We Help You Keep Your Promises

Devin Mahoney’s six-year-old daughter asked him a question over breakfast. “Dad, how many jobs do you have?”

He laughed telling the story, because it sounded made up, even though she really did say it. His answer to her that morning was the same one he’d give anyone: he’s a CEO, a dad, a husband, an athlete. Four kids, two of them teenagers, two in elementary school, and a company that is trying to change the way leaders understand what’s happening inside their own organizations.

“It’s not about getting paid,” he says. “It’s about what impact you can have in the world.”

Mahoney came out of Carnegie Mellon with degrees in electrical and computer engineering and computer science, and went straight into cybersecurity. His early career ran through ManTech and then Kyrus Tech, where he joined as the tenth employee. At Kyrus, his work helped lay the groundwork for Carbon Black, the endpoint security company that would later reach unicorn status. He went on to contribute to Red Canary’s growth and helped guide Randori to a valuation north of $200 million.

The pattern across those years was consistent. Mahoney kept ending up at the intersection of security, data, and the question of how you find what matters inside a system that’s generating more noise than any person can process.

“I had this frustration,” he says. “I can’t see where the work is happening across my team.”

At first, he thought the problem was limited to cybersecurity leaders. It wasn’t. It was everywhere. Engineers working in Jira, salespeople living in Salesforce, customer teams scattered across email and Slack and meetings. All of them talking about roughly the same things, in different terms, at different levels of abstraction, and none of it visible in one place.

“The engineers are at code by code, and the salespeople just need to make their quarterly numbers, and none of them are really talking to each other,” he says, “even if you put them into the same system.”

That frustration became QTalo.

The company, based in Reston, Virginia, builds software that reads across a company’s communication and project tools and surfaces what leadership actually needs to see. It’s structured as a SaaS product, though in practice the work looks more like a hybrid. QTalo’s team works alongside operations leaders, showing them what the software is detecting and asking whether it matches what they expect.

“We help you keep your promises,” Mahoney says. That’s his elevator pitch. Six words.

The deeper capability is in the transition from spotting a single incident to recognizing a recurring problem. A customer’s response time slipping once is a data point. The same thing happening more frequently over the past two weeks than in the month before is a trend that requires a decision.

“We go quickly from the instance to the pattern,” he says.

But a couple of years into building QTalo, Mahoney realized his original thesis was backwards.

He started the company believing that leaders didn’t have enough visibility. That they needed more data and a more complete picture of what was happening inside their organizations. The opposite turned out to be true.

“I think they can see far too much,” he says. “They’re overwhelmed by the amount of chaos and data that’s coming to them. And the problem is knowing what deserves their attention.”

That reversal reshaped the product. The goal became filtering. If something doesn’t require a leader’s attention, QTalo keeps it out of the way.

Getting there has required Mahoney to stay open to being wrong, which he admits is harder than it sounds.

“Over the years, I’ve been sure that I’ve been right about so many things,” he says. “You have to have that as a founder. You have to have this assurance that whatever bet you’re making at the time is correct. But in that assurance, it’s so hard to also be open to being wrong.”

The discipline, he says, is holding the line until the data tells you to stop. “You have to continually pressure test that. But still hold the line until, oh, wait a second. Today’s the day. This is the day that we’re gonna make a change, and here’s why.”

QTalo is six people. Mahoney funded the company through relationships built over years in cybersecurity. Friends who had their own exits from cybersecurity companies, people he’d done computer security and forensics work for years earlier, wanted in when he told them what he was building. They became his board.

“It takes everything I ever had and everything I didn’t even know I had to bring the right team together,” he says. “I thought I knew design thinking. I thought I knew how to manage a product. I had to eat some humble pie and really learn that myself.”

What he’s found most valuable is bringing in experts and working with them in what he calls a player-coach mentality: the most intensive class you’ve ever taken with a one-on-one tutor, except you’re doing it live, with your own product, with real customers.

“I just love soaking in this expertise and learning everything I can from it,” he says.

His proudest moment so far came when QTalo surfaced something for a customer that they would not have found on their own. The software flagged it as important. The customer had no idea it was there. Without QTalo, it might have been two months before anyone noticed.

“That’s a really proud moment for me,” he says.

When asked what resource has been most valuable to him as a founder, Mahoney holds up a book: Steve Blank’s The Startup Owner’s Manual. It’s a signed copy. He met Blank in person.

Mahoney grew up Quaker, attended a Quaker school, and says the philosophy is still deeply embedded in him and in the company. He has four children and has been married for more than twenty years. He describes himself as a dad, a husband, an athlete, and a CEO, in roughly that order.

His offer to other founders is the kind of thing people say at the end of an interview and don’t always mean. Mahoney means it. He wants to share what he’s learned in the trenches, the practical knowledge about how you build and manage a company when you’re six people.

“I would really love to help anybody who is just a little bit behind me,” he says. “I think I have a lot to offer.”

Devin Mahoney is the Co-Founder and CEO of QTalo, based in Reston, Virginia. He holds degrees in electrical and computer engineering and computer science from Carnegie Mellon University. His career in cybersecurity includes early roles at ManTech and Kyrus Tech, where he helped build the foundations for companies including Carbon Black and Red Canary. QTalo helps client-facing service leaders understand how work moves within their organizations by surfacing the patterns and exceptions that deserve attention across communication and project tools.