Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / 160: Anurag Gurtu, Chief Product Officer at StrikeReady: How to sell a platform

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160: Anurag Gurtu, Chief Product Officer at StrikeReady: How to sell a platform · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: If you help address the talent shortage in cybersecurity, there'll be a lot of leaders who'll be willing to listen.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: Find out how Strike Ready is doing this with someone called Tara in this episode with their chief product officer, Anarag Gurchin.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Sales Bluebird podcast, which exists because at cybersecurity startups, it is hard to get to repeatable sales process and then scale the business.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: Sales Bluebird gives you tips, tricks, experiences, examples, ideas, and inspiration from people who know a thing or 10 about building great cybersecurity companies.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: I am your host, Andrew Monahan.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: Our guest today is Enarag Gurtu, Chief Product Officer at Strike Ready.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: Anarag, welcome to Sales Bluebird.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: Nice to meet you, Andrew, and thanks for having me on Blue Bird call.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm looking forward to this.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's gonna be an interesting discussion what you've got going there.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: I was really fascinated to look at your website that you've you've given a name to your technology.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm kind of interested to learn about uh what's going on there.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: But Anarrag, before we get to the business end of this, let's learn a little bit more about you.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: I have, believe it or not, 35 questions on my list.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I won't be asking you 35, don't worry.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna ask you to pick uh a number between one and thirty-five three times, and I'll read out the question it corresponds to.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: You ready to go?
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm ready to go.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: All right, first number.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: Seven.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: Seven.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: One great airport you really enjoy.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: Los Angeles Airport, LAX.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: Why LAX?
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: That was the first airport I landed into from New Delhi, and I just fell in love with it.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: Ah, that's great.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: That was your landing point in the US?
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: That was my landing point in the US 22 years ago.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's awesome.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: Good good to know that.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh okay, one more number between one and thirty-five.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: Nine.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: Nine.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_01: What's uh what's a really good book or a good movie you've you've read or watched recently?
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: The r most recent book that I read was Profiting in Bull and Bure Market by Stan Weinstein.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, tell me about that book.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know it.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's a book that uh helps you understand and master trading psychology if you enjoy stock market.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: So it helps you educate, gives you the insights of how to play both the bull side and the beer side effectively.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: Ah, okay.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I've not heard of that book.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's fascinating though.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: And then last number, team 135?
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: I think the last number would be 30.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: 30.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: Favorite vacation destination.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: That would be Caribbean.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: The Caribbean island.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: Any any Caribbean island, yeah.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: Any island.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: Any Caribbean island.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: Which ones have you been to?
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: Or have you been to them all?
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: I have I've been to uh a lot of them, uh, but if I have to pick one, I would pick um Bahamas.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not being to the Bahamas.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: I my family and I went to St.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: John in the U.S.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: Virgin Islands just uh a couple of months ago, and that was fantastic.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: And my wife's originally from the Dominican Republic, so we've been down there quite a few times.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: So it's good to see her family.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, we're living in Denver in the winter, it's nice to go down there in the uh in the winter and warm up a little bit from time to time.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I don't know.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: Let's talk about uh a bit more about you.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: So going back to when you were a kid, probably in New Delhi then, I reckon, how did you first make money uh when you were growing up there?
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I was a student till I decided to leave India and then come here for my master's.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: So I never well, actually, I did have a job.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: I made money after my undergrad about for an year because I had to give my GRE uh and then start selling.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: So I was selling books, I was selling clothes, I was selling anything that was given to me to sell.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: That was my first and last job.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: It was a six-month gig.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: Make as much money as you can and then buy clothes and shoes and fly to US.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: That sounds like it might be quite a hard gig though, right?
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of lessons learned about how to sell doing that.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it was pretty much going door to door and trying to sell whatever you could.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: So it it was an interesting, interesting foray into sales as soon as I graduated.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: Did my engineering and started selling some random stuff, but it was fun.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: And then what was your first real job when you landed at LAX?
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I came to LA to study.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: I did my master's in computer networks from USC.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then at school, I had different jobs.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: I was cinema school helping edit movies and shows and stuff like that.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I was just um working in the ISD, uh, helping with storage of like we used to run SANS over there, so helping with uh the storage and making sure everything is backed up on a daily basis and and we can recover from backups and stuff like that.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: So I did that as part of my um 10, 20 hours of work that you could do during your study period.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: And then if I fast forward to your career, I see well-known names such as Ncircle, Cisco, FireEye, GuruCall, and now you're the chief product officer at Strike Ready.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: For those of us that uh don't know Strike Ready, if I was a CISO, how would you answer my question?
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: What does Strike Ready do?
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: So Strike Ready is going off to the pain point that cybersecurity faces, which is uh hiring skilled talent within an organization.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: We all know like the best of the best companies can afford to hire the best of the best people.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: But we want to democratize that human intelligence.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: You want to make it available to every organization, whether it be large or small.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: So think of it like would you want to have the best red team that maybe Citibank has, or would you want to have the best SOC team that one of the largest healthcare organizations has, or do you want to have the best IR team or the best threat intel team or the best threat hunting team that maybe JP Morgan or someone else has?
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: So they are best of the best guys.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: They have the best of the best knowledge, uh, they have skills, and our goal is to democratize and make all that skill and knowledge available uh in real time to any practitioner, regardless of what role they play within cyber, to every organization in the world.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: So that sounds very wide.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: What's the best use cases that uh you saw for right now?
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so there are different use cases.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: So think of it like let's say you're you're challenged in your SOC team, tier one, tier two, you need more SOC people, or you need people to perform and triage and handle alerts a lot more effectively.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you are in part of the IR team and you want to handle the best possible situation when you're dealing with a certain incident on how to handle that situation.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe you're part of the red team and you need to get access to the best uh the underlying active campaigns that are compromising organizations like yourself and you want to know what the kill chain is or what the mitrotections techniques are, you want to expose the gaps that exist in the organization and close them.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe you're part of a threat Intel team and you want to operationalize intelligence to the most effective in the most effective manner, right?
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: So all of them require skilled people.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: You can hire like unskilled people and they'll not do the job as effectively as most cybersecurity skilled practitioners would do.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: But if that's the situation where you're running on, where you have challenges to hire the best of the best people to perform the job more most effectively at scale and high speed with high accuracy, that's where strike really comes in.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a platform that we have designed, which helps any practitioner, regardless of what role, what department within the cybersecurity they belong to.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: And it gives them the know-how, the knowledge, the tools, and the skills that they require to perform the job to the best extent as possible.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: So let's go back to the first one, the SOC, right?
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: So a lot of companies have some sort of operations team at least, right?
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: If whether it's a glorified SOC or maybe a little more basic is up for debate, but they have some sort of operations, CUBY operations going on.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: If I was in the SOC, would I be using it hands-on, or would your platform be somewhere in the middle taking alerts and feeding me different things?
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: How does it translate like that?
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: So think about a SOC, right?
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: So typically what would happen is you would have a central platform which is going to aggregate and ingest alerts, right?
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: Or you may not have that platform.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: You would seek for that uh feature or capability.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: So let's say you have a platform which is aggregating and ingesting all alerts.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: As a SOC Tier 1 analyst, you would have to find which alerts are critical, uh higher priority that you have to look into.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: Once you have those alerts in your queue, you would have to then reanalyze those alerts to see if they are true positive or false positive, right?
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: If they are true positive, you would go about enriching those alerts, right?
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you would uh start documenting information regarding those alerts or artifacts which are in that alert.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: And then you would see whether you can handle that alert or you have to escalate it to an IR team for them to perform the job, right?
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: So all of that process takes a lot of time.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: You might spend anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of days to handle an alert or an incident, depending on the complexity of it.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: Our product comes in where the security analyst, the SOC analyst would jump onto our platform.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: Our product will connect to all the security products that you would have, whether it be a SEM, a fireball, an EDR, a gateway, email gateway, um, proxies, IDS, IPS, whatever technologies you have, we just hook up to those.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: And then the job that you used to perform, which is basically ingestion of alert, prioritization of an alert, analysis of another, whether it's a true positive or false positive, documenting all the steps in an alert is completely handled by our platform.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: So our platform will do that.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: And you can question a platform and say, why did you say it's a true positive?
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: Why did you say it's a false positive?
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: It will give you a very fair answer of why it thinks it is, decided one or the other.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then it will give you recommendations of how to effectively deal with that alert, right?
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: So if you have to do an IR activity, and if let's say you don't have an IR team, it will actually guide you and say you need to do step A, B, and C.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: And this is the sequence of the steps that should happen.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: And if you want, the product can go ahead and do it by itself, or you can take control and do those things.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: But whatever the method be, whether you go autonomous or you do it uh manually, it will again document all those steps on your behalf and it will capture that information.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: So the next time something comes, it again gives you the guidance to handle those alerts much more effectively.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: So what would have taken you a few hours or days, it pretty much can be done uh in less than minutes, in a few minutes or so.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: And it does it do that in the context of your organization, knowing a little, you know, what you care about, maybe which frameworks you're using, things like that?
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: It does that in the context of your organization.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: It does that in the context of what technologies that you have deployed and integrated with the platform.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: But the knowledge that it offers you is a knowledge that it's just learning globally uh across all the customers and making it available uh in real time.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: And then for someone looking from the outside, what would you say is the big innovation that you've you've really struck at behind the scenes?
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: There are many elements to the innovation that I've got into the product.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: So one is uh to democratize this intelligence, this human intelligence of how to deal with a certain situation or how to perform a certain task most effectively, and then making it available to all security practitioners.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's one aspect of innovation that has gone into our platform.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: The second aspect, which is extremely unique and which doesn't exist in the cyber world, is we have built this digital cybersecurity analyst.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: We call it Cara.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: And the purpose of this analyst is actually to empower the cybersecurity practitioners.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: And when I say empower, it basically means to make them a lot more effective and efficient by increasing their knowledge, by enhancing their skill, and with helping them with speed, scale, and accuracy to perform any tasks they want.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: So Kara embodies a persona of uh the practitioner that you would want.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: So you can say, I want to hire Kara for a SOC tier one role, I want to hire Kara for an IR role, I want to hire Kara for a red teamer, as a red team, or I want to hire Kara as a threat intel, as a threat hunter, or whatever it may be.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: So she comes and joins your team, and then she assists, she starts assisting uh you as a security practitioner to whatever tasks that you delegate.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: Or if you want, it can go ahead and work in an autonomous manner as well.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_01: I'm hoping there's a great story about the naming of Kara.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there's a story behind Kara.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: So C-A-R-A is the acronym, it stands for Cyber Awareness and Response Analyst, but Kara in Irish means a friend.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: So and the third aspect is uh cybersecurity is dominated by male persona.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: So we said let's get a female persona to pick some male as.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: So three creates tools.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: So if all your customers hire multiple chiers, they're redressing the balance quite quickly, right?
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's a single entity, but uh she interacts with each and every practitioner as a unique conversation or an instance, yes.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: No, I love that.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: I love that.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, when I hear of multiple use cases, I often wonder who's the main buyer of your technology.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: But see, the ultimate buyer is a CISO, but they can be a second-line buyers or influencers.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: So you can have a director of SOC security operations can be a buyer, a director of vulnerability management or a senior director of volumetric management can be a buyer, a director of IT security can be a buyer, a director of red teaming can be a buyer, a director of threat intelligence can be a buyer.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: So we can have different buyers within the CISO org, as you know, like uh large, fairly in like mid to large and large enterprises.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: You would have teams which are 40, 50 people and they'll be carved out in four, five, or six different functions.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: And each one of them is solving a problem of their own, right?
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: But to solve the problem of their own, they need to have skilled people within their team.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where our platform and our and Kara come in.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: Do you have a sales team already right now?
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: We have a sales team.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we have a sales team in US as well as uh in Middle East.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm wondering if I'm a seller in your sales team and I see all these potential buying groups to start with, I'm wondering if which one I pick first.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: And or do I just skip the secondary and go straight to the CISO as my entry point?
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_01: I'm wondering how how they're approaching things like that.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: As a startup, there are different ways to sell, right?
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: Every as as you know, and you've been in sales for a fairly long time.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: Early state sales uh is very different than a mid-sale sales and a late state sales.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh late stage sales, I would say, is the easiest where the company's logo sells on its own and you just like relax and then you go into your whatever VIP club and you make it, right?
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: Early stage sales is very different.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you have to understand that for an innovative product, there would be early adopters who would be more receptive and you have to target them.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: The second stage of customers, we call them fast followers, and they'll be a little less receptive.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: But if you're like a three and a half, four-year-old company, five-year-old company, have some name in the industry, not as much, but still they'll be open to it.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: And then you have a set of customers who go with magic quadrants and stuff like that, or or waves and stuff, which we tag as laggards, right?
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not saying they're laggards, but that's how the industry calls them.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: Who look for organizations which are 10 years, 15 years old or much more, have a lot of presence and globally recognized, and they'll only buy consider them to buy the products.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: So for us, it's look for early adopters, that's the number one thing.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: But the way the selling motion works is we really don't say go and pitch it to a CISO, although it would be great for a top-down approach.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we say go to a practitioner, regardless of what team they belong to, and just understand what the pain points are, right?
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then hear them out, see if there's any pain point that they state which maps to a pain point that the product can solve.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and if it does, you know that you have an entry point.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: And then move forward with highlighting how you would solve that pain point, how the way you would solve the pain point is significantly better than a competitor, or it's unique.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: And third, show them after solving the pain point why the platform approach is much more better because it's fully integrated.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: There are a lot of other capabilities and features that come in, which isolated or siloed or feature-based companies cannot play.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: There's a difference between building a platform and building a feature, and that's where we start uh showing significant differentiation in addition to innovation.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: You having sold platforms a few times myself, one of the things that I kind of realized over time was the lower down in the organization you go, the less they care about the platform.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: But the higher up you go in the organization, the more they care about platforms.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: I'm wondering if how your team kind of navigates that that whole dilemma.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's exactly the thing.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: When we are uh presenting to a top-level executive, maybe a CISO or a VP, we are positioning the platform organizations with recession or no recession.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone's to one wants to consolidate technologies.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody is happy with uh deploying 50 products, 60 cybersecurity products, which don't want to talk to themselves and are completely disconnected.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: And if they rev, the APIs break and stuff like that.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: So everyone is looking for consolidation play.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: That's one thing.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, absolutely top-down.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's a platform-based story which explains them how the organization's security maturity can significantly improve by one introducing one technology from Strike Ready and how they can do a massive vendor consolidation, right?
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: We're not saying we're gonna replace the best of the best names, but we're gonna show them that it's a pretty powerful product and it gives them an option of if they want to replace certain products or vendors.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: But if you're doing a top-down or a middle-tier approach, sales play, then it's more about let's just understand the pain point.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: And the pain point can be that, like obviously, when you walk into an account, if you're talking to a SOC team or you're talking to a Threat Intel team, or you're talking to a red team or a vulnerability management team, right?
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: Each one of their pain points would be different.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: So you are at that point just in a listening mode and trying to understand what pain points do you have in your day-to-day operation, right?
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: Or day-to-day function.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: And you're trying to like figure that out whether these map to the use cases or the capabilities that a product can offer.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: And if they do, then you try and demonstrate that.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: But then you try to show them how when you help.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: So I'll give you an example, right?
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: How when you help a SOC team, that information can be leveraged by a voluntary management team in a much more effective way.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: Or that information can also be leveraged by a red team or a threat intel team or by some other team, right?
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: Or it can be other things, right?
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: It can be a voluntary management entry point, and then you're showing that how that information can be leveraged by a red team or a threat intel team or something or a SOC team or an IR team.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: So that's how you try to then show why a platform-based uh technology would be better, right?
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: You're still not talking about the financial side of it, uh, but you're still trying to prove that even with that pain point, how effectively you can solve that pain point in a much more holistic way rather than just a very small, like um niche way.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: And is anyone you talk to feel like their job is threatened?
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: That you've got this amazing tool that even has a name.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, my goodness, is this person gonna take my job?
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: No, we actually thought really hard about it when we were starting Strike Ready because the minute uh automation and AI come in, a lot of uh heroes stand up and people think uh, you know, we'll come and replace our jobs.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: And especially with cybersecurity analysts, when they see that for the first time, they think that we're gonna take that job.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: And we made it as it's less about messaging.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, in the messaging, everyone can say you're not replacing anything.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: But we made it as part of the product to show them that the goal is not to take the job, because if that was the goal, we will not give you knowledge and we will not enhance your skill of the current practitioner, right?
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: We will make it a black box and we basically will come in and your job is gone.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: But if our approach is to empower you, if the approach is to educate you while you're performing the function, your job or your task, if the goal is to enhance your skill and tell you how you can skill your and uh enhance your skill while you're doing your day-to-day job, if the goal is to expose all the knowledge that we are learning across the best of the best defenders and making it available to you as a practitioner, then absolutely not.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: We are, I mean, it's the goal is not to replace, right?
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a black box, it's an open system.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: And once people see that, I mean, they see it's not a marketing fluff where it's just a messaging saying we're not going to replace jobs.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: So the goal is to replace jobs.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: They see actually the product is designed in a completely inverse fashion.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's going after the skilled talent gap.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's saying we can get junior analysts or mid-tier analysts, and we can enhance them and empower them to the fullest extent so that they can be highly productive at the most optimal price point that you can afford.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: It feels like this there's almost like a messaging opportunity there where you're actually trying to make those people heroes themselves, right?
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: By giving them almost like a superpower cloak to put it on that's gonna make them look like they're just amazing at their jobs, right?
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's like uh our CEO uh Yasser makes a play and says it's like we have built this uh Jarvis, the suit of Jarvis, and you can wear it and you can become a superhero.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: And and our goal is to make you a superhero because we have built this Jarvis for you to perform any any function that you want as in the in the most uh effective and efficient way.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's great.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_01: So rewinding just a little bit, you talked about early adopters, right?
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: This is the this is the holy grail for early stage companies, right?
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: How do we find those people that are more likely to buy from us just because of who they are and their their mindset and how they approach their jobs?
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: Is that a qualification the team does once they're talking to someone?
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: Or have you figured out a way to identify those people ahead of time?
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: So at least you're targeting the right people and targeting the right companies who you think are more likely to be early adopters?
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's both.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: When you are having a conversation with an executive, or even if it uh if it's a senior leader within cybersecurity, or even if it's a mature uh analyst, just a conversation with them, you can sort of uh assess if they are an early adopter to a technology.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: And then the questions are very simple, right?
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: What I mean, you can simply ask like what are the latest and greatest technologies that you see in the market and you have embraced or adopted, right?
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: And if they're throwing any new names or fairly recent companies that have been out of stealth, maybe three years old or two years old, or maybe like four or five years old.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: Not very well known companies, but you as a window know them because you Much more closer to the market landscape, you can sense that they are early adopters, uh, for sure.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: And typically, I would say the other thing is you can see a lot of a lot of these folks as well, they'll be on the circuit, they'll be on speaking tracks, they'll be talking about innovation, they'll be talking about completely transforming security operations or whatever function that they do, right?
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: They'll be thinking disruptively.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: And you sort of know that these guys are like forward-leaning folks who can embrace uh more cutting-edge technologies and products.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: It is amazing the correlation between those that want to go out and speak and you know pass on information and ideas, the correlation of those people to ones that actually want to go and try new stuff as well.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's uh it's kind of interesting.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's a very, very strong correlation.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: And going back to what you're saying about the sales team, you've got the team in the US and also the Mid East.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_01: I'm more curious about the decision to actually hire the first salesperson and when the company thought they were ready for a salesperson to come on board.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: A little bit on our background, right?
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: Majority of us are all ex-FireEye.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we were old timers at FireEye.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: Some of us spent um eight to nine years at FireEye, some of them uh spent a little shorter, and that a little lesser.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: But they all all of us were in different teams.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, some of our were in the product team, some of us were in the marketing team, some of us were in the engineering team, some of them were research team, some of them were sales team, and so on, some of them were in the sales engineering team.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: So when we were starting uh strike ready, even prior to starting strike ready, we all were having discussions and timing was very different for each one of them, but everyone knew what we were trying to build and they believed in it.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: So it was very natural for us when we said, you know what, I think uh here's the product, and everyone was looking at the product when it was being built and stuff like that.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: They were all giving us feedback, right?
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: It was not like we were going out to hire the first salesperson, it was just very natural for them to say, you know what, I think the time is right and I think we can take it to the market.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: And that's how they they just joined us.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: So we knew each other for like 10, 12 years, and uh it was a very natural uh way for them to just resign in their old companies, which were doing fairly well, and then just uh be part of strike ready.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm curious, were they uh senior people in sales or you know, just established sellers?
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_01: What was the profile?
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they were mid-to-senior people in sales, they were running regions or countries at that time, and they knew who we were because we used to work with them, we used to support their country on the sales side, uh, in different capacities.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: And and yeah, we were like uh we were friends as well.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: So when we were starting, it became very natural for them to just say, you know what?
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: I think we believe in it.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's gonna hopefully should it will do well.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: You you never know, but hopefully it will do well and we are ready to join.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_01: That's great.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: Do you remember the first ever paying customer who was not a friendly who kind of was out there in the market and didn't know you guys beforehand?
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we have uh well, the first paying customer was not friendly.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: We had a lot of them.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_00: We had a few in Middle East and we had a few in in US, but I think it was uh see, we never approached uh as if like um we are a well, very well-established company and you want to come and sell our product, right?
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh our approach was very different.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: We said, well, we are new to the market.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: Uh there's a there's a core problem of skilled talent gap that we are going after, and we feel it's a very different way of approaching that problem.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's unlike of how it was approached in the past using automation play, because that's not the way to solve that problem.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_00: You can't solve a skilled talent gap problem with automation where you need skilled people to build automation.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_00: So we said, like, that's not gonna work and uh it doesn't make sense to us.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: So we basically reached out to a lot of uh unfriendlies too, and we said, well, you don't have to buy, there's no pressure to buy, just look at it.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: And if you think it makes sense, and if there are certain problems that you feel exist, you can just if you are overwhelming and open to uh sharing that with us, we can tell you if we can solve it.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: If you cannot solve it, I mean there's nothing we can do, there's nothing to sell to you, but if we can solve it, give it a chance and look at what this disruptive product can do.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_00: And and that's how we started uh acquiring customers.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_01: And that first PO came in and the team had a celebration.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we are all remotes, we do celebrate, but uh we are all heads down.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: One PO and then we start focusing on the next and the next and the next.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, there'll be one point at which we'll all stop and celebrate, but do a big celebration, but we never had a big celebration.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's just like we still are far away from a goal.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, no, I get it.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_01: These little milestones though are important to recognize and and celebrate because there's a lot of hard work that goes to make them happen, right?
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_01: One of the things that's through the market these days, is that uh getting attention right now is really hard, right?
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_01: There's 6,500 security vendors out there all vying for attention from the same sort of people you're you're going after as well.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm wondering how you're how the company's thinking about trying to do things differently and trying to rise above the noise out there and be and be noticed.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you I mean you have to play the the typical tactic of uh engaging um firms and analyst firms and stuff like that, keep them abreast on the updates that you have within your product and how your product is just disruptive or transformative and stuff like that.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_00: But I think it's a word of mouth that automatically starts selling your product, and this is what we are seeing now is is the customers who are happy, who have renewed the product, uh, who are spending a lot of money with our platform, who have made a platform as a centerpiece or like an off center, and then all of the operations, uh entire security operations run and sit on it.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: They start spreading the word that they had the best of the best products, but things didn't work out.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_00: And now with this product, they can see a significant difference.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh they definitely see a lot more security maturity within the organization.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_00: They see a lot more enhancement and improvement in ROI with existing investments.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: It shows them an opportunity to uh consolidate, significant opportunity to consolidate.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_00: And then the challenge that they had of hiring skilled people or retaining skilled people just has gone away, right?
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: So that message uh from an actual user or practitioner tremendously helps uh compared to any other marketing strategy that you would deploy.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the challenge with that is you kind of have to almost hope it happens, right?
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_01: You don't get the control over it that you perhaps would if it was uh all within within the company.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_00: I think the if the product is good, it speaks for itself.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's one thing that I learned at Splunk.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we have everyone at Splunk used to drink their Kool-Aid and uh we used to like just laugh at it.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I played with Splunk too, but I just realized that the product was like hands down the best product that I've ever played with, uh especially the Splunk Enterprise, the core product that they have.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, like, you know what, it might take time for traction, but uh if the product is good, it speaks for itself.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: The second is you can always go with a product-led approach, and which is what Splunk did.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: They went with the product product-led approach, freeware and stuff like that.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_00: All very restricted license on how much data you could ingest and you had to pay off for that.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: So we haven't taken that approach yet.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, those are the two ways, like either it's like uh influencer-based marketing, practitioner influencer-based marketing, or you do a product-led approach, or you burn through a massive amount of capital on marketing to just like uh make noise, or you have to intensely make noise.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_01: It seems like you know, throwing money at making even more noise than the next person isn't necessarily the right answer.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_01: So you're gonna be a little bit different rather than uh just do more, right?
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, you have to be more smarter, but that's one another way to make noise.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: I'm own name companies, but I've seen a lot of companies do that.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_00: They make a lot of noise and the products are not, I think, up to that level.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: But they get traction.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_00: They still get traction.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, to a certain extent it works.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_01: But when you when you're taking uh$750 million in funding to try and make more noise, uh uh you wonder the what success you have to have to make it all worthwhile.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, I know.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_01: Listen, I've enjoyed the conversation.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_01: Are you guys hiring right now at Strike Ready?
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_00: We are actively hiring in all departments, especially in sales, uh all over the all over the world, but uh primarily more focused on US at this point.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but yeah, we are actively hiring both on sales and sales engineering side.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_00: Very good.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_01: Well, listen, I enjoyed the conversation.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_01: I wish you and the team the best of luck for 2022 and and 2023.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me on Blueboard Call.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_01: So that was a really interesting take for me on how to address the talent shortage out there.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_01: I know there's lots of companies out there trying to hire people, uh, finding it's very expensive to get people, and they just or they just can't get them either.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_01: And some way to help them with that is gonna resonate.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_01: I was glad to hear the story behind Kara and uh the naming of Kara.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_01: That was fascinating, but I've got three takeaways from the discussion.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_01: The first one is the focus on pain points.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_01: Now, look, I get it, right?
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_01: In sales, that's what we do.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_01: We we figure out what uh what problems people have and want to solve them.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_01: But when you've got so many different use cases, as Anareg was talking about, you really have to get very good at meeting lots of people and digging in very quickly into what their biggest challenges are across multiple personas and teams to figure out where you can fit in.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_01: So you have to kind of go wide before you go narrow.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_01: You can't go with just one persona, feel like you know them, and then go and have that conversation.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: So I think it does put a lot of focus on the sales team to be able to do really good pain discovery and understanding what problems the companies are facing that are most able to then drive a deal.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_01: That was the first thing.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_01: The second thing was what Einarag was saying about early adopters.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they're out there, you have to go find them.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but one of the tells that uh he talked about was they tend to be the ones that go out on the speaking circuit, they're on committees, they're on, they're in groups, they're leaders of organizations that not just being CISOs or senior leaders, they've got other things going on.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's funny how those people tend to be the ones that are also more forward-leaning, more dynamic.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_01: They're thinking already beyond what's facing them right there and then.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_01: Think about you know, three years, five years' time, and what startups they should be working with to help uh advance their programs over time, not just what they're focused on solving right now.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_01: And it was interesting what he said about them being mostly, you know, often younger companies as well.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, younger companies are not burdened by the old way of doing things.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_01: They tend to uh attract more dynamic people because that's just the nature of what you're walking into.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_01: Things are not certain.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of work to be done.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_01: You roll your sleeves up, you solve problems on the fly.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: You know, bringing slow and old ways of doing things don't tend to work at those types of companies.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_01: So I thought that was interesting.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_01: The second one and early adopters.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_01: And the third one was something that I half keyed onto when he was talking, which is that um in many ways, what they're doing at Strike Ready is making the existing team much more effective, almost give them a cloak of ability beyond what they have right now, right?
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_01: They're gonna be able to do their jobs a bit better, they're gonna get insights into things that um we don't have right now.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_01: So for those that were perhaps a little bit worried about their jobs or what it really means for them, I think the more forward-thinking people they talk to will realize this is actually gonna make me look really good.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_01: I wonder if there's a message in their marketing or their outreach about that.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_01: So those are my takeaways.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_01: You may have different ones yourselves, but uh, I wish I wrote in the team over there at Strike Ready.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_01: All the best for 2022 and 2023.