The Fund Founder Spotlight Interview: Travis Good of Haekka
The Fund is a founder community and early stage fund, by founders for founders.
Welcome to The Founder Spotlight where we highlight the incredible people behind the companies we’ve backed at The Fund. This week the spotlight is on Travis Good, CEO and co- founder of Haekka, a smart training platform for people that love Slack.
“I have to go to a training.” How many times have you said that during your career? More times than you can count I’m sure, as it’s a common practice and often required in the workplace. Travis Good, CEO and co-founder of Haekka, along with co-founder Ryan Rich, are reinventing the way companies provide and employees experience training. They are doing this by integrating trainings into the tools we use everyday (Slack and Teams).
The name Haekka is Icelandic for elevate, ascend, or rise. It should come as no surprise they’re passionate about elevating learning for companies, in particular those who are looking to provide training in the areas of compliance, privacy, and security awareness. With Haekka you can deliver modern, effective content across your company in a way your employees will appreciate.
Tell us about Haekka
Haekka is a privacy and security training platform for growing technology companies. The majority of our customers are venture backed startups, somewhere between a seed and series B stage. At our last startup, Ryan and I had to prove different aspects of compliance in order to sell B2B software. One of the areas where we couldn't find any easy and good solution was the required training for frameworks such as SOC2, ISO, HIPAA, PCI, CCPA, GDPR, and HITRUST. We wrote and open sourced our own training at our last company, and then after selling that company we took a couple years off to figure out what to do next. We felt that building a super intuitive and easy-to-use training platform for companies like our previous one was the next path to go down. Haekka empowers managers to put required training on auto-pilot.
What's Haekka’s “North Star”?
Our North Star is making security and privacy training disappear for the end user, while ensuring that they actually know the things that they should be doing on a daily basis.
What sets Haekka apart from competitors?
Our competitors are traditional enterprise type tools. They have long implementation cycles and they're pretty clunky to use. Think of web apps where they're loading PDFs, or some video that was recorded a few years ago. We provide a modern training platform that’s integrated heavily with Slack and Teams right now. We make the training “disappear” by integrating it into the tools people use in their workflows. We make it a part of people’s daily lives. That's different from anybody else in the market today.
What drives you into startup battle every day?
This is my second startup and I’m primarily driven by the challenge of it. I don’t think I complain as much this time around in terms of the stress and the cycles of really high highs and really low lows. I actually think I’m kind of driven by those cycles and the challenge of trying to get back up to the high highs.
Do you have a favorite startup focused podcast?
I am a big podcaster and audio book person. The one I listen to the most frequently is probably the SaaStr Podcast. They have a lot of quality content. They talk to leaders at companies of various sizes through the different stages of the journey. They’re not going to give you a formula for your company, but hearing different stories helps inform your decisions in your own specific problems base.