Invest Like the Best · Oct 20, 2026 · 57m · 51m saved
With Christina Cacioppo, Founder and CEO of Vanta
Vanta now serves roughly 16,000 customers across five products, built on integrations with about 400 other tools. Most software companies that got this big would be charging a premium for being first. Christina Cacioppo, founder and CEO of Vanta, told Patrick O'Shaughnessy on Invest Like the Best that being first never mattered — only shipping did.
"You're really only as good as the last thing you shipped."
Christina started Vanta eight years ago to help companies prove their security and compliance to customers through audits like SOC 2, ISO 27001 and HIPAA, and has since watched a wave of AI-native rivals try to clone that business in a weekend.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 57 minutes of audio, 7 minutes of reading.
Here are the 5 takeaways that matter.
Key Takeaways
Christina says Vanta's edge is execution, not being first — rivals can "vibe code" a copy of the product in a weekend
High-margin software now trades at a fraction of what faster, lower-margin AI companies command: an 80%-growth, 80%-margin business gets 3 to 10 times less multiple
Vanta eats the AI token cost rather than disguise a markup as "credits" — about 25% of customers are already in an agent-led flow, with a goal of 75%
Top-employee pay at Vanta has risen roughly tenfold in five years as AI labs bid with huge, unproven equity stories
Christina says knowing the company and the customer is underhyped relative to narrow skills like sales ability
Some French customers switched to Chinese AI models over business continuity risk, not ideology
Vanta is pushing toward fixing vulnerabilities at "machine speed" instead of triaging by severity
1. An Inverted Valuation Market
Christina built Vanta's advantage on what she calls a "trust graph," a security data lake assembled from the roughly 400 tools the product plugs into.
Rivals can copy a product overnight, so only continued shipping wins
"You're really only as good as the last thing you shipped... someone can vibe code your thing in a weekend." — Christina Cacioppo
That same speed has flipped how investors price the business she built. Christina said a fast-growing, high-margin company like Vanta now trades at a third to a quarter of the multiple it would have commanded before, because investors are rewarding faster, lower-margin AI plays instead.
A slower, high-margin business is valued below a faster, lower-margin one today
"At the fullness of time, an 80% growth business with 80% margins will... be better than a 160% growth business with 30% margins. But today the latter is valued at three, four times the multiple of the former — ten times the multiple of the former." — Christina Cacioppo
