Huntress Will Need To Disrupt Itself To Protect SMBs: CEO Kyle Hanslovan

To get ahead of the ever-worsening cyberthreats faced by SMBs, the vendor’s current offering ‘needs to be put out of business by the future version of Huntress,’ Hanslovan tells CRN.

While the first decade in business for Huntress has seen a massive expansion of its managed cybersecurity platform, disruption to everything the company has built is coming, according to Huntress CEO Kyle Hanslovan.

Crucially, however, it’s coming from within the company itself. In an interview with CRN, Hanslovan (pictured) said that getting ahead of the ever-worsening cyberthreats faced by SMBs will mean disrupting the very products and playbook that built the vendor’s success.

In other words, “the current version of Huntress needs to be put out of business by the future version of Huntress,” he said.

None of this is ignoring the fact that Huntress, which Hanslovan co-founded in 2015, has done something that few security vendors are able to accomplish in growing to its current scale and impact in the MSP channel, he said. Huntress surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue a year ago and employs more than 600, as well as working with thousands of solution and service provider partners.

Notably, the company has seen this growth while staying focused on meeting the security needs of underserved SMBs, Hanslovan said.

That has remained true even as Huntress has expanded beyond its core managed EDR (endpoint detection and response) offering to now provide managed versions of ITDR (identity threat detection and response), security awareness training and SIEM (security information and event management) as well.

And yet, even with the dramatic rise of cybersecurity awareness and spending, there’s still not enough being done to slow the growth of attacks, Hanslovan said — particularly when it comes to SMBs.

“We as an industry are not winning right now,” he said. “If you look at how many companies [threat actors] are extorting, versus the number of companies that we and our partners are protecting — we're not actually winning that battle yet.”

Evolving Strategies

While the transformation into a new version of Huntress will not happen overnight — “I've seen what happens when vendors do too much at once,” Hanslovan said — the company is already showing signs of embracing new strategies.

Those include its recently announced collaboration with Microsoft that brings its products into the tech giant's online marketplace. Huntress also announced its first distribution partnership, with Sherweb, last month.

While Huntress had always avoided marketplaces and distributors in the past out of concerns over relying too heavily on third-party support, Hanslovan said the urgency around bringing security to more SMBs has changed his perspective.

“I had to realize that if I don't use some of these [distributors] to help me protect the masses, I'm going to fall short of my mission of protecting the 99 percent,” he said.

Ultimately, the vision that Huntress needs to achieve in its next iteration is to become a true “turnkey solution” for cybersecurity, Hanslovan said.

“I’m not talking to anyone right now that says, ‘I need [multiple different] point products. They just want an outcome,” he said.

The bottom line is that during its second decade, a new version of Huntress must emerge to better meet those expectations — which will inevitably “kill off the point solution version of Huntress,” Hanslovan said.

“I could easily make the next 10 years about being a faster horse,” he said. “But I think people need a new car.”

‘Transparent To A Fault’

Hanslovan’s openness about the future of Huntress and its need for self-disruption should not be surprising to anyone who has followed the company over the years, however.

Taking that type of approach has, in fact, been one of the keys for Huntress in its efforts to win and maintain trust from MSPs, according to Andrew Kaiser, vice president of sales at Huntress.

Huntress has long made a point of “being transparent, sometimes to a fault,” said Kaiser, who has been with the company since 2019.

For instance, internally, that has meant sharing the financial presentations it provides to its board to its internal staff, he said. Externally, it has meant publicly acknowledging mistakes.

Rather than hiding from a mistake, the Huntress approach has been to make it public and “let people beat us up for it,” Kaiser said. “We’re going to let them hold us accountable for how we rectify that mistake and do things differently next time.”

Overall, “if there's ever a question of, ‘Should this be shared externally?’ — then you've already got your answer,” he said. “And that's worked well for us so far.”

That openness and transparency has translated into enduring trust and loyalty from many in the MSP community, said Dustin Bolander, founder and managing partner of Clear Guidance Partners, an Austin-based MSP and longtime Huntress partner.

One example, Bolander said, is that Huntress Co-Founder and CTO Chris Bisnett is known for going on Reddit and posting “huge novels” about why a mistake was made and how Huntress has addressed it.

Leading The Way On Security

More importantly, of course, is the fact that most of the time Huntress does get things right — including catching and rapidly shutting down attacks in the middle of the night, Bolander said.

“The big thing I always tell people is, Huntress helps me sleep at night,” he said.

Huntress has also stood out by going a step beyond most other vendors and actually guiding MSPs on where they should be going next when it comes to security, Bolander said.

“Huntress is constantly pushing us, ‘You should be doing X, Y and Z’,’” he said. “I don't know that there's any other vendor that I've worked with that has been giving us a roadmap — or at least pointing us in the direction that we need to go — so we're not having to figure out stuff as much on our own.”