Galina Antova: How to translate a corporate growth mindset into scaling your own business?
Imagine what it means for a young female tech professional to land a career at IBM and become responsible for integrating fast-growth startups into a large corporation. Impressive, right? How about becoming an intrapreneur at Siemens and translating the growth-first mindset into scaling her own business.
Today we are meeting you with Galina Antova, a cybersecurity entrepreneur and executive who has advised and led growth strategies and large-scale digital transformations for Fortune 500 customers. She is the co-founder and Chief Business Development Officer of Claroty, a cybersecurity company for industrial control networks, a female entrepreneurship advocate, and a mentor at Bulgaria Innovation Hub.
Being mentored by the CEO of Siemens, Peter Loescher, and having worked with C-level managers from large international companies, Antova is now a founder who has a lot of professional insights, which have guided her throughout her career.
In this story, Galina Antova shares what are the main differences and similarities between driving the growth of leading international companies and developing a venture from scratch, what it takes for a company to raise $240M in six years, and how did she end up becoming the entrepreneur she is today?
The journey of a founder
Galina Antova shares that she had a very traditional start of her career in entrepreneurship and software development - she did a Bachelor's in computer science and then started working for IBM. “At that stage of my career, I didn't really think that I would want to be an entrepreneur or that it was even a career path to folks like me who are coming out of school,” she shares.
Within IBM, however, she was fortunate to work in a group that was acquiring a lot of companies, so from very early on, she ended up working with startups and bringing them onboard within the large company. “I happened to be at the right place at IBM because my position gave me a perspective that there's a different path than working for a large corporation,” Antova explains.
After spending around 6 years at IBM, she realized that if she wants to progress, she has to get educated on the business front and complement her technical skills. That is what led her to Switzerland where she enrolled for an MBA at the IMD Business School, one of the most prestigious business schools in the world. Besides focusing a lot on must-have business knowledge such as finance and accounting, Antova learned quite a lot about leadership development, the importance of diversity, and how to understand yourself as a leader.
“We had a class of 90 people who represented 60+ nationalities, so one of the most important lessons that I was taught was related to the value of diversity, not just in terms of ethnic background, but also diversity in experiences and in business backgrounds,” Antova says.
At the end of her studies, she was selected to join the CEO Program at Siemens. The idea of the program was to allow bright graduates to join Siemens, do a number of rotations to better understand the company, and then be offered the opportunity to start a new business and receive mentoring from the CEO of Siemens who at that time was Peter Löscher.
From corporate to startup
As she explains, this was around 2011-2012, the years that are associated with the beginning of a new segment within cybersecurity, that of protecting industrial networks. High profile attacks on critical infrastructure made it clear that industrial devices and networks that run the world's infrastructure could be vulnerable to cyber-attacks. And since Siemens is one of the largest automation vendors in the world, this period posed both a challenge and an opportunity for the company.
“Coming with my background in software and IT security from regular IT security enterprises, the time at Siemens made me realize that the world's networks literally run on operational technology devices - everything from electric utilities to manufacturing. However, there was very little cybersecurity in terms of products and services specifically addressing the challenges of protecting those networks,” Antova shares.
Long story short, she started a new business within Siemens with the goal to provide cybersecurity services to many of the large international customers of the corporation. This is where the entrepreneurial journey of Antova started, as she basically built a startup within a very large organization.
“I had to define what the business would do, ended up moving the business from Germany to Atlanta in the US, hired a team, put together an offering. By going through this process, I learned that it is possible to build a startup, and it is not some kind of an unachievable dream, and also realized that I liked the autonomy that this opportunity gave me,” she says.
Through her experience in the market, she came to the insight that there was a need for cybersecurity solutions that are tailored to those industrial networks and that the large incumbent cybersecurity companies at that time were not offering anything that is specific to industrials.
The importance of industrial cybersecurity
Antova explains that since industrial networks are real-time, companies cannot afford to have disruptions in the process because it negatively affects uptime and availability. Her team was faced with the challenge to rethink product strategy for that particular segment and build a product that fulfills the requirements of industrial customers from the ground up.
“Back then it didn't seem so obvious, but in retrospect, I see it more clearly that there was a multi-billion dollar opportunity because all the world's infrastructure runs on those networks. Today, I am proud that my company Claroty was one of the first to bring those specific products to market,” she remarks.
As of now, Claroty has grown into having 300 employees from all around the world and working with some of the biggest enterprises from over 50 countries. So far the company has raised a total of more than $240M with the latest round being a $140M Series D in June 2021. Antova owes this track record to three main factors. First, she explains, she and her team got the right timing because they figured it out at the inception of industrial cybersecurity when the large enterprises have an urgent enough need to start spending money on that issue.
“We also got product strategy right because our offering was clearly differentiated than anything that existed on the market back then and was able to fulfill the requirements of specific networks. And the third element is simply execution. I am sure that we got a lot of things wrong as part of the journey but on balance, we probably got more things right,” Antova says.
The missing puzzle piece in the mindset of Bulgarian entrepreneurs
“Judging by myself, having the common background Bulgarian entrepreneurs and building a wide network with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, my observation is that Balkan founders are relatively scared to dream big compared to US founders. Whether you are working on a startup that has a small ambition or a large ambition, you are going to spend exactly the same amount of time trying to hustle, fundraise money, and attract customers. So the bolder the opportunity and the bolder the vision, the more likely it is for founders to get investors excited and raise enough money to start working on their ideas,” Antova explains.
So what should Bulgarian founders do to bridge that gap? Here is what Galina Antova advises:
Have the ambition and the vision to go after the really big market opportunities.
Have a big enough total addressable market (TAM) and don’t limit the market based on geographical location.
Have a story to tell because that gives you the best chance of raising enough money to be successful.
Have enough of a war chest to keep iterating.
She explains that it is very rare for founders to have such an amazing insight that no one else in the world has thought about that. Usually, it is something that other people have thought about as well but founders can still be successful depending on how they execute and what specific angle they bring. When they continue to iterate, they learn more about their market opportunity and how customers are responding to it, which gives them a better chance to find their product-market fit. She also highlights that moving faster, developing the product faster, and having many people working on your product are all connected to how much money they raise.
The lens of risk applies differently to male and female founders
When it comes to the female/male startup founders divide, she explains that there is a lot of subconscious and conscious bias at every step of the entrepreneurial journey, starting with fundraising. She shared that there have been a lot of studies that show that female and male founders are treated differently by VCs because of social bias.
“For example, when male founders pitch to an investor, they are usually asked about the potential upside. If they define their TAM as X, they are asked ‘Why don’t you define it as 10X’. Whereas when they have follow-up questions for female founders, they are usually focused on protecting the downside and come in the lines of ‘How do you know you will be able to hire the right people to do the job?’. The lens or risk just applies differently,” Antova shares.
Helping Bulgarian founders be bold and think big
Antova highlights that she decided to become a mentor at Bulgaria Innovation Hub with the goal to share her own lessons learned. “As a Bulgarian, I’d love to contribute to that specific set of founders and help them start thinking beyond Bulgaria and Europe. The current opportunities allow us to go straight to the US and other big overseas markets. It is really nice to see that companies in the BIH cohorts have such expansion strategies prioritized,” she concludes.
The possibility for Bulgaria Innovation Hub to achieve these milestones is achieved with the support of America for Bulgaria Foundation (ABF) - an independent, nonpartisan, and nonpolitical American grant-making foundation working in partnership with Bulgarians to strengthen the country’s private sector and related democratic institutions. For more information, please visit: https://us4bg.org/