In this “Meet the Team” Q&A, we talked with Neil Carpenter, who joined the solutions architecture team at Minimus at the beginning of April. As part of this team, Neil partners with potential customers to help them evaluate Minimus and see the value it provides to their teams.
Before Minimus, Neil has extensive experience in partnering with companies large and small to address cloud security problems, including roles as Field CTO and Principal Technical Evangelist at Orca Security. He also worked at Twistlock, Palo Alto, StackRox, and Red Hat, focusing on securing cloud environments and Kubernetes clusters. Prior to that, Neil spent over a decade building Microsoft’s customer-facing incident response capabilities. Neil is passionate about simplifying security and is excited to bring his experience to Minimus.
Read on to learn what brought Neil to Minimus, how he’d explain Minimus and challenges when doing so, and lessons and skills he’s learned throughout his career.
What brought me to Minimus was the opportunity to help organizations solve vulnerability management challenges in a new and exciting way. This has been the single biggest problem I've talked about for years and years now. And I think Minimus has the ability to help organizations streamline and become more efficient at vulnerability management and solve the problems that matter most to them.
Another thing honestly is the team that we have here. Having worked with so many of these people before and knowing that not only do we work well together, but everybody individually is a superstar. It's just an amazing opportunity.
I would think of it as cleaning my room. When I was a kid, I always had a hard time keeping my room clean. I had stuff all over the place. If I started to clean it up, it took forever because I had so much mess. Minimus is really helping us start from a good place. Start with everything already organized, where it belongs.
And so when I have to clean up the room, when I have to do vulnerability management, I have much less of a mess to start with. I've just got a few things to pick up and clean up instead of having the entire room be a disaster.
Vulnerability management is a problem we've been struggling with for 20+ years. And most recently, a lot of it has been focused on how do we patch the right things more quickly? How do we identify the right things to patch? Minimus says, what if we had fewer vulnerabilities to start with? What if instead of having thousands and thousands of vulnerabilities in the container image, we had five or six? That makes it so much easier to do the rest of what needs to be done.
One of the most important lessons I've learned as an SE is something my account exec taught me, which is that selling is not about just signing a contract, making a deal, making money. When we sell to a customer, it has to be something where we both gain value out of it, where we are making a good deal and we are the customers getting value, we're getting value, and it's worth continuing on.
If you try to sell to somebody and you don't give them value, you're going to sell to them once, and then they're going to remember you for the rest of time. And you are continuously going to be operating at a deficit.
One of the most important skills I've learned is really thinking about how products get built and advocating for the right features, the right fixes, and understanding the prioritization that goes into building an entire product. It's so easy to look at a particular problem that you are focused on and think, “This is the most important thing in the world”.
But we've got to look at the bigger picture and we've got to understand, “How do I prioritize this across everything else that's happening, every customer need, every innovation that's going on?”
So for me, one of the biggest challenges in demoing Minimus and sharing it with people is that it's so simple, it's so clear, that it feels almost like a party trick. People want to know where the complexity is, what we're not showing them. And the simple answer is that that's it.
This is a really easy concept. Minimus dramatically reduces the number of vulnerabilities going into vulnerability management programs. It enables organizations to focus on problems that are emergent, problems that are critical, and really spend less time triaging vulnerabilities, trying to decide which ones they have to focus on. Because that overall attack surface is reduced dramatically. I think once people get that, once they really see end-to-end what this will do in their business, it's stunning. It's incredible. It's such an easy value proposition to get.
With Minimus, your containers start secure—up to 95% fewer CVEs right out of the box. That means fewer alerts, faster compliance, and a safer path to production. Get a demo or try it today.
