Rapid7, Inc. Common Stock Piper Sandler 5th Annual Growth Frontiers Conference

Well, good morning, everyone. I am Rob Owens. I head up the technology research group at Piper and cover cybersecurity and infrastructure software. Very pleased to, after all these years, see Rafe again, but to be having a discussion with Rafe Brown, current CFO of Rapid7.

Thank you. Nice to see you.

Welcome. Good to see you.

Thank you all. Yeah. At a high level, a lot of changes at Rapid7 with senior management.

Maybe just take us through some of the different logistics, a lot of the changes, and then what coaxed you to Sure to come to the company.

Yeah. I joined the company in December of last year, so I am now up over the nine-month hurdle. But essentially out of the top management layer, there has been almost complete turnover just in the last few months. Whether it was Allan Peters joining in October of last year. On June 1, we got a new CEO and a new Chief Technology and Product Officer. Quite literally out of the top five executives on the team, our longest-tenured person is right now the head of HR, who has been there a year and a half. So, it really speaks to a lot of change. I really believe it speaks to the commitment of the organization to really transform the next leg of the journey, and I think that is a big piece of it.

Corey Thomas, who has been the CEO for a number of years, is our Executive Chairman, so we do have that continuity element as Corey still is active in the organization and part of it. Obviously with that many new executives and the path underway, there is a lot of change going on.

You're no stranger to the Boston area. You're no stranger to being a public company CFO. What compelled you most to come over?

Part of it is really that. Rapid7, great history, had a very high stock price for a long time.

It did. That was dislocated over the last few years.

I looked at it as this opportunity of coming to an organization where big change was needed, but an organization that was determined to make the big changes to go on that next leg of the journey. I think that's what's really exciting for us. There's certainly stages of any kind of redirection like that, but there were some of them that were just glaringly obvious. I came in for Corey hired me, and he laid out a path that was determined to make some of those big changes, whether it was changes we need to do on the product side and the technology side, changes we need to do to the expense structure.

He had hired a new leader on the go-to-market side who was, at the time I was interviewing, was just a couple of months into this job role, but who was already very actively engaged and could lay out a real strong path of how we could sharpen our go-to-market while we're still building out some of these other legs of the stool. I just like the fact that the company, it had its history. It has over $800 million of ARR. It has all those kind of advantages, but was looking very clearly at the challenge ahead and willing to make the tough choices to get that done.

Company at reasonable scale. Ironically, we haven't had that many companies in cyber achieve $1 billion a year in ARR, number one. But you mentioned big changes. Big changes to go to market, big changes from a product standpoint. There's a lot of change at a very interesting time in cyber.

Sure. Let's focus on that change and maybe what was required most, in your opinion.