DFJ Growth is a late-stage venture capital firm that backed Cylance in one of its growth rounds, and this founder interview captures Stuart McClure's perspective on the entrepreneurial journey at a stage when Cylance had moved past early proof-of-concept and into the harder work of building a scalable, durable company.
The interview covers the founding conviction: that the security industry had accepted a fundamentally broken model. Detect-and-respond assumes you will be compromised and focuses on minimizing the damage afterward. Prevention — stopping the attack before it executes — was widely dismissed as impossible because signature-based tools could not prevent what they had not seen before. Stuart's insight was that machine learning could change this equation by classifying executables based on their mathematical properties rather than their known-bad signatures. That model, he argued, could generalize to novel threats in a way that signatures never could.
Building a company around that thesis required surviving years of market skepticism. Stuart talks honestly about what that period was like — the customer conversations where security teams said they had heard "better AV" pitches before, the industry press that treated AI-based security as marketing hype, the need to maintain team conviction while the evidence slowly accumulated. What sustained it was the empirical results: when Cylance's model went up against real threats in controlled conditions, it performed.
The DFJ Growth interview is one of the more substantive entrepreneurial accounts Stuart has given, and it reflects the kind of candor that characterizes his best communication: specific about what was hard, honest about what he would do differently, clear about what actually drove success.