The $X Price Tag That Unlocked Transcend's Growth

"Throw out a big number, see what happens." It's advice that would make most first-time founders cringe, but for Ben Brook, CEO of Transcend, it became the pricing philosophy that helped transform his data privacy startup from zero buyers to one of the fastest-growing B2B companies in the space.

Transcend isn't just another privacy compliance tool—it's infrastructure that automates what used to require armies of legal teams manually processing individual data requests. The Series B startup, backed by Excel and Index Ventures, has cracked the code on displacing legacy incumbents in an industry notorious for resistance to change.

In this interview, Brook reveals the counterintuitive strategies that took Transcend from product-market fit struggles to repeatedly beating established competitors, the exact pricing formula that captures 25% of customer value, and why the convergence of AI governance and privacy regulation is creating the biggest opportunity shift in years.

Ben Brook: So I'm Ben Brook. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Transcend. We are a data privacy infrastructure company. We help other businesses encode privacy rules across all of their technology. We're helping them comply with privacy laws and really adopting the spirit of privacy and giving consumers far better control over their personal data. We're backed by Excel and Index. We're now a Series B startup.

I think the biggest challenge for us, like many founders, was finding that first product market fit. As a founder in the weeds, you're so excited about this thing, you think, 'We've got it, this is gonna land, people are gonna love it,' and nobody wants to buy it. And then really learning to trust the data and test, understand what the customer really needs. You can't stress enough when you're building a product to really understand your customer.

Ben Brook: What we ended up doing was we found a few early customers. We basically just said, 'What if we just automated this for you? We'll be like your extended privacy engineering team. Let us build the solution and help us understand every aspect of it.' It was actually a fairly consultative engagement with the first two or three customers, and we made sure that they were aligned to the fact that yes, we are going to build a product here, but that was how we approached it.

Especially when it's a little bit more toward the enterprise software motion, I think that's absolutely a path you can take where you just let customers vent their problems and offer to find a way to fix them.

Ben Brook: In enterprise, this is when you need to have your first sellers. Typically you can do founder-led sales for the first, call it 20-30 customers, but not only should you start handing that off, but also it's an important part of proving that you're able to scale the business past yourself—who knows every nook and cranny of the product and you've been thinking about this problem for five years or whatever.

To be able to have a seller become successful in selling your product is an important first milestone. And we really spent the time to find that right sort of first seller. The first seller is completely different from the late-stage seller where they're super creative, they do every sales role alone, which includes generating pipeline, actually running the deal as an account executive would, and then even a lot of sales engineering in some cases, probably contracting all of the full end-to-end sales process.

Somebody who's just incredible at this. I really believe there's nothing more important than finding the best hire. If you need to slow down to get it right, it's 100% worth it.

Ben Brook: After that, depending on what your sort of ARR is at around 100 customers, you either need to scale your sales team or you're probably—if it's way upmarket—you probably already have. But in any case, being able to scale a sales team really is about, if you don't have a sales background, you should find a sales leader.

It is such a huge subject with so much expertise that it is one of the things where you just need to find a great leader who can do all of the right pieces of building playbooks, breaking out the sales process with sales development representatives, account executives, sales engineering, revenue operations, and so forth. There's a whole organization and that sort of meta process is very playbooked but not something a founder should do. They should absolutely find the best leader that they can.

Ben Brook: There's a few things I'll say about pricing. The first is make it super iterative. You really need to adapt it and change it until you find your price point. Even then, it's only gonna last for maybe one year, one and a half years before you have gotten enough data to say certain parts of this are stupid, we need to change it.

Second is, you should start as high as possible because most founders are shocked at what the market will pay for their product. And especially if you're a first-time founder, you almost feel guilty or greedy asking for certain numbers, but ultimately for pricing, you really have to understand the business value that a company is getting by using your product.

Ben Brook: It kind of sounds like just corporate jargon, but this is actually how companies buy. And so, if you're not articulating the actual dollar value of your product or if you have no idea how to even start, the person who's buying your product is gonna try to create that assessment themselves so that they can take it to the CFO and get it approved.

And so, the real answer is: do you want to be involved in that process or do you not? If it's gonna get approved, you better be involved in that process. So you actually do have to articulate, if you're gonna drive revenue for the company, how much can you drive? If you're going to decrease costs, how much can you decrease costs? Can you actually articulate what we call value drivers and educate the person who's trying to buy your product, who's interested in it, and work with them to sort of build this value case together?

And then whatever that value is, your price should be about 25%, two-thirds of that so that they get the ROI number on top for the remaining three-fourths.

Ben Brook: The real sort of key to our Series B was proving that we could repeatedly switch customers off of the status quo in privacy, which is incredibly manual operational work where data owners are consistently being interviewed, asked to manually operate on one individual's data when that individual asks to be deleted. And that is the status quo sort of encoded by legacy incumbent software.

The real bet at our Series A was: can we repeatedly show that we can take market share? Is there a long term outcome where Transcend takes that sort of top spot in the market? And so our Series A to our Series B was really all about building our sales team, scaling up marketing operation, and really delivering a customer experience that customers would be happy to sort of do case studies and shout about us from the rooftops and tell their friends to switch as well.

Ben Brook: We really track milestones around our win rate against the incumbent competitor. And if we could get it to a certain number, we thought that would be really critical for our Series B story and ultimately unstick the market that felt like it was turning into a bit of a cottage industry around the sort of status quo way of doing things.

So we really had a metric-driven process against that and just executed really well on that plan so that at the Series B we could tell the full story of customers making this mass migration switch.

Ben Brook: The current trend in privacy right now is, first, governance of AI systems. There is a sort of mad dash inside every business right now to adopt AI, and part of that is compiling all of the data into a format that can be leveraged for the purposes of AI. For those who are technical, these are like vector databases and building embeddings, but there are very few guardrails around any of these systems in the way that personal information may be processed.

On one hand, there's the way that personal data is being used in AI systems, and then on the other, there's the way that AI systems may be impacting individuals, so like bias and harm, fairness, particularly when AI systems are being used for decision making.

The most recent landmark regulation was the AI Act in Europe. Many businesses are trying to understand how they're using AI, put processes in place around ensuring that the right guardrails are in place or that they've appropriately assessed the impacts of using that AI. And so that's certainly a current trend in privacy today.

Ben Brook: One of the effects of that—a lot of the people who became the chief privacy officer are going through a title change and sort of role and scope change to also be the owner of AI governance. And a lot of companies are saying, 'While we're at it, let's make it everything digital governance, all regulatory policy, all governance of our systems short of security.'

That has been a big sort of industry shift. The customers and the buyer, the people that we sell to are undergoing just a massive sort of change in scope, and so that's a really important trend right now.

And then every day there's something in privacy that's like, 'Wow, that's a really creepy thing,' and there will be a data breach or there'll be something that is always driving the news. The Meta sunglasses, for example—it took about three days for someone, some two kids at Harvard, to turn that into a system which can literally just find people's online profiles as you walk down the street. It's just overlaying their name, LinkedIn, job title just by facial recognition. So there's all kinds of crazy stuff just in the daily news, but categorically, the shift toward AI governance and this broadening sort of superset of privacy.