KnowBe4 channel chief Mills looks to bring greater focus, distribution to partner strategy

**Robert Dutt:** Hello, and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show.

Kurt Mills is the new channel chief at KnowBe4, the company you probably already know for security awareness training, though they’d like you to think of them now as digital workforce security.

Kurt’s held channel leadership roles at Trellix, Check Point, Mimecast, FireMon and Blue Coat. He’s basically done the full cybersecurity channel tour.

He joined KnowBe4 about a month ago. He’s still very much getting the lay of the land, but he came in with a clear diagnosis: too many partners, too much non-standard pricing, not enough presence in the field.

He’s also walking into an interesting company moment. Brian Palma has been CEO for about a year and a half. The company is owned by Vista Equity Partners, and the product story is expanding from phishing simulations toward AI agent security and a broader human risk platform.

Let’s get right into it, my chat with Kurt Mills from KnowBe4.

**Robert Dutt:** Kurt, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

**Kurt Mills:** Yeah, it’s a pleasure to be here, Robert. I always enjoy talking to our friends across the pond there in Toronto and look forward to, like I said, having a good hang today.

**Robert Dutt:** We were discussing, dear listener, before we got into this, that Kurt is located in Chicago, and exchanged some of the Great Lakes weather dynamics, as it were, which are a constant topic of conversation.

You’ve spent a long time in the industry, most recently running global channels at Trellix, where you made it to SVP. You’ve done Check Point, Mimecast, Blue Coat, FireMon. What was it about this moment and about KnowBe4 specifically that made you say, “Yeah, this is the next fit?”

**Kurt Mills:** Yeah, well, let’s start by saying when you mention all those, it makes me feel a little bit old, Robert. But yeah, 25 years in the industry, and you learn a lot over that time. I will say it’s gone fast.

But when I say you learn a lot, you learn a lot about the type of cultures, the leadership and the opportunities that you want to participate in. And for me, that means it starts with leadership. Having the opportunity to work with Brian Palma, our CFO and a few others here, again, was a really exciting opportunity for me.

When you take that and you really look at the bones of this company and the opportunity to scale through a billion dollars, that’s what I like to do. I like to find companies with good bones, and maybe, Robert, they have just a lever or two that they need to pull to get to that next level of growth. And in many cases, that comes from the channel.

**Robert Dutt:** How much of your job do you see as kind of preserving what works there versus looking for those opportunities to find the scale?

I’m just curious because KnowBe4 has traditionally had that kind of identity as Stu’s company, with Kevin Mitnick as the face. Now Brian’s been in the chair for a while — I know a familiar face to you — and you’re coming in as channel chief. I’m curious where the balance between optimize for scale and maintain the founder’s company kind of sits for you right now.

**Kurt Mills:** Yeah, well, like I said, they’ve done an amazing job as far as good bones, getting it to a certain point. But as you know, there are certain levers when we talk about channel where the growth started to slow down a little bit with the model they had, which was very much an inside-out type model.

In the worlds that I’ve come from, you have to be present to win, and that’s a big part of it. But ultimately it is a balance, because I don’t want to distract from the great amount of energy this company has. It’s very infectious.

I’ve had the opportunity to spend time in our Clearwater office as well as our D.C.-area office over the last few weeks, and it just blows me away how much energy there is through that place. It just kind of resonates.

So I want to make sure I maintain that, with the idea of evolving the company in such a way from a channel perspective that we are really improving our coverage, bringing in certain best practices from the industry.

I had a background in Mimecast, as you highlighted, and so I was used to working against or competing against KnowBe4 in the past. And I think what we did very well in my past days is make sure we had the right partners selling the right solutions to the right customers. But we also made sure we focused on the right partners and had the coverage, as far as being available and present from a channel perspective, and then really the enablement piece.

Weaving those pieces in, if you will, Robert, to complement what was already going on here as a company.

**Robert Dutt:** At Trellix, you were there in the aftermath of the big merger of McAfee and FireEye coming together, trying to build a unified channel, unified story out of those pieces.

KnowBe4 is a very different kind of situation. It’s one product line, very strong brand recognition, but maybe the challenge is around building that enterprise channel over time. Without asking you to choose which of your children you love the most, which challenge do you prefer?

**Kurt Mills:** Again, there are a lot of similarities between the two, believe it or not, although they came to where they are in very different fashions. In both cases, they needed to evolve as a company.

One was taking two giants together and trying to integrate them, and there was a lot to do there. In the case of KnowBe4, they are adding solutions to be what we’ll call a fully integrated solution. But in both cases, it’s really a matter of: how do you do that?

I wouldn’t say there’s a favourite one over the other. I’m here at KnowBe4 now, so that’s where I’m excited to be. But when all is said and done, it’s about how do you evolve a company and move a ship in the next direction.

**Robert Dutt:** Speaking of that evolution, the language or the message of the company has shifted a bit of late. Security awareness training used to be the byline, the mantra. Now it’s much more about digital workforce security, securing humans and AI agents.

For Canadian partners who are listening, what does that mean in terms of how they position you to their customers? Is this still kind of a compliance checkbox kind of sale, or do you see the conversation moving up the stack a bit?

**Kurt Mills:** Let me start by going back to the whole Trellix thing. It’s always still about where, how and when do you win, right?

When you’re talking to partners, the speeds and feeds are interesting, but they really want to understand how you win. And so that’s the really big component of what we’re trying to do here as we move the ship.

As it relates to the Canadian partners, it’s how do you leverage all different types of routes to market? I know from working in Canada for many, many years, it’s not just about the reseller community. It’s about the MSPs, how you leverage the hyperscalers, for instance, like AWS and others, as well as distribution.

And so there is an opportunity here at KnowBe4 to make sure we are leveraging all these different channel routes to market, those levers, if you will, to make sure we get to a point here, hopefully early in the new year, where we’re really focused on scale, leverage and growth.

What I’m trying to do, Robert, between now and then is set the table to serve up dinner for our Canadian partners, as well as our partners globally.

**Robert Dutt:** Speaking of the Canadian market, from what I can see, Canada represents around five percent of the customer base. The Canadian channel market, as you suggest, is very heavily MSP-driven. A lot of mid-market and SMB customers, obviously given the nature of the nation.

How are you thinking about Canada? Is this kind of a mini-America market, or is there a distinct strategy, programs, maybe distinct distribution for Canada that fits because it is a little bit different than just take the American strategy and shrink it?

**Kurt Mills:** Yeah, and again, I don’t know if there’s an American strategy versus a Canada strategy, but I’ll go back to my original comments: you’ve got to be present to win.

Certainly in Canada, the relationships are important, and it’s hard to do that when you’re making phone calls from Florida in many cases. You have to be there.

So again, I’ll go back to the comment I made about coverage. It’s critical that we make sure, as we are hiring and as we’re evolving our organization, that we have people on the ground in Canada that maybe have history, credibility and success with those Canadian partners, MSPs, et cetera.

**Robert Dutt:** On the product side, you guys launched AIDA orchestration back in February, basically an autonomous AI agent that runs a security awareness program without human intervention.

For partners, that sounds both really, really good because it means something I can do without having to do it, or a threat to my services revenue — maybe both.

How are you positioning AIDA to the channel? Is it something they wrap services around, or does it reduce the need for their involvement?

**Kurt Mills:** Yeah, it’s interesting. I go to a lot of these big conferences and such, and you know, Robert, from walking through them, everybody says AI this, that or the other.

But for me, what was a big draw to this company is the fact that we actually cut our teeth with AI. Think about where we started out, kind of that tier three or segment three of SMB, and we literally had to help our customers who were very challenged with their workforce or the resources they had to do things.

So this isn’t new to us. We kind of started the company with the idea of this behavioural intelligence and AI to support customers. And now we’ve just moved upstream over time, which has been accepted and adopted by mid-market, enterprise and even Fortune accounts.

**Robert Dutt:** And given that it’s been out there for six months or more now, any thoughts on what you’ve seen partners doing in terms of building services around AIDA?

**Kurt Mills:** Yeah. I think there are a couple of things. Services is always kind of a loaded comment because what is the definition of services now?

You have a lot of SaaS companies and cloud-based companies where you’re just pointing something to the cloud, you’re hitting it and you’re going. It’s not like the old days, Robert, where you had hardware and it was 15, 20 days of implementation services.

Where I do think there’s an opportunity here — and again, I’m on week four on the clock — is what we’ll call those assessment-led services-type opportunities.

There was a mention in some of the briefings we had about systems integrators. If you really think about it, the ability to use our solutions for even health checks and things like that is really powerful because, again, we still know that over 70 percent of breaches are coming from your employee base.

So I think there’s an opportunity there. I’m still digging into it. Please, IT department, don’t get upset with me for saying these things. But again, when I look at the crystal ball of where there’s a huge value opportunity in services, that’s one of them.

**Robert Dutt:** All right. Speaking of crystal balling, the press release announcing your new role talks about the priority of evolving the global partner program, operations, routes to market. That’s kind of the boilerplate of it.

I know you’re still getting the lay of the land and figuring out all the strategy, but what specifically can you tell us about what you see as the priorities to align, fix and figure out over the next 12 months?

**Kurt Mills:** Yeah, well, it’s been a bit of backing out of the driveway going 70 and changing the tires, if you will. But again, there are things that we want to have going into the new year, so we’re moving very quickly.

The good news is this isn’t the first time I’ve done it. That’s my background, right? I come into places and assess the situation, and we put a motion in place.

Really, what we’re trying to do, Robert, very quickly is create what we’ll call a segment-optimized channel, so that we have the right people focused on the right things.

We have way too many partners here. I’m sorry to say that, but it was just sign up anybody and everyone. It’s the old 80/20 rule. Twenty percent of them are representing 80 percent of the revenue. So we have to bring in distribution. We have to do things like that.

That said, going back to your question, I kind of look at the world in three phases right now.

What we’re trying to do is focus on the coverage first, focus on how we’re going to engage and how we’re going to teach our partners how to recognize a KnowBe4 opportunity. That’s the table stakes in phase one over the next 90 days here.

Then there is an opportunity, without a doubt. We have to pull that lever with the channel program to drive the behaviours, but also just the alignment with the partner community.

I have no hesitation saying that we have a little friction in the gears as far as just too many non-standard pricing scenarios for the segments we play in.

What I mean by that is there has to be a partner program that has enough discount stack in it that incorporates distribution, for instance, and even incorporates, we’ll say, the hyperscalers into an opportunity. So one, we capture everybody involved in the opportunity, but two, so that they are self-servicing as far as the channel and distribution to work with their customers without having to come back to us for support on additional quotes, et cetera.

And then phase three, like I said, is we’re off and running like a rocket come the beginning of next year. It’s go time. The mantra I’ve been using internally is: go, go, go. No more no, no, no.

**Robert Dutt:** You mentioned the channel has kind of been an everyone’s-invited kind of thing, which does lead to that large channel partner base where no one’s really closely — or not many are closely — aligned.

Have you been there long enough to see the common threads for what makes one of those 20 percent of partners who do 80 percent of the work the kinds of folks you want to build that program around for the next generation?

**Kurt Mills:** Yeah, it’s a really good question.

When I look at the profile or common denominator, they’re selling what I’ll call — we have probably 70 integrated solutions with other vendors. So they’re selling maybe a CrowdStrike, maybe they’re selling a Netskope or somebody like that, where we have integrations.

Think about that better-together story. They’re already talking to customers and having those conversations about their transformations. For us, we want to be part of that conversation because we do provide value with all the solutions we have now to them with those integrations.

So I think that’s a big part of it.

**Robert Dutt:** At Trellix, you talked a lot about specializations and partner certifications that kind of align with industry best practices. Is that still kind of the playbook or the guideline here — more tiers, more specializations — or is this sort of a simplification situation?

**Kurt Mills:** Yeah, a little different situation. That’s where the two companies are very different.

I had over 55 different solutions at Trellix. There is no way I’m ever going to a partner community and say, learn 55 different solutions, Robert.

One of the things I had to do immediately there was just break it down to specializations and really try to cater to the fact that if a partner really focuses on endpoint, here’s the track you’ll go to learn. If you’re focusing on this area or that area, go there.

Here it’s a little bit different. We’ve been an industry leader for a long, long time as far as our awareness training goes, and really what we’ve done is we’ve just incorporated new pieces to it to make it more of a full solution.

So the challenge and the opportunity I have here is going to the partner community and letting them be aware of all the different things we do. They just don’t know.

We have to be more front and present with them to educate them, so they are better serving their customers as well.

**Robert Dutt:** You touched on distributors and needing to get distribution in place and figured out a while ago. Where are you at today? Are distribution relationships in place, particularly here in Canada? And where do you see that going over the short to medium term?

**Kurt Mills:** Yeah, another loaded question.

As I mentioned earlier, there is no way I could ever hire enough people to support the amount of partners we have. So we have to be very conscious of the profile of the partners where we need to have people in field and present in the territories or at these big partners every day. That’s a big part of it.

But I don’t want to dismiss or forget about the fact that we do have this whole other set of partners, probably a few thousand of them, that we still want to do business with. But we believe if we leverage distribution, they may do a better job than us to make sure they’re readily available, accessible and can support their opportunities they have from time to time.

So to answer your question, internationally we’ve just recently signed up Infinigate, and we’re starting to get them ramped up. In North America, we have Carahsoft for our public sector business, SLED.

What’s really powerful, as a pleasant surprise when I came in, is we’re working with almost a thousand of the 3,000-plus universities in North America. That’s a really powerful building block to have.

But what we haven’t done, and what I’m in the process of doing over the next 90 days, is making sure we’re leveraging and picking the right distributor that aligns to our needs. And that is somebody who can support our long tail of partners in a very proactive way.

And there are a couple we’re talking to right now.

**Robert Dutt:** So it sounds like specialist distribution is kind of in place for deeper support, and maybe you’re looking to expand on the more broadline, long-tail-supporting kind of distributor.

**Kurt Mills:** Without a doubt. And even go as far as beyond our long-tail partners, our MSPs.

If you look at Infinigate internationally, they have an MSP program within themselves. And there are a couple that do here with wonderful platforms to support them.

So I think as you wake up into the new year with KnowBe4, you’re going to see what I want to say are more best practices as far as how you scale by leveraging these different channel routes to market, including distribution.

**Robert Dutt:** Your bio mentioned building teams through IPOs, acquisitions, rapid expansion, the latter of which is obviously a goal here. But you’re walking into a company that went private a few years back.

Does that change the channel strategy at all and how you think about it? Is the goal to build for eventual exit, and how do you balance that against kind of long-term partner-value types of questions?

**Kurt Mills:** Yeah, it doesn’t really change the approach. I’m not a big believer in this word “playbook.” You really have to kind of assess and diagnose before you prescribe anything.

You heard me say companies with good bones. I’ve gone to companies where they’re like, “Kurt, we need to get through $500 million or a billion dollars.” I’ve gone to those who say, “Hey, Kurt, we want to go public,” or, “We want to sell the company in 12 to 18 or 24 months.”

It’s really about outcomes in some ways and understanding and really having the transparency from the executive teams as to what they’re trying to achieve here.

You’re right. We went back private, and there is a huge opportunity for us to go back public, for instance. And to do that, there are certain best practices that have to be in place, even from a channel perspective, and rules of engagement and integrity aspects that have to be done.

Again, I’m very fortunate that they have a lot of this already in place. We just need to evolve it a bit to be more meaningful with the partner community, but also just be easier to work with.

**Robert Dutt:** Something I’ve noticed, I think, is accelerating over the last 18 months and really accelerating of late: cyber insurance providers asking for proof of security awareness training as part of their overall requirements.

Do you see that kind of human risk management becoming a standard managed service that MSPs bundle, say, the way they do endpoint and backup today? And if so, what is the margin? What does the business look like for a partner today and into the future?

**Kurt Mills:** Well, let me start by saying I hope so. I hope so. I hope there’s regulations around it, because that’s certainly great for us, right?

I would say that one will take me a little bit longer to figure out the how, Robert. But I will say this: one of those channel routes to market is, there are OEM relationships, there are tech alliance relationships.

We talked about a few from the traditional cybersecurity vendors, but there are other relationships we’re having conversations with that are more aligned to the area that you just highlighted. And there’s a very great interest from those companies to partner with us in some smart way.

**Robert Dutt:** One of the big words of the industry and the channel, of course, is ecosystem: the idea that it’s not always going to be one vendor and one partner going to market with a customer because there’s a wider range or wide variety of things that need to be solved for.

You obviously touched on that in mentioning that one of your key definers of a good KnowBe4 partner is one who takes you and a bunch of complementary things and goes to the customer with that all brought together and thought through.

But when you’re doing that, how do you manage channel conflict, different models between the vendors and those kinds of things between yourselves and the EDR, the email security vendors and the other folks that they’re carrying as well?

**Kurt Mills:** You heard me mention earlier, we’re pretty fortunate.

Again, one of those pleasant surprises when I got here is I didn’t realize we had 70 native integrations with all these different vendors. That’s a wonderful storyline in itself because it’s telling you they’re looking to us to complement how they’re going to market.

And some of those companies, as you know, are the biggest cybersecurity companies in the world. So that tells you something there.

But I think there’s also an understanding, as we get the message out more. We do have 16 years of behavioural threat intelligence. Nobody has that.

And kind of a shout-out to my competitors, but I know how you go to market. I’ve worked for some of you.

Ultimately there’s an opportunity for us to really leverage, as you talked about, the beginnings of this company that now really resonates. So that 16 years of intelligence really is going to help us out as far as where we go next and how our partners position us alongside some of these other technologies.

**Robert Dutt:** That’s mostly the technology side of it, which is often different from the business integration side of things.

Is there any concern there? How do you think about that when you’re going to market, kind of not directly hand-in-hand but also in partnership with some of these folks who have complementary business models?

**Kurt Mills:** Yeah, well, I would say we’ll schedule a follow-up call at some time here in the near future, and you’ll see one of those very large organizations who are now starting to, let’s just say, promote us over their own technologies because they know their customers are asking for it.

**Robert Dutt:** All right, that’s a good teaser for the near future. I appreciate that.

Along those lines, if we talk again in a year, what will have changed for a KnowBe4 partner? What’s the one big thing that you hope you’ll be able to stand there and say, “Bam, that’s what I did?”

**Kurt Mills:** Yeah, well, my hope is pretty simple, and that is our growth is increasing significantly with them because they know us, they trust us.

More importantly, they know how to position us in the marketplace. And as a result, we’re having a conversation about how close we are to passing through a billion dollars as an organization.

And our partners are more talking to us: How do we do more? How do I get more people involved?

**Robert Dutt:** And last one for me. For the MSP or VAR who’s listening and says, “Okay, I’ve heard of KnowBe4, but I’ve never really figured out how to make money with them,” what’s kind of the pitch? Why should they take another look at KnowBe4 right now?

**Kurt Mills:** I would say this to the MSP community: We can do better. We can do better.

And that’s an area that I really am digging into right now, Robert. There are certain areas that, from a platform standpoint, we can be more MSP-friendly.

We do have some MSPs that do a great job. But again, you heard me talk about programmatically, operationally, really deciding as a company: What does MSP mean to us?

It’s always an interesting thing, Robert. I’ll leave you with this thought: Every company I go into, I say, “Tell me your definition of MSP.”

And 50 percent of the time I hear the words, “Well, this systems integrator.” And I’m like, “No, that’s managed infrastructure. That’s not MSP.”

“Well, this MSP…” I’m like, “No, that’s a reseller. That’s not MSP.”

So again, it always starts with the idea of what is MSP going to mean to us, so we have a clear, clear go-to-market strategy that MSPs can decide to participate in.

**Robert Dutt:** Good luck on defining that and building out the channel program. It’ll be an interesting one to watch over the next year. And thank you again for taking the time.

**Kurt Mills:** Appreciate it, Robert. And if we decide to get together at some point, I don’t mind going to Canada in the winter. I’m used to it.

**Robert Dutt:** I appreciate that. All right, take care.

There you have it, Kurt Mills from KnowBe4. I’d like to thank Kurt for his time and for being as candid as he was about what’s working and what isn’t, particularly on the MSP front, where he was direct that KnowBe4 has room to improve.

Some thoughts on this one.

KnowBe4 has a channel scaling problem, and they’ve hired someone who’s done this before. His three-phase plan — fix coverage, fix the program and then accelerate — is sensible. But the real test is whether Canadian partners see field presence and distribution presence that matches that plan.

Kurt’s committed to a follow-up conversation down the road, so we’ll hold him to that.

For the channel community, this is worth watching. If you’re an MSP who looked at KnowBe4 and bounced off the platform experience, Kurt’s explicitly asking you to take another look.

And if you’re a VAR already carrying CrowdStrike, Netskope and other vendors in the KnowBe4 integration ecosystem, there’s probably a better-together conversation you could be having.

Thanks for listening today. Please follow or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and most podcast directories. And if you want to leave a rating or review, we’d love that.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.