Abhishek Agrawal

Princeton, Microsoft and Dropbox

Agrawal earned a degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University and later an MBA from Harvard Business School, according to SC Media. His early work included a 2007 conference paper on chemical sensing with quantum cascade lasers. He then worked as an engineer at a Microsoft research and development lab that prototyped improvements to the Office suite. Two of his projects there were Ribbon Hero, a game that taught people to use Microsoft Office, and Chart Advisor, which automated the choice of chart in Excel, according to his personal site.

He joined Dropbox in 2013, when it had roughly 250 to 300 employees, according to Unusual Ventures, and became an early product manager there, shipping collaboration products and the core infrastructure and analytics that helped the company scale. At Dropbox he built full-text search and new mobile landing experiences, and he met Ryan Noon and Chris Park, his future co-founders.

Starting Material After the 2016 Election Hacks

The three began by exploring several ideas, not all of them in security; one was HR analytics and another knowledge base management, he told Unusual Ventures. The one that stuck came from the 2016 hack of John Podesta's personal Gmail account, in which attackers downloaded years of mail and published it. We literally got started after the election hacks in 2016, he told Expert Insights. His point was that the stored mail was the target. It's a content security problem, not just an email security problem.

He sold before there was much to sell. we were selling bullet points in a notepad, he said, and he designed mock landing pages in Figma to test how the company would explain itself before building the software. One of the first customers, Mars, signed on early. And they bought us before we even had a public website, it was crazy. He warns founders to be careful whom they share early ideas with: these ideas are, they're like preemies, you know, they need to be nurtured.

Building a Platform for the Workspace

Material grew from email into files, connected apps and account takeover protection. In 2022 it raised $100 million in a round led by Founders Fund that valued it at $1.1 billion, with Andreessen Horowitz and Elad Gil also investing, according to Material. Agrawal describes the goal as a single security platform for the office suites every company runs. So there's no CrowdStrike, but for your productivity suite. He made the same case at RSAC 2024: Who is the Crowdstrike for M365? There isn't one.

Off the Clock

His personal site collects what he calls his art and engineering projects. They include a homemade 3D scanner built from a webcam, a rescued turntable and an LED matrix, a second scanner made with a line laser, Human Antenna, which sent signals wirelessly through the capacitance of the skin, and TrivPals, a turn-based trivia game for iOS, alongside his painting and photography, according to aagrawal.me.