BotGuard, founded as a result of a unique blend of passion, necessity, and technical expertise, has become a force in safeguarding online assets from bots and cyber threats. With a captivating origin story, BotGuard’s journey reflects the power of innovation and entrepreneurship in addressing pressing cybersecurity challenges.
Nik Rozenberg, CEO of BotGuard, delves into the origins of BotGuard, the principles that drive its leadership, its competitive edge in the cybersecurity market, and its readiness to tackle emerging industry trends and challenges.
Can you tell us about the origins of BotGuard? How did the idea for the company and its products come to life?
This story is quite amusing, as it all began as a side project. Initially, my co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Denis, who happens to be a pharmaceutical chemist by profession but has had a passion for programming since he was 8 years old, created a website focused on vegetarian diets.
There was a lot of proprietary content, mostly nutritional facts, recipes and recommendations, on this website, and then an army of scraper bots came and began to steal it all. At the time, it turned out that there was no affordable or truly efficient tool on the market to stop them; the few tools available carried a huge cost for large enterprises. And again, the technology used at that time did not look convincing enough no matter how much it cost. This led to a decision to develop our own innovative solution. Long story short, Denis developed a prototype, then we posted a couple of words about it here and there, and in a few weeks, we got a couple of hundred paying customers. The next natural step was to quit our jobs and register a new company.
As the CEO of BotGuard, what principles or values drive your leadership style?
Personally, I value human relations, so I prefer to work with people who are interesting beyond their technical skills and who fit the company’s culture. At BotGuard we have many smart, driven people, and they complement each other well. We focus on working with the right people who match our vision and filtering out the office bots.
BotGuard operates in a competitive cybersecurity market. What makes your product stand out from the competition?
This is a great question. We do universal web traffic protection and management, including malicious bots mitigation, protection against hacker attacks, and layer 7 DDoS attacks, and we also run very competitive monitoring. There are a hundred zillion cyber companies in the market, but if you look at who could help you with protecting and filtering your website traffic, there are only a handful of companies, and for most of them this is not a core functionality.Â
If you are a cyber expert, you can, of course, set up a content delivery network (CDN), an application delivery controller or even write a script to filter out some of the application-layer bots, but to put it mildly, these are not the optimal tools for this task. We provide a universal toolset for filtering out all harmful and useless web traffic, very easy to configure, and gives the user complete control over the incoming traffic. At present I see many competitors in the overall cybersecurity market, but no real alternative around dedicated to the protection against bad traffic and bots, especially at a reasonable price.
What emerging trends or challenges do you foresee in the cybersecurity industry, and how is BotGuard prepared to address them?
Their names are legion and they are all artificial intelligence (AI) related. This is challenging, and soon all cyber battles will be between AIs themselves. Even worse, any school child will soon be able to tell his or her phone to make a bot to hack the school server and get it done in minutes. Only another AI will be able to stop it. At BotGuard, we already have a number of AI models developed, mainly related to the analysis of traffic patterns. We have researchers, and I believe we are ahead of most cyber companies in the region.Â
What would be one advice you would give someone who wishes to achieve a similar level of success?
People are different, and businesses are different. The key to success is to focus on what you do best and delegate the rest to talented people in their respective areas. Realistically, if you are a Business Leader or Start-Up Founder, you don’t have much time for anything else than your business priorities, so technology should not be something that suffers from it.Â
For example, protecting a website with reliable technology brings a lot of advantages for the core business and can help save money down the line by avoiding costly attacks. Trust the protection of your website’s health to experts in the domain, and avoid self-medication with homemade products. The same principle applies to other areas of the business; everyone has a dedicated set of skills and talent that should be utilised accordingly.
