Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / 151: Ayal Yogev, CEO and Co-Founder of Anjuna: What's more important... product or sales?

Transcript

151: Ayal Yogev, CEO and Co-Founder of Anjuna: What's more important... product or sales? · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: The most important thing is distribution, not product, according to the CEO of Anjuna, Teal Yoga.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: Find out what he means by that and the nuances about how they went about building distribution in this episode.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Sales Blue Bird podcast, which exists because at B2B startups it's hard to get consistent direction and scale the sales team.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: Sales Bluebird provides you tips, tricks, experiences, examples, ideas, and inspiration from people who know a thing or 10 about building great cybersecurity companies.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: I am your host, Andrew Monahan.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: Our guest today is Al Yogev, CEO and co-founder at Andruna.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Sales Bluebird.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for having me.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_01: I'm looking forward to our discussion.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: We're at RSA, huge chaos and loudness and confusion going on on the expo floor.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: We're meeting in a place decidedly off-site, and it's cool to hear about the companies that really make a different early stage in cybersecurity.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: However, before we get into the business end of this, I have a list of questions right near AL, and uh I'm looking to bring in number 2115, and I'm gonna ask you the question and uh learn a little bit about you yourself.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: Sure, start with uh 12.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: 12 is what's one great sales or business book that you've read that you'd recommend to people?
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Oh wow.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: I think I really liked how I just read uh Zero to One by Peter Teal.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: I thought that was a very, very good one.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's like a classic, but it's it's it's very good.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's great for starting up with the founders, right?
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: I remember reading that a few years back.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: Another number between one and fifteen.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: Uh do uh two.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: Two.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: Do you prefer a suite of the four seasons or a cabin in the woods?
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: Oh wow, I like both.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: I guess it depends on you know what the weekend plans are.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: I guess I'll go with the suite of the four seasons.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Something nice about that, right?
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's hard to say no to.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: I think what I want to do is a week in the cabin in the woods and then go to the four seasons for a couple of days.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's usually exactly pampered after being in the woods for a little bit.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: That's the perfect one.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: One more number until you want to fifteen.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: Six.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: Six is what's a favorite summer pastime for you and your family?
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: So uh we've been living uh here in the Bay Area for the last 10 years, but uh we're originally from uh from Israel.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: So usually in the summer we just go and visit the family back in Israel, which is always super, super nice to see everyone.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: How long do you go back for when you go?
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so it depends.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: We used to go for like two or three weeks.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: Last uh last summer we went for longer than that because the kids had to quarantine because we couldn't backseat the kids back then.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: This summer we're gonna go for four weeks.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm originally from Scotland, so I have the same thing.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: When I go back, it's a lot of family and friends things.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: And it's tough because it's a long way to go in a short period of time.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but it's always great to see everyone.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: It is, isn't it?
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: All right, well, let's talk about the business side of this.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: What can you tell us about where in the journey Andruna is in terms of your growth and uh size?
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: So we're in the beginning of the scale phase of the business.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Again, happy to kind of go deeper, but essentially we spend a bunch of time, obviously, kind of building the product and finding sort of initial product market fit and understanding our sort of distribution model.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: Who are we selling to?
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: What's the right way to sell to these people?
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: You know, what companies do we sell to?
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: Who do we sell to within those companies, and what's the right way to engage them and talk to them?
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: Now that we've figured that out, you know, and obviously there's always you can always kind of improve and do better, but we have sort of a good understanding of that.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: We're now scaling a sales organization.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then the next phase is we're starting that's sort of on the go-to-market side.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: On the product engineering side, it's about finding new uh revenue streams to add on top to the initial one that we have.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: How did you decide internally that you had found enough of a product market fit to then do it scale?
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's mostly about reputability.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's being able to see sort of the same thing working over and over again once you have that.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: And again, you I think product market fit is a journey, right?
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's not sort of one point where you have product market fit and that's it.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: But once we kind of felt we're sort of deep enough or further enough in the journey to start, you know, scaling this and bring, you know, other people who are not the founders, not the initial executive team to go and then we can train them to go and sell this.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: That's when we realize okay, we can start scaling.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: If you were to guess, you may know precisely how many companies that you talk to as part of that learning journey.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that has to be hundreds.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: Really?
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: And any key learnings that you had that you just didn't think about beforehand?
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, a ton.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'd say the big one for us is the to me, that phase is one is that I think one I've learned that distribution is more important than anything else in a startup.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: I kind of grew up in product, I came from the product side, and to me it always about, you know, having great product, having the best product in the market.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: I still think we have the best product in the market, and that's great, but distribution is just key to be successful.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: You can have the best product, but if you don't figure out the distribution and you don't build out the right go-to-market motion, you're just not gonna be successful in the market.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: And we've seen the opposite.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: We've seen companies with mediocre products building an amazing go-to-market motion and being extremely, extremely successful.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: And again, I'm not gonna name names, but we've seen this in the security space quite a lot.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so that was sort of one learning.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: And then to me, and the sort of figuring that out, to me was just basically a lot of experimentation and basically trying and failing and trying and failing, and then sort of figuring out, okay, what does work?
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: And then once you do doubling down on that, to me, that was sort of the process that we took, and that would be the process I would take to this over and over again.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: So why don't you explain what Andruna does, what it's all about?
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: So we're uh company in the confidential computing space.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: And at a very, very high level, when companies kind of go through their cloud journey, when they kind of move workloads to the cloud, they run into the problem of essentially once you run on somebody else's infrastructure, they have access to everything you do on top of that infrastructure.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: So you add just a ton of risk, both by the cloud vendors having access, the government potentially coming in with a subpoena getting access, or just third parties running on that same infrastructure that might do things that will eventually put you at risk.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: High level, what happened in the space was that the hardware vendors build a solution to completely solve that.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: Interestingly enough, it actually started with the non-tloud side, it started with the cell phones.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you ever thought what happens if you lose your phone, you have biometric data, your fingerprint or face ID.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: You know, what happens?
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: You know, can somebody get access to that?
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: And the answer to that is no, because the phones have this confidential computing capability that gives you complete security, even from physical access to the device.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, interestingly enough, that's kind of what allowed Apple a few years back to basically say no to the FBI when they asked them to remember that.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: And that was because of confidential computing.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: Apple could essentially tell the FBI, we just don't have any access to data on the iPhone because of those capabilities.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: And what happened was that this moved to the server side, and the sort of the hardware vendors, you know, Intel, EMD, ARM, and now NVIDIA have realized that this is where obviously a lot of the sensitive data is, and they've added that capability into their chipset.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh in 2020, all the cloud vendor essentially adopted these technologies.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason they've done so is to be able to do two things.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: One is turn to their customers and tell them when you use confidential computing, we don't have any access to your data on top of our platform, which is probably the number one issue companies have about moving sensitive data to the cloud.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: And also allows them to turn to the government and tell the government, you can subpoena us because we just don't have access to customer data.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: You want access to our customer data, go directly to the customer.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: So that's sort of the big shift that happened in the market.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: And where we fit in is every time there was a major harbor shift, you needed a software stack on top of it to make it usable.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: We've seen that with, you know, uh Microsoft and the operating system on top of CPUs.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we've seen that with VMware on top of virtualization.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: Virtualization was a huge shift, uh but you needed VMware to make it useful.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: And without VMware, nobody would be using virtualization, right?
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: Or a company like VMware, nobody would be using virtualization to begin with.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: We do the same for confidential computing.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's another extremely powerful technology built by the hardware vendors that is extremely difficult to use.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: And exactly like what VMware did or Microsoft did for the CPU, we build a software stack on top of it to make it super simple to use and ubiquitous across the different hardware technologies.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: So what they did in the on-prem world is just say, here's the functionality, go figure it out, right?
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: And some companies could and most couldn't, right?
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: And what you're doing is the cloud just or an on-prem as well, saying that we've got a whole way to make this work.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we support the cloud and on-prem.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: Most of the use cases, I don't think we have any deployments on-prem today.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: Our deployments are in the cloud because this is just uh sort of the key use case that we found, even though I think it's going to expand beyond the cloud, and happy to talk more about that.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, this is now part of every CPU that Intel ships and AMD ships.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: All the clouds have enabled this, and every cloud shows a different underlying technology.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: You know, Microsoft went with Intel, Google went with AMD, Amazon being Amazon build their own hardware solution, you know, called Nitro Enclave to go support this.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: But the problem the customers are running into is obviously this is an extremely powerful technology that can help them move sensitive workloads to the cloud, but it means rebuilding, rewriting every application to go use this and write extremely low-level code, basically either assembly language or C-level language.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's just not something that any organization wants to do.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: Not to mention, if you use third-party applications like databases or key management solutions, you're not going to go rewrite those to go support this.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: So basically, there's a huge need for a layer, a software layer, kind of like VMware, to just obfuscate all of that and allow you to take any application, any workload, and just run it in a confidential computing environment for complete privacy in the cloud.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: And the customers out there, what are they using it for?
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: What's the use cases they actually have in place?
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's funny because the use cases that we see now starting are around migrating sensitive data to the cloud.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: So it's usually around, you know, starting with moving a database to the cloud or moving a key management solution to the cloud, or moving some machine learning workload where both the algorithm and the data might be sensitive to the public cloud.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we see some use cases around geographical expansion.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: So American companies that want to expand into China and they might not trust their cloud vendor in China or the Chinese government.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: We see European companies wanting to expand to the US, and because of privacy regulations, they have a lot of challenges around that, and they obviously want to protect user data running outside of Europe.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: So these are the use cases that we see.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: But the interesting thing about this is every time a security solution has no performance impact and has been extremely simple to use, it became sort of the default.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: And we've seen that with the firewall, we've seen that with TLS, then how every website uses.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: And this is sort of what we see with here as well with confidential computing.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: With a lot of these companies, we start with protecting, let's say, a database, but then they come to us and say, but we have this application that we build on top of the database and the data gets there as well.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: Can we protect that application?
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: And then, you know, there's the next application, the talks of the applications that's using the database.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: Can we protect that?
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: And soon we essentially become a part of the infrastructure and we protect all the applications.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: And where I think confidential computing in general as a space is going is that everything will be running in confidential computing.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you have a security solution that's, you know, no performance impact, super simple to use, why not use it to protect all your workloads and all your data?
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: So it becomes almost as ubiquitous as the hypervisor, VMware world, right?
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: Just we could do something with a cloud that just is there.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_01: In that view, would the customer buy that or would the cloud company provide that?
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: So I think what we're seeing now, and this is sort of my so we're not working with both AWS and Azure, they're both partners of ours.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: But my sense of where this market is going is this is very similar to what we've seen with companies like Snowflake, where the clouds are gonna have their own sort of offering, but only for their own cloud.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: But then there's gonna be a company that's gonna be a cross-cloud, it's gonna be a best of breed to service, you know, multi-cloud customers.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason it's gonna be very difficult for one cloud to provide this is that what this essentially allows you to do is run workloads in multiple clouds, potentially in a hybrid cloud environment, some on-prem, some in the cloud.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: And essentially everything is running completely protected and the data is protected between the different workloads and applications across all these different environments.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: This is something that you need sort of a third party that's not one of the clouds providing, and that's exactly part of the value that we bring to the table.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: So the customer's standpoint, obviously they do care which cloud, but in some ways they don't, right?
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's just it's all taken care of for.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: And this sort of sort of obfuscates the cloud, at least that that portion of what the cloud does.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, we see more and more companies.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: Multi-cloud is now something every company has to think about uh for obvious reasons.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: The large companies, you know, one of our advisors is Michael Johnson, who was the CESA of Capital One.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: And Capital One, as everybody knows, kind of went all in on AWS.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: But he told me they have to think about multi-cloud because every acquisition that they make brings them into another cloud.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: So you kind of have to, plus with financial services specifically, regulations are now starting to mandate them to think about multi-cloud for resiliency.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: And who inside an organization is the buyer of your software?
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's funny because we ended up kind of selling into two types of customers, and each one of them has a different buyer.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: So one sort of type of customer we sell to is the sort of the G2000s or sort of governments, these types of customers.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: And they usually have extremely sensitive workloads or regulated data, uh and they're all somewhere in their cloud journey.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: Some of them are very early on, some of them are further along.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: And we essentially enable them to either start their cloud journey or move more sensitive data into the cloud.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: And there we usually sell into either the security team or the infrastructure team.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: So either the CISO or the infrastructure team.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: The other vertical that we discovered sort of almost by accident was ISVs, software vendors.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: And there, the use cases is allowing them to tell their customers we use confidential computing, so we and our employees don't have any access to your data as you know, to our customers' data running within our platform, uh, which allows them to basically bypass a lot of the sort of the security screen, you know, the security uh questionnaires that the customers are giving them.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: And there, the buyer is usually more on the you know, either product side or CTO or VP of engineering side, and not necessarily uh the CISO.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that makes kind of sense.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: And for the ones that on the your first use case, it seems like the main driver would be risk mitigation, but is there an operational efficiency to be gained as well or cost savings?
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: So it's funny because the cost savings come from the fact that we enable them to run workloads in areas where they just couldn't think it was possible to do so.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: So either move things to the cloud and get all the benefits of the cloud, where before there were some workloads they just couldn't move to the cloud, or we allow them to run workloads much, much closer to where they're needed.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: So in some cases, we've seen, I'll give you one example of a company working with and they're expanding into China, and they were very worried about the Chinese government getting access to their data.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so they in originally they thought about running the you know, pieces of the workloads in China, and China pieces in Singapore, and having all the keys in Singapore and out of China, and just having encrypted data in China, and it just caused a lot of sort of friction in terms of, you know, in terms of the uh the operational efficiency of things.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: You you you want to run workloads and have the keys as close as you need to the data, otherwise you get latency.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: And being able to just run everything within China in a completely protected, completely secure way, allowed them to get those gains.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, that makes sense.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_01: And for the go-to-market team, how did you start hiring salespeople?
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: What were the first roles that you buyers?
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so we had a somewhat of a unique story in that sense.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: So basically, what we've done sort of in the initial phases of the company was one, obviously, build the product, but also figure out that product market, you know, fair, what's the distribution channel?
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: I mentioned all the different things that we've been happy to kind of go deeper there, but all these sort of different experiments that we've done.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: Once you kind of figure it out, okay, this is gonna be our go-to market motion, and we realized it was gonna be a direct go-to-market motion selling into large enterprises where we started.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: I was sort of lucky to get connected with Mark Ranny, which I don't know if Mark Cranny.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: Mark Ranny, yeah, is a very well-known name.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: And he got very excited about what we do.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: And he actually joined us as a very hands-on go-to-market advisor.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: And he basically helped us grow the team from basically zero to nine sales teams within four months.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: So we just scaled very, very, very quickly.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: And not just on the sort of the sales side, the marketing side, the you know, partnership and alliances side.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: So we just sort of grew from like zero to relatively large very quickly just through sort of what Mark was able to put in place.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: And how did that work out?
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: So it's still in motion.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's actually working out pretty great.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: He's um, again, I'm sure a lot of people read about him in you know in Ben Horwitz's book.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: What he knows about go to market is like if I live, you know, 10 lifetimes, I don't think I'll you know I know as much about this as he does.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: And do you remember which for the roles that he first started hiring for?
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so the first two roles that we brought was a VP of sales and CMO.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so these were the two roles, and then I I can actually maybe take a step back because I've kind of seen this, and this was just amazing to watch him kind of build.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: He basically identifies like these are the things that we need to do to start scaling this much, much faster.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: And he started putting them in place basically in the right order in terms of what's sort of the long pole and in terms of getting things in place.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: And the first thing he did was essentially build a team.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: He said, this is gonna be the long pole and getting the team sort of hired and ramped up.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: So that was the first thing.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: So we bought a VP of sales and he started hiring people underneath him.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, uh sales reps, an SDR team, SEs, we ramped up the team super quickly.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then we worked on the, you know, just a lot of contents for them to be able to go and pitch the customers.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, we had the content that we used, but the level of the level of perfection that he's sort of striving towards as well.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: So you need as a CEO founder is different to what a sales team needs.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't have your experience, your passion, things like that.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: They need to operate at a different level, right?
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: That's exactly right.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: And kind of his point was we need to take all the things that you guys have in your heads and kind of put them into a slide that uh, you know, the sales team can go use.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: And we just spent, we basically had uh, I think it was like a few months of you know, two-hour meetings a week with me, my co-founder, our VP of engineering, our head of product, and then Mark, our CMO or VP of sales, just going, you know, building that customer-facing deck and all the decks is it just creates just a bunch of collateral that comes out of this.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: And that was just an amazing process and kind of watch him, you know, help drive that.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: Then he helped with packaging and pricing.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: And obviously, we had sort of initial packaging and price.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: He said, no, this is not kind of the level of maturity that we would need, you know, the sales team would go need to go do this.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: So he helped build that and then all the sales operations, all the tools, the processes uh behind the scenes to go basically execute at that level.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: So just watching him put all that in place has just been phenomenal.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: And when you were in the room working away, you put the deck you're working on, right?
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_01: There's probably some key components of that.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_01: What else came out of that?
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_01: Was there, I don't know, like uh discovery frameworks, things like that that he was using?
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: So one, it's just not one deck, it's just a multitude of decks, right?
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: There's the customer-facing deck, there's the sort of technical deep dive deck, there's all these sort of competitive decks that come along with it.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: There's the deck for when you sort of present the offer to the customer.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: So there's just a bunch of things that come out of that.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: But then, yeah, the older discovery question, understanding, you know, how do you identify this, you know, the right customer to go?
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: Is this something that's sort of worth pursuing now or do we want to sort of park it for now?
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: There's just a bunch of things that come out of it.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then also just a lot of other collateral that helps kind of feed the top of the funnel and goes to the marketing team to start nurturing these that we have.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's awesome.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: How did you get in touch with uh Mark Freddy?
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: So we got connected through one of our investors.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: So, Mark, he was the CEO of another portfolio company of theirs, and he just uh left his role there, and they basically told him there's a company we want you to meet.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: Do we think you guys are gonna hit it off?
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: We did, and that's sort of how we got connected.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and again, it's just the experience has just been phenomenal.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he's done this many times, right?
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: So he's yeah, that there's not that many people on you know on the planet that have done this multiple times, being able to take companies from you know zero to multi-billion dollar exits in different spaces.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: This is like obviously he has sort of his playbook, but his playbook is extremely, extremely flexible and can adjust itself to kind of the different situations of different companies.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's awesome.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: And when you look at the rest of this year, what's the plan for the sales team in terms of growth and you know, channels and distribution?
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so uh there's sort of two things.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: One is uh we're gonna obviously continue growing the sales teams.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: Uh expecting to end a year was about 18 uh sales teams.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: And then uh obviously there's the direct motion, and then the other side of it, which is another person that cranny connected me with, uh, we hired our VP of Alliances, and he's again just a phenomenal, phenomenal hire.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: He's an ex uh AWS uh person.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: He actually ran uh Alliances for Cranny two times before us, and there's a lot of additional value that can be added, not just by going direct, but also by going through these partnerships with the cloud vendors and through these partnerships with the ISV vendors.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: With a lot of the ISV vendors, we have sort of a sell-to motion, but also a sales with motion.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: So he's helping uh shape that and build that.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: That's awesome.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: When you look at you know RSA, right?
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_01: There's thousands of vendors in the space.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: I think I often wonder as a company getting going, how you think about how do we rise above this noise?
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: How do we get our unfair share of attention given everything else that's going on over there?
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, I completely agree with you.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: That's actually one of the big challenges that every security company faces, right?
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: There's just so much noise out there, everything sounds roughly the same.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's really hard to kind of, you know, to get above the noise.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: And to some extent for us, it's even uh harder to some extent because we're not sort of following a trail that somebody else laid for us.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: There's a bunch of companies that, you know, for better or worse, it's sometimes it's a great strategy, but one company sort of, you know, created a market and then a bunch of companies sort of follow in their footsteps.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a much easier sort of sales motion because people know what you're talking about.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: You don't need to say I cost less or I'm better that way, but people kind of know the value that they're getting and they have a budget for it, or they're, you know, they're coming up with a renewal and they think about whether or not to replace it.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: This is not the case for us.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: We're building something completely different that nobody else is doing.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: We're building a completely new market.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: But I think the security aspect of this, but I think this is going to completely change the enterprise security market.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: Again, not necessarily just us, but confidential computing is going to make about 80% of what we see out there obsolete and happy to kind of talk about why I think that is.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: Well, listen, I enjoyed the conversation, AL.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_01: I really wish you every success for this year and beyond.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: And thanks for watching.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: This was a fascinating chat with AL on this interview, but an area that I knew a little bit about and learned a lot from him.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_01: But the real takeaways for me were around all the go-to-market stuff that we talked about.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: I thought that AL was very, very thoughtful about how he's gone about doing it.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: And he's done some things that perhaps others have not, and it really paying off for him as he's building the team and the company.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: So, first takeaway was one of the threads throughout the whole episode was the time and the resources they spent working on the foundations to be able to then build the sales team.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: He talked at the start about understanding problems, personas, how we solve those problems for those personas, and a lot of depth around that.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: And then later on in the episode, he talked about how they'd engage with Mark Craney, who's been around the startup world for many years and got a lot of help from him as an advisor to build out the foundations and the playbooks and all the tools the sales team would need so they could start building out the sales team.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: And it sounds like they built the sales team pretty rapidly as they realized they were ready for it.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_01: So that was one takeaway.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: And the second takeaway was how they became ready for it.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: You know, AL said that they literally had hundreds of conversations with people to learn about what people needed and why, and that allowed them to get the product market fit.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, as you said, you know, product market fit is a journey, but their sign they were looking for is repeatability.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: When are we at the point where, as a founding team or a founding team with a little bit of help, they could get to repeatability and then have the confidence to then add in those sales teams that he was talking about?
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_01: So I thought that was uh really thoughtful and interesting how he did that.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: And the third one was the idea that distribution is most important.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: It is in fact more important than product, although having a great product is important too.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: So he said that uh, you know, distribution, thinking about the go-to-market, thinking about selling motions and how you support those selling motions is what's going to allow them to break out and be successful.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_01: As he said, and I think as many of us have realized over the years, that having a great product isn't enough.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: But there's lots of examples with people with okay or good enough type products that have really figured out the go-to-market and how to sell it have actually to be the ones that uh have turned out to be successful.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: So those are my three big takeaways from that call.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_01: I really did enjoy the conversation with AL, and I wish the Anjuna team and AL success for 2022 or into 2024.