- Wire is a collaboration platform that prides itself on its advanced security, end-to-end-encryption and exceptional user experience.
- The company is Headquartered in Switzerland with offices in Berlin and San Francisco.
- Wire counts over 600 customers worldwide from SMBs to NGOs to Fortune 500 companies.
What does Wire do and what sets it apart from other collaboration platforms?
Wire is the most secure collaboration platform, and security is at the heart of everything we do. We offer a dynamically encrypted messenger, voice, video and conference calls, file sharing and external collaboration — all of which are protected by industry-leading end-to-end encryption, securing all data that passes through our platform.
Unlike most established collaboration providers to the enterprise market, our encryption keys only exist on the devices of our users. Wire can not access these encryption keys – meaning no man in the middle vulnerability where the solution provider, in reality, can access encryption keys and read your content.
For more than 1,000 enterprise customers, we provide secure and scalable collaboration. This includes custom deployment options to cater to enterprises and governments looking to protect their documents, as well as to secure their communications across teams, with clients and with partners.
What has been your main goal for the company since becoming CEO?
Right now, my main goal for Wire is driving the hypergrowth we’ve been seeing as we usher in a new future of work.
The future of work is remote; it entails a way of working outside of the four walls of a company’s office. Enterprises need to be prepared for this future — particularly when it comes to the security of their proprietary data in the course of day-to-day collaboration. Many of them have had to adapt to it hastily with the lockdown orders brought about by the coronavirus pandemic. Hence, the growth we’ve seen.
Yet, many others have chosen tools to facilitate remote collaboration that doesn’t have a high threshold for security – or privacy regulation for the matter. This is a problem because as we move forward, the working world will only become increasingly remote, meaning that data will be relayed through messaging, video and file sharing — all of which must be held to the highest levels of security.
We have seen that governments were especially unprepared for this level of working from home with little or no ability to move sensitive information around. To a broad extent, we have seen similar tendencies within certain industries in the private sector.
As CEO of Wire, it’s been my goal to lead the charge for the need for security within enterprises as we manage these changes before us.
What Challenges Have you Faced as CEO?
Everything! At least I thought so. Then something called the coronavirus arrived, and everything changed.
First, we had to figure out how we could make sure everyone within Wire could stay safe and work from home with guidelines changing dramatically fast at the beginning of the crisis. We had to change guidelines almost daily in the beginning. A lot of daily routines have had to be adjusted as we learned to cope with the new realities.
Second, in our new collaborative setup, we had to ensure an action plan around how we could best cope with the 20x increase in demand we saw literally overnight as countries and cities started to lockdown. We’ve helped current customers dramatically accelerate their internal roll-out of Wire to tens and even hundreds of thousands of users. It’s certainly been a dynamic and oftentimes challenging time within the company because we’ve had to move fast. Still, in general, I believe all of us at Wire are dealing exceptionally well with the situation and its resulting workload. I am truly proud of everyone and how they have coped with all of this.
Third, I admit that there could be some room for improvement in how we manage our general communication through this crisis, and I point the finger at myself. As CEO, the buck stops with me, and I want to ensure that everyone is kept well-informed in a fast-moving world where all of our processes were swiftly and without warning disrupted.
Fourth, I recognise that now it will soon be time to get back to a “new normal”. Defining what that actually means to our company based on guidelines, best practices and the learnings we’ve achieved in the past two months will be another leadership challenge that we will need to put energy into during the coming days and weeks.
What are your plans for growth this year?
We grew more than 500% during 2019, and I believe we will see a similar or potentially even higher growth rate in 2020. Secure collaboration for work is clearly in high demand, and no one does it better than Wire.
It has been a challenging time for all of us at Wire managing this explosion in demand and customer requests during the pandemic where we – like the rest of the world – are all working from our home offices, our living rooms, dining tables or even balconies. But we have adapted through our collaborative culture and high customer orientation, supporting a record-breaking number of new customers. In April alone, we signed up more enterprise customers than we did in the entirety of 2019.
At the same time, we have had to support massively accelerated roll-out plans from customers who signed up in the first quarter of 2020. For instance, we have a very large European customer that originally planned to roll out to around 10,000 users in Q2. However, due to the pandemic, the aim is now to potentially roll out to all of their more than 100,000 employees and contractors. We have a few other similarly accelerated deployments we are supporting through these trying times.
