Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / Selling as a technical founder with Vincent Berk, Chief Strategy Officer, Quantum Xchange

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Selling as a technical founder with Vincent Berk, Chief Strategy Officer, Quantum Xchange · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: One of the toughest things for a very technical person to do is to go and become a salesperson.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: In the early stages of a company, that's exactly what a technical founder is expected to do.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: They can't and probably shouldn't hire a sales team too early.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: So it's up to them to go out there and be the salesperson.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Now, some are naturals, but unfortunately most are not.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I thought it'd be kind of fun and interesting to talk to someone who has had to do that before, who has made the mistakes as a technical person trying to be the salesperson, and along the way learned a lot about how to do this and how to sell before bringing on a sales team.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's why I'm excited to introduce you to Vince Burke.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Vince actually got a PhD in AI 20 years ago, long before AI was cool and interesting.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: He founded a cybersecurity company called Flowtrack about 10 years ago and ran it for seven years.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: And recently he was a CTO and chief architect at Riverbed.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: So here's a very technical person.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: And now he's in the leadership team at Quantum Exchange, which is in the super technical area of post-quantum cryptography.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: So we use his experiences along the way, both at Flowtrack and also Quantum Exchange, to advise John Jeffrey, the technical founder of Cyber Donut, about how to win those first early customers before he brings on a sales team.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Andrew Monohan, and this is the Cybersecurity Go to Market podcast where we tackle the question: how can cybersecurity companies grow sales faster?
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thanks, I'm looking forward to our discussion today.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: This is going to go off in a couple of different directions.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: You and I actually, before we get into it, uh share a little bit of a common thing in that my first ever role selling a cybersecurity product.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't called cybersecurity back in those days, but a security product was in 1998.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I was uh selling PGP encryption in Europe in 1998.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's how I joined a company to do that.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's amazing.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: I remember actually in the old days of encryption, what we used to do is you actually manually encrypted your emails before you sent them.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Remember that?
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: You had to choose to press the button, and then you had to choose the right key to use and PGP to make sure it was the right person, the whole thing.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: And you had to share the keys, the public key, yourself, right?
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: Like you emailed it to people.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: I remember that.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, before my time, but I think they used to, but back in the super early days, they even had like parties to share the public keys.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: Like, oh, here's my public key and here's your public key and things like that.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: And we got public key servers and people, yeah.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: This is the entire infrastructure that exists around that right now, so like evolved from that.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I still have key files from people from 25 years ago, to be honest.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: What would you do with it though?
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: Just like everything, hard drives, hard drive capacity by far has outpaced uh my need for storage.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: So I have all the old stuff.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: I should take a look and see if my PGP keys are kicking around somewhere in the uh the eco-verse out there.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let's the conversation today, Vince, is around we're trying to answer the question today is how does a technical person, a technical founder who doesn't have a sales background and sales training and all the stuff that we all go through as sales teams and MARC teams out there, how does one of these people successfully sell in the very early stage of the company?
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, you've got an interesting background in that you have the technical background.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, before quantum exchange, you were the CTO at Riverbed, right?
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: That that is not a sales job title that carrying a quota, working for you know two or three layers of management.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: So that's an interesting, different, different take right there.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so you got the background and you're the founder at Flow Track.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: So you know, founder selling was part of your your your experiences from 10 years ago.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: So you got a unique background to bring to this.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: So let me go right back.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you you found a flow track.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: Take us back to that moment where you're sitting there and you say, okay, now I need to go do some selling.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: What did it feel like to you?
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: What were you what were your impressions as you were going into it?
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so you start out starting a business because I had been working on this highly scalable, you know, backend database system that could be used for you know machine learning and behavioral and anomaly detection technology on network traffic.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: And you are interested in it because you're a geek, right?
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: Like I loved it.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I loved how it was scaling, and I I saw, and there were some people, you know, potential future customers, friends that I was talking to and say, Oh, you should really sell this thing, right?
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: So that's that's where it starts.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: So then you start wondering, well, selling, well, you first have to advertise.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: So that was my entire belief, right?
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: Like you put your brand out there, or you tell some story about how you have the best security in the world, and now everybody will show up and you know you hang your sign outside the door and nothing happens.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody cares.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I had to, I had to learn, right?
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: I had to learn because in the end, right, like the greatest technology means absolutely nothing if it doesn't solve a problem that somebody can identify and put a name to and have, right?
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: And so I went through years of trying, you know, I recognized I had a deficiency in terms of I had no idea how to do tech selling to enterprise or or even mid-market.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I found people that could help me with marketing, understand marketing, market research, understand how people buy, purchase, you know, cycles, um, how people adopt solutions, well, probably how to talk about problems that play in the enterprise, um, all the way to the level where the VP of sales that I ended up hiring says, look, before you understand what I do, you should just take some Sandler training, right?
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: Like so I went through just boot games and things like that just to learn the basics of selling and and understanding.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, Flowtrack, we we ran that company for the better part of seven years.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: And that was, it was a tremendous, I mean, it was like it was it had to be zero to 60 for me, right?
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: Like there was a tremendous um amount of learning I had to do, even though the selling, right, like the motions account management, I did not necessarily go through myself all that much.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: But certainly in the early days, as the sort of the you know, the inventor of the technology, you are the company sales engineer, right?
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: And you have to understand how to how to talk about it.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you can't jump on a call and you know start talking for 45 minutes about how fantastic the solution is, right?
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: You do that the first time, and then you wonder why you don't have a next call.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: And and yeah, so those were a lot of hard lessons to learn.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that's how I rolled into it.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let's try and make this more specific, this conversation.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: So uh we've been talking about to this amazing startup called Cyber Donut.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: And we're actually going to rewind the clock a little bit in Cyber Donut back to his early days two years ago.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: The founder, John Jeffrey, is a technical founder.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: And obviously, he's not an SDR, he's not a salesperson, he doesn't carry the bag, never had a quota before.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and in his development, he's exhausted his network, let's say, right?
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: He's talking to all his friends and family and his friendlies out there in this tree and you know, got a maybe a few of them on board.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but he's got a knot in his stomach now because he's thinking, okay, now I need to kind of get those next few.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: I don't, I don't really want to hire a head of sales yet.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: I don't even really know what I'm doing.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: If I was even to hire a salesperson, I'm gonna keep going a little bit longer, where there's just me being that that founder seller.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: Let's give him some some pointers.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: What should he do next to find his next few sales opportunities?
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so the the very first question I have for you is John is recognizing that he perhaps does not have um the sales acumen.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he he he knows it's not his thing, right?
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: But he he knows he can't afford to go hire people quite yet.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: So has John already recognized that there is a uh there is a common threat in the people that he has managed to sell to?
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: Let's say he's got uh four or five, you know, early early adopters, design partners, and go, oh, there's a there's two or three use cases I'm seeing again and again here.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: So the very first thing um that John needs to know is that he needs to absolutely focus on that early nascent vertical market that he has.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I I can't say that enough because there's a number of reasons, and and most of your listeners will already know this, right?
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: If your solution is solving a problem in a small vertical, even though it could be applied theoretically everywhere, you are starting to learn how to talk about the specific problems in that vertical, right?
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: That'd be a cybersecurity solution, right?
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: There's going to be, you know, the smorgasboard of different cybersecurity solutions is enormous.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: We all go to RSA, we all see 800 exhibitors, we all have a we all walk away confused.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: If you need one of them, we're all 800, right?
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: So if you have a vertical in which your solution works and you've you you are starting to learn how to talk about your solution in the problems in that particular vertical, and that vertical could be as simple as an industry like finance or manufacturing or or large-scale industry, you know, whatever the case may be, or it can be as simple as um a technology layer, right?
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: Like, for instance, uh focusing on a technology like you know, like like Flowtrack focused on NetFlow.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: There's people that focus on packets, some people focus on emblems, you know, what what have you.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um that focus also helps because the people that use your solution there, they move to other companies in the space.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: Say you work for a defense contractor and you're doing something in the IT space.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's not unlikely that your next job is going to be, again, in defense contracting in the IT space.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: So you might move from one to the other.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: If you worked with a great solution in one of those, then you might bring that along to your next place, right?
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: So focusing on the vertical where you have your early success, on the market where you have your early success is going to be the best thing John can do to find the next few customers.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and then what I'm saying here is that is a word of mouth effect.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: So he should go back to his friendlies and say, okay, I'm I'm showing you some value, you're getting some use out of it.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: Who else in your network, who else do you know when you're, you know, let's call it manufacturing, you know, the uh people who use Cisco in manufacturing and therefore have NetFlow enabled, let's say, right?
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: And they'll know those people probably, right?
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: They're they'll know each other.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think word of mouth is probably the most powerful initial sales engine because it is, and I think this has been proven, right?
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: Like when I am perceived to have some gain in selling you something, you will weigh my words, you know, you will adjust the weight you you assign to my words, right?
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: Someone who doesn't appear to have anything to gain by talking about your solution will be believed five times more than you ever could yourself, right?
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: So so word of mouth is extremely important.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh vertical focus is extremely important initially.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: And then the other thing, and this is you know, this is a topic that I've had to deal with a number of times, right?
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: If you are if you're operating in a vertical that is, you know, that is new, right?
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: Like there's no established um large players yet, right?
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: Or you know, the it's a new industry, right?
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_01: Like right now, we're in quantum safe encryption, right?
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, people are just starting to think about that, right?
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: That is not an established space.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, the number one most important thing is to put your thought leadership out there.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: And and you know, that you know, if I look back at my flow track days, like that's the best thing John can do.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: I think the biggest customers came because they would read my ramblings on places like dark reading, or at some point I spoke to a reporter at the New York Times about something that was bothering me, and she wrote up an article on you know about it, right?
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: Like that sort of um thought leadership, how you're thinking about the problem helps people realize what the problem is, how they perhaps should be thinking about it.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: They might have more questions.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: And today it's easier than ever to get in touch with a founder.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: People can connect on LinkedIn and say, like, I read your article in on dark reading, and you were talking about data governance, and I hadn't actually thought about it, but I probably also have data scattered around all over the place.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: That is a huge liability.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: Now, what do you think I should do about it?
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: Or I disagree with how you talk about it.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: Here's how I think, etc.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: So that is now easier than it ever was.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: So John should absolutely be out there.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's better for him to write a blog than to you know, to buy ads on Google or what have you.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: So one of the things I've heard from, or I sense as well, actually, from earlier stage companies, people, is they're passionate about what they're building, but there's also this, I don't know what it is, lack of confidence as well, a little bit, right?
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: They want to hold back.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: We're not quite there yet.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: I don't, I don't want to say things because it's not quite a rounded product, or we're not quite at the point where whatever, right?
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: They're frightened a little bit to make that step.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: What encouragement you give to John to say, look, you just have to start and you have to put your thought leadership out there as opposed to hold back too long.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you you already said it, right?
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: Like, because so, and I have this tendency as a technical person as well, right?
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you don't really want to go out and confidently make statements until you know absolutely sure you're right.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you know, here's a surprise.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: Like, the vast majority of people out there don't know a tenth of what they need to be knowing in order to talk about anything, right?
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: Like the reality is you just there's only so much you can know.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: At some point, you have to be out there, trust that what you're saying is based on the best of your knowledge today.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, people are gonna show up and it says that, well, you know, you have no idea what you're talking about.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: There are solutions that address this, you know, here's how the world has been doing it for ages, right?
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: And then and that's fine, right?
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: Like that's perhaps how you learn, or perhaps you disagree with that, right?
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, there is in this world room for a lot of different opinions and a lot of different products that fit those opinions, right?
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: So um, the only way you're going to to become better is to, you know, fight back that embarrassment and go and do it.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: Write a blog, do something.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: I love that you said that, uh, Vince.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I interviewed uh Eric Olden, who is the CEO at Strata Identity.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: And Strata is Eric's third founding of a company.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: He sold the first two to RSA and their identity companies.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: And he had a rule uh up to I think series A, which was no one at this company makes a cold call or sends a cold email.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: What we're gonna do is we're gonna go out there and uh make some content, and we're gonna ruffle some feathers and get our viewpoint across, and the right people will be attracted to us.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: And he'll tell you that they got their first many customers by having that approach before they got to Series B or whatever and hired a proper, you know, bigger sales team.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think, I mean, I think it absolutely is right.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: You know, like the the world is also a probability distribution or or some distribution of different beliefs, right?
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the early adopters are gonna be the ones that most closely align with how you see the world, right?
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: Like, for instance, and and I'll I'll give you this example, right?
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: Like I started Flowtrack because I had a very firm belief that um the approach that people were taking in the late you know 2010 you know time frame, right?
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: Or around 2010, I guess, was you know, security is uh really good firewalls.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: Like you got to lock the door, right?
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: Like build your walls, you know, build your defenses.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: And my belief is like that's not enough.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: Like if we look at kinematic, you know, warfare, I know you know I'm not a military man, but like we notice very much that you know, when you build a castle, you put up a wall, and then you go and stand on that wall with your binoculars.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: Because the moment you build a wall, the adversary is going to find a way to climb over it or dig under it.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why we stent there with the binoculars, because then we can see what they're doing and we can change our defenses based on it, right?
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: Another way to put it is that the firewall changes the terrain, right?
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: That you know, you you look at the weak spots of the terrain, you put up the firewall or or you know the access control, the you know, whatever static-ish defense that we're talking about, and it changes the landscape and it forces the attacker to do or change tactics, right?
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_01: They have to do something different.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: They can't walk in the front door, they have to do something different now.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: The net consequence of that's going to be that they might do something that becomes more observable.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: So, my whole premise at Flowtrack was why aren't we looking, right?
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, packets, NetFlow, right?
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: Like people will do, well, I'm looking at packets with my intrusion detection system.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: No, what you're doing is you're looking for signatures of known bad stuff in your packets.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: That doesn't mean you're actually looking at what the packets are doing, right?
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_01: Like you're not keeping a forensic record, you're not keeping a record and going back and trying to identify like my my entire point was, and my belief was it is you know, security is achieved not only by static defenses, they're there, it's achieved through visibility as well.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_01: And we have a we have a uh it is not you know the spending is disproportionate, right?
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: People need to spend more on visibility tools, especially visibility tools to give them a forensic record.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: And we could talk about why I believe that is the case, but that was a that is what I believed then.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: I still believe to this day we don't have that because we still don't know today what we need to be looking at tomorrow, and that's why forensically accurate visibility tools is so important in computer networks.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I put that opinion out there to whomever would listen.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: And there were plenty of people that said that that was a load bullshit, right?
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I did not think that.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: So by putting that opinion out there, the people that saw something in that gravitated towards me, and they told their friends about it.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: It was a strong opinion, right?
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: And so um, so I absolutely agree with that, and I think it's the most important thing to do.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: Now, if you do put your opinion out there and nobody gravitates towards probably that's a that's a message too, right?
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: Like it maybe think about whether you need to rethink.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: I love that you got the confidence to do it and and listen.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: I guess part of it is you want to hear what people were how they respond.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: If no one responds, you know something.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: If everyone says you're mad, you know, well, take that as a data point as well.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: But uh, I think going through the process is a great learning experience for everyone.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: Vince, let's learn a little bit more about you personally.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you as usual, I have my list of 49 questions here, and I am gonna use a next gen AI-oriented random number generator to pick three questions up my list completely at random.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: We actually use, uh, as you might imagine, advanced quantum cryptography to protect our algorithm because it is so unique and it does do a good job of generating these questions randomly.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're ready to go, I'm gonna spin the wheel and uh and get the right question here for you.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: You run it.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: All right, question 41.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: How did you first make money as a kid?
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_01: Oh gosh, um, you know, I've done a variety of jobs, but uh, but I started out as a paper boy bringing newspapers around.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: Now there's a job that you don't see too much anymore.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_01: No, and that was that was I lived, you know, I was I grew up in the Netherlands, right, in Europe.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_01: So the Netherlands has 200 rainy days a year.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: So with a as a paper boy bringing newspapers around in the rain, that's you know, you learn.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: You better really want to have that money at that point, right?
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I had to buy a computer.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, you had motivation, that's the thing, right?
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's funny.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: My um, so I grew up in Scotland.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not from originally from the US.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, my my cousin, my eldest cousin Gordon, he had a paper around as well when he was a teenager.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to say, at the age of 14, 15, he was off at four in the morning delivering papers around you know his part of town.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: And you imagine these days saying, yeah, it's okay that a 14-year-old or a 15-year-old will be off in the dark, gloomy mornings in Scotland to go and do that.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: On a bicycle, yeah, no, I don't know.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I think, I mean, if I think back on the job where where selling became the first, you know, like truly part of the job, is at some point I had a summer job in a supermarket behind the cash register.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_01: And there is where you learn that people interactions is what it's all about, right?
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_01: And selling, right?
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: And and it's nice because there you get those, you know, those were the days when you still got the whole of the money, right?
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: There was no electronic transactions, and I guess I'm dating myself right now.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: Good lessons to learn for sure.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: Let's uh spin the wheel for the next completely random question.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: Let's do it.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: All right, number six.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: What's uh an embarrassing or memorable moment, funny moment in your career that always uh stands out for you?
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_01: Oh gosh, there are so many, so many embarrassing moments um to think about.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, first of all, let's say I in that same supermarket that we just talked about, I also uh worked in the tobacco and the liquor store, which is by in and of itself, talk about children that have jobs where we wouldn't accept that anymore.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I must have been like 15, 16, and I was slinging tobacco, if you will, right?
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_01: And um, and I I very clearly remember that I was, you know, so I I would, you know, you the local people would come and they would buy.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_01: And this was right around New Year's.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I think you probably remember this from Scotland as well.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: New Year's can be like absolutely crazy, right?
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the uh the you know.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: Terms of like the how big the party is and the amount of fireworks they had.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so later that day, so I you know, I you interact with people all the time when you're when you're when you're a seller, right?
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: And you don't, especially at that level, right?
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_01: You don't remember.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: And um, I remember coming in after my shift, coming into the local fireworks place, preparing for New Year's, and there were these people sitting there, and they were all smoking, all between the fireworks, which was exceptionally, right?
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: There's a think about scary there.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_01: And and I walked in and I was picking some fireworks, and I said, Hi, you were from the supermarket.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, What did I do?
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_01: And they gave me this, they gave me everything.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: I walked out with three bags of fireworks just because I was it was yeah, there's no recollection who these people were.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: They must have been in the store.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes you get paid in money, and sometimes you get paid in fireworks, it seems like that's so funny.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, no, the that was, I think, especially the most embarrassing aspect about uh about that to me personally was that I was always I considered myself a computer guy.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: I like my computer.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't think that being in front of people was something that I would gonna be good at.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_01: And the day, you know, so you summer jobs, right?
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: You sent your your application in.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_01: They said, okay, yeah, show up that day.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_01: Showed up that day.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: So, well, you're gonna be at the cash federal.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm like, no, I don't think I'm at the cash fighter.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you're gonna be at the cash fighter.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: So um, that was embarrassing for me.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: It was hard.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_01: That's great, though.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: All right, last question.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: Let me spin the wheel one last time.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, number 37.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: What is the story behind you getting your first job in cybersecurity?
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: So, so actually, my background is in in machine learning.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: I have um I have a PhD in in AI, actually.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: And the problem was that 20 years ago, people thought that AI was just like an academic novelty, right?
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_01: So you ended up with people thinking that neural networks were just a curiosity, curious thing that academics would do.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_01: You could go train these things, and then you know, make nobody thought it was gonna do what we're seeing today.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so when you study machine learning, what that really meant was you're either gonna be an academic or you'd have to find a place to apply that.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_01: And um, at the time, cybersecurity was a growing and budding space, and I had an interest in it.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_01: So I went into cybersecurity as a as a way to apply machine learning technology, which I know today that's what everybody says they're doing, but 20 years ago it was sort of like I saw that kind of as the only path.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_01: So you were ahead of the curve then, way ahead of the curve, 20 years when goodness sake.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_01: I know I should have stick stuck with it.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: Stay stayed out of these quantum computers, right?
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: So so let me ask you though.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_00: So uh you go through all those years, and then suddenly December 22 hits, and the world discovers, my goodness, there's this thing called Chat GPT that uses this thing called AI.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's fantastic.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: And you say, Well, what are we doing for the last 20 years?
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_01: No, actually, what I thought is like, oh my gosh, this is gonna be a tremendously bursting bubble, and there's gonna be a lot of fallout.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: You still think that?
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we'll come on to that maybe in a minute.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: Let's go back to John though.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_00: So, John, he's put his uh his thought leadership out there.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: He's got some, he's got his first few non-friendly meetings booked, right?
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: These are people he doesn't know.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: What surprised you most about those those first sales calls with people you'd never met before uh back in the day?
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um the lessons I learned is what surprised me most, right?
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: So and and I I really and in fact I ended up from those early because the first sales meeting you have, you show up and you're like, Well, I got this product.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, well, okay, good.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: Let me see it.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: And then you dive into your demo and you demo away and you just can't stop talking.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: And and you'll only a seasoned salesperson notices this, right?
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_01: The customer, the prospect might ask a question.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: Can you do this?
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, and we can do this and that and the other thing, and even more, right?
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_01: Like, no, no, no.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_01: Can you solve my problem?
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, here's how it's done.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, great.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_01: Conversation's now finished, right?
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we've found the problem, we've qualified, we can handle it.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_01: They've qualified, we can handle it, right?
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: The con the sale, the sale's on its way, right?
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_01: And so what surprised me most about those early conversations is how hard that lesson learned was, because the feedback loop is you get another call, or you have, you know, you go to a next stage.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_01: You might go to a demonstration or a proof of concept, right?
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_01: And and from that, I the lessons I learned in that have resulted in a sort of a document that I've carried with me for my entire life that that basically dictates how I believe these conversations need to go, right?
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_01: Like if the customer, the prospect isn't talking 50% of the time, you're not having momentum in your conversation.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_01: If you do not start the call with understanding and letting the customer explain why it is that they're there and what they're hoping to learn, then you don't even have a right to bring out a PowerPoint or to bring out a demonstration of your product.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't make a difference because the customer is there to try to figure out if they can solve something that they are struggling with.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_01: If you don't understand what it is that they're struggling with, well, what are you doing?
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_01: And you need to qualify early on whether or not you can solve that problem for them.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: So, what I tell early sales engineers or early sales salespeople is it is all about keeping that conversation going.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: You are on a knowledge discovery mission even more than the customer is, because they probably already have an idea of how they want to solve the problem.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_01: You need to figure out what that problem is and see if you can solve it better for them.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_01: Because if you can solve it better, you have a competitive angle.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_01: And the only way you're gonna do that is with a thousand questions.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_01: So write down those thousand questions before you go on the call.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_01: This can go as deep as like, do you have a packet broker infrastructure?
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_01: Or do you do you maintain endpoints?
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_01: Or what are those endpoints like, all the way to, you know, is risk, is compliance a problem?
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: You know, have you had compromises?
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_01: How can you be certain of, you know, like and that those questions are going to tell you and guide you?
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_01: And that's probably the biggest biggest lessons I learned early on, and that's always been with me.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: So you went from someone who was an expert in your product, obviously, to someone who figured out I need something, and you got your document that says this is actually what I should be asking about and focusing on, not just my but even my product yet, right?
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Andrew, but so that that's kind of the key, right?
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_01: Like you when you you know when you first enter a sales conversation, you're nervous.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_01: Oh gosh, I don't, you know, I don't know how this, you know, what what am I what am I supposed to do here?
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_01: If that's how you're entering a sales conversation, postpone it, right?
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_01: At this point, you haven't thought long enough about what you want to achieve in this column.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_01: Because once you know what you want to achieve, yeah, I want to sell something, yeah, obviously, right?
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_01: You in order to sell, you need to understand if you can solve the customer's unique problem.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_01: And the only way you're gonna do that is by knowing more about their problem.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: If you realize that, then you will have a thousand questions that should be bubbling up.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_01: And they are, you know, how well does my product match the environment they have and the problem they have?
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_01: If you write those out, you are eager to get on that sales call because you want to start qualifying, right?
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: The moment you feel eager to get onto that call, then you're in the right mindset to go and have a productive conversation with the prospect.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I feel like on that first call, if I was John, right, I I would say I would encourage him to think about his goal being be able to answer three questions.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_00: One is, do they have a problem that we can solve?
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_00: Second one, do they agree it's worth solving?
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: It might be it might be a number 100 on their priority list, right?
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: Or it might be number three, right?
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: We need to know that.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_00: And thirdly, how well can we solve that problem?
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so I would get those three things and get their agreement that that point there, you can get the second meeting.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_00: But don't try and go on from there if you don't know what all that is.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: No, and that's that's exactly right.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_01: And and each of those questions have a lot of nuance, right?
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_01: Each of those questions should lead to further discussion.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_01: And then only when we all agree that indeed, right, the customer always works under the assumption that you're not lying, right?
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_01: Like you're not saying I can solve your problem while you can't, right?
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: Diving into product demonstrations only makes sense if the customer is like, yeah, I do believe indeed that you might have something here for me, right?
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_01: And um uh and then obviously keep enough time to set up next steps.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, I agree with that, right?
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_01: Those that's the qualification.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_01: And you qualify each other.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_01: And when you both see the green light in that, it's it's worthy of a next step or a next conversation.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we talked a little bit about this uh in terms of cyber donut.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: We know that your um content exchanges in a very technical area.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this is common for many founders, right?
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: They they they spend their time building this amazing product and they focus on what the product does.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and it's it's often a technical conversation they're comfortable having.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: But at the end of the day, people buy things to solve business problems.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_00: So, how do you think about balancing the technical discussion with the need to also prove and show that we can help them get some sort of business outcome that they care about?
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the technical discussion proves that we can meet the aperture, the uh requirements that they have, right?
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_01: So, for instance, the uh speed and scale of your solution, how it it is able to handle tremendous volumes of data.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_01: Because it's right, the reality of the matter is you walk the trade show floor, every everybody says they're fast, everybody says they're gonna catch the hacker.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_01: The reality is that there will never be a company that says, yeah, we're the slower cybersecurity product.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, right?
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_01: Like nobody's gonna do that.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um what the technical discussion comes out to be is to give the customer the confidence that the claim that you're making actually fits their environment.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_01: You may be very, very fast in a particular scenario.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_01: You may not be fast in theirs, right?
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: You may be able to catch particular patterns, but not in their specific environment because of the way their telemetry is set up.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_01: The tech the technical part of the discussion should only be to qualify that for their particular environment, the problem is also solvable.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: And then how do you how do you make that connection or help them make that connection though to some sort of business outcome?
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_00: Because especially right now, I mean, you may see this, uh, but I think a lot of a lot of people are experiencing a lot of scrutiny around opportunities and deals before the purchase happens.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_00: Say, well, do we have to do it?
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: Do we have to do it now?
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_00: Why do we have to can we put it out six months?
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_00: Is there someone that does it 80% as well and you know 50% cheaper?
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: You know, really getting into that business outcome discussion is important.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: I'm wondering what your experience is of of helping people realize what it can actually do at a at a higher level than just solve the technical problem.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think I think though that's a shift that we've been seeing in the industry because um, or maybe I've been selling more and more expensive things in my yeah through my career, that could be possible too, that there that there that there is more scrutiny.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_01: But the the the question in cybersecurity is not how do you become 100% secure, right?
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's not possible.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_01: Like if you want to be 100% secure, then have no data, right?
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_01: Unplug the computers, you have no data, then you're 100% secure, right?
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like you can't you can't get hacked because there is no data.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, unfortunately, that's not the reality.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_01: We have more and more data.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_01: So in order, right?
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_01: Like um, it is not realistic to have an infinite spend on cybersecurity.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_01: Now we can argue about if the spend for cybersecurity is sufficient or not, but the question is the spend that you as an organization has on cybersecurity, is that appropriate, right?
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_01: Is that maximizing the amount of defense you have, right?
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so there's a question was, well, I can buy this firewall or I can buy this um this access control solution, right?
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_01: Like which of the two is the better spend?
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_01: Or can I, you know, get 80% of the way by spending a lot less and then buy both solutions?
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_01: What is that, how does that change that risk landscape for me?
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_01: And that is going to be specific to the type of organization you have.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: What kind of data you have, where that data lives, how your people work, would it work from the road, they work from home, you know, is your data living in a cloud through remote desktop?
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: Is it, you know, is everybody working from an office?
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_01: All these things change the landscape and the attack surface significantly.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, but that's the job of the CISO.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_01: No CISO should ever look around and say, I'm gonna do what my uh my friend, the CISO, and this other company does, because he he did a good job there.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't apply.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_01: And therefore, these qualifying questions from the customer end and the justification that comes with it is absolutely valid.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_01: I'll give you one statistic, right?
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I I'm sure I'm getting the numbers wrong, right?
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the spend that we have on cybersecurity is what, is it like um 65 billion a year or something?
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_01: Like there's some number like that.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um the estimated loss due to cybersecurity event is 12 billion dollars a year.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_01: So then there's the question, right?
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a um if we were to spend, you know, what's double six, 130 billion a year on cybersecurity, do we see that 12 billion loss go to six, to zero, right?
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like so there is a certain right like so so it it is like uh every dollar you spend on additional cybersecurity tooling in people is going to get you like diminishing returns in terms of uh of risk reduction, right?
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so we have to make sure we qualify that uh correctly.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_01: That seems like uh a big disparity, 65 to 12, even if it's a little bit off.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_00: I mean I may be getting the numbers wrong, but the ratios are right.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_00: Fascinating.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you mentioned earlier that uh you hired a VP of sales at Flowtrack.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_00: When should John Jeffrey bring on their first sales leader or first salesperson in the development at uh Cyber Donut?
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_01: As soon as as John recognizes that there is a clustering um in a particular type of customer, and that could be as simple as we seem to be uh clustering around enterprise, right?
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_01: Like we or we seem to be clustering around the automotive industry, right?
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like as soon as you see a grouping in which you can have a repeatable success is when you can start looking for people that are uh sales professionals.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_01: Because the ten, right, like it tends to be such that those sales professionals they are proficient in particular areas, right?
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_01: And perhaps not in in others, right?
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_01: You need to make sure that you you don't want to hire an inside sales guy that then needs to go sell to the big banks because maybe that doesn't work.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_01: On the other hand, I've had really, really good luck with cold calling in some scenarios, just knowing exactly what the message was and the people I can target.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's going to remain John's responsibility to understand who to target.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_01: And then the sales professional will be able to execute on that um, you know, on those instructions, if you will.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_00: And you hired a leader with Flow Trek first.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_00: Is that what you did?
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_00: Why did you choose to do that?
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I I I did because I uh I I needed education, first of all.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I also needed someone who understood both the sales and marketing end because there's something that is really important that I think um that I think happens in in the early startup days.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I I'm not saying this has to happen like with a with a sales leader, but someone who can who was not just like a wrench turner.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_01: Because what is most important in those early days where John is getting you know his early sales for cyber donut, right?
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_01: You have to aggressively, you know, backpropagate what you learn from those early customers back to your engineering organization and your messaging, right?
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_01: Like it is almost and it is one of the most unnatural things to do for someone who's a big technologist, right?
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I know I wrote the best database and all, you know, this cybersecurity thing, that's gonna fly.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody should love it, right?
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, okay, that's why we're all using Unix systems today, right?
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_01: Like there's a there's it's not how that goes, right?
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_01: Like the customer is going to tell you what they liked, what they didn't like, and a good sales leader is able to internalize that and effectively become sort of a proxy product manager, even and drive the messaging, right?
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_01: Because you're that's the other fault that people make early on, right?
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_01: Like, oh, my product isn't selling.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_01: I need to shift my messaging around.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like, hang on a second.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_01: Typically, your messaging is not focused, you're not focusing it on the group of people that are purchasing it to you're shifting your messaging all the time.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_01: These people see or hear about your, you know, about cyber donut once every three weeks.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_01: And if your message changes, you know, from you know, I solved this problem to solve that problem, and you know, and now I got sprinkles on it, right?
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_01: Like that they're gonna be like, whoa, I don't really know what this company does yet, right?
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_01: Consistency of messaging and concentrated firepower, laser focus of that messaging is going to be really important.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_01: A leader can help you do that, realizes that bigger pattern.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas just someone who's who's executing on instructions is not going to do that.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, okay, you want me to sell sprinkles now?
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna sell sprinkles now, right?
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_01: Isn't work that way, right?
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_01: Like you have to recognize you see it every day, all day, right?
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_01: The the the prospect does not.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_01: They hear about you and they have time for you like a few minutes every couple of weeks, right?
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_01: So leaders help with that higher level in uh picture.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I recognize back in the day I didn't have that insight yet.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Vince, look, we've talked, believe it or not, for almost 40 minutes now.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_00: This has been a really good conversation.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I think uh another founder or uh leaders at early stage companies is going to get a lot from your experiences at FlowTrack and also a content.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_00: If someone wants to get in touch with you, is LinkedIn the best way to do that?
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_00: I think LinkedIn is the skills tool of choice these days, actually.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_00: All right, well, I'll be sure to put the link to your LinkedIn in the show notes.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I want to thank you and wish you the best for 2024 and beyond.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely been my pleasure to be here.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much.