When you see something not working – listen to your gut. Stop, pivot and try something new.

Keeper Security is transforming the way businesses and individuals protect their passwords and sensitive digital assets to significantly reduce cyber theft. As the leading password manager and digital vault, Keeper helps millions of people and thousands of businesses substantially mitigate the risk of a data breach. Keeper is SOC-2 Certified and utilizes best-in-class encryption to safeguard its customers. Keeper protects businesses of all sizes across every major industry sector. Keeper partners with global OEMs and mobile operators to preload Keeper on smartphones and tablets.

BusinessInterviews.com: What inspired you to launch your business?

Darren Guccione: My partner and co-founder, Craig Lurey, and I came up with the idea for Keeper on a trip to Asia back in 2008. The iPhone had launched with great success and Apple was about to unlock the floodgates on the App Store – we saw a market opportunity. At that time, no one in the industry was creating a cyber security “vault” for Smartphones. Craig had 40 hours of flight time coding the first version of Keeper for iPhone. We launched it in 2009 as a free application and the rest is history.

BusinessInterviews.com: What has been your biggest challenge as a business owner and how have you met that challenge?

Darren Guccione: I have failed so many times – it was the methodology for my success. When you start a business, you go through what I call “the spanking line.” You will make lots of mistakes and you will fail. I think one of the things I’ve gotten better at with age is to fail fast. When you see something not working – listen to your gut. Stop, pivot and try something new. Successful entrepreneurs rarely strike gold right out of the gate. Every great one that I know of has battle scars from failing a bunch of times. The key is to keep going – no matter how hard it gets – if people doubt you, you have to be able to be strong and ignore it – in the realm of the overall universe, they don’t matter…only your customers and real stakeholders matter.

BusinessInterviews.com: Have you had any mentors or role models that have influenced you? Describe the impact.

Darren Guccione: I respect leaders who have emotional intelligence. People follow these types of leaders because they are confident, and when there is a crisis, these leaders understand that the calm head always prevails. They have a sense of control and supreme knowledge about what they do.

BusinessInterviews.com: What advice do you have for other entrepreneurs and business owners? What do you wish someone told you?

Darren Guccione: Build a great product and have great service – it starts here. If you do these two things right, you will be well on your way and the need for a massive marketing budget, to get you out of the gate the first year, will be mitigated. Great products create virality and buzz.

Executing and staying hyper-focused on the initiatives that are geared towards propelling the grand scheme are important. Rome wasn’t built in a day – I’m a believer in breaking things down into a series of steps and deadlines – then cranking on them while mitigating distractions. The ability to stay focused is probably the hardest part of being a CEO every day. It is very easy to get distracted – things come up all the time that aren’t part of your plan. You have to have to ability to resolve errant, but important, issues quickly or simply say “no” or “not now.” Sometimes, I will let people know that “we are never going to do that. It’s not the right move for us.”

BusinessInterviews.com: Anything else you’d like to comment on while we have you?

Darren Guccione: Advice on how to spot a great opportunity: The main element to look at before starting off or deciding if an idea is worth pursuing is how big the market is. If the market for that idea is massive, then the company has the potential to be big. In contrary, if the market is small, your company will remain small even if you perform well.

Focus on ideas which integrates themselves within a massive market opportunity and then go from there. For Keeper Security, for example, we knew that everyone shares the same problem with passwords and that is pervasive enough to be tackled.