Vanta's Spreadsheet Origins

A story about how Christina Cacioppo discovered the idea for Vanta while working at Dropbox, and how she validated it with a simple spreadsheet.

"I was at Dropbox working on Paper, which was their Google Docs competitor. When we went to launch it, we were told we couldn't because we didn't have SOC 2 compliance. I had no idea what that was, so I started asking questions to understand what blocked us and if it might block other companies too.

While Dropbox had a security team to handle this, I realized the average startup doesn't. The interesting part is that even though I had spent 2 years learning to code and built 35 projects, I didn't write any code to test this idea. Instead, I decided to validate it with just an Excel spreadsheet.

I went to a couple YC startups that I thought might need this and asked if they would find it valuable. There wasn't a lightbulb moment at Dropbox - I actually ran screaming from the room because the process sounded awful. The idea of spending 2 years of work just to see if we had product-market fit seemed bad. I wanted to find reality faster, so I came back to it later with the spreadsheet approach.

The hard part wasn't coding - I could write somewhat shoddy JavaScript to make a first version. The real challenge was figuring out if anyone would want this thing at the end, so I focused on front-loading that validation."