OEM Partnerships: What Every Practitioner, Vendor, and Investor Needs to Understand

Episode notes

The threat intel in your SIEM, the scanning engine in your endpoint tool, the analysis powering your detection platform. There's a good chance those capabilities come from a company you've never directly evaluated. That's OEM. And it touches every corner of cybersecurity. Chad Loeven has spent 20 years building OEM partnerships on both sides of the table, licensing technology inbound as a buyer and outbound as a seller. In this episode, he breaks open one of the most misunderstood parts of the cybersecurity market and explains how it actually works. We get into what qualifies as OEM versus resale or MSSP, why OEM can be the smartest go-to-market path for startups, and the real stories behind deals that worked and deals that didn't. Chad shares the seven-figure Yahoo contract that nearly drained his company, the DLP product that proved some solutions just don't OEM well, and the time he walked into a company where 25% of revenue disappeared overnight because of a single OEM dependency. But this isn't just a conversation for partnership teams. If you're a practitioner, this episode explains why some capabilities in your stack feel native and others feel bolted on.