Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / 157: Erkang Zheng, CEO of Jupiter One - need for sales structure | power of community in building a customer base | founder led selling

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157: Erkang Zheng, CEO of Jupiter One - need for sales structure | power of community in building a customer base | founder led selling · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: Air Kong Jung founded Jupyter1, got the first handful of customers, and then started building the sales team.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: Find out when he knew they were ready, the first few critical hires, and how they are approaching differentiation in this episode.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Sales Bluebird podcast, which exists because at cybersecurity startups, it's hard to get traction, build momentum, and scale the business.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: Sales Bluebird provides you tips, tricks, experiences, examples, ideas, and inspiration from people who know a thing or ten about building great cybersecurity companies.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: I am your host, Andrew Monahan, and our guest today is Erkun Jung, CEO and founder at Jupyter1.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: Erkham, welcome to Sales Bluebird.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you for having me, Andrew.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'm looking forward to this conversation.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, me too.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I I've heard the company named that for quite a few months, and it seems like you're getting a name for yourself and some traction out there.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm looking to hear what you've got going on and what you're doing on the go-to-market side.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: All good things I hear.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: That's good.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_01: But Erkham, before we get to the business side of this, let's get to know you a little bit better.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: What I have on my sheet here is 35 questions.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: Don't worry.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: We're not going to be spending an hour asking you 35 questions on yourself.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: What I'm going to ask you to do is to pick a number between one and 35, and I'll read out the question that corresponds to it.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: Does that sound like a plan?
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Which question is the easiest?
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: Let's go with that one.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let's see what happens.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: Pick a number.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: How about number seven?
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: Seven.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: What is one great airport you've been to?
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: One great airport.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: I love my home airport, RDU.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: Big enough, just big enough, and small, so you can get in and out of the airport in 10 minutes.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: That's my favorite type of airport, the one that you spend little time in.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: Especially if you have pre-check, right?
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: So now literally from on my office right now, it's very close to the airport.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I can go from my office to the gate in literally 15 minutes.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's incredible.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: You uh compare that to, I don't know, some of the bigger airports.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: That's uh people would uh give an arm or a leg for that some days, I would imagine.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's funny you you chose that one.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm from the UK and I kind of hear all the horror stories right now of people going through Heathrow.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's an absolute disaster.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: There's more bags, I think, left in the airport than actually given to people when they get off their plane.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's just a complete mess.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's a disaster.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I hear you, man.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: All right, next number between one and thirty-five.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: All right, how about 18?
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: 18.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: What is one thing that you own that you should really just really throw out?
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my god.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: Oh man.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: So there are actually plenty.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: I moved at the end of last year, so I still have a bunch of boxes, and I think most of those should probably be thrown away.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: But if one thing, we've got to tell you two things, right?
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: So one thing I think I should throw away, and one thing I think I already did.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I still have one of those, you know, early digital cameras that uses a tape.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not a tape camera, but it's a digital camera that uses a tape.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's a Sony digital camera.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I paid like$2,000 for that thing at the time.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: I used it like twice.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: Like a camcorder rather than an SLR, is that right?
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: Camcorder uses a tape to store the digital data, right?
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know if anybody has really ever seen one or used one.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: At one point, that's the only way that you can record HD video.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: Any other type of camcorders, because the amount of data is so big and the memory card at the time was so small, you couldn't do it.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: So that was the only way.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't know.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: I held on to that thing because I paid so much for it.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: And but I know that I would never use it again.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I don't know if we still have it, but we bought one our eldest kid was born in 2006, right?
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: And that was that before smartphones kind of really so you you had to go get something, and yeah, we needed tapes, and you had to figure out what I do with my tapes now.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: And speaking of tapes and old technology, so I used to have, I'm a technical guy by background, so I used to have full racks of servers at home that I just play with myself.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: So during my move by the end of last year, I threw away most of the stuff, right?
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: So the old servers that I never use anymore and the rack that go uh with it, had them recycled by a local company.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the things that I threw away that I kind of regretted was those ATM cars.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: Remember those ATM cards?
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: Not the ATM, like you know, the band cards, right?
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh-huh.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: The networking cards for ATM.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, the technology doesn't exist anymore.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly, those things.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: And then I later on, for whatever reason, I was just curious on hey, how much are those things worth and do people still need them?
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I looked them up on eBay.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: Those are PCI slots, right?
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: ATM cards.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: And it turns out those are selling for like 400 bucks each.
• 5:30
  unknown: Oh my god.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I threw away like, you know, four of them.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my goodness.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's a tough thing, right?
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: There's always the stories about should have kept it, but then you have this other still like, well, we didn't get rid of stuff.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: Oh man.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: All right, one more number between one and thirty-five.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: So either the first one or last one.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: How about you pick?
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: Either one or thirty-five.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna go with thirty-five.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: So if you could choose, where in the world would you like to live?
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: Oh man.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's an interesting one.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's a hard question.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because uh I I feel like, you know, I've been in North Carolina for the past 22 years, and I don't see myself really leaving North Carolina because this really feels like home.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: But I wouldn't mind spending half a year in, say, Hawaii, you know, of the year.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: You know, so that may be one of my favorite destinations.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: I'll stick with that.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: I'm kind of with you actually.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: Uh not to say Hawaii, but uh yeah, I always think, you know, a few years ahead, what are we gonna do when the kids are out of the house?
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: I don't see myself staying in one place.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: I see myself having a home base, and then we we live places for three to six months of the year.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: Go to really live there, don't just go for a week somewhere.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: Let's just go get uh that's right, you know, rent a flat for a couple of months in, I don't know, Sydney or Hong Kong or something like that, and just go an experience, you know?
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think that's the way to go.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: Because, you know, and all of our friends are still here in the area, so I I don't see us, you know, leaving here anytime soon, right?
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, but but staying Hawaii two months a year and Hong Kong two months a year isn't a bad deal.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: Not a bad deal at all.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: So Erkon, cash your mind back.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_01: What was your first way that you made money when you were a kid?
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: Oh gosh.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: I've been telling that story quite a bit recently.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: So the the first money that I made, right, or the first job I had was actually selling vacuum cleaners door to door.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't know if you've seen these, and it was branded Kirby.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: So Kirby vacuum cleaners, and it felt a little bit like a scam, to be honest.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: Because they're so expensive, but they're actually really good uh vacuums.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: So this was 24, 25 years ago, right?
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: So, and these things sell for$1,500,$1,600 or something for a vacuum cleaner, and people have to take out a loan to buy a vacuum cleaner.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think they still go for you know$2,500 or$3,000 nowadays, but I don't know if they still sell them door to door.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: You can buy them online now.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: So that was what I did.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, I went door to door demonstrating free cleaning, basically, right?
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: Demonstrating these uh cleaners for folks, and they would gladly let me clean their house, but most most of them are not spending any money buying it.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: That's funny.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's the classic show don't tell, right?
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I'm gonna clean your house for you.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but I I did sell one, so that's how I made my first dollar, I guess.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: Good for you.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: Good for you.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: What was your first real job where you got a W-2 and a paycheck?
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: That was I think it was working at a university.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: So helping with some you know, web design, some programming type of things.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: So you were on the technical side, but you founded Jupyter One not that long ago.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: Before we get into what Jupyter One does, what was it like winning your first real paying customer?
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: It felt awesome, right?
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: So actually, I had paying customers before I had a product.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: So the vision of Jupyter One was so compelling, and you know, because the way that it would work is it would replace a lot of the busy work that a security person would have to do.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: We'll get into that more, right?
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: And but basically for the first couple customers, I said, hey, the the product is still in beta mode, but I'll augment the product with my own services, right?
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: So the things that what I will do eventually the product will do for you.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: So that's how I got the first two paying customers.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: So that was before the product.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: So that that's the classic this thing's gonna do a lot, it just doesn't do it all right now, but don't worry, we'll do it manually until we do it inside the software.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: That's pretty cool.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: I like that a lot.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let's get into Jupyter One then.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: If I was a CISO, Erkung, how would you answer my question?
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: What does Jupyter One do?
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a great question.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: It may be a little hard to get it in 10 seconds, but let me try it, right?
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: So we help CISOs and their teams to use data and automations to make better decisions faster.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: So overall, that's what Jupyter One does.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, let's go a little deeper.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: So what does that mean?
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: Think about what the security teams are doing, right?
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: The security teams are protecting the business and reducing the risk, right?
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: And what's the foundation of that?
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: The foundation of that is to know what we have.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: And out of the things that we have, which ones matter?
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: How do I prioritize my time and who can fix those issues that arise from those assets?
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what Jupyter One Do is help CISOs and their teams use data and automation to collect and understand all of the granular digital cyber assets that they have.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not talking about just a laptop and you know things like that, physical things, right?
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not even talking about like virtual machines that has an IP address, right?
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's just a very tiny subset of all of the digital assets that make up the entire operations.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: You have digital identities and access permissions and code and changes to code and even security awareness trainings and all of these things that make up a company's digital operations.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: Jupyter One aggregates and helps people understand all of those assets and which ones matter and which ones have problems that they need to pay attention to in order to reduce risk.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: So first thing that comes to mind is I remember, gosh, 15, 20 years ago, Semantic had bought Altiras, and their leading thing was you can't secure what you can't manage, or you can't secure what you don't know about, right?
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: Through my lens, that was the first time I kind of heard the thought that you need to know what all your assets.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: But it's 2022 right now, right?
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: So what problems are people, hair on fire problems are people experiencing that would cause them to say, now I need to fix this right now?
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, because just over time, the digital operations has become more and more complex.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: So you think about not only do we have to manage all the things you know inside our network and environments, everything is not bound by the network boundaries anymore.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: So everything is remote and cloud and API driven and software defined, right?
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: So combined with you still have all this mess inside of your own four walls, right?
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: So that combination of the technology growing so quickly just added a tremendous amount of complexity.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: And the other thing is it's not that we didn't want to do this before, right?
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, we've always wanted to have quote unquote CMDBs, right?
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: So that was the term configuration management database for all of the things, right?
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: So the configurations of the devices, right?
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what CMDBs do.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: But because there's so much complexity, it went beyond just devices, right?
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: Like I talked about, all of these digital assets, operational entities and elements.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: The good thing is why does this matter now?
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: And frankly, it's because technology is also giving us a way to deal with this in a way that we weren't able to before.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: And that's API-driven approach.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: All of these infrastructures and management interfaces and technology tools, even the things that we're using right now, right?
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: So the video conferencing tools like Zoom and Teams and WebEx and so on, right?
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: All of these SaaS applications, they all have an API.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: So what that means is then, you know, we actually do have a more consistent mechanism of collecting and aggregating those data and understanding it.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: But I think going back to what we're saying, right, you you can protect what you can see, I'll go beyond that, is to say you can protect what you don't understand.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just you see that I have an asset or something, but do you understand the context of that asset?
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: So I'll give you an example, right?
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: To say, hey, if I have a user that's compromised, well, hey, is that a user an intern or is that user an admin to your production environment?
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: Those two are very different context.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: So without knowing that context very quickly, then you lose time in whatever you're doing, whether it's incident response or vulnerability prioritization or reporting or whatever the case you are, you're doing, you have to have that context as quickly as possible to make your team efficient.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: When I hear context, I'm thinking both what's around the asset, but also granularity into the asset itself.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: You need to know a lot more than just simple IP address, OS, and what's running, I would imagine, right?
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's both, right?
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: So you're right.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: So the granularity are provided by some of the tooling that we already have, right?
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: So for things like there's agents that run on certain things, there are scanners that do a deep testing of certain things, right?
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: That provides that level of deep telemetry data.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what's interesting is that the agents only know very deep about that single device or that single vertical of things.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: And the scanner is the same way, they only know about that single vertical of things.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they they go deep in those.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: But what we're lacking is how do you connect the dots?
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: Because any of those things don't work in silo, right?
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: The reason that you're a developer or the reason that you have a laptop to do things isn't because you're in a siloed environment and operating isolation.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's because you are connecting to all these other things.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: So, how do we make sense of all of these connections?
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: That's where context comes from, right?
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the part that we lack is not just the visibility, but the understanding of things in our environment.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: And what's the big innovation then that Jupyter One brought to this whole space then, or Cocoon?
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we are the pioneer that uh had built this type of data on a graph data model, right?
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: So we've leveraged graph to do these types of asset consolidation and analysis, right?
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: So we're a data analytical platform foundationally built on a graph, right?
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: And specifically then for the use case of cyber assets.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the key innovation.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: And then the other part for me, I was a former CISO and uh security practitioner for basically all of my career.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: And part of what I think that we have not been doing really well is actually back to the basics.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: So we've been trying to deploy these shiny tools for these new acronyms that come out, right?
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: And we ended up having like you know 40, 50, 80 tools in our environment that do all these little things.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now, we want best of breed so that we can you know stay ahead of the thread and all that kind of things, right?
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: But at the end of the day, what I feel like that that to some extent further aggravates the problem by adding complexity to the operations.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: And what I wanted to do for me as a practitioner is to go back to the basics and go back to try to simplify the stack and simplify the operations.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: So the you know, back to your question of the innovation that we bring is how do we do the basic things really well?
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's what Jupyter One provides.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: We can do the basic things at scale, at large scale, really, really well.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: And we can make difficult problems and difficult questions easy to answer.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: I think one of the things I've kind of realized over the years to be true is that uh like many environments in cybersecurity, if you look at uh challenges that people are facing, often if you go back to root cause, it's doing the basics.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's not because they're missing some shiny new tool on the edge somewhere, right?
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's are we doing the fundamentals really well?
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: I hate to talk about myself just a little bit, but uh I wrote something a few years back about so I grew up in Scotland playing golf, and my granddad put a golf club in my hand when I was three years old.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the things I realized with golf over the years is that for all the fancy gadgets and the 400, 500 drivers and the balls that cost five, ten bucks each and all that sort of stuff, at the end of the day, golf is a game where all the matches is your grip, your stance, and your song.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_01: And uh people will spend thousands of dollars on the latest and greatest golf clubs, but spend zero on the lessons.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: And uh if they really want to be good at the game and not just try and impress their buddies with their fancy new driver, right, or putter, what they would do is get some lessons.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: But that's just not what we do in golf.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: Fascinating.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: So when someone is in acquisition mode for Jupiter one, are they buying because they they're thinking we need to understand this whole thing?
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we got a gap, and you know, just generally it's a good idea that we need to get an asset, understand our assets and the context and that, or are they thinking, well, here's a use case that we have to start with?
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: Are you thinking about use cases to get going with you guys?
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, right?
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: Because especially in sales code market, we don't want to buoy the ocean, right?
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: Even if we could, you know, as a platform, we could do all these things.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: We don't want to do all of those things on day one, right?
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: So we very much are use case focused on certain things, right?
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: So it really is twofold, right?
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: So there are uh very forward-looking, innovative CISOs, you know, we have many of those customers, right?
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: So folks from you know Robinhood and Databricks, right?
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: So for example, these are very forward-thinking teams and CISOs, and they recognize the power of the platform.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: In many cases, they said, oh my God, we set out a journey, we hire the people to build this ourselves.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, you've done it in a much better way, and then let's just use your product, right?
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: So we do have customers like that that are bought into the entire platform and the power of you know having that very broad asset aggregation.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: So those are one set of customers, but those are a smaller set.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the majority of them are looking for, hey, what's the pain point that you can solve for me today?
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: And what are those immediate use cases I can leverage?
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: So those are things around you know, faster incident response, right?
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: So as a use case.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: So incident response are you know when something bad happens, a potential breach happens, and you are responding to it, and you have to have the context of the device or the resource being under attack, right?
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: Then things like blast radius and ownership and data access and things like that.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: How do you get that?
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: And time is of the essence, right?
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: So you don't want to spend hours and days figuring things out.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: How do you get those insights within seconds, minutes that you otherwise would have to spend hours and days on, right?
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: And that's one of the use cases that we do really well.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we help people do that.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: And there are other use cases, right?
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: So vulnerability management, cloud security, and things like that.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: So to your point, right?
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: So we do focus on specific use cases.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_01: I got it.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_01: You got your first customers before you really had a product, you're getting them going.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: At what point did you say now is the time to invest and bring in a sales team?
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: It really is first, is after the product has become publicly available.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, we have, in addition to the first couple customers that are trying it even before the product was released, right?
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: So now we have a release product, we have a handful of other early adopters, and we had at least one large customer, right?
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: So at scale.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: So we started to think about okay, so now the product works not just for people like us as a startup, right?
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, 20, 30, 50 people companies, but we onboarded a customer with 500 employees or around that number, right?
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: And that is the point where we begin to think, okay, so now it's the time to kind of press the accelerator on go to market a little bit.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: And the other part to consider is early days, right?
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: So founders are doing everything, right?
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: So I was the guy writing code.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: You know, of course, I have a team of you know founding engineers that helped me, right?
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: So along the way.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: But I was still writing code, I was the product owner, and I was the salesperson, I was the sales solutions engineer, I was the support, I was I was all these people, right?
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: So at some point, you know, it's really those two factors.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: So one is we have some early traction and some validation of the market, product market fit.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: Two is I am running out of bandwidth, right?
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: If I'm talking to enough customers and I'm running out of bandwidth myself, right?
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: So those are the two indicators of starting to hire a sales team.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: And then what roles did you hire first?
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: So we had two individual salespersons joining on the team to start with.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: And one of them was a you know, BizDef type person who helped me do a little bit of marketing, a little bit of you know, events and a little bit of sales from earlier on.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: And then we hired an additional, more dedicated sales rep, right?
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: And those are the two.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: Sales hires.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: And then later on, right, so as we grow and continue to gain traction, we started hiring sales leaders, who's my current CRO, right, Chief Revenue Officer.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: But that came a bit later, you know, after we did you have a full team almost of you know five to eight reps before you brought the leader in, or did you bring them in to scale?
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we still have the mentality of these leaders being player coaches, right?
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: At least especially at the beginning.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, we hire leaders to scale a function, but at the beginning, that function is tiny, right?
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't have a large team.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: So the person, Brian Kelly, in this case, who's my CRO, when he first came in, we only had three or four actually salesperson, right, on the team.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: And he came in and he actually is very much rolled up their sleeves and you know, dive right in in every sales conversations and that type of leader, right?
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: But at the same time, you know, we were at a point that we needed to provide some structure and some process, right?
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's beyond my capability to do, right?
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: So, look, I can sell my product, of course, right?
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm not the type of sales leader, right?
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: So I didn't necessarily come from a sales background myself, right?
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: So we need a sales leader to put in the right processes to implement the right tools, right?
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: So how do we use HubSpot?
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: How do we use Salesforce, right?
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, which one is the right one for us at what stage?
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: What other tools do we need?
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_00: You know, how do we grow customer success?
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: How do we grow sales engineering, right?
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: So all those things, you know, would have to come to a point where we need to scale, right?
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: Rather than me doing everything or just a couple of guys doing everything.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: So that's you know, that's that's how it progressed.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: One of the stages that I've seen companies struggle a little bit with and it becomes a little bit messy, is that move from founder-led selling into how do we hand over the knowledge and the experiences to a sales team and still not let them just go on their own, but you know, help them with what we know.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: Any learnings in that process as you brought those first few people on and how you were trying to extrate yourself a little bit from the this conversations?
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so of course, right?
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: So around the same time, right?
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: So I brought in the sales leader.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, right before I brought in the sales leader, I brought in a very strong solution architect.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: He's still on the team and he now leads the entire solutions engineering team, right?
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of the knowledge transfer is with the technical salesperson, right?
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: So the solution engineer, the solution architect.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: So the only way to do it is by doing it together.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so first you have to have the right people with the right skills, right?
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: So they need to have the level of you know, either immediate expertise or they have the ability and the aptitude to grow into, right?
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_00: So and pick up those things very, very quickly, right?
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_00: And this particular gentleman, Akash, right?
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: So I remember when interviewing him and hiring him, I said, hey, Akash, how about you go create yourself a Drupal One account?
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, we offer a free version, so anybody can go just sign up very easily, right?
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: I said, Hey, how about you go create yourself an account and you know give you a couple of days to play with it and you come back and do a demo to me.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: So he was not a security domain expert, right?
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: But he came back and did a demo that was a better demo than my current salespeople, right?
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: So of course it wasn't a perfect demo, but it was great based on what he could learn on himself, right?
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: So it was that type of person, right?
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: That type of skill set that we looked for, and we hired him immediately, and I started transferring all my knowledge to him, right?
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: And that's how it started, right?
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_00: Then we have to then you know train the trainer, right?
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: So for me, right, so I was training him, and he becomes a trainer to train others.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_00: And over time it comes to a point that, you know, of course, still there was a period of time, right?
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: Even when we had like almost 10 people on the sales team, there was still a period of time where I was still involved or at least informed on every single deal.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: I was to some extent had a conversation, or maybe just an inertial conversation, or maybe just an inertial leading the demo, or maybe it was specific advanced questions as part of the demo or something.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I was still involved in the sales process to some extent.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: But then there comes a time where deals are closing without me even knowing.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that's just a beautiful feeling.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, now we're coming to a point where we're really scaling the sales team.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the fledgling is starting to find its feet and fly in its own, right?
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_01: And not have the person helping them do that.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: So it must be a great feeling when that happens.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_01: Two big challenges right now I see in the industry.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_01: One is a lot of sales teams are thinking through how do we get more first meetings, right?
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_01: How do we get things coming in top of funnel?
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's hard, hard, hard to do that right now.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm wondering what you've learned about that at the Jupyter 1.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it is especially noisy in the cybersecurity market, right?
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of people using the same words and saying the same things that may actually may or may not do the things that they say.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: And you're right, it's very hard to break through the noise.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: And second, what's challenging is that you know the CISOs and the security leaders are getting bombarded by these vendors, right?
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_00: So there are so many of them.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: To some degree, there's truth on both sides, right?
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: So on the CISO side, they were like, please do not call me.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_00: I've got so much going on, and I've got so many vendors calling me to stop.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_00: But on the other hand, all of these startups, they are fighting for survival, right?
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: They have to do this.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, sometimes there's a bit of a you know misunderstanding on both sides, right?
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a bit of a lack of empathy on both sides, right?
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: Because C SORS are trying to stay above water, startups are trying to survive, right?
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: You know, what do you do?
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_00: So I think for us is number one, continue to invest in the product and make sure the product is actually working and helping and providing value.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: And number two, and generating great content, right, digital content that can be self-consumed around the product and around the approach and around the thought leadership, around just not just what you do, but how you do things and the principles behind it.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: You know, those types of things, right?
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: That tells the story about the product as well as our mentality and principles.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_01: Let me ask you that, Rakram, before you go further.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, sometimes when I hear people talk about content, I'm thinking, okay, here we go, another white paper, right?
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: Any examples of things that you're doing that's a little bit different, that's much more about what leadership and you know, evangelizing problems, things like that?
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not just white paper, right?
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I think there's many forms of content.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: You know, white paper is certainly one way, but it also depends on the type of content that you put out, right?
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: So the actual content, right?
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't mean necessarily the format.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_00: It could be a blog, it could be a white paper, it could be other things.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_00: And the content needs to be different, unique, and compelling, right?
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, like for example, we talk a lot about graph, right?
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_00: So things around that.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: How does graph really solve the problem?
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_00: So a lot of content around those in the early days was really helpful.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_00: And also it's not just our stories, right?
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: So Jupiter One is very community focused.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: So one example, right?
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_00: So we brought in a number of community leaders and practitioners to write a book collectively, right?
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: So we didn't write a book just by ourselves.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: We actually released three books uh in the past year, right?
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_00: So two of those, we had around 10, 12 authors on each book.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_00: And everybody chimp, you know, chime into a little bit and write their chapter and put their experiences and tell their stories, and then we published the book, right?
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: So that's unique, right?
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: So those are the stories that that people you know want to hear.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_01: And these are people that were in the industry, and you just approached them and said, Hey, do you want to take part?
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: That's awesome.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's right, in the industry.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_00: And we also have a I hired my CISO about a year ago, right?
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_00: So he is a thought leader in the industry, and he published his book, right?
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_00: So the cyber defense matrix.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_00: And that became a very compelling content because that's true thought leadership from practitioners, right?
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm working on a new paper now that's around the technology stack today, right?
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, I've also had a cybersecurity manifesto before, right?
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: So there's you know, these types of things that if you are putting out genuine practitioner level content that people can get value from, then it does attract folks to pay attention to it.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's one aspect.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_00: And the other aspect, it really is a word of mouth was actually very helpful for us.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you feel like that's probably very slow and so on, right?
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_00: But the proof, you know, the social proof, right?
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: So within the communities, the peer-to-peer validation, it goes a long way, especially in the early days, you know, when you're promoting the product.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_01: Right here, word of mouth, I think that's great, but it's kind of waiting for it to happen almost, right?
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, we hope we get word of mouth.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's not something that uh you can just say, okay, let's turn on the word of mouth, right?
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm wondering, there must be something in the middle there where companies can do more to encourage it, as it were.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I wonder if you've had any thoughts about that.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and actually that is also really difficult, right?
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because you can force people to talk about it, right?
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes it's actually kind of hard to even find the right incentive for people to talk about it, right?
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_00: I think what really is, is a lot of that comes down to the product, right?
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_00: So is your product actually a game-changing thing, right?
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_00: So can what they're using get them excited?
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_00: If you get them excited, they will talk about it.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that's the probably the most compelling part, right?
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_00: If I say, hey, I'm using this, and all of a sudden I just say, you know, two days in responding to an incident and somebody else has a similar situation, do they ask about it?
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: And the other practitioner will be very excited to talk about it, right?
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_00: Because it made a difference and it helped them out.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, it made them become, you know, heroes in their organization, right?
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what we focus on.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_00: What we focus on is helping our customers to feel like they have the superpower, right?
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_00: So they can do things that they couldn't do before.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_00: And if you can give people that type of result, then they will be more willing to talk about it.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I love that whole idea of helping make our customers superheroes.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_01: If he doesn't want to get that kind of status and also, you know, forward mentum in their career because of how they're doing things, it sounds awesome.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: Well, listen, Arcan, I I've really enjoyed the conversation this morning.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_01: I'm wondering if someone wants to get hold of you to continue the conversation or to talk about maybe even joining Jupyter1, what's the best way to get hold of you?
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I would encourage you to visit the website, uh, Jupiter1.com or check out our LinkedIn page or you know, Glassdoor page, right?
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: So if you are you know looking to join us and we have a really amazing team, a very strong culture, and you know, people love it here.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_00: So you know, we'd love to hear from you.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_01: That's great.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm rooting for you in 2022 and 2023, and wish you all the best for the rest of the year.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: Sounds good.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Andrew.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that was a fun conversation for me talking to Ericum there.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_01: Clearly very passionate about what Jupyter1 is building, what they're doing, and he's been very thoughtful, in my opinion, about how they've gone about doing it.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_01: I had three real takeaways from this.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: The first one was the timing of when they brought in the first salespeople.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_01: So he took it upon himself as the founder, even though he's more technically oriented, to do the first few customer sales, right?
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_01: He ran it himself.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_01: He said, you know, they got the first few customers pre-release a product and then a couple afterwards, and then after that is when they brought in the first sales buyers, right?
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_01: So interestingly, he did that.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_01: He took it upon himself to really be a good salesperson, and then the idea that he was going to transfer the knowledge to the new people coming in on the sales side.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_01: So I thought that was interesting.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_01: The second one is you know, he brought in the sales leader reasonably early, right?
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_01: He wanted them to help build out a team, but he said it you know, not just because it was the right thing to do, because they needed to build a team, but secondly, what he wanted was a structure, he wanted the processes, the structure, the tools set up, and that's not a sales, a seller's job, it's not an AE's job to do that.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_01: But as a leader coming in, you can set things up the way you want them and have things working.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_01: So I thought that was a really interesting way to look at one of the reasons why you want to see a leader in.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_01: And then finally, as we all know, rising with the noise right now, differentiation can be really difficult.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: You know, when I asked him about that, he didn't come up with some gimmicky ways that they're trying to differentiate or rise with the noise, right?
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't a case of, I don't know, uh giving out t-shirts or swag or something like that.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_01: What he was really thinking about was, you know, first principles build an awesome product, right?
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_01: That people want to talk about, that they want to share with their friends.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_01: So they want to say, I got this thing that really works well, it's made a difference to my life, and then have a community around what they're doing so that there's the environment where they can share.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_01: So, three takeaways from me, you may have different ones.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_01: I really enjoyed the conversation though, I know with Aircombe and uh Julia One all the success for 2022 and into 2023.