The Limitation of Your Organization Will Be Your Imagination and Ambition: Interview with Kevin Tian, Co-Founder and CEO of Doppel

I recently went one-on-one with Kevin Tian, co-founder and CEO of Doppel.

Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks, or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?

Kevin: Before co-founding Doppel, I worked as a software engineer at Uber and Lyft, building dispatch systems and contributing to their flying cars initiative. Although it is not a traditional cybersecurity background, it gave me a deep experience in AI and large-scale distributed systems. The greatest turning point was when my co-founder, Rahul, and I  saw social engineering rise as the #1 source of breaches and the #1 source of insurance claims in cyber, especially with AI making this the greatest attack vector. We quickly sought to build an AI-native platform that could combat the volume, velocity, and variety of these attacks and drive SOC automation.

Adam: How did you come up with your business idea and know your business idea was worth pursuing?  What advice do you have for others on how to come up with and test business ideas?

Kevin: My co-founder, Rahul, and I had always talked about starting a company. In 2022, three key elements fell into place: rapid advances in AI, the shift to remote work, and attackers weaponizing social engineering at scale. Rahul was roommates with one of the heads of research at OpenAI, so we had early insight into where language models were headed. We started by solving a specific problem by protecting crypto companies from impersonation – and quickly realized the same attacks were plaguing enterprises across industries. Advice I would give on testing and discovering business ideas would be to move really, really fast in working with customers, understanding their pains, and building great products and technology to solve them.

Adam: What are the key steps you have taken to grow your business? What advice do you have for others on how to take their businesses to the next level?

Kevin: In 2025, we’ve seen explosive growth in both revenue, new customers, and employees. From the early days of building Doppel through today, my guiding principles have been my guiding principles were and still are:

• Automate what matters: We moved from a co-pilot model to autonomous AI agents and upskilled our tier-one analyst team to different AI-focused roles – our agents now review millions of alerts per day, improving speed and recall
• Broaden the market deliberately: We expanded from threat intel, brand & executive protection, and takedowns to deep fake simulation across voice, SMS, Telegram, WhatsApp, and email. Our data enables us to continue to deliver more products for our customers.
• Invest in the threat graph: Connecting signals across email, social, mobile, web, phone numbers, advertiser IDs, and domains let us see true multi-channel campaigns

Adam: What are your best sales and marketing tips?

Kevin: For us, the strongest marketing came from our product results – shutting down thousands of attacks made our customers our best advocates. We’ve focused on making our customers successful and delivering results that matter, which has helped us gain momentum tremendously. We’ve positioned Doppel as not as another cybersecurity company, but as the social engineering defense company, creating a new category and giving us the opportunity to lead this category.

Adam: What are the most important trends in technology that leaders should be aware of and understand? What should they understand about them?

Kevin: There are numerous components to what technology leaders should be aware of, but here are some of the key trends:

1. Generative AI is normalizing deception – making deepfakes, fake ads, and cloned voices cheap and scalable. We’ve built a “vibe-phishing” simulation product that enables deepfake voice & SMS simulations to harden your team against these threat actors.
2. Multi-channel attack surfaces (email, social media, phone, and paid ads) now dominate traditional tools that protect only corporate emails, which miss the real threats
3. Automation and reasoning-capable AI are essential for defense – analyzing millions of signals daily to detect unusual behavior humans can’t process

Adam: In your experience, what are the defining qualities of an effective leader? How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?

Kevin: An effective leader is defined by transparency, vision, and energy. Transparency builds trust and accountability—leaders who communicate clearly and provide timely feedback foster stronger relationships and enable teams to grow. Vision gives direction and purpose, allowing team members to understand where the organization is headed and how their work contributes to the bigger picture. Energy fuels momentum and keeps teams motivated through challenges. To tune your leadership skills, find great mentors to learn from and constantly evaluate what is the most important thing your team needs from you as a leader at any given stage of the company. By staying self-aware, focused, and adaptable, leaders can continue to grow and elevate their impact.

Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading, and managing teams?

Kevin: The best advice for building, leading, and managing teams is to always be recruiting. This approach serves two key purposes: it ensures you have a strong bench to draw from when key roles open up, and it helps you continually calibrate on what “great” looks like—identifying the A-players who will elevate your team. To tune your leadership skills, find great mentors to learn from and constantly evaluate what is the most important thing your team needs from you as a leader at any given stage of the company.

Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives, and civic leaders?

Kevin: 

1. Customer obsession. Fly to meet customers in person, think two steps ahead in terms of what your customers will need, and chase the pain in your products and services to uplevel your offerings.
2. Hire people better than you. Look for the best leaders of any function so that they can scale the organization beyond yourself and make sure you’re best in class. If you were building a football team, how would you make sure you get the best QB and WRs on the team?
3. Think two steps ahead. Companies often hit a plateau in growth – how do you think two steps ahead to prevent that bottleneck? Ship the new product, invest in the new GTM motion, and expand the marketing muscle.

Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?

Kevin: The best piece of advice I’ve ever received is to think big. Very much the limitation of your organization will be your imagination and ambition. The more you challenge yourself to envision what’s possible and act with confidence, the more your team and company will rise to meet that vision.

Adam: Is there anything else you would like to share?

Kevin: What excites me most going into 2026 is how fast the social engineering landscape is changing. Generative AI is making deception effortless, but it’s also giving defenders a better chance at fighting back. We’re building Doppel into the default platform for social engineering defense – our mission is to equip defenders with the best possible tools for the job, and help executives and organizations verify what they see online.