As Netskope’s chief digital and information officer, Mike Anderson sits at the intersection of security, cloud, and business outcomes, helping customers and teams move faster, safer, and smarter. He has led transformations that marry agility with accountability, modern tech with measurable value, and bold vision with a culture that empowers people to do the best work of their careers.
Anderson has a rare lens, that of a practitioner who has worn both the internal CIO hat and a customer-facing go-to-market hat. On a recent episode of the Tech Whisperers podcast, he unpacked lessons from his career, including how to future-proof an IT leadership career, inspire buy-in for bold ideas, and build a culture of ambition by “lighting a fire in someone, not under them.”
We spent some time after the podcast diving into Netskope’s journey from startup to IPO. Anderson shared the playbook he used to help scale a high-growth company, providing practical takeaways about operating choices, people practices, and leadership habits that any leader can apply to their own situation. What follows is that conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Dan Roberts: Why did you decide to leave an enterprise CIO path for a then-little-known startup? What was appealing about the opportunity?
Mike Anderson: One reason was the agility you can show in your career as a CIO. When you’ve been at big companies, sometimes you’re not known as the person that can roll up your sleeves and do the hard work. The agility to dial it up or dial it down, no matter what, is important. You also have to be passionate about the problem being solved. That was part of why I looked to be involved during the interview process when my wife was considering joining Netskope. I wanted to learn more about the company, and I said, ‘If you’re going to go join a startup, let’s make sure it’s the right one.’ Because part of the benefit of joining a startup is, hopefully, there’s a positive liquidity event in the future, not to mention working for a great company with great people.
Often people will say to me, ‘You went to the other side,’ and I’ll say that, as a CIO, you can often make a bigger impact in a tech company than in a big manufacturer or pharmaceutical. You’ll make an impact there, but you’re not the end buyer. Being at a tech company, you’re really the customer, so you can create a lot more value beyond your role as CIO. People on my team say they have that same ambition, to be a CIO or CISO in a tech company, because they love talking to customers about how we use our own products.
And I learn from our customers. I have three to five conversations a week with CIOs and CISOs, and I ask them questions like, ‘How are you using our technology? What creative use cases have you come up with?’ One leader said he used it for change management, and I was like, really? He said that, especially in the SaaS world, you’re often replacing tools with new tools, so he basically used Netskope to create a coaching message that said, ‘This tool’s going away on this date, and it’s being replaced by this tool.’ It made perfect sense, because no one reads emails from IT, and no one attends the webinars you put on for people to learn about the new solution. What they do is call the help desk the first day because they can’t get into the tool they used to use. The ability to coach people in real-time, let them know what’s changing, that’s a really cool use case and it helps create better digital citizens.
What were some of the things you did to make the business public-company ready?
Sanjay [Beri, CEO and co-founder] never wanted the company to just be acquired and rolled into something else. The ambition since Netskope started was to be a public company and an iconic security company. So, he and our leadership team started operating like a public company many quarters before we went public. I think that helps a lot in establishing the operating rhythm you need to have.
Obviously, at day zero in a tech company, IT is a lot smaller. We were operating in less than half the countries we are today. We’ve made several acquisitions since I joined four and a half years ago, bringing technology and advanced roadmap and capabilities. We’ve got four major R&D centers on three continents.
As the team has grown, we’ve shifted to a product operating model to break down silos in the organization. Security and IT teams tend to have a little friction, so instead, our CISO and I put those teams together and formed product teams to focus on the things we needed to accomplish specific to the public readiness — because one thing you get audited on is user access. What access does someone have? Do you have the right segregation of duties inside your applications? That was something we achieved together in a very short time frame. The process we had before was very manual; we needed to apply technology and some new thinking to it.
How did you keep teams engaged and healthy under pressure while also honoring the transparency constraints pre-IPO?
We did a good job of not talking about things we couldn’t talk about unless it was someone that was read-in to the process, but absent that, I’m a big believer in making scoreboards public. That’s why I’m a big fan of Kanban boards and OKRs. Make your work visible. Don’t try to hide things. There’s an adage that bad news isn’t like wine — it doesn’t age well. If there’s a problem, the sooner we know about the problem, the sooner we can solve it before it becomes a bigger problem.
When it comes to people, you have to constantly re-recruit the people you have — especially when people see an IPO as the milestone they’ve been waiting for. What are we doing to invigorate those people to get them excited about the next step in our journey as a company? The way you re-recruit top talent isn’t by just throwing money and options at them. Treat them like people; make sure they know what they do every day makes an impact. A lot of people will trade money for knowing they’re making an impact, because people like being on a winning team.
And authenticity matters because people can always tell when you’re not being real — and once that trust is gone, it’s hard to win it back.
Why do you make comparisons between shadow IT and dating?
On the podcast, I talked about how finding applications is a lot like dating. People go on a few dates, start to like someone, introduce them to their friends to see what they think, and eventually introduce them to their parents — hoping they’ll love them too. In this case, the parents are the CIO or the CISO. You usually find out about the relationship when they’ve already made a choice and are asking for your blessing — or your help to support it.
And just like with real parenting, sometimes you have a different idea of who the right partner should be. You might see potential risks or long-term compatibility issues that others overlook. But if you come down too hard, they’ll just hide the next relationship. That’s why I prefer to approach shadow IT with curiosity rather than control.
One advantage I have is that I use our own platform to get visibility into these ‘dating scenarios.’ It gives me insights into which new applications people are trying out, where they’re connecting from, and how those tools are being used. That visibility helps me start proactive conversations, not to shut things down, but to understand what attracted them to that ‘partner’ in the first place.
I’ll ask questions like, ‘What drew you to this application?’ or ‘What problem are you trying to solve?’ Those conversations reveal the challenges people are trying to address and the outcomes they value most. When I see similar patterns across teams, I can surface those themes and use them to inform broader technology decisions. It’s a great way to turn shadow IT into a learning opportunity, and to help people become better digital citizens who feel empowered, not policed.
Now that Netskope is public, what’s materially different about how you operate? Has anything surprised you?
I’ve worked for public companies before, so I had the cheat sheet around what that looks like. You have a target, meet it. I’ve often been asked, ‘Now that you’ve got all the money, what are you going to go spend it on?’ Well, there’s a difference between the balance sheet and the income statement. We’ve got a lot of money from the IPO on the balance sheet. That doesn’t mean the income statement — revenue in, expenses out — has changed. My P&L expectation hasn’t changed. Now it’s under a magnifying glass.
Nothing’s changed from a risk appetite standpoint either. We’re a cyber company, so the worst thing that could happen to us is have a breach. But risk is more than cyber. Risk is also making strategic bets as a company. Hiring a salesperson is a risk. If you hire the person in that market and they don’t deliver revenue, that’s a risk to your organization. What I try to get my team thinking about is, how do we de-risk those decisions? How do we de-risk that new salesperson not getting onboarded? How do we de-risk the attrition in salespeople? Because that becomes a drain on expense versus a contributor to revenue.
I try to get my teams to think about that, and that’s what I tell them winning is. Winning is successfully onboarding people. Winning is helping them get more meetings, getting more first meetings turning into second meetings, making the quotation process so simple that people don’t need a PhD to figure out how to do a quote as we scale and add more products and capabilities. That’s no different than it was a year ago, or two years ago. It’s just now we have different investments we’re making, and how do we help use technology to de-risk those decisions so we can be successful?
What’s your advice for CIOs eyeing a practitioner role in a high-growth company?
Most important is to follow the revenue. How does your company make revenue? Where are they trying to make revenue? What are the business models your business is in? It’s no different from what I’d look at with any other CIO job I would step into: Are we selling directly? Are we selling through a channel? Are we a multi-tiered distribution model? How does that vary by country? How does that influence the investment decisions we want to make? Those are all the things that you need to learn, and you need to learn those in the first 90 days. That’s got to be part of your playbook.
Also — and again, you have this with any CIO role — don’t assume because you did something somewhere else it will work here. It’s the adage of seek to understand, not to be understood. Come in with an open mind. Take time to understand how the business operates, why the decisions that have been made are the way they are.
Especially if you’re coming from a big company, realize that you’re probably going to have to roll up your sleeves. You’re not going to have a whole army of people to delegate things to. You may have to build your own presentation. You may not be able to hire a chief of staff right out of the gate, so be willing to roll up your sleeves.
For example, I remember recently shopping in a sporting goods store, trying to help my CFO troubleshoot his laptop. You have to be willing to take those calls and do that work, but also know when to call in an expert.
Now that the IPO chapter is closed, what does the next chapter look for Netskope?
As our CEO Sanjay always says, you innovate or die. We’ve been fortunate to be recognized as a leader in the key areas our company serves by the leading industry analyst firms, and we have to continue to innovate and execute to maintain that leadership position.
We invest a lot in R&D to continue innovating for our customers, to stay ahead of the newest adversaries — for example, how do you overcome things like deepfakes? Are deepfakes joining a Zoom call or a Teams call? How do you make sure you can sniff that out? Because of AI, the attacks are getting a lot more sophisticated. They look a lot more real. You don’t have the easy indicators such as grammar mistakes like you had before. So you have to be able to make the right investments. I think AI is the biggest opportunity; it’s also the biggest risk we face. In the cyber space, we always say, the bad guys only have to get it right once; we have to get it right every day.
In any business, you’re measured by the leverage you create — how efficiently you turn investment into outcomes. For our go-to-market teams, that means increasing sales productivity and getting more revenue per dollar spent. For G&A functions, it’s about scaling efficiently and maximizing the return on every investment we make. That’s where I focus a lot of my team’s energy: helping the company scale and using AI to get there.
We have some exciting AI initiatives under way to automate a lot of the work salespeople typically do — like researching companies and people — so they can tailor their outreach more effectively. The reps in our pilot said it’s saving them hours each week, allowing them to engage with customers more effectively and drive growth by getting more meetings with the right people.
We also focus on ramp time. When we hire new salespeople, how do we help them land those first big deals that build confidence and momentum? If a salesperson doesn’t learn how to sell our solution quickly, that becomes a real problem. The faster we can help them figure that out, the better.
We’re not selling to a single buying group; we’re selling to three: the security team, the infrastructure and network team, and the CIO. Both as CIO and in my strategy role, I’m focused on how we help our salespeople develop the situational awareness to carry the right conversation with each. One is a risk conversation, another is a technical discussion that dives into the speeds and feeds, and the third is a value conversation.
We’re investing in AI technology to help reps practice, train, and learn so they can be effective across all three audiences as quickly as possible. Those are some of the big bets we’re making from an IT standpoint.
For more insights from Mike Anderson’s leadership playbook, tune in to the Tech Whisperers podcast.
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Read More from This Article: Netskope CIO Mike Anderson on making the leap to a startup
Source: News