Before Eoin Hinchy founded automation platform Tines, he spent more than a decade on security teams at DocuSign, Deloitte, and eBay, where he saw firsthand the time eaten away by important but repetitive–and not-exactly-thrilling—tasks. He and Tines co-founder Thomas Kinsella decided to do something about it, launching Tines from a cramped office in Dublin. Now, Tines saves their 400+ global customers a mind-boggling amount of time, performing more than one billion automated actions each week.
In this episode of Spotlight On, Eoin joins Accel’s Luca Bocchio to discuss how Tines got here, including: why you can argue like cats and dogs and still be founder “soulmates,” why founders don’t (necessarily) need to move to the Bay Area anymore, and what he learned from throwing out parts of the startup playbook—and trusting his instincts instead.
Conversation Highlights
00:00 – Introduction to Tines
01:19 – Reimagining the way security works
07:08 – How to balance long-term vision while staying open to customer feedback
15:02 – The problem with leaning too far into playbooks as an early-stage startup
16:54 – Focus on how you tell your story from day one
17:47 – Why founders don’t have to move to the Bay Area anymore
22:41 – How to evolve as you expand your customer base from tech to other industries
24:08 – Staying open-minded about how customers use your product
30:08 – Tines’s approach to integrating AI into their platform involved 70+ failed experiments
40:05 – Being honest about your strengths and weaknesses as a founder
Related Links
Announcing our $125M Series C fundraise
Tines: Security orchestration, automation and response platform
