“When you grow up pretty darn broke, you have to learn and experiment,” Hanslovan told Fortune. “Sometimes you learn by getting your hands slapped, and sometimes you learn with success.”
That realization pushed Hanslovan to take a leap. In 2015, he left a stable career to cofound Huntress, a cybersecurity startup focused on protecting small and midsize organizations that larger firms often overlook—from small-town accountants to innovative tech startups.
For Huntress, that threat has been great for business: It has scaled to over 700 employees across five countries and a $3 billion valuation. But according to Hanslovan, it didn’t come without serious sacrifice over the past decade.
“I slept in my car for most of Huntress in the beginning; we couldn’t get venture capital,” the 40-year-old recalled to Fortune. “I had 60 venture capitalists tell me no, and we had burned all of our founder cash.”
“I actually think a lot of people that make it have some weird level of dysfunction as a child that just made them [able to] pursue through these hard times,” Hanslovan said. “So even though it wasn’t the greatest part of my life, I don’t regret it at all.”
Still, he’d make some changes. When he started Huntress, his three children were 5, 9, and 11 years old. Today they’re 15, 19, and 21; two have left for college, and a divorce has come and gone in between.
“I over-rotated on work way too hard. The first eight years I believed in that hustle culture, grind culture,” he said. “I missed a lot of the greatest years of their lives.”
“I probably wouldn’t do it all over again if I could,” he added.
For all his success, Hanslovan also admitted that it doesn’t necessarily come with automatic satisfaction.
“All the finances and all the glamour and all that has not made me any happier. If anything, it’s made me more disconnected,” he said.
Part of that dissatisfaction, he added, stemmed from a mindset he’d internalized early: that building a billion-dollar business was the benchmark for having made it.
“I just wish I would have known in the earlier days that I would have still been successful even if this didn’t turn into a $3 billion company,” Hanslovan said. “There are a lot of ways to make a difference that doesn’t just come with the dollars.”
Still, Hanslovan stressed against reaching for the moon if it’s not absolutely necessary.
“You don’t have to become Mark Cuban. You don’t have to create $3 billion Huntress to have a good life and provide for your family,” Hanslovan said. “There’s nothing wrong with progressing with a lifestyle business, a local business of their own, or something along those lines that allows them to be able to satisfy that gap.”
