Sarah Scharf

The throughline across 16,000 Vanta customers: AI is raising the stakes for trust, and the companies that build trust grow faster. Finally, anything worth doing takes a village: thank you to our customers, past and present, for being demanding in the best ways. Without your time and feedback, we wouldn't have this opportunity. Thank you to Vanta’ns, past and present, for trusting us with your time and careers. It remains the privilege of my career to hold a megaphone to your work.

It took us two years to grow from $10 mm to $100 mm in Annual Recurring Revenue and 15 months to reach $200 mm. Nine months later, we crossed $300 mm. Vanta’s growth rate increased each of the past four quarters – compounding really is the eighth wonder of the world! “But wait,” you might be thinking. “How does a software company founded before 2022 *increase* its growth rate?” Narrative violation!

San Francisco is the warmest city in the lower 48 this morning

The hot new job at tech companies is leading "storytelling." The term doubled on LinkedIn job posts in the U.S since last year. The WSJ writes: "Compliance technology firm Vanta this month began hiring for a head of storytelling, offering a salary of up to $274,000." "Productivity app Notion recently merged its communications, social media and influencer functions into one 10-person, so-called storytelling team." "Financial technology brand Chime last month began hiring for a director of corporate editorial and storytelling—its first storyteller opening." As a former reporter and career-long content/brand leader, I have some thoughts! These examples point to a shift in internal marketing orgs that reflect a shrinking earned media landscape and an endless, growing number of distribution channels to share and own your narrative, i.e. "going direct." It's not entirely editorial, or events, or PR, or marketing. It's how all these pieces work together and how they contribute to the bigger picture - your story! I joke with my reporter friends that they are infinitely hireable if they ever left journalism. Why? Because we are trained to ask: "So what? Why should readers care? What does it mean for them?" To me, that's a big nuance in this conversation. Because... *Storytelling is a human act and it's a service.* Super interested to watch what happens here. Are you long/short on this role?

me getting fired up to spend an hour in Vanta doing an Incident Response/Disaster Recovery Tabletop Exercise with a Governance, Risk, and Compliance Engineer to get us one step closer to SOC 2 Type 2 attestation