Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / 158: Abhishek Dubey, CEO of Bolster - Fast time to value = a new deal per week

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158: Abhishek Dubey, CEO of Bolster - Fast time to value = a new deal per week · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: There's a cyber security startup that's winning a deal a week right now.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: What's their secret?
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Well, find out in this episode with their co-founder and CEO, Abyssek Dubay.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Sales Bluebird podcast, which exists because at cybersecurity startups, it is hard to get to repeatable sales process and scale the business.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Sales Bluebird gives you tips, tricks, experiences, examples, ideas, and inspiration from people who know a thing or can about building great cybersecurity companies.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: I am your host, Andrew Monahan.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Our guest today is Abhishek Dubay, co-founder and CEO at Bolster.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: Abishek, welcome to Sales Bluebird.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, Andrew.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: Glad to be here.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm glad to have you on.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's going to be an interesting conversation.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: But before we get into the business end of this, Abishek, let's get to know a little bit about yourself.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: I have a list here of 35 questions, believe it or not.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: The good news, I want to ask you 35 questions.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Pick numbers between one and 35, and I'll read out the question it corresponds to.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: I don't see the questions.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: Oh no, you don't get to see the questions.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I see.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: I'll pick one.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: How about that?
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: One.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Alright.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Dive bar or cocktail bar?
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: A dive bar.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: Is there one there in the peninsula that you like?
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: I will say uh San Antonio Nut House.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, like it.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Another number between one and thirty-five.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: Twelve.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Twelve.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Alright.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: They say home is where the heart is.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: Where is home for you?
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: That is a hard one.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: I'm split between US and India.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: My parents still live in India, a hometown called Agra, where the Tashmahal is.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: So that is a hard one.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I love Bay Area Mountain View where my wife and our dog live.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: So two places.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: I think I'm somewhat similar.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: I was born and grew up in all the rest of it in Scotland.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I kind of view that as when I when I see pictures and videos of there, I think, oh, that's home.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: But then day to day, you know, I'm here on the south side of Denver, and that for me is home too.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's tough to pick it up, right?
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: One last number between more than 35.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: 35.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: 35.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: Where in the world would you like to live if you could live anywhere?
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: I think where I'm living right now.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: You think so?
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: I love this place and ability to travel.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: I I love the Bay Area.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's just amazing San Francisco Bay Area.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm very, very fortunate about that.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you're in the heart of everything right there, right?
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's just one of the most beautiful places, just taking a drive by Highway One.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: Love to do long road drives.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: And if you just go on Highway One, it's one of the most scenic places in the world.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: Very fortunate to be here.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Beautiful, beautiful.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: When you were growing up in Agra, how did you first make money as a kid?
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: By actually renting comics.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: I had quite a bit of comic collection.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: So every summer we would have these laid-out comics, and we would basically rent out for a day for two cents.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: That was the first way.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: And often I love doing bets with my parents and relatives.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: I I would challenge them, oh, I can ring 10 Cokes.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: And they would take on the bet that I couldn't do it and I would go do it.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: So that's how I made early on.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: And later I had interest in, you know, we had uh doing tuitions, but I never made money.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: I wanted to make money, but my parents didn't allow he said, you know, you shouldn't charge for education.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: But early on it was comic books and uh betting with your parents.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: Betting with my parents.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: I love it.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's awesome.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: What was your first real job?
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: My first real job was here in the United States working for Qualis.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: So I was very fortunate.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: So I did my master's at Carnegie Mellon, which was in cybersecurity in 2006.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: And it was very, very hard as an immigrant on a visa to get a job in cybersecurity in 2006, which most people would not believe.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: And somehow I had a job offer in Pittsburgh, which was paying me more than my job offer over a year.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: But I wanted to be in Silicon Valley, and QuALUS was like almost a dream job for me, a startup in cybersecurity, and it was not a hard decision.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: And my role was doing vulnerability reverse engineering.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: So QuALES, if you know, they do vulnerability detection and patch management.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: And that's when Qualist was writing high, right?
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: They were one of the not up and coming at that point.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: They're probably more established as one of the main players in cybersecurity back then.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and it was one of the also original companies which was doing SaaS in cybersecurity because it was all appliances.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: So if I look back, actually Qualis was way far ahead in what they were selling than any other company.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'm very fortunate to actually be there and learn, you know, quite a few things.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: And Philippe was the CEO, right?
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, one of the great names from back in the day for sure.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: Let's fast forward to today, though.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: You're the co-founder and CEO at Bolster.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: So Abhishek, if I was a CISO, how would you answer my question?
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: What does Bolster do?
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: So Booster helps protect your organization's customers from account takeovers or fake executives, you know, bad actors impersonating your executives or putting bad links.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: Bolster would go proactively find these bad websites and find accounting impersonation on social media and take them down.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: From detection to take down, we have fully automated the whole process.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: And not only that, we are protecting your end customers.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: There's often we see that multiple organizations have multiple products in place.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: So we help consolidate because these are all sort of a piecemeal approach products.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: And Booster unifies and brings all of these things together.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_01: So not only are we saving money on your security analyst that you're spending, which is just doing manual work, we are helping consolidate four or five solutions that you have with one single solution.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: So the problem is that there are fake or spoofing websites or email forums that are acting and looking like, you know, whoever Amazon or Macy's or whoever it might be.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: And then what you do is you find them and take them down.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: So it protects the brand, I guess, but also it protects their customers.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Is that right?
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, absolutely.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I there's also a new breed of attacks that are going on, Andrew.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: So if you look at recently, Cloudfare and Twilio were uh had this massive breach.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: And if you look at the breach happened because of a typospot domain, more than a typospot, they appended SSO to Twilio, Twilio-SSO.com and Cloudfare-SSO and Cloudfare-Okta.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: And if you look at no email security solution would prevent this, no web gateway solution would prevent this because this is on a mobile of their employees.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: And they typically do not actually generate a list of typosports of the organization to protect against it.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: So something like this could be only protected by a solution like ours.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: And we had that data in our solution because we saw these domains being registered on day one.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: So not only are we now protecting the end customers with our technologies, organizations can protect their organizations from beaches like these, where you know none of the email security solutions would work.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that makes sense.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: And what's the secret sauce then?
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: What's the big innovation inside BOLS that enables you to compete?
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, I think the biggest innovation that we did, we came from my co-founder Sheshi Prakash and I came from deep background from detection.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: That's what we did.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, Paulis and my all my jobs coming from Cisco just before Booster is how do we do detection in real time?
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: The whole thing doing, you know, all my jobs have been in cybersecurity is detection is very post.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: We get a malware, we'll write a signature.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: We have a vulnerability, we'll detect it, and then we'll write a signature.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: But there has been nothing proactive and there was very limited use of machine learning.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: Most companies use machine learning on the back-end operation side of things, but not in real time.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: So what we did was we basically build a real-time system to load websites in a browser automatically in the cloud and just identify websites just like a human analyst would.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: So, as humans, if we go to a websfargo fake site, we will see, hey, images look like Wells Fargo or Amazon, and text say give me a username, password, or it's a scam.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: So with machine learning and deep learning, we had the ability to understand how do images look like, what logos are there, and on the text, we can understand the intent of the text.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: And then when we combine with that, we could look at any web page, whether it's a social media post or marketplace or mobile app store, we can say, hey, this is a page talking about Amazon, and the intent is a gift card, or they're using their logo.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: And then with our deep background in threat Intel, we can say, hey, Amazon doesn't own this, then this must be bad.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: And we were able to do this.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: So we built a massive browser automation infrastructure in the cloud.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: The first thing we did before the whole solution came in, we built checkfish.ai, which is our community tool where you can go put a link, whether you see on social media, whether it's behind you know 50 shorteners, we will launch a headless browser in the cloud and we will tell you in real time if it's a scam of a certain brand.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's great.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: So it sounds like the end result of that is you're able to more accurately identify the issues at scale, though, right?
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: And accuracy is very important because not only are we doing detection, we are doing remediation and takedown.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: And we can't do takedown at scale and can't, you know, keep bugging AWS and CloudFares of the world.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: If we didn't detect it correctly, they wouldn't partner with us.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: So because we can do correct very, you know, our false positive rate is one in 100,000 and with the accuracy rate of 99.8%, we can actually do automated takedowns.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: So that was, we didn't think of takedowns early on, but because of the accuracy of our detection, we could do automated takedowns.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: And now we have three patents granted, uh, two for detection, fully granted, and one for our the way we do takedowns.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: And given the use cases you gave me, one was more internal, protecting the internal side, and the other one is protecting customers.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: Who's the buyer of bolster inside of the organization?
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: So our typical buyer is CISO and SecOps within CISO.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: So most of depending on the organization, a typical buyer is director of SecOps.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: And how organizations are structured or budget, quite a few times it's actually CISO as well.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: And do they measure the effect of the impact they're having on the customer side as well?
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: Is that a big win for them?
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's a huge win.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: So one of the things that we see constantly across our customers is if you are a retail customer which is doing$20,$30 million in sales, they were actually losing money and their customer support teams are bearing the brunt because their customers would come say, Oh, I paid for this, I never get the product.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: So we see a direct decline when they poster in place, direct decline, the measurable one in number of customer support tickets and how many customers have been complaining.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: And we saw this through a multiple of our customers.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: Like, how many tickets do you have open?
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: So, other than the revenue and all the hard costs in terms of people and automation we are saving them, that's the one clear indicator.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I imagine the ROI can be pretty compelling.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: One thing that's true though is that even if you have the most compelling ROI in the world, it's really hard right now to stand out in the noise of all these people and offering cybersecurity solutions.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: I'm wondering how you're thinking about that real thing of how do we rise above the noise and act and look and feel completely different to everyone else.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: I think from very early on, Andrew, the way we thought about the product, and I did a lot of uh side gigs while I was working for a, you know, being in the valley here.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: What I learned was showing value is num, if we can show time to value, reduce as much as possible, customers would buy.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_01: The challenge with a lot of solutions in cybersecurity is just the nature of cybersecurity is very complex and it takes a lot of time to show value.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: So, how do we even get a first meeting if it will take you uh, you know, six, seven months to get integrated and show value?
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's just very, very hard.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: Then you have to spend so much money on customer acquisition, on marketing, getting these meetings, where with our solution from day one, we wanted to show value very quickly.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: So when we even go into our first meeting, we are able to do a dashboard and show the problem for the customer.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: So we are not showing them a generic account.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: We are showing them what their problem looks like.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: And even just showing that to them, you know, 40% of times are now, you know, less than$40,000 customer.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: We are not even doing POCs because the value is there.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: We actually show them more than they actually know about the problem.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's interesting.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: Whenever you show someone the problem that they have without building trust and credibility, it can go either way.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: But what's interesting about you is you're not saying your stuff sucks.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: You're just saying there's other stuff in the world that's trying to impersonate you.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not that you've got bad tools or bad people.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: This is just the nature of the world you're in.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: I like that.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: So actually, you bring up a good point.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: We have seen that where you know accounts, very large accounts, had very, very robust problems, and we went and showed like this is your problem.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_01: And people took it personally because it looked like they're not doing their job.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: So we have become sensitive on large accounts.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_01: But when customers are coming to us, they know there is a problem.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: I think they ask us, like, how much do you know about my problem?
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: So conversations in cybersecurity are also changing.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I think they're a good breed of products that are coming out, which are able to, you know, time to value is very less.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: I think time to value is huge, right?
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: You know, no one with a skill shortage and the people shortage, no one wants to say, well, I'll need five more people in six months to deploy this, right?
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: If you can get time to value down today, that's a huge one, I would imagine.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's consistent across the customers.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_01: You know, customers don't want to do a POC.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's just if I imagine there's so much time being consumed, how many PLCs they would do?
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: And this they don't have to buy one product.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, dead on.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: You mentioned before there was a you didn't call it trial, but there's a way anyone could go and test something, right?
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: Is that leading business your way?
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: Is that a way that people get into this if they're just want to try it out?
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: So, yes, checkfish.ai, it's available for free uh for everybody to use.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, it's not a full solution today, so eventually we will uh get there, but they can test our technology.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: It helps.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: We wanted to, you know, see when we were building AI, is our AI actually good?
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: And coming from the cybersecurity community, we know the cybersecurity community is very volunteer-driven and they want to give a lot of input.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: And we thought if we put it out there, I know they're going to say our AI is bad, but the only way to get better is have other cybersecurity people review our detection and give feedback.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: Our initial tool was not to actually have it drive business, but build a community, build a lot of detection capabilities.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_01: And it has over time it has created a lot of buzz for us.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: And yes, it does generate customers as well.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: That's correct.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: Bolster is a little bit unique in that you formed in 2017, is that right?
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: So you've been around a little bit.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: I wonder if you can cast your mind back to you're developing, you're developing, you're developing, and suddenly at some point you need customers, right?
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: As you were winning your first 10 customers, let's say, any big takeaways or learnings that you had that were surprising or really interesting from that whole process?
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: I think a few things that were surprising if I look back, even early customers, we didn't have actually sales team.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: We really started selling last year first, uh, two, two and a half years, Shashi.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: My co-founder and I were in our garage just building and building.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: So we didn't start selling until very late.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_01: And we were able to sell a little bit on our own.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: And what we learned was we were also surprised that the customer was willing to give us very big dollars.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: One of our largest customers gave Shashi and me, two guys,$150,000 per year for three years.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: And this is not a friendly, you know, we got an introduction.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: What was this the value?
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: We went and showed this customer that hey, we see these many problems.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_01: And his question, he was so fed up with all the vendors in the market because they were all salespeople trying to sell, and they couldn't get to the problem of such a large customer.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: And we were so confident that our technology would work.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: He said, Abhishek and Shashi, I'll give you a month to do a POC.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_01: Don't worry, you don't have to do it in 15 days.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: And we said, No, no, we'll do it in 15 days, and it worked.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: And after that, it still took six months actually to close the customer because enterprise procurement was a huge learning lesson, Andrew.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: So I think across those 10 customers, I would say when starting out, we discount how hard it is to get into an enterprise account, irrespective of how it doesn't matter how good your product is, you still have to go through this procurement cycle, POC cycle.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: And what we learned was once you're also in there, it's also easier to sell into the cycles.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_01: Customer is so much pain.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: So, how can we take away most amount of problems for customers to just try our product?
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_01: That was one of the biggest learnings.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: The easier we can make that part, then the rest of the things you know can be taken care of.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: So we really, really focused on how to make our product very easy to use, how we can make our product easy to deploy.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: So I would say one of those two key learnings.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: And then third thing I would say is just learning the contract process.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: When you've never done an enterprise sales deal coming from you know building engineering and customer support, that was a huge learning lesson.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: And as founders, often we were advised that we would go argue about very little things in the contract, which had no impact in the long term.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: So as I started learning that lawyers just want to make, you know, they have this one extreme viewpoint, but it may not be relative to your business.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_01: You just have to close the deal.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_01: And it really built the appreciation for sales and what salespeople do.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_01: So it was very good to actually we close first 700k of our business, just Shashi and me by ourselves.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's great.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's true finder-led selling, right?
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: You're out there, you're learning the hard way, some of these challenges are there.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: At what point did you say, all right, enough of that for us?
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: We need to actually hire someone to do this for us.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was good because we believe we could do quite a bit.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: So I think we got very good advice from our board members.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_01: Like, guys, you need to scale this.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: And it was in 2020.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, they said you already have this.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: And we said, no, no, we can do sales on our own.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's easy.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: We didn't realize what a methodical sales looked like.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I also got very good advice that Abishek, we believe product market fit is already there.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: He said, Abhishek, product market fit is there when you take somebody who knows nothing about your product can sell your product.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: And that was like, oh wow, that was a big thing that we learned.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: So we hired our first VP of sales in 2020 and then COVID hit right after.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: And then, you know, it didn't work out.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_01: We have a new VP of sales really starting 2021, and it has been phenomenal for us, Andrew.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: This year alone, you know, just telling we are averaging more than one customer a week, despite everything that is going on in the market.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: One customer a week, that's awesome.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna grow rapidly at that rate.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: And this is what's all going in the market.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: So the customer traction and the velocity for customer acquisition has been really phenomenal.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: So your first hire was a sales leader, is that right?
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: Is that what you did?
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: That is correct, yes.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: And did they bring in some SEs and salespeople underneath them?
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, they did.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: Well, why do you think you didn't work out with that first person?
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's a lot of learnings for me.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: I think partly what we realized when COVID hit, what kind of business we are in, right?
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_01: So it that person we hired was very, very good, but it was more very traditional enterprise sales, not selling online.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that was one of the biggest things in COVID.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_01: First three months, everybody went in a shock, nobody would buy anything.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: And then how do you demand generation?
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_01: So, coming from an enterprise background where demand generation is a lot of conferences and you meet people for you know lunches and dinners, creating that demand became a challenge.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_01: And how do you show the value?
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I think as we learn more about the business, that hey, most of our products can be sold online, we can close very large deals without even meeting a customer, then how do we do demand generation?
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: And SU and SEM worked really well for us.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: That's great.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: So you had someone who's thinking about traditional enterprise selling, let's go out and make it happen ourselves.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: The reality, the way your product works actually, though, is it actually benefits from people coming to it and trying it and going, this is something we might need, right?
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: And if COVID was not there, it may have would have worked out.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's just, I mean, it's not that we have very large customers who need that kind of enterprise selling.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: It just, I think the circumstances that we were in, there were no events, nobody was talking, nobody was meeting.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I think just putting into that situation, so if time was different, if it was 2022 or maybe 2023, you know, that would have worked out really well.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: And as you were helping that first team get up and running, how did you, as the founders, help them transition knowledge from your head onto some sort of way for them to operate?
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_01: It was and and a little bit difficult.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_01: When the thing is, as founder, either you know don't know sales when you know a little bit, it's actually very dangerous, right?
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I think focus, I'm very fortunate to have our current VP of sales.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, he was very good and he said he asked a lot of questions and he built processes around it.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: And what we started doing is that we realized, okay, what are the accounts that we're not worried about?
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_01: Can we not even step in into those accounts?
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: So it was sort of a place of vulnerability to actually be at extreme end to be okay to lose a 30k deal if I don't go.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_01: And until I was okay with that, I realized our team wouldn't learn unless they make a few mistakes.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: We have, as founders, have to give our team the trust to actually execute and fail a couple of times.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_01: Otherwise, if I keep stepping in and I don't tell what is wrong and don't build the tools, so right, having Zoom teams recorded, right, and then give feedback after the fact versus me constantly getting in the call and they don't learn, right?
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's just me having a GPS in the car.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: I would never learn directions in San Francisco.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_01: So that was, I think, big thing, me stepping out and trusting my team to do the right thing and then giving them feedback.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: There must be a few times where you were desperate to jump in though, right?
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: Uh yeah, I would lie if that wasn't the case.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's always happens that way.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: And how big is the team right now, the sales team?
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so sales team, we have seven people.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: Today.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: And for the different roles that you have?
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_01: So we have enterprise AEs.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: Right now they're doing everything, but our focus because we're getting a lot of large deals, have them focus on enterprise.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: You're just getting a huge inbound around these sort of commercial deals.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: So we are taking our SDR teams, best performing folks, promoting them to a commercial AE role.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_01: And then we have two SCs and we have one channel partner person.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: And those SDRs must love it, right?
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's what they want to do.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: They want to step up to the big leagues, you know, handle full sales cycles themselves.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: Must be great when you end up with a company that allows you to do that, right?
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, SDR, Andrew, is a very, very tough job.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: I have huge appreciation for people.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: Getting 50 no's and then show up again.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: I really feel as an engineer I should have gotten this training very early on in my life.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_01: As founders, all founders maybe just do one SDR job and hitting 50 no's uh in a day and just getting to a one yes and just doing that for a year.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_01: So over time, the more I learned about sales, I have huge huge respect for every role in sales.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: And SDR, I think, would top them all.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: To me, it's a little bit weird, right?
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: We take our most junior people with the least amount of experience and knowledge to then somehow call pretty senior people and get them to listen and trust them a little bit to pay attention.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's a hard thing to do.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: It really is.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_01: And people who do well, I've I mean, just I just think about having 15 no's and it just not knows.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: People say a lot of things I'm around certain calls.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_01: And it's very, very hard for folks to hear all these bad things and then come up, do again, do again, do again.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_01: But it also builds uh you know character and a lot of these skills.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: You go become VP of sales.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_01: You can pretty much go become any job after you have built that kind of resilience and tenacity.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: I think everything you can go become a CEO.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: If you're thinking about the team, uh the company growing the next year or two, where do you see the sales team with maybe some big big decisions you have to make or changes what you go to market you're thinking about going forward?
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: I think our most focused right now, our number one focus has become Andrew, we believe we have a very good product market sales fit.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_01: Not only we customers need it, we can actually sell the product very efficiently.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_01: Number one focus is how do we distribute the product faster?
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's really about distribution.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_01: And we're figuring out what is our distribution avenues, right?
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_01: So inbound is one avenue, channel partners is one avenue, OEM partnerships.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_01: It does it make sense.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_01: So really figuring out how we can scale within our ICP, what are the levels that we have for distribution?
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_01: So for you know, next two quarters on, we're just absolutely focused on distribution.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's great.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: Well, listen, Abhishek, I've really enjoyed the conversation.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: It sounds like you're on a great trajectory right now, right now.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: Winning a deal a week, there's lots of sales teams and companies and cybersecurity that are sitting there going, yes, please.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'd like that too.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we've been very, very fortunate.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_01: And despite everything, I think the product and the team, uh, you know, bolster team is doing a fantastic job.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: So very, very happy about that.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: Well, listen, I'm rooting for you for the rest of the year and into 2023.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: I appreciate you joining us today.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, thank you, Andrew.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_01: Really enjoyed speaking to you.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that was a really cool discussion with Abishek.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: I really enjoyed that one.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: You know, a lot of good things they've got going on at Bolster.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: Clearly, winning a deal a week is good.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's better than most.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, they got real traction out there with what they're doing.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: I had a number of takeaways.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: I'll try and get it down to three big ones though.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: The first one is what Abishek was saying about what prospects really want right now is a really fast time to value.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_00: So I think this is a trend now.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: If I look back on the interviews I've had with CEOs and CROs, one of the factors I think in companies that are doing better than others is how fast that they can get to value.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: Organizations are not looking to have to spend six, nine months in a bunch of people allocated to a project to try and deliver value, right?
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: Especially if it's not transformational value for that company.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: If you can articulate a way for them to get quick use, quick value from what you're delivering without asking for a whole team to go deliver it and get it up and running from their side, that's a big win, right?
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the second part of what he was saying was that they're able to consolidate a bunch of different tools.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not that no one's doing this right now, it's all in bits and pieces.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: And what their value prop is we'll consolidate those tools for you and we'll we'll have the time to value much quicker than you might imagine, and it'll be a lot better to use from there on.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a really compelling value prop right there.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: Second one was I thought it was really interesting what Abyssek said about having profound respect for what sellers, salespeople, sales teams do.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_00: He, I think he said he won, they won the first seven of the first 700k, I forget what it was, in business themselves as two co-founders.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: And they realized this is a lot tougher than we thought, right?
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: They realized it took time.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: They liked the fact that the product got validation, but then the real selling had to happen, right?
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: Had to get through procurement, had to get buy-in from different people, like anything, right?
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just one demo and done if you're asking for significant amounts of money and they are.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_00: It requires committee and you know, working through different buying groups and all the rest of it.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: So I thought it was kind of cool that A, he wanted to do that.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: He wanted to do the selling himself and experience it.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: And then B recognize that it needs a dedicated team that really knows what they're doing, and they brought in the sales team after that.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I really liked how he was thinking about that.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: And then the last one, you know, I asked him about the focus going forward for the go-to-market team.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_00: And in his mind, distribution, right, is the most important.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: So roots to market, where do the sales team go?
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_00: Who are they working with as OEMs, as a channel, is it direct, things like that.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_00: So the fact that they're looking now at, okay, we're not resting on laurels.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: We've got some great traction, but if we want to keep scaling, we've got to figure out where we put our money to invest in optimizing the current route to market and then thinking about other channels to get there as well.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_00: So, what a great conversation.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: Bolster is clearly doing really well.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_00: And as I said, Debbie Chick at the end, they're rooting for them in 2022 and 2023.