SGNL Blueprints: Once a Founder, Always A Builder

Costanoa’s BuilderOps Blueprints are designed to help early-stage start-ups build successful foundations. Through this series, Costanoa’s BuilderOps team interviews founders and start-up leaders, showcasing their superpowers and learnings on all things company building. Costanoa is an early-stage VC firm backing company builders across data, dev, and fintech.

For our latest BuilderOps Blueprint, we connected with Ching-Yu Hu, who has just joined SGNL, an AI-led cybersecurity company that’s redefining enterprise identity management for a secure, adaptive future, as its Chief Operating Officer. CY’s impressive credentials include co-founding Skybox Imaging, which was acquired by Google in 2014 for $500M; serving as an Executive-in-Residence for Costanoa Ventures; and investing in multiple start-ups, including Verkada, TigerEye, Observe.ai, Skydio, Sila Nanotechnologies, Yellowbrick Data, and more. 

You’ve gone from being an exited founder, to a VC, and now back to a startup, this time as the COO at SGNL, which is transforming identity access management at the enterprise level using AI. That’s exciting – talk about how you came to the decision!

I’ve had the tremendous fortune of both having 1) my first job out of school as an accidental and unlikely founder of a successful space-tech startup and 2) spending the last 7 years investing and working alongside insanely talented founders riding the AI wave.  

Having been in-and-around early stage startups for the last 17 years, I don’t think there has ever been a better time to build. The rapid evolution of AI tooling and infrastructure has changed the art and craft of company building entirely. What used to take months takes seconds. 

Instead of investing in builders from the sidelines, I realized I had an incredible opportunity to go back to my roots building myself. Then the question became, who are the smartest people I know working on hard problems of consequence? 

I have been friends with Scott Kriz and Erik Gustavson for several years now and have a deep respect for the SGNL team (sidenote: thank you to Barak Kaufman for introducing us via the Post Exit Founder community). Costanoa also happens to be the lead seed investor in the company and being an EIR also gave me a useful vantage point to make my decision. 

The problem SGNL is solving is both urgent and systemic for the world’s largest enterprises. Most enterprise identity systems operate on static assumptions and rely on identity access management platforms built in the 2000’s to secure their critical systems: someone gets access once and often keeps it far too long, even as roles, risks, and org structures evolve. The wave of AI agents is only exacerbating this problem. 

SGNL is rethinking identity-first security from first principles. We help Fortune 500’s eliminate standing access and achieve zero-standing privilege across their cloud environments, codebases, customer applications, and now AI agents. We do this by enforcing contextual and continuous access decisions, granting and revoking access in real time – considering who someone is, what they’re doing, and what’s changing (sign up for demo here). 

What was the biggest lesson you learned from Skybox that you carry with you as you embark at SGNL? 

I have many hard-earned scar tissues from the Skybox journey, but the one that I reflect on frequently is that we simply got the team and culture right, and the rest followed to turn the impossible into the inevitable. . 

Before we started the company, I thought our biggest risks would be technical. After all, we’d have to design, build, launch, and operate high-resolution satellites 10x cheaper than government funded satellites. This was back in 2009 – there was no NewSpace industry at the time and we were paving an uncharted path. Turns out our most difficult challenges were related to managing people-issues: managing suppliers, the board dynamics, investors, etc. Having a resilient culture and a brilliant team helped us navigate and survive some of these difficult and dark moments. 

If you walked through our office, it’s immediately obvious that our culture was lightning-in-bottle in terms of camaraderie, execution, and shenanigans (to put it lightly:). What you choose to do and who you do it with is in large part a reflection of your identity: so it’s really important to choose wisely.

When you do, it’s an incredible gift – while you’re in that role and beyond. Even today, the core Skybox team is very close. I don’t make any material personal or work decisions without calling some of my former co-founders or our founding team teammates for their counsel. It’s an extraordinary gift that keeps giving by building a company with people you enjoy and trust, even 15 years later. 

I think a really interesting retrospective measure of culture can be seen by the slope of upward career trajectory of alumni after they take on new adventures. For example: Dan Berkenstock (cofounding CEO) is now a Distinguished Research Fellow at Hoover Institute. Jonny Dyer ( Skybox Chief Engineer) and Paul Day (Skybox TPM) are cofounders of Muon Space (also a Costanoa portfolio company!) which is 3-4x more complex and is scaling incredibly well. Mike Trela (Skybox VP Eng) and John Fenwick (Skybox cofounder) have been leading the charge for Satellite Connectivity at Apple, just straight up saving lives every day. Britt Jamison (Skybox intern) is now Head of Product for OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise, etc. 

We’ve loved having you as an EIR here at Costanoa. What final takeaways would you like to share with inception stage founders? 

Being an EIR with Costanoa has been a ton of fun and rewarding and I am grateful to the whole Costanoa team for having me. As parting thoughts, I encourage founders to focus on two things: 1) Be really thoughtful about which investor you bring on your cap table. Take time to craft and ask the hard questions during back channel calls. 2) chase problems that actually matter. Startups are ridiculously hard no matter what – regardless if you build something incremental or world-changing, so you might as well GO BIG!