Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / 133: Brian Lake, COO of Torq, Innovation Sandbox finalist on their innovation and the importance of staying focused on the problems to solve

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133: Brian Lake, COO of Torq, Innovation Sandbox finalist on their innovation and the importance of staying focused on the problems to solve · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: One of the biggest challenges facing security leaders right now is how to operate a great security team while facing the staff and skills shortage in the industry.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: Brian Lake, the COO at Torque, joins us today to explain the approach that Torque is taking to help out.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Sales Bluebird podcast, which exists because at B2B startups it's hard to get consistent traction and scale the sales team.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: And sales Bluebird gives you tips, tricks, experiences, examples, ideas, and inspiration from people who know a thing or ten about selling and building a startup.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: I'm your host, Andrew Monahan.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: Our guest today is Brian Lake, the Chief Operating Officer at Torque.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: Brian, welcome to Sales Bluebird.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm looking forward to this discussion.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: TorC is selected as part of the RSA sandbox, innovation sandbox coming up.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm fascinated to learn more about the companies that are in there.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: And Torque is one of them about what you're doing and how it's different.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: But before we get into the business, Brian, I want to get to know the real Brian Lake.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: So let me ask you, I've got 15 questions on my list here.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to ask you to pick a random number team one and 15, and I'll ask you the question that corresponds to.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: You ready to go?
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: I am.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: Give me a number.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: Four.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: Four is Beach or Mountains.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: Mountains.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: Another number?
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Number 12.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: 12 is what's one great sales book that uh you really like and remember?
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I think the first 90 days, and it's not technically a just focused sales book, but I think as a leader and kind of figuring out how you make progress as a business is one that's always kind of stuck with me.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: And is that written, you know, 90 days into a new role and that gives you almost like the roadmap.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Is that what it is?
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: It is.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: And the way you think about it is, and as a sales leader, I think it's so important as all of our life is kind of split into 90 day increments in every quarter that we go through.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: But how you approach the business and how you think about the team and the structure around it.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: Got it.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: One more number, please.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: 13.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: 13.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: They say home is where the heart is.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: Where is home for you?
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: Uh home for me is Oregon.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: Now I would say this is the fourth time I've lived here.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: I was born here.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: I went to school here, and I'm here now, and one other time.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so if where I'm from, it tends to be Oregon-centric.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Where have you been in the meantime?
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: I grew up in Eugene, Oregon.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: I spent time living on Catalina Island.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: I went to high school in Palm Desert.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: I went to college in Oregon.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: I lived in San Francisco during the dot-com boom and bust.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Back to Portland, was in Seattle with Microsoft and back to Portland again.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: That's quite the journey.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I was in the Bay Area the same time as you.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: I you laugh at this.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: I moved from the UK to the US in January of 2000, moved my whole life over for, I don't know, supposed riches and dot-com riches and all the rest of it.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: And 60 days after I moved in was the end of March when things just went to pot.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: It was an interesting time.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let's talk business then.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: So congrats on being selected for the innovation sandbox.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: You know, quite a big honor, right?
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: And you get the chance to present in front of the panel, I think, at RSA.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: Tell me, you know, I'm a simple sales guy from Scotland, right?
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not deeply technical.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: I tend to try and get things down to their bare bones to understand them.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: Tell me what Torque does and what it means in the industry.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, thanks.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: We really appreciate it.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: So Torque is a no-code automation platform for security teams.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so when you think about what that means, security organizations have changed pretty dramatically, I think, over the last number of years.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: And the number of tools they have, the number of alerts that they're managing, the number of people that they have, the amount of applications and infrastructure that they're worried about, kind of across both the traditional corporate campuses and now in the world we live in, additionally to other employees all over the world.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: What we've seen and what we found is those organizations are still security organizations, they are still doing a lot of things really manually today.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so as they've added more people and more tools, more things they're doing, a lot of the work that they're doing to keep the organization secure is manual repetitive tasks, which can be, or maybe they would like to be or need to be automated.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the combination of what they're faced with today and what tools historically they've had to do this has led to them adding more people, maybe building scripts and doing some technical pieces to try to do this, but really having a need to automate it from a manual to an automated way.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: Can you give me an example of the type of thing that might be automated that right now they're, I don't know, do manually or spreadsheets or whatever?
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so you think about just uh like a permissions access in order for somebody to do something within the organization, whether it's a valid request or not, or a phishing email.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there's lots of scenarios that organizations are faced with when they're they're thinking about they get something that comes in from one of their systems, made their seam and something of that nature.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: They have to then review it, they have to validate it, they have to take action, and they have to do something about it.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: And they may need to quarantine a machine and they may need to take a user offline and they may need to patch a system.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: But a lot of those things are are manually intensive today.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: And given the nature of all the things that they're doing and the things they're faced with, being able to automate those things are really important.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I would imagine, therefore, a multi-vendor, which everyone has, right?
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone's multi-vendor.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: The question is exactly how many do they have?
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: In a multi-vendor world, tools don't talk to each other.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: So is this the layer that comes in and just helps do all the coordination?
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot to that.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think any tool themselves, and you think about automation that's come to other parts of the world, the IT world that we've lived in.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: I worked at Puppet, and that was obviously server administration and automation for sysadmins.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: But you think about the nature of it is the tools that they're managing, even if the tools themselves have automation within them, being able to automate the processes across.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: So you take it from your email, you maybe take it from your cloud provider, you maybe take it for your CSPM, you take it maybe from your instant messaging platform.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's integration into all of these pieces that allow you to build an automation to solve a problem across the organization that ultimately is something that you're doing manually across systems and people.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: So you got selected for the innovation sandbox.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: What's the big innovation that Torque is bringing to the market?
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I think there's a lot of innovation that's coming to the market.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: I think the time is right between, you know, the tools and what like we talked about that the security teams, what they're faced with today and the tools that they have to do that.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: The innovation is allowing the users, and these are you talk about security users within an organization.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: You're allowing those users, enabling those users to solve this problem in a way without having to be a developer, and doing this with a speed and time to value that is aligned to the kind of the nature of the job that they have and across different roles within the organization.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think the innovation is not only what we're doing by tying into all of the partners and all of the technology providers they're using, but also how we do it in the speed and simplicity of allowing you to do these really powerful things.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: So it sounds like then by default, some of what's been happening up till now has been reliant on developers if you're doing it in a non-developer way.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: Is that am I reading that right?
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, traditionally to build, you know, integrations was or or APIs and some of the nature of the way the tools were built and the nature of kind of what you would have to do or the skill set that would require to do some of these things required the security people to be developers, which is a very rare and kind of unique skill set.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so allowing the security organization as a whole, whether it's the SOC team or it's analysts, or you know, it's more junior people or it's more senior people and architects, being able to allow them to have the tools to do these things in an automated way with ease that integrates into all things that they're using.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: Got it.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: So when I hear that, I'm thinking that the real business reason to buy would be simplicity, you know, getting more done with the same amount of people as opposed to asking for more headcount.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: Am I on the right track there?
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think that's one of them.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think you'd say ultimately being able to keep the organization secure, given the nature of what they're doing, the more efficiently or effectively you can do that, the more you can focus the people who have on kind of the right area.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that's again allowing more than a certain people to be able to do more.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: So do more with less, but also just do more in general and do it in a non-manual way.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so then you get repeatability and you get predictability around it for the security teams.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_01: Are people comfortable these days in the automation that they're building, actually starting to do blocking and quarantining and things that may have a downstream effect on business if they get it wrong, or they still take me so far, but you know, don't do that extra step.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: What's the temperature right now that there that you're seeing?
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I don't think people necessarily start there when you think of the automation around the remediation capabilities for it.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: I think a lot of these are manual tasks that they know really well.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: These are scenarios they can describe in detail that they're doing.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: They know the steps, they know the things that they're doing in the order that they're doing it.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: And whether it's a very simple thing that they do all the time or a very complicated thing that they do occasionally, no, each one of those has a lot of value for them if they can just automate that and take it off from doing it manually, where you could make a mistake.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: I think a lot of areas, as they get more comfort, they get more familiarity, they get more experience, then you obviously extend that to kind of doing things in more complicated things or maybe taking action, more action.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's something similar.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_01: I remember selling DLP back in the day.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: One of the things that we used to talk about was the path to prevention.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: It was let's take the steps to get there where you feel comfortable taking that last step, which is actually start blocking stuff.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: And it seems like that's what you're saying, right?
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: People got natural things they want to automate, and they'll, as they gain confidence, they'll add more onto that workflow.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm curious that the genesis of Torque.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: What happened back in the day for someone to say, I'm going to start a company doing this?
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_01: Any background you can give us there?
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, our founders actually have a bit of an interesting story.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: So our founders founded Luminate Security, which was a zero trust security company, which they sold to Symantec.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so after they had finished with that through the acquisition, they actually started a company called Stackpulse.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: And StackPulse was a site reliability engineering or SRE focused automation application.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: And that was the original genesis of the company.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what we found in working with site reliability engineering teams about automating the things that they're doing is really the scenarios were security-centric in general, that they had the most value or had the biggest need for.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so we did it, we evolved the company into Torque, that, and focused specifically on a no-code automation platform for security teams that allowed you to take a lot of the work that we built into the original Stack Pulse product, for site reliability engineering, and then turn that into the no-code engine that you can use with the integrations to do uh security automation.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so that was the genesis for that.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then working with customers and kind of hearing the challenges.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: One of our advisors was very clearly a VP of security operations, understood that while the security teams have grown and while they have a lot of security tools in place, that 80% or more of the time that their team was spending was just doing mundane, repeatable tasks to keep the environment secure.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: And if you can automate that, then we could focus the team on other items to ensure as security is continually moving target and is it something that's it's aware to everybody within the company and outside as well.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: That's great.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: So a pivot in the middle there into using the similar sort of thing you're building into security.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm wondering right now, what can you share about the size of Torque, number of employees, things like that?
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so we now have over 100 employees between our headquarters in Portland, Oregon in the US, and then our founders and our team at Tel Aviv, Israel.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: We've raised uh just around$80 million, most recently from Inside Partners, as well as GGV Capital and Bessemer Partners.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: And that's allowed us to really build the technology in the team to support the customers and our growth.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: And the good to market side then, have you started building out a sales team?
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: And at what point did you decide that was the right thing to do, right timing to do it?
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: We have.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, we had uh some original kind of pieces of the team and have added to that as we've grown kind of dramatically to support our customers.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so we have sales team members in the US, we have uh teammates in the UK, we have teammates now in Asia Pacific as well, and that's our sales kind of capacity in addition to our sales engineering capacity, partners, STRs, and then our marketing and channel and business development.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: When you said you had an original team, was that from was it Stack Policy Set?
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: Was that where we came from, or did you have to hire new?
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: No, well, so we had some original kind of pieces in place from Stack Pulse that we moved with us into Torque and then have added to that as we'll be accelerated to go to market to support the opportunity.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: So it was helpful.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: Well, a lot of the team that has come with us is worth noting, worked together with me at Puppet, which did as you know, you know, server automation, but then also worked with me at Quizlock, which was security software.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so the combination of the two really suited us well to support the opportunity of torque.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: I'm wondering how you got your first customers that were non-friendlies.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_01: What route did they come from?
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they come from a number of places.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: You know, when you think about as a sales leader, you know, you're it's activity, progress, and results.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so where that activity comes from, certainly from a number of areas.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, you do get the friendlies in the early days from the friends and family network, which includes your investors.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: You do get that from the marketing engine that our marketing team has built around the content and things and getting some awareness out of the marketplace of what we're doing.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: We have our own, obviously, SDR team to support proactively taking the message to the market.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: We have partners that we're working with, technology partners that we've built integration and workflows alongside of that also drive some interest and awareness into the pipeline.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so we get them from a lot of different areas, and that certainly helps support the growth that we have for the team, keeping busy.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: You remember that first time when you go to non-friendly to give you a PO?
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: Do I?
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: Of course.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: I will tell you, you know, having been through this a few times, having worked at really large companies like Microsoft and Oracle, I mean, I think your customers and you remember those, they're near and dear to you.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the people that you work with and understand ultimately, you know, they don't care about our product.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: They care about their company.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: And if our product can help them with their company, and we can find a way to be a good partner to them.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so certainly helping understand, you know, what they're faced with, what they're challenging and what we're doing, and how we can help them, which ultimately is the beginning of the partnership and the purchase is part of that.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, there's certainly some in every company I've been at, including Torque, that I'll never forget.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's a heck of a moment when you get past the friendlies and you start adding the ones that we, you know, we actually reached out to them and they were intrigued and they took a risk on us.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: I'm interested in how you, I guess Torek is thinking about the wider cybersecurity market right now.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's so much noise, there's so much confusion between different areas about what people do or don't do.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: And in some ways, I feel for the CISOs that they're trying to make sense of all this.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: But from a startup standpoint, you need to figure out how do you stand out right above all that and actually get some traction.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: I wonder if you got any insights as you guys will be on the journey from doing that.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, the security landscape, I mean, the RSA when we went last time, obviously that was the beginning of the end of trade shows as we know it for a period of time.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so we're now going back in June, which we're thrilled about.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: But I mean, RSA five years ago, well, I mean, you'd say, what was the landscape then?
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, is it more complicated today?
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: Is it less complicated today?
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's a really important part of the company's, you know, what they're faced with and what they're dealing with in our customers.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think the great thing about it is there's so much innovation that comes out of the space.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: And there's so many ways to think about the problems in a different way.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think, you know, being focused on the problem you solve and how you solve it and how that's different than other people who solve it and why and why they should potentially partner with you to solve it are questions that you should always be asking yourself.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: And your customers and prospects are always going to be asking you.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so how you differentiate and how you position it and how you help them and how what they use it for and those things are are really, really important.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: But I don't think that ever goes away, whether you're little or big.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's always important.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think you're right.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I do like what you were saying, though, about the, you know, being true to your innovation and what you're trying to achieve.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, security is one of these areas where the people that move faster than vendors are the attackers.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: And it's almost the sweet spot for a startup, right?
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: Where they're able to go so much faster and nimble on development and releases versus the big companies.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you go to the big company for a feature request, it could be two years.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: You go to your small startup that's very nimble and weren't in the business, it could be two sprints.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: And that's a big advantage when you're that small and able to deliver that fast.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: It is.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, and you're really focusing on the problem you're solving for your customers.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so you understand what they're trying to accomplish and what their options are and how you can do that, and then how you can innovate from solving that as that changes.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: And like you said, no, I think that's one of the advantages of a small company is to be able to the number of kind of steps between hearing that message and being able to deliver on that innovation is really small.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I think you'd like to think that you can always do that, even as you get big.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: It certainly gets a little bit more challenging.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: But if your focus is on your customer and then being successful as a company, we will continually be there.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: What do you look for hiring sales team members?
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's a good, I've come to a couple of conclusions over the years of hiring salespeople.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: One, I I never wanted to be a sales leader.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: I actually don't like most salespeople, which is kind of puts me in a strange position.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: I love great salespeople and customers do too.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I think there's a big difference between great salespeople that are really there to help their customers be successful and people that are telling you what their products do, which are not the same thing.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so what I've found is taking really complicated things and helping customers understand why it's not complicated relative to the problem you're helping them with takes a level of capacity from a modern-day seller that I think is really important.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: When I say capacity, you just say the horsepower that they bring to the equation.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, it's easy to make things more complicated.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's hard to make them less complicated.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: And it takes some, whether that's your pricing and licensing or the problem you're solving or how you do it.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so you look for people that are bright and have high capacity.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: I also look for people that have the right amount of experience relative to the problem that we're solving.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so I find that people, including myself, when you bring enough to the equation, and I had an old sales leader that I worked with who draw a draw it up in a bar and just saying that, you know, bringing enough capacity and enough experience to the problem, but leaving enough where you can learn, grow, develop is really where you're, you know, the most gets you out of bed and gets you kind of focused on it.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, if they have the capacity and they have the experience and then the motivation, and there's lots of ways that and reasons that people are motivated.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: I just want it to be something other than me.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, some people, they're really competitive.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that's where that drive comes from.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: I have others that are just afraid to fail.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's not whether they are trying to win, it's trying not to lose.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: And it sounds like the same thing, but from my experience, it's really not.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't really matter from my perspective, that drive and that motivation, whether it's a desire, whether it's a competitive, whether it's a fear, it's just something that's innate in salespeople.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: Something's driving them.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: You combine that with the right amount of experience relative to the problem that we're solving and kind of how we're doing it, with the capacity kind of that and that horsepower, you tend to find your top performers.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_01: How easy is it to really get in touch with someone's motivation during the interview process?
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I mean, uh, your my interview process, I'm a one of these active recruiters, you know, I talk to people all the time about what we're doing and how we're doing it and, you know, the potential to work with people.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: I think you just get to learn kind of what motivates people or why they do what they do.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: I also have found that I've said that, you know, what people do in the past is nearly a perfect indicator of what they'll do next.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so anytime that I've made mistakes and I've made loads of them in my learnings, but when you expect somebody to do something that's dramatically different than what they've done in the past, you know, that's kind of my mistake, you know, and that people historically, if you look, they take on challenges, they spend three or four years in the role, they kind of take on more, they learn, grow, and then they do that again.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like the odds that they'll do that again are nearly 100%.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so you kind of get to know them in an interview process.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: And again, great candidates are interviewing you, whether or not you fit in with what you know they're trying to accomplish.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: You get to know each other, but you also get to know kind of what they've done in the past and how they've done it.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: And they get to know kind of what we're expecting to have them do and where we're going.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: And when you combine all those elements, you tend to find people that are happy and do the best work and make the biggest contribution to the team.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's interesting.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: And in I like what you're saying about you know, continuously searching, continuously talking to people.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: You know, obviously when you're in a start mode, everyone has a big impact, but especially in sales, right?
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_01: You can you can lose months and months of traction with someone who's not able to learn, right?
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_01: Who isn't willing to adapt, whose motivation is perhaps not quite in the right space when they're coming into an earlier stage company.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_01: It seems like everything's amplified in these earlier stages as you bring in people on board.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: I wonder how you know someone has that ability to learn as well.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's uh interesting one.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: Do you have any tests that you do during the process?
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there's different variations of people doing this, and but you really having and learning about how they've gotten to where they are now and then what they want to do next.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I think they're very simple questions to ask, but it's very telling to kind of learn what when someone tells their story of how you got to where you are today, and in turn, what do you want to do?
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm continually surprised by some of the answers.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: Some of them are exactly what I would expect to hear out of them, and other ones I never would have thought it in a million years.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: But hearing someone tell that, how they took on challenges or how they found the next job or why they went to the next spot and why they want to leave now and what they want to accomplish in whatever time frame their horizon they're looking at, you know, and everybody's a little bit different about that, but the way they describe that, I think, is very telling about you know who they are and what they're gonna do and how they're gonna do it when they work for you, or will they work for anybody else?
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_01: Coming back to Torque just now.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_01: Where do you see the security automation, no code market going over the next few years?
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_01: What are new things are gonna be the themes and the things that are gonna impact the market?
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: You know, having been through this with Puppet, and again, Puppet is not security automation, Puppet was server administration for sysadmins, but just you know, having been through that market from a little infancy and to where it grew to, just as an analogy of kind of what we're in and what we're kind of faced with, is you know, people were doing things very manually and they were configuring servers basically to support package applications, and that changed.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: And that changed for a lot of reasons.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: It changed because of the cloud, and that changed because of building the applications and direct consumer and the mobile devices that we carry.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's a lot of factors that attributed to server admins having to create and maintain the infrastructure to support the applications.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: And at the same time, the companies that we work with today, whether it's your airlines or your banks or retail company, you can suggest that FedEx is not a software company, but in its heart, that application that runs the supply chain is a software company.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: And you could say that about a lot of different industries.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_00: I take that and apply it to security.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: You know, these security organizations now are faced with the challenge and the very difficult challenge of securing all of those and keeping all of those assets and applications and environments and employees and infrastructure secure.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, so if you're bringing that automation, we're in the very early days of them automating the manual repetitive tasks that takes to keep the environment secure.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so that problem, I suspect, as we see, ranges from the largest companies in the world having to face with this and companies that have a very small security staff.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: And everybody in between is building applications and is building software to maintain their business or to support their customers that needs to ensure that is secure, is compliant, and is done with the staff that they have to ensure that they're able to deliver that to their employees, to their customers, to their shareholders, and everybody else.
• 24:21
  unknown: Okay.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: So just more need for the existing things that are going to make a difference for them right now.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: Now I guess you're really well placed because there is this, you know, whatever it is, the number, week to week, month, three million job shortage, position shortage and insecurity.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_01: When you're looking to automate things, it's going to help break the backbone maybe of that uh situation, right?
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: Well, absolutely.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, when you think about what they're already faced with, I mean, the number, when we talk to customers today, it doesn't take a lot of creativity or imagination to think about scenarios they're doing manually that they need to automate or they would like to automate, or they're desperate to bring automation to.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so you combine that with a staffing shortage and the dynamics, certainly the need is there.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: I think the need will continue to be there as they continue to grow and they're continue faced with more challenges within the organization or staffing challenges that they will bring more automation to the environment, which will allow them to be more secure.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: Got it.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_01: I would imagine you're hiring at Torque right now, is that right?
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: Of course.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: Always hiring, you know, always hiring.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_01: Any prominent positions you want to throw out there that you're looking at right now?
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, you think about it, obviously, the go-to-market team, you know, we've built out the SER organization, you're building out the sales team, you're looking for geographies where the opportunity is big and the geographic area is small.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's where, and then doing that across theaters between APAC, AMIA, and the US.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, adding sales team members and sales engineers to help us, you know, with the capacity we need to support the customer demand and exceed our goals.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_01: And if someone wants to get hold of you, Brian, what's the best way to do that?
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_01: My email I'm uh as Brian L at Torque.io.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_01: And Torque is T-O-R-Q.io, right?
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_01: Well, listen, I've enjoyed our conversation.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_01: Absolute best of luck for the innovation sandbox contest itself and for the rest of the year.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: It sounds like you guys are in a great spot.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: I appreciate it.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_01: I enjoyed that conversation with Brian.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it sounds like Torques in a great spot right now, tackling or helping to tackle one of the great challenges around skills and people shortage in operations and security.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_01: And uh they're in a great spot to do that.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: For me, there were two big takeaways, and you may have different ones, but my two were first of all, how important it is to stay focused on the problems that you're trying to solve for prospects.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: I think sometimes the temptation is to be very focused on ourselves.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: We get focused on the product that we're building and the challenges of doing that and how to get around those and how to add new features on it.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_01: Wouldn't it be good if we added this and that and the next thing?
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_01: And keeping the North Star being what do customers actually face, the problems that they're trying to tackle and how do we uniquely go after those is a great way to combat that natural tendency to focus just on ourselves.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_01: So I really liked how he mentioned that a couple of times actually in the interview.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: The second thing is I really noticed that when we started talking about people in hiring the right type of people for the team, especially the sales team, you know, Brian really talked in depth about how he thinks about that and what he does.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_01: You know, he went into more depth than before.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: It was obviously an important thing for him.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_01: And the things he was talking about, I think, are super important, right?
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: Thinking about the motivations of the people coming on board and making sure we understand those, the willingness to learn, the capacity that they have to get into this market and really, you know, adapt, change, grow, and be successful, I think was important.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_01: So those were my two main takeaways.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure you might have some more, but a great conversation with Brian Lake, who is the chief operating officer at Torque.