small team. You kind of got some co-founders for DNSFilter. And you've been working remotely, mostly this whole time.
So how do you build a company culture like we have working remotely?
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
It's really, really, really hard, honestly. I'd say that it started that way. It wasn't really a conscious decision or anything like that. I'm here in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina right now. That's not where I live all the time, but it's where I spend some time. That's basically where, you live too.
You can attest to the fact there's not a lot of any cast experts down here. Yeah, yeah, they're probably think cast net or something. What are you talking about? I don't know. They think it's a fishing thing. But yeah, so we just it had to be remote, know, like we could you couldn't just get that talent here. But and then I think we got lucky and probably a terrible way to say it. But like with Covid happening.
Mikey Pruitt
No one's even heard the word before.
Hahaha
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
It just like you had to be remote. it wasn't really a question in it and became like an advantage, you know, that we were set up that way. Well, the thing was with and with COVID, we were like each other's friends to a degree there, right? You you'd have
Mikey Pruitt
I'm picking up a trend here. Go ahead, finish.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
virtual happy hours and all these Slack channels started up for interest so that that was cool. You got to do a of that. We ⁓ I've been pretty hard on except, you know, during COVID, of course, doing these we do the annual company meetups. I get a lot of pushback from that from our CFO and the board sometimes because it's a very expensive undertaking.
But I think it's critical. can't be completely remote and never meet each other. You have to at least meet up once a year for sure so you understand it's not just a person behind a screen. A lot of times you end up showing up there like, I hate this person. And then you leave and you're like, oh, they're not an ass. They're actually pretty cool. That's how they're whatever.
body languages or something, you know, you learn all these things. But I'd say the toughest part is the communication. Like I, I, I'm not going to say that we're, we're definitely not perfect at it. Like I still want to make us better. ⁓ but I think, you know, like if you're working on a project or whatever, you can't just roll up to the desk next to you and ask something, you know? ⁓ so.
You have to have every project plan and I'm not saying we do this, but we got to have every project plan like meticulously detailed and planned out and updates and know, regular cadence on updates and things like that. So it's, it's challenging and it's weird because some of the stuff that you'll read about the real world, like, or not the real world, the in-person world, I'll say.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
I don't know why I said real world, but the in-person world, they'll say, for example, like, recurring meetings are a waste of time. I'm not, I agree you need to be careful about them, but like in a remote culture, I'm not so sure that that's true. You know, like if you don't do a recurring meeting, then when do you ever meet and think about what's going on, you know? ⁓ But yeah, if you're in an office where you could just be exchanging information,
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, never.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
yelling over cubicles or at lunch or whatever. It's different. So it's just a different beast, man. You have to work really, really hard and not get complacent.
Mikey Pruitt
Exactly. So the trend that I'm, excuse me, the trend that I'm picking up on is you're what based on what you've said today, it's almost like you were accidentally in the right place at the right time. Like, ⁓ you know, the open DNS purchase and you were there to capitalize the web shrinker acquisition now, the source acquisition, ⁓ inventing a remote culture and all these things. And I'm curious, like,
There's a lot of people that are like aspiring to start companies like DNSFilter, be like a entrepreneur or a CEO or whatever. And you, you are kind of saying that you are accidentally in this position. However, I imagine there's some type of underlying drive that has pushed those, let's say lucky moments to come to fruition. So like, do you have any advice for aspiring entrepreneurs?
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Yeah, I guess a little bit, I mean, the timing is definitely important. I wouldn't say. ⁓ Yeah, I would say timing more than luck, if you know what I mean. Like if one of these things that I mentioned didn't happen, we could still be in the same place. But for example, I don't think you. Starting up a DNSFiltering company today.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, don't do that.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
I don't think you're going to do that well. ⁓ mean, you're welcome to try. I'm not saying you shouldn't because I don't want another competitor. I'm just saying the timing, there might be another shift, for example, in a couple years or something like that. But like that OpenDNS shift to Cisco, that was a really good time to get into it. And even then, it was only a couple years later. anyway, timing, can't really control, ⁓ well, the luck you can't control the timing you can that you you need to choose the right time to take your shot for sure. But I think it starts with like solving ⁓ a problem that you live through for sure, you know, like, like I did. I think that that's one piece because like, it needs to be a problem you know a lot about and that you're passionate about solving. So like the passion is definitely the other key part. And and I think the reason for
The passion is because you're going to always see these competitors. You can't focus on them. You can't let that get you down. You always have to like focus just on yourself and your customers and your execution. And there's going to be a lot of really bad things that happen. I can tell you there's a lot more bad things that happen here than good things throughout the years. The good things just ended up being so good. They outweigh the bad, but there's way more horrible nights and days and
times where you want to give up and everything like that. And you just got to work really, really hard. I don't, I, there's a little blog post that wrote about this. I think I quoted Elon Musk at the time. I'll stay away from that now because he was cool years ago, but everybody hates him now. But like, like, you know, I do think what he said still matters. And, and it resonated with me, which was that,
Mikey Pruitt
Hahaha
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
you like you don't have to necessarily just be intelligent, right? You have to work really, really hard. So if you're going to get into this and sort of expect like work life balance for me, that that didn't happen. It's a weak point. It's a weak point for me. But what I could say is that I'll just work harder than anybody else. And I don't mean in I mean both.
in the time and this only happens if you're passionate about what you're doing, but like both during the hours that I am at work, I am just purely doing work. Like I don't care about anything else in my life except doing the work and it's probably bad, but that's what I do. I'll also work like double the amount of hours. So it's, ⁓ I think that's the easiest way to get ahead. It's like truthfully, you don't know if you're smarter than anybody else, but if you're the equal level of smart,
and you put in twice the amount of hours, well, you're going to get there probably at least twice as fast. ⁓ So it might be.
cliche or bad advice, but I think that's what it is. Like you can't just chat GPT your way to it. ⁓ And you can't just expect to have like a work life balance and be really successful. I don't think when you're starting up your own business.
Mikey Pruitt
Good advice. You have to have that passion, that drive in order to make it through the hard spots. And you got to work a lot harder than you would think. And you have to be paying attention to when it is time to put your foot on the gas and go.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Yeah, there's also this guy, this guy Ray Antonino. I don't know if you know him. ⁓ Yeah, he's local here in the Myrtle Beach startup community. And I don't know if it still says it, but if you look at his LinkedIn, he says like building a 10 year overnight success. And that's always resonated with me too is like people look at and they'll be, you know, you can look at DNSFilter and say like, that's great. You guys blew up so fast or whatever, you know.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, I know him.
Yeah.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
But no, we didn't. Like, it's gonna be 10 years in September. that, it is true. Like it takes, a lot of people don't realize, but if you look at, do the research, it takes, even it, I mean, the odds of being successful are so low, because a lot of people give up. But even when you're working really, really hard, all these companies that you think just blew up.
On average, they're seven to 10 years at it before you feel like they blew up or before you heard about it. So ⁓ it's not going to happen that fast.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah. You don't see, yeah, you don't see Ken, ⁓ you know, shoving, shoving a bunch of luggage through, TSA to go to a trade show with like 50 people in 2015. You don't see that stuff on the billboards or on our blog or anything like that. but Ken put in the work and he did it double time.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
No, no.
Yeah, so that's all it is. I mean, I think if you have passion, you got a problem you want to solve, and you work really, really hard, you're going to be ahead of everybody else already. And then the last thing I'll say is that I mean, to a degree, chat GPT can help with this a little or AI can help with this a little bit now. ⁓ But you can't undervalue
either being technical yourself or having a technical co-founder. I've mentored at places like Techstars and everything like that. And it's ⁓ the amount of people who come that they have a good idea, but they have no technical understanding of a way to make it happen is staggering. I don't see how you can do.
Mikey Pruitt
you
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
I don't know, least in the world I'm in, I think you've got to be technical or have somebody technical along with you. That's going to help a lot.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, I would agree with that.
It's like, even some of the salespeople here at DNSFilter, you know, I'm like, hey, like open up your terminal and try to try to close them or open them and edit a document and just just to figure it out. They're like, how do you do it? I'm like, use Google, use chat. GPT, like go figure it out because that's how you learn with tech. Like I thought so I do like I am like I know nothing like I'm building. I'll show you this on camera.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Yep. Yeah.
Mikey Pruitt
That's my new home server over there. Yeah. So,
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
⁓ yeah, I saw some pictures of it. That's, that thing is bad ass.
Mikey Pruitt
so the, ⁓ like, how do you flash an HB and H yeah, that's the HL 15 with the back plane. It's like 15 drives. It's going to be beautiful.
Ken - CEO, DNSFilter
That's the back flip.
Yeah, off of Back Please is like they did an offshoot, I think, and build those things.
Mikey Pruitt
So like I had to learn how to flash an HBA card to IT mode, whatever all that means. But I just wanted to figure it out and it worked. But I did want to kind of close with one thing. It's like this future. What do you think the future looks like for cybersecurity or DNSFilter or both?
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
It's a good question, something always trying to figure out. ⁓ I think the immediate future, I think we've been pretty clear on with the roadmap of Zorus and everything like that, trying to get RC stability up and start, but, and bring CyberSight into the mix, is like that ⁓ behavior analytics, I'll say. ⁓
The reason I bring up cyber sites specifically is because threats are just evolving and getting really, really advanced. So I think there's, I'm trying to think how I can do this without going on a big tangent, but basically, you know, there's the DNS layer threats and everything like that. Certainly the analytics of what's going to happen before and after is really important before it was collecting it. But now with the advent of
⁓ machine learning and AI becoming even cheaper and faster and more capable, like we're going to be able to do a ton, a ton with that and forensically analyzing threats or trends. You know, I see, I see us building a lot of that ⁓ sort of forensic analysis, pre-warning of things to happen, leveraging AI in finding threats in the product. ⁓ Additionally, you know, I know for us, we're going to be focusing on something
that we're calling Project Illuminate internally. I can't go into everything about it, but it's going to be basically giving a lot of the machine learning ⁓ insights that we have and our decision making, giving insights to that, to people who ⁓ may or may not be DNSFilter customers so they can protect better. ⁓ And then beyond that, I don't know, I'm always like thinking about it. ⁓ I know one thing that concerns
I'm thinking, you know, that DNSFilter, mean, we, our mission is to protect real people from real things happening in the real world. And I'll go on one tangent for a second and mean that like, that's really important to me because there's all sorts of things that happen that people don't realize we have an impact on from national security to child safety and things like that.
that affect things in the real world, like our research. We were just named in a national security warning for research that we did multiple years ago. ⁓ I think it was, we reported three or four child pornography rings to the FBI. We were involved in something called Project Endgame, stopping the world's largest ransomware. ⁓
having the world's largest ransomware takedown. So basically as I see these things happening in the real world, my point is that I'm realizing we're not protecting machines or anything, we're protecting people and we're filtering bad stuff from happening to people. So I say that because one thing that's kind of at the top of my mind, I don't know if we'll turn it into a product or not.
is ⁓ things like that can happen as a result of AI, like deep fake candidates and everything like that. ⁓ You've seen it happen a lot. I don't know if you know, but ⁓ they didn't get through thanks to our amazing HR team and some of the training tactics that we give them and stuff that we've been ⁓ looking at and exploring, I'll say for a potential product. But ⁓ we had somebody that
actually came in here to DNSFilter applying for a job that was a deep fake candidate. So that really concerns me. ⁓ I don't know. I don't know if that answers your question, but I think.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, I've seen some videos like that, like an interview session where it was just a total fake person on the other end. And the interviewer was like, can you wave your hand in front of your face? ⁓ the person, whoever was working there, I was like, ⁓ no. Because that's going to break the current version of AI that could be used. But that's only a temporary ⁓ scam prevention measure.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Yeah, they're gonna get better and better, right? You know, ⁓ that might work now. And we have some tactics that ⁓ I'd rather not share that we do that, you know, I think work for now. ⁓ I do believe that I don't know if we'll go in this direction or something we'll do. just, I do believe that as we build this illuminate product, I realize how much information we do have and can tie all these indicators together.
And realize that there's a lot of other types of threats that we could stop. So ⁓ I have a feeling that we'll maybe get into more.
Mikey Pruitt
future looks bright. Well I'm excited for the ride and Ken thank you for joining me today I really appreciate it.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Same here, thank you. Glad we were able to finally get the time to do it.
Mikey Pruitt
Awesome.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
All right.
Welcome, everybody, to another episode of DNS Unfiltered. Today, I'm joined by a very special guest, Ken Carnegie, the CEO of DNSFilter. Welcome to the show, Ken.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Thanks Mikey, good to see you.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, glad to have you here. I've been trying to get Ken on the pod for a little while, but as you can imagine, CEOs get a little busy. A little bit. Yeah, that's okay. That's okay. We won't tell the audience that. So I kind of wanted to start out talking to Ken about...
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
You're happy to be here. Little bit. Think we rescheduled this like three times now.
haha
Mikey Pruitt
How you kind of developed into DNSFilter because you've not always been the CEO of DNSFilter. Like you did things before that and somehow all of your experiences led up to a very important company in the DNS space. I'm curious about that backstory a little bit.
Ken - CEO, DNSFilter
Yeah, yeah, definitely. mean, so well, yeah, before DNSFilter ⁓ back in in school and in college at Boston College in 2007, ⁓ I started a company called Anaptics to design, deploy and maintain large Wi-Fi networks. So I would say it's a hybrid between like an MSP and a a Wisp like a wireless ISP.
Probably more closer to the MSP side, I think, because we only would do singular properties and stuff like that and locations, as opposed to letting anybody sign up. yeah, it actually started off just with like, I was living in a pretty dumpy apartment building in Boston, and I convinced the HOA to let me put an antenna on the roof. So I invested like 800 bucks in a
Mikey Pruitt
You
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
and a big wire Wi Fi antenna with a heated, you know, Wi Fi router and put it on my roof. And, and I went around the town around the blocks in the town, and put like those flyers up with the pull off stickers that if you want internet for 30 bucks a month, I'll hook you up, you know, so yeah, yeah, so, so it started off there, you know, and it took it took
Mikey Pruitt
I'll beam it to your building.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
three, four years, five years maybe or something like that. But, you know, I was, I started off doing, you know, that I didn't really do many situations like that, but it started being like apartment, condo buildings, hotels, resorts, things like that. ⁓ And ultimately I'd say in the 2010 or 11 timeframe, I started deploying more government type networks. So that could be state or federal.
like libraries, courthouses, naval base, ⁓ naval hospitals, military bases, things like that. those, ⁓ those types of networks, they required us to have filtering on them, you know, to block inappropriate content. So that's kind of, that's kind of how I got into it. I started using this product, OpenDNS ⁓ at the time to do it. I didn't want to have any
Mikey Pruitt
Mm-hmm.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Any any hardware or anything like that. So I always felt that DNS was the path to do it. And that was really my first like. I guess introduction, you'll say to it. The interesting part was I didn't have to use it at it. I didn't understand though the power of it yet. Actually, it was it was just a requirement that it had to do so. I'd say when it really clicked for me that this was like a useful technology.
was actually back at the hotel type networks and the apartment complexes and things like that. I was having bandwidth issues like there was always network congestion and everything like that. And I never had to do filtering at it. I mean, you could imagine you don't want to block inappropriate content at hotels. People wouldn't return probably.
Mikey Pruitt
Right.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
So, but ⁓ I put open DNS on those networks and just started looking at the traffic that was going through. And I saw there was a lot of stuff that was ⁓ classified as threats coming through. So I was like, well, you know, no reason I shouldn't be able to block threats on these networks. don't, nobody wants that happening, right? So I blocked those threats and not only did I see it made people safer, of course,
It also stopped a lot of the copyright notices. was getting people doing pirated content and everything like that. But the interesting fact was it solved actually all my network issues. All these people bringing infected devices into the network that was dragging it down, it all just went away overnight. So I'd say that's the moment where I noticed how powerful filtering, especially at the DNS layer, without needing any equipment could be.
Mikey Pruitt
And that kind of leads me into my next question about this OpenDNS software that you were using, really great at the time. Kind of one of the first in the space to do like a no hardware type of firewall type of thing. And now at DNSFilter, we go right up against what is now Umbrella that was OpenDNS. I'm just curious, like from, let's just say like a CEO perspective, you know, what is it like to go up against those industry giants?
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
It's challenging for sure. I there's actually a kind of funny story. I don't even know if I told you about it, but Well, I'll kind of say like what what made me start DNSFilter, but there's a funny story about open DNS in there so
Basically, you know, they called me out one day and they said that they thought I was overusing or, you know, I was basically a different type of customer, even though I went and went through the proper channels and everything. And they said, we're going to have to raise your price. I was generally OK with that. But this price increase is going to be like seven hundred ish percent as far as I recall. So, yeah. ⁓
Mikey Pruitt
Just a slight 700%.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
So you can imagine on government networks, those are fixed contracts. So I can't just find budget. And then on the the hotels and stuff, like I said, I didn't have to do it. It was just something I was doing out of my pocket, you know. So that was a quick no. And and I looked around and I briefly landed on this product called Internet Guide from Dine that did an OK job, but there were no statistics or analytics or anything like that. So that's kind of what drove me to start, ⁓ it wasn't even drove me to start DNSFilter truthfully. It was really just, I started making and I made an MVP of something for myself for my own use case. And that was the only intention I ever had here. ⁓ Then a few months into that, it was like the summer of 2015, I saw an article in TechCrunch that, ⁓
Open DNS had been acquired. was now Cisco umbrella and it was a $635 million acquisition. I was like, that's a lot of money. You know, I can't believe that there's, I had no idea that they were like being used that much and that prevalent, but I figured, Hey, there's gotta be a lot of people. And now it makes sense why they tried to raise the price of me. There's gotta be a lot of people in my similar situation where
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
They either had to say no and couldn't find something good or said yes, because they couldn't find something good. But now is the time to try to make a go here. So we went for it. We got some like beta users at first. I wasn't even charging for the service. We just got three or 400 people using it. A bunch of those people came over from Internet Guide, actually from Dime, because they happened to sunset.
their service as well and some of their support people sent people our way. And it was funny, I guess, you know, we got to a point where I'm like, I guess we got to start charging here. So we just we just turned it on. think I think I just picked twenty dollars a month. Just pay twenty dollars a month. And we turned it on. And this is like mid to late 2017 and almost everybody stayed. So was like, all right, well, I guess we got a business now.
Mikey Pruitt
You
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
And, decided to go for it. So I remember the funny part about open DNS part is the first day that I, I was still working at, at anaptics at my MSP, but I decided I'm going to, I'm going to go full time. Right. So I needed an office. So was really still in my office. just, went across the hallway and went to this conference room and I sat down and I was like, beginning of the day, I'm like, all right, I got to go start.
getting some customers now. And I was like, how do I do that? Well, our competitors, OpenDNS and everything, I went to the OpenDNS website, looked at all their customer testimonials, and I just started firing off emails to all their customers that had the testimonials like, hey, you want to try this out and everything? By the end of the day, before I left that conference room, I had an email from ⁓ from David Yulevich, the who is the CEO and founder of OpenDNS. Like, what the hell are you doing here? You know, like you shouldn't be saying these things. What are you know, they're not true. And I was like, I forget what they were. It was probably something about. I really don't recall. It could have been up. Yeah, it was that we were better at something. I can't remember what it was, but I was like, well, here's the proof. It is true, you know, and he was like, all right, well.
Mikey Pruitt
Price increase, lack of innovation.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Whatever, just don't be emailing our customers. that was when I was like, wow, okay, it's that easy to get them rattled. Like that fired me up. You know, I thought there's opportunity here. now though, you know, bringing it back to your question, it's crazy because, you know, it's went a lot beyond anything I anticipated it could at the day that I started it. And
I don't know, man. It's not, I would say it's not actually that hard to compete against them to be, to, yeah.
Mikey Pruitt
Well, you kind of proved that on like day one, you're
like, wow. And instead of like extinguishing your fire for this for DNS, which you now had like ⁓ a pretty good solid respect for the power that it could deliver and having him, you know, try to put your flame out, just like made a blaze. And you're like, this is this is happening.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Yeah, I mean, if anything, I think I just I thrive on competition. So I always want to be the best and I want us to be the best. I feel really passionate about it. So having competition, just all it does is fire me fire me up. You know, but the reality is we got a lot of really passionate people here who know a lot about it. You know, I care and I think a lot of others do about protecting people for real. ⁓ You know, everybody here has equity in the company, you know, it means something to them. So I feel like when you're doing that work and you're doing threat modeling and hunting those threats and trying to build the product, it just means a lot more to us than I'll say a company of thousands of people where it's kind of just a job.
Mikey Pruitt
So since you brought it up and I wanted to bring this up later, but since you kind of hinted on it, let's talk about competition for a minute. And I believe the recent Zorus acquisition kind of started from a cease and desist as well. Something that Brett told me about a day or two ago. I'm curious what your take on the cease and desist is and how the Zorus / DNSFilter unification started.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Okay.
That's exactly it. I mean, it started off. Remember they had this marketing tagline that we were old hat and they were something else. I was like, come on, like whatever. And, ⁓ but that was years ago before Brett was there. And, and yeah, it did. This did start off as a cease and desist. It was pretty interesting because they had a, ⁓ competitive, ⁓ like a comparison page against Zorus versus DNSFilter.
I can't recall exactly what the items were, but they said we didn't do things that we did. and, know. Exactly. And honestly, again, this goes before Brett had it all, but like they had a history of doing that. So I took a really aggressive stance with them, fired him a letter from our chief legal officer, you know, got on the call, was prepared to just be.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, like no iOS client. It's like, actually, we do have one.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
a total ass to him and I think he was prepared to do the same with me. I don't know what it was. He made me laugh or something like that on the call and I was like, this guy's not, he's not a dick. can't be, yeah. And we were like, all right, why don't we meet up at IT Nation? So we sat down there and we talked for, it was.
Mikey Pruitt
He's not the evil person I thought he was.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
probably just supposed to be a little bit. think we ended up talking for like three hours, you know? And it just became apparent that we were like almost the same person. and yeah, and then, and then here we are today. I mean, it just became that apparent that, you know, DNSFilter, we've grown so much doing so many different types of customers. MSPs is where we started and where I started. It's really important. I felt like we were.
I don't want to say, I don't know if losing touch is the right way to put it, but more that, you know, we, had, we didn't have anybody specialized in that anymore because of the wide variety of things and customers that we had. So I was like, Hey, this is a great opportunity to take a team of people who have lived their whole lives in MSP. ⁓ and, and I know that they're going to take really good care of the customers that I care about. So why don't we bring them in?
And let them run the whole MSP part of the operation. It's kind of where it started. And also they have a great, I think they're really well known for their endpoint agent stability. We were having some trouble with that. That's definitely top of my mind. so, yeah, I think it's a great fit. It's crazy. I go down there and it just feels like I don't know how to explain it. It feels like...
I obviously haven't worked with them for years, but it just feels like I have, like the level of connection you have when you come in with everybody who works there.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, it's a natural fit. I was talking about the same thing with Brett that the teams are really matched very well. Like we've been like cracking jokes at each other, even making fun of like us lurking on their stuff and them lurking on ours. And like, it's, it's kind of funny how it's, how it turned out really, really well that has turned out really
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Yeah, it's almost funny going through, you know, the discovery and like there's stuff you can talk about before a deal closes versus after obviously we are competitors. So we couldn't go super deep if something was to have fallen apart. But it's funny now, once it's closed and you go down there and you start going through everything and you're like, how do you guys do that? And like, we do like this. And like, we knew you couldn't do that or whatever. And then they give it back to you and.
And it just, makes it actually fun to go through it and combine the two because you get there and we're finally like, okay, to be fair, you do do this better or, know, and you guys do this better. And then it's just exciting. It's exciting to not compete against each other anymore and instead combine everything. And everybody's really honest about like, who's good at what, who's better at what.
Mikey Pruitt
Concessions.
Well, let's talk about one thing that DNSFilter is really good at, which is our global network. So you, you know, starting a DNSFiltering company, I guess you assume like, I guess I have to have an Anycast network at some point. Like how did something like that come into existence? It seems like a very hard thing to solve.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Yeah, it is because it's like it's a super unique technology that not that many people have, right? I'm trying to think about the name. can't. I won't. no, no, I won't look it up now. But it started off. had this hosting provider. I don't I don't even know if they exist anymore. ⁓ But they.
Mikey Pruitt
Anycast?
packet.net
and netactuate.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
No, no,
they might have, they ran our interstitial infrastructure for a bit. They had limited any cast locations. You might remember it. They had only like three or four when we started with them. They were based at a Netherlands or something.
Mikey Pruitt
Yes, I know the one you're talking about. And FYI, used to be the one to deploy our network.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
No,
no, I don't. Yeah. Well, no comment. No comment. But anyway, it started off like we use that like this out of the box provider. It's going to kill me that I can't remember who it is. But like, but yeah, it only had three, four or five locations and it wasn't enough as you got global and everything like that.
Mikey Pruitt
I can't even remember. Kids like, I'm glad you got a microphone. Just stick to that, buddy.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
⁓ so it became apparent really quickly that we were going to have to figure out how to do this ourselves. And my co-founder at the time, this guy, Mike Scherl, he knew, he knew networking pretty well. He had started a hosting company. I knew it pretty well too, but like, you know, BGP and in cast is completely different beast. It's, very rare. Not many people know about it. So I remember him sort of freaking out a little bit, like, how are we going to figure this out?
And I have this different approach, I think, where I'm just like, there's nothing that there's nothing that you cannot achieve is just how I feel like it just takes time and research. So what I did was I started Googling and I saw there is this, they have these O'Reilly manuals, I'm sure you've seen about various things. So there is an O'Reilly manual about BGP Anycast. And I was like, okay, I'm going to look up who wrote that book.
And the next day it was this guy in Austria. The next day or a day or two days later, we're on ⁓ Skype with him in Austria and we were, we just paid him. I don't even know that he charged us at the end of the day, but we were like, Hey, can we just ask you questions for an hour or two? And by answering all those questions, we could just kind of get a lot of our stuff solved and start on it and just learn, know, that, that was really though, truthfully, I had.
little involvement after that stage in that. was definitely more, yeah, that was really Mike and I guess ultimately you too back then, you know. So, but yeah, it's crazy what it's grown into now.
Mikey Pruitt
You're like, Anycast, I got you your resources, go do it.
Yeah, I was the.
So I'm really glad you told that story. I wasn't trying to pry it out of you, but I'm really glad you did because it really to me tells tells a lot about your personality can that ⁓ you saw a barrier and your co-founder was like, I don't know, like super stressed and then you and you kind of said like, well, if you could learn from anybody about this technology, who would it be? It's like, well, the person that wrote the book on the technology.
and you've moved everything out of the way to find this person, contact them, get them to agree to a few hour session to coach you guys on how to do it. Like that is just impressive mental fortitude. First of all, it really, it reminds me of that movie, uh, men of honor. think it's like Cuba Gooding Jr. And he's like a sub mariner in the Navy and he like loses his leg. And at the end he's in the, uh, in the courtroom trying to prove that he can still do his job.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Thank you. Thank you.
Mikey Pruitt
and his drill sergeant, who was never nice to him. I think he's played by Al Pacino, not Al Pacino, one of those guys, doesn't matter.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilterI reme-
I remember what you're talking about, yeah.
Mikey Pruitt (21:11)
So he's like doing like a, you know, chanting almost like you, like he finds things in the way and he moves them and he like keeps going forward and that's what you do. And that's, I think why DNSFilter is as successful as it is like kudos to you. You're welcome. Right. Both legs intact. Awesome. So there's
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Yeah.
I appreciate that very much, thank you. And thankfully I still got both my legs. Thanks for that
too.
Mikey Pruitt
There's another kind of core technology to DNSFilter and that's our categorization. ⁓ and back in the day, Ken and team decided to purchase another company to kind of bring that technology in house. Talk about that.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Yeah, that was another, I mean, I feel like all of these things are just really happenstance sort of serendipitous things that have to almost hit, you know, in our situation. And we got a really unique once in a lifetime opportunity, I guess. this was, yeah, I mean, obviously to block DNS, you know, to block domains.
You need to know what's what like even just at a simple not even the threat part just even at a simple ⁓ Content category piece if you want to block porn for example. Well, you got to have a list of all the sites. They're porn ⁓ Same for news or any other category, right? So You know we started off like most of our competitors are today where we were like we're just gonna go buy a list from somebody and But we couldn't actually afford the real list, but we couldn't afford like a Zvelo list or anything for five grand a month. So we went to this company, Web Shrinker, we were a customer there. I think we were paying like $500 a month for the list. And it was actually really good. Although we couldn't afford the other list, of course, we did testing to see what would it be worthwhile to even try to somehow afford this. And Web Shrinker was still consistently better. This guy, was the Adam Spotten, the founder of it. ⁓ He built a bunch of machine learning that was able to do this on the fly, and it was really, really accurate. So ⁓ as I learned more about it, it became apparent that, like, hey, it's not just like to be a DNS provider and have a network and a service that can block. mean, there's clearly lots of people.
that do that. ⁓ You can't just be that otherwise you're just a commodity. Like we need to be better. We need to be able to identify threats and do all this in house and have control over this and make it better. So decided to approach Adam and say, Hey, you know, would you be willing to sell your company and like actually just come work here with us instead. So that's essentially what we did. ⁓
you know, brought Adam on pretty early bunch of, you know, equity and stuff like that. And, and yeah, now we had this web shrinker technology. So today, obviously at that time it was just doing content. The piece that really got me fired up is he's like, I got this machine learning set up to be able to do this for threats actually too. So that's, that's the piece that fired me up. ⁓
So bringing him on board was big and now here it is, you know, we've got this proprietary technology and, it's doing two and a half million requests a second, right. And, we're identifying last time I checked over 70 % of the threats through that technology in-house. So, um, yeah, it was a cool story, but it proved it out and Adam stayed on board for quite some time and now it's, it's pretty advanced.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, it is really impressive. We'll do like checks between like our list, so to speak, keep it in very generic terms against others, using, ⁓ what's that website, I can't remember.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Virus total, probably.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, virus total. like, does the virus total say? What do we say? And usually we're ahead of virus total, like meaning that we will label something as malicious in some way and virus total will not. Nothing on virus total will say it's bad or malicious. And then a few days later, one or two of those are like, it is malicious. 10 days later, more of them, it's malicious. And then, you know, two weeks later, everyone's in agreement with us. So that was a, just a key.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
⁓ huh.
Mikey Pruitt
a core piece of technology. And just like you said, blocking is like, it's less than half of the equation. The bigger piece is actually knowing what to block. And I think that's where a lot of people, it's hard to kind of prove. And a lot of people, it's hard to believe in the same manner, but anyway, it's true.
Ken - CEO, DNSFilter (25:59)
Yeah, truly,
man. mean, it's like the world, it's crazy. You know, it's not even that long ago. mean, DNSFilter isn't even 10 from like the actual first day, you know. ⁓
really, let's say eight years since the first paying customer, not even, but like in those eight years, I mean, it's great that we know how to do the NKS stuff. You don't even really need to know how to do that anymore to set up a network. Like that's how we get the fastest network in the world. But to have the 10th fastest or something pretty fast, like you can just kind of buy it off the shelf. Now people really underplay, I think.
⁓ and I'm just going to say it, especially on the Reddit forums, you know, in my opinion, they, they, yeah, yeah. Hey guys, a lot of them, they always just throw us up against other people. They completely devalue the, the, the value of having that threat stuff in house. Like it touches so many things, even acquiring Xorus learning how, like, for example, one of their big complaints is, ⁓ people would.
Mikey Pruitt
IR slash MSP.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
You know, something's miscategorized. I don't know if that happens a lot, but let's say it even doesn't, right? But things get miscategorized. It happened with us occasionally too. that somebody submits a ticket and they're like, it takes weeks to get an answer or something like that. Well, that's not on Zorus. I mean, it reflects on them, but at the end of the day, they were using a third party feed. So they're beholden to that provider changing it.
And if that doesn't happen or takes a long time, know, whatever with us, we have control over that to do it immediately. you know, and, and then, so there's that there's the, the threat blocking effectiveness. mean, it just touches on so many different levels that people don't really think about that having an in-house is a huge advantage.
Mikey Pruitt
Exactly. The list is really the core technology. But you also mentioned, go ahead.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Yeah. then,
no, no, sorry. I'll just say too, like the other thing is while for a time people may have thought at least in the MSP space, you think, ⁓ like DNSFilter. I know we're showing commitment with the source acquisition now, but you might think, you know, they're doing all these larger fortune 500s and stuff like that. But the reality is to doing that is.
why we are 10 days or more faster. Like we have millions and millions of homes using us. We have entire countries that use us. We have Fortune 500 company, like this whole mixture of a wide variety of locations combined with learning from an in-house is that like having that is not a negative. Like being an MSP using us, that's a positive because you're getting access to a data set.
that really, yeah, I mean, it may exist with Umbrella to be fair. They're pretty big too, but they don't have the in-house talent that we do on the machine learning.
Mikey Pruitt (29:11)
Yeah. So let me clarify that what you just said. So typically there's like a patient zero, like, uh-oh, this is a new threat domain or some domain is now malicious. We know it's malicious. And Ken is saying, if you have a 20,000 employee enterprise, they are more likely to hit that domain before the MSP customers would. Therefore the MSP gets the benefits of those enterprise customers being on the front line, so to speak.
I've never heard it put that way.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Yeah,
well, or there's so many. mean, we could go deep on this if you want. There's but there's like, I mean, the same could happen for a home, right? Like, opposite wise, there's a lot of threats that we see that being in we're in like six million homes right now being in all those homes all over the world ⁓ through, you know, ISPs, things like that.
you'll see stuff that happens in a home first and then it gets brought into a corporate network as well, you know, or somebody doesn't. And I don't know why that is. I suspect it could be maybe somebody isn't using DNSFilter for or something like DNSFilter at work. I mean, they're using it at work, right? But then maybe they don't have roaming protection and they take that work machine home and now they're unprotected at home.
and I let something through or whatever, right? But now that thing got through and you bring that net, that laptop back into the, to the corporate network. What do you think happens? Like that's, that's how it goes. But, ⁓ I could go deeper if you want, there's some pretty cool threat hunting stuff that we've seen, but yeah.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah.
Well, you mentioned something else that I wanted to touch on, which is Reddit. And I don't want to talk about Reddit, but I do want to talk about the really customer-centric values that you can have instilled in the entire company. And I remember when I started, like six years ago, we were very attentive to customer feedback. And that has never stopped. And I'm curious why you always thought that was important.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
⁓ Honestly, that's part of, well, there's multiple layers here. For one, starts with, I guess it's probably, it could be a bad ⁓ personal quality or something like that, but I want everybody to like me, you know, is one thing. So for one thing is it really matters to me to make as many people happy.
Mikey Pruitt
Hahaha!
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
⁓ as possible in kind of every aspect of my life, but certainly with the product that we make. So it really matters to me and so does reputation too. you know, ⁓ I just don't, ideally, I don't want anybody being able to point at us saying that we ever didn't listen or don't care. Like I want them to have a really, really high opinion of us, both in terms of ethics, morals, how the product's built, how we treat people.
Both internal, external and all that. So that's kind of like number one. And number two is I think like a lot of times, you know, somebody may ask like, how do you make a successful product or something? I mean, there's a lot that goes into it and starting a company and all that. But I'd say to start with, you know, for me, I knew I knew the core of what I needed.
In the product to start it, right? But like, that's just me. That's just me. As far as, as what it means to be for a larger audience, for them to be happy with it. There's lots of founders or people, I feel like this happens maybe when you're really technical too, is that they're, they'll, they'll think they know best. And they want to like, I guess Steve Jobs, I mean, he's a bad example because he's so damn good at his job.
But like he had that line that like ⁓ something like, you need to, the customer doesn't know what they want. You need to tell them like that essentially. Like, and that's true. Maybe in some cases when you're doing something really innovative, I guess, you know, I'd say, but when you're trying to build something better and make people happy and then, and then usually the innovation comes later. Why? I don't know why people sit and they think about like how they should build it.
You know, like in other words, there's a whole, yeah, I would just send out before we even had like candy and these feedback tools and stuff like that. I would just send out a survey monkey survey. I would try not to do it too much to, know, get people upset with like my emails, but I just send out a survey monkey survey to 500 customers or 300 customers and
Mikey Pruitt
You're like, there's a whole group of people that will just tell you.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
and whoever answers, cool, I'll get like 50 answers, you know? And I would just build what they say. I mean, not always, like sometimes honestly, people have some pretty stupid, ⁓ some pretty stupid suggestions, but generally, you know, there's people agree on things and you find the trends and you just build it. And I accomplish making them happy, giving them a product that does what they need. ⁓
I also get a deeper connection with them. They feel more invested because they literally, I how cool is that? You got to say, I think it should have this. And to know that you're one of the five customers, 10 customers, or even maybe you're the only one behind why this product has this feature, which is then being used by 35 million people around the world. It's just cool. So I don't know. That's why.
Mikey Pruitt
Your input is important, so keep sending it in. And it's funny, there's like a, there's like, can kind of measure this, like, ⁓ 50 people voted for this thing and, you know, a hundred people voted on this thing. So we do the hundred person thing. It's like, well, let's like, let's like read the comments. Cause when you.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Yeah, super important.
Well, it depends. think
A good example is like dark mode. know, like, yeah, I want it to honestly, I want it cool, too. I think it's super cool. Like I want that on my screen on a wall and just to look bad ass like I actually that's why the whole front dashboard page is the way it was. I was like, I just want something bad ass that I can put on my wall and the MSP.
and make it look like something out of the born identity or something like that on my screen. So I get dark mode is cool. And there's a lot of votes. It's probably the most voted or top three, I'm guessing right now features in terms of upvotes. like, know, truthfully, when you got a limited set of resources, you can't just always go at the top vote.
It's like, well, we could make something more stable. We could roll out something that's going to protect more people, make an improvement to the machine learning. It's all of that. And then eventually we'll get there. But right now the mission is to protect real people from bad things happening in the real world. And ⁓ anything in dark mode doesn't really further that mission, to be honest, even though it's cool. Yeah, I try to do it for like a hackathon or something, you
Mikey Pruitt
It does look cool.
Pro tip: the dark reader plug-in actually makes the dashboard look really good in dark mode. Just a little pro tip for the audience.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
It's also not that easy to be clear by the way, too. It's not like we're just lazy. I mean, it's actually a very large undertaking to do dark mode. It's like a several month project. No, it's way, way more than that. It's like several months of work.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, it's like it's just another style sheet. It's like, actually, it's a little bit more.
So let's talk about this, like the company culture that you built at DNSFilter and now incorporating Xorus, which turns out matches really well. You were working alone at anaptics. had a small team. You kind of got some co-founders for DNSFilter. And you've been working remotely, mostly this whole time.
So how do you build a company culture like we have working remotely?
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
It's really, really, really hard, honestly. I'd say that it started that way. It wasn't really a conscious decision or anything like that. I'm here in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina right now. That's not where I live all the time, but it's where I spend some time. That's basically where, you live too.
You can attest to the fact there's not a lot of any cast experts down here. Yeah, yeah, they're probably think cast net or something. What are you talking about? I don't know. They think it's a fishing thing. But yeah, so we just it had to be remote, know, like we could you couldn't just get that talent here. But and then I think we got lucky and probably a terrible way to say it. But like with Covid happening.
Mikey Pruitt
No one's even heard the word before.
Hahaha
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
It just like you had to be remote. it wasn't really a question in it and became like an advantage, you know, that we were set up that way. Well, the thing was with and with COVID, we were like each other's friends to a degree there, right? You you'd have
Mikey Pruitt
I'm picking up a trend here. Go ahead, finish.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
virtual happy hours and all these Slack channels started up for interest so that that was cool. You got to do a of that. We ⁓ I've been pretty hard on except, you know, during COVID, of course, doing these we do the annual company meetups. I get a lot of pushback from that from our CFO and the board sometimes because it's a very expensive undertaking.
But I think it's critical. can't be completely remote and never meet each other. You have to at least meet up once a year for sure so you understand it's not just a person behind a screen. A lot of times you end up showing up there like, I hate this person. And then you leave and you're like, oh, they're not an ass. They're actually pretty cool. That's how they're whatever.
body languages or something, you know, you learn all these things. But I'd say the toughest part is the communication. Like I, I, I'm not going to say that we're, we're definitely not perfect at it. Like I still want to make us better. ⁓ but I think, you know, like if you're working on a project or whatever, you can't just roll up to the desk next to you and ask something, you know? ⁓ so.
You have to have every project plan and I'm not saying we do this, but we got to have every project plan like meticulously detailed and planned out and updates and know, regular cadence on updates and things like that. So it's, it's challenging and it's weird because some of the stuff that you'll read about the real world, like, or not the real world, the in-person world, I'll say.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
I don't know why I said real world, but the in-person world, they'll say, for example, like, recurring meetings are a waste of time. I'm not, I agree you need to be careful about them, but like in a remote culture, I'm not so sure that that's true. You know, like if you don't do a recurring meeting, then when do you ever meet and think about what's going on, you know? ⁓ But yeah, if you're in an office where you could just be exchanging information,
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, never.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
yelling over cubicles or at lunch or whatever. It's different. So it's just a different beast, man. You have to work really, really hard and not get complacent.
Mikey Pruitt
Exactly. So the trend that I'm, excuse me, the trend that I'm picking up on is you're what based on what you've said today, it's almost like you were accidentally in the right place at the right time. Like, ⁓ you know, the open DNS purchase and you were there to capitalize the web shrinker acquisition now, the source acquisition, ⁓ inventing a remote culture and all these things. And I'm curious, like,
There's a lot of people that are like aspiring to start companies like DNSFilter, be like a entrepreneur or a CEO or whatever. And you, you are kind of saying that you are accidentally in this position. However, I imagine there's some type of underlying drive that has pushed those, let's say lucky moments to come to fruition. So like, do you have any advice for aspiring entrepreneurs?
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Yeah, I guess a little bit, I mean, the timing is definitely important. I wouldn't say. ⁓ Yeah, I would say timing more than luck, if you know what I mean. Like if one of these things that I mentioned didn't happen, we could still be in the same place. But for example, I don't think you. Starting up a DNSFiltering company today.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, don't do that.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
I don't think you're going to do that well. ⁓ mean, you're welcome to try. I'm not saying you shouldn't because I don't want another competitor. I'm just saying the timing, there might be another shift, for example, in a couple years or something like that. But like that OpenDNS shift to Cisco, that was a really good time to get into it. And even then, it was only a couple years later. anyway, timing, can't really control, ⁓ well, the luck you can't control the timing you can that you you need to choose the right time to take your shot for sure. But I think it starts with like solving ⁓ a problem that you live through for sure, you know, like, like I did. I think that that's one piece because like, it needs to be a problem you know a lot about and that you're passionate about solving. So like the passion is definitely the other key part. And and I think the reason for
The passion is because you're going to always see these competitors. You can't focus on them. You can't let that get you down. You always have to like focus just on yourself and your customers and your execution. And there's going to be a lot of really bad things that happen. I can tell you there's a lot more bad things that happen here than good things throughout the years. The good things just ended up being so good. They outweigh the bad, but there's way more horrible nights and days and
times where you want to give up and everything like that. And you just got to work really, really hard. I don't, I, there's a little blog post that wrote about this. I think I quoted Elon Musk at the time. I'll stay away from that now because he was cool years ago, but everybody hates him now. But like, like, you know, I do think what he said still matters. And, and it resonated with me, which was that,
Mikey Pruitt
Hahaha
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
you like you don't have to necessarily just be intelligent, right? You have to work really, really hard. So if you're going to get into this and sort of expect like work life balance for me, that that didn't happen. It's a weak point. It's a weak point for me. But what I could say is that I'll just work harder than anybody else. And I don't mean in I mean both.
in the time and this only happens if you're passionate about what you're doing, but like both during the hours that I am at work, I am just purely doing work. Like I don't care about anything else in my life except doing the work and it's probably bad, but that's what I do. I'll also work like double the amount of hours. So it's, ⁓ I think that's the easiest way to get ahead. It's like truthfully, you don't know if you're smarter than anybody else, but if you're the equal level of smart,
and you put in twice the amount of hours, well, you're going to get there probably at least twice as fast. ⁓ So it might be.
cliche or bad advice, but I think that's what it is. Like you can't just chat GPT your way to it. ⁓ And you can't just expect to have like a work life balance and be really successful. I don't think when you're starting up your own business.
Mikey Pruitt
Good advice. You have to have that passion, that drive in order to make it through the hard spots. And you got to work a lot harder than you would think. And you have to be paying attention to when it is time to put your foot on the gas and go.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Yeah, there's also this guy, this guy Ray Antonino. I don't know if you know him. ⁓ Yeah, he's local here in the Myrtle Beach startup community. And I don't know if it still says it, but if you look at his LinkedIn, he says like building a 10 year overnight success. And that's always resonated with me too is like people look at and they'll be, you know, you can look at DNSFilter and say like, that's great. You guys blew up so fast or whatever, you know.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, I know him.
Yeah.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
But no, we didn't. Like, it's gonna be 10 years in September. that, it is true. Like it takes, a lot of people don't realize, but if you look at, do the research, it takes, even it, I mean, the odds of being successful are so low, because a lot of people give up. But even when you're working really, really hard, all these companies that you think just blew up.
On average, they're seven to 10 years at it before you feel like they blew up or before you heard about it. So ⁓ it's not going to happen that fast.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah. You don't see, yeah, you don't see Ken, ⁓ you know, shoving, shoving a bunch of luggage through, TSA to go to a trade show with like 50 people in 2015. You don't see that stuff on the billboards or on our blog or anything like that. but Ken put in the work and he did it double time.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
No, no.
Yeah, so that's all it is. I mean, I think if you have passion, you got a problem you want to solve, and you work really, really hard, you're going to be ahead of everybody else already. And then the last thing I'll say is that I mean, to a degree, chat GPT can help with this a little or AI can help with this a little bit now. ⁓ But you can't undervalue
either being technical yourself or having a technical co-founder. I've mentored at places like Techstars and everything like that. And it's ⁓ the amount of people who come that they have a good idea, but they have no technical understanding of a way to make it happen is staggering. I don't see how you can do.
Mikey Pruitt
you
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
I don't know, least in the world I'm in, I think you've got to be technical or have somebody technical along with you. That's going to help a lot.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, I would agree with that.
It's like, even some of the salespeople here at DNSFilter, you know, I'm like, hey, like open up your terminal and try to try to close them or open them and edit a document and just just to figure it out. They're like, how do you do it? I'm like, use Google, use chat. GPT, like go figure it out because that's how you learn with tech. Like I thought so I do like I am like I know nothing like I'm building. I'll show you this on camera.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Yep. Yeah.
Mikey Pruitt
That's my new home server over there. Yeah. So,
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
⁓ yeah, I saw some pictures of it. That's, that thing is bad ass.
Mikey Pruitt
so the, ⁓ like, how do you flash an HB and H yeah, that's the HL 15 with the back plane. It's like 15 drives. It's going to be beautiful.
Ken - CEO, DNSFilter
That's the back flip.
Yeah, off of Back Please is like they did an offshoot, I think, and build those things.
Mikey Pruitt
So like I had to learn how to flash an HBA card to IT mode, whatever all that means. But I just wanted to figure it out and it worked. But I did want to kind of close with one thing. It's like this future. What do you think the future looks like for cybersecurity or DNSFilter or both?
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
It's a good question, something always trying to figure out. ⁓ I think the immediate future, I think we've been pretty clear on with the roadmap of Zorus and everything like that, trying to get RC stability up and start, but, and bring CyberSight into the mix, is like that ⁓ behavior analytics, I'll say. ⁓
The reason I bring up cyber sites specifically is because threats are just evolving and getting really, really advanced. So I think there's, I'm trying to think how I can do this without going on a big tangent, but basically, you know, there's the DNS layer threats and everything like that. Certainly the analytics of what's going to happen before and after is really important before it was collecting it. But now with the advent of
⁓ machine learning and AI becoming even cheaper and faster and more capable, like we're going to be able to do a ton, a ton with that and forensically analyzing threats or trends. You know, I see, I see us building a lot of that ⁓ sort of forensic analysis, pre-warning of things to happen, leveraging AI in finding threats in the product. ⁓ Additionally, you know, I know for us, we're going to be focusing on something
that we're calling Project Illuminate internally. I can't go into everything about it, but it's going to be basically giving a lot of the machine learning ⁓ insights that we have and our decision making, giving insights to that, to people who ⁓ may or may not be DNSFilter customers so they can protect better. ⁓ And then beyond that, I don't know, I'm always like thinking about it. ⁓ I know one thing that concerns
I'm thinking, you know, that DNSFilter, mean, we, our mission is to protect real people from real things happening in the real world. And I'll go on one tangent for a second and mean that like, that's really important to me because there's all sorts of things that happen that people don't realize we have an impact on from national security to child safety and things like that.
that affect things in the real world, like our research. We were just named in a national security warning for research that we did multiple years ago. ⁓ I think it was, we reported three or four child pornography rings to the FBI. We were involved in something called Project Endgame, stopping the world's largest ransomware. ⁓
having the world's largest ransomware takedown. So basically as I see these things happening in the real world, my point is that I'm realizing we're not protecting machines or anything, we're protecting people and we're filtering bad stuff from happening to people. So I say that because one thing that's kind of at the top of my mind, I don't know if we'll turn it into a product or not.
is ⁓ things like that can happen as a result of AI, like deep fake candidates and everything like that. ⁓ You've seen it happen a lot. I don't know if you know, but ⁓ they didn't get through thanks to our amazing HR team and some of the training tactics that we give them and stuff that we've been ⁓ looking at and exploring, I'll say for a potential product. But ⁓ we had somebody that
actually came in here to DNSFilter applying for a job that was a deep fake candidate. So that really concerns me. ⁓ I don't know. I don't know if that answers your question, but I think.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, I've seen some videos like that, like an interview session where it was just a total fake person on the other end. And the interviewer was like, can you wave your hand in front of your face? ⁓ the person, whoever was working there, I was like, ⁓ no. Because that's going to break the current version of AI that could be used. But that's only a temporary ⁓ scam prevention measure.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Yeah, they're gonna get better and better, right? You know, ⁓ that might work now. And we have some tactics that ⁓ I'd rather not share that we do that, you know, I think work for now. ⁓ I do believe that I don't know if we'll go in this direction or something we'll do. just, I do believe that as we build this illuminate product, I realize how much information we do have and can tie all these indicators together.
And realize that there's a lot of other types of threats that we could stop. So ⁓ I have a feeling that we'll maybe get into more.
Mikey Pruitt
future looks bright. Well I'm excited for the ride and Ken thank you for joining me today I really appreciate it.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
Same here, thank you. Glad we were able to finally get the time to do it.
Mikey Pruitt
Awesome.
Ken Carnesi - CEO, DNSFilter
All right.