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Fired From Corporate. Now He's Disrupting a $6 Billion Industry. · Beyond Fulfillment Podcast

• 0:00
  Foreign.
• 0:05
  Taylor, welcome to Beyond Fulfillment.
• 0:07
  Dave, it's great to be here.
• 0:08
  Thanks for having me.
• 0:09
  Yes, sir.
• 0:10
  We appreciate you taking the time to be here.
• 0:12
  So Craig, you co founded cyberhoot over a decade, which is a cyber security firm that does things differently.
• 0:20
  So we'll certainly get into that.
• 0:22
  But.
• 0:23
  But just to set the stage for our listeners, can you talk about your backstory and how you became an entrepreneur?
• 0:30
  Well, that's an interesting story.
• 0:31
  So back up 35 years.
• 0:33
  I have a degree in psychology, but quickly learned I didn't want a PhD.
• 0:37
  So I got out and started a company doing irrigation systems 30 years ago.
• 0:42
  35 years ago.
• 0:43
  Didn't last long there, but got an opportunity to go to work for a firewall vendor in cybersecurity.
• 0:47
  I didn't know much about the Internet at the time.
• 0:50
  I had helped at the University of.
• 0:52
  I attended in their computer science lab and we were doing like email that was keyboard driven.
• 0:57
  Like if you had to forward an email you hit F and if you had a reply you hit R.
• 1:01
  Like it was ancient times before there was a world wide web.
• 1:04
  Fast forward 30 years later.
• 1:06
  I've been a CISSP for going on 20 years now.
• 1:10
  Since 2001, I was sub 25,000 on my certificate.
• 1:14
  Now there's 3 million CISSPs.
• 1:17
  And about 12 years ago I was fired from one of my Fortune 500 gigs that I had about 2 or 3 of in my career.
• 1:23
  And I did some soul searching and asked myself some tough questions and said, you know, I'm not drumming the steering wheel when I drive to work on my two hour commute there and back.
• 1:34
  I'm not enjoying this.
• 1:35
  Even though I was fired, it was more of a, you know, more of a soul searching moment for me.
• 1:40
  And so I founded cyberhoot with a bunch of former colleagues from Computer Sciences Corporation.
• 1:45
  It's now called dxc.
• 1:47
  And because we thought we could do something a little different in cybersecurity education, we felt there was a need for a course correction, that there was too much fear and shame out there with these gotcha emails and just
• 2:00
  the approach in general wasn't working.
• 2:02
  There were a lot of breaches then.
• 2:04
  It's only gotten worse in the last 12 years.
• 2:07
  So we founded Cyberhoot.
• 2:08
  And you know, I can go into any of the details you want, but that's how I arrived here today.
• 2:14
  Okay, all right, Appreciate that backstory and a lot to unpack there.
• 2:18
  So you were a longtime veteran of the cybersecurity industry.
• 2:22
  Again, what is cissp by the way?
• 2:25
  It's I'm going to botch this, but I believe it's certified information system Security Professional.
• 2:31
  It's a mouthful.
• 2:32
  It's the default security certification, equivalent really to the bar exam or medicine exam.
• 2:40
  It's a four hour exam that measures what you know about cyber literacy and cybersecurity.
• 2:45
  Okay, so like you said, you were sub 25,000 and now there's 3 million.
• 2:50
  So you're certainly could be called, I guess, an OG of the cyber security world.
• 2:55
  I've never been called that, but I.
• 2:57
  Sure, if you say so.
• 2:59
  Okay, so.
• 3:00
  And you're working at a Fortune 500 company, you get fired, and then you decide to start this company.
• 3:06
  So I mean, when that happens, right?
• 3:08
  Was it?
• 3:09
  I know you mentioned there's some soul searching, like how did you land on the.
• 3:13
  The idea of it's time to start my own thing?
• 3:17
  Hey, let me tell you about Max Capital Hub.
• 3:21
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• 3:28
  They do business loans, business funding, and they'll actually help you clean up your credit so you qualify for more.
• 3:35
  They're not just handing you paperwork.
• 3:37
  Their team builds an actual strategy around your business.
• 3:42
  So if you've been stuck or the bank has told you no, give Max Capital Hub a call or book a free consultation@maxcapitalhub.com tell them I sent you.
• 3:55
  Well, if you find yourself in a career for 20 years.
• 3:59
  At the time, I had been doing cybersecurity for Fortune 500 companies, three different ones, for 20 years, and not really enjoying it as much as you'd want.
• 4:08
  The experiences were exceptional.
• 4:11
  I was exposed to all sorts of things.
• 4:14
  I traveled the world.
• 4:15
  I was building cybersecurity programs in far off countries and locally in the United States.
• 4:21
  And look, the experiences I wouldn't trade for the world for anything.
• 4:25
  But I was never my own boss.
• 4:27
  I was always building something for someone else.
• 4:29
  I was managing someone else's risk.
• 4:32
  And I wanted to build something for me.
• 4:35
  And my view about the world is a lot of community service.
• 4:39
  As a side note, for 12 years I've been riding in the Pan Mass Challenge as a cancer fundraiser and raised $150,000 for cancer research.
• 4:49
  So I feel very strongly and passionately about community service.
• 4:53
  And I thought the world needed a better answer to cybersecurity training, one that was founded in a multidisciplinary approach.
• 5:01
  So I had some confidence that I had a good idea.
• 5:04
  I was certain I didn't know all the things that I Needed to, to start a company, to run a company, to deal with, you know, personality issues and all the other stuff.
• 5:14
  But I had to say to myself, you know, Craig, you've been in leadership classes, you've been a public speaker, you've done a lot of things in your life.
• 5:22
  I think you know enough people to solve the problems as they come up or work through them yourself.
• 5:28
  So you should go for it.
• 5:29
  Even if you don't have all the answers, you don't need the answers.
• 5:32
  You just need to be confident you can find, find someone who can help you solve the answer.
• 5:37
  And so I jumped off that cliff and it's been the best, absolutely best thing I ever did in my professional career.
• 5:45
  Because working for yourself is amazing if you've got a viable company and it's profitable.
• 5:51
  There's been some days where I had to go into my deep reserves from my, you know, robbing my retirement account to fund the company.
• 6:00
  Before we had product market fit and we had no customers to make sure we survived.
• 6:07
  But we're past that now and couldn't be happier.
• 6:11
  Okay, all right, so like you said, you have this soul searching moment.
• 6:15
  You really decide you want to work for yourself, be your own boss.
• 6:18
  And you'd been in corporate for let's say 20 years or so.
• 6:21
  So what's the process like when you make that decision?
• 6:25
  Like what happens next?
• 6:26
  Well, you have to decide, are you going to do this full time?
• 6:29
  And I didn't.
• 6:30
  I actually took another job in a small msp, which let me be a part time CISO there and a part time developer of this solution, this LMS platform that we had.
• 6:43
  So all of us founders, we didn't jump in with deep pockets because we'd had an exit some other time and we could afford to just do nothing but this.
• 6:52
  We hedged our bets by having really full time day jobs and a lot of nights and weekends building the company for the first three to five years.
• 7:01
  That was a strategic decision I made.
• 7:03
  Also my wife was very certain she needed me to have an income she was working, but also I needed to bring bread for the table.
• 7:10
  So there was that part of it.
• 7:12
  And what was the other deciding moment?
• 7:14
  This, I guess maybe hubris that I thought I could make something.
• 7:20
  There was.
• 7:20
  There's no guarantee whenever you set out to start a company that it's going to solve a problem.
• 7:25
  And we're in a, we're in an industry, to be Honest, Dave, with 50 other competitors, so it's a very highly competitive industry.
• 7:32
  It's hard to stand out.
• 7:33
  We did take a multidisciplinary approach.
• 7:35
  We do have multi, you know, we have psychology and education and cybersecurity all wrapped up.
• 7:40
  I think the four co founders of Cyberhoot have like a hundred plus years of cybersecurity experience.
• 7:46
  So we got a lot of experience doing these things.
• 7:49
  What doesn't work informs what we do so that we can do things that do work.
• 7:54
  So yeah, not jumping in with both feet and having income from other sources was really key to succeeding here.
• 8:01
  Okay, all right.
• 8:03
  So you mentioned you had the day job for the first several years and now you have, you have three other co founders.
• 8:09
  So there's four co founders total, is that right?
• 8:10
  Correct.
• 8:11
  Okay.
• 8:11
  And so you also mentioned some like, some challenges finding product market fit.
• 8:16
  So like what was that like in terms of how the, how the product evolved from your original vision to what it is today?
• 8:24
  So originally we were jumping into an industry which had very deep ruts.
• 8:29
  You do this and you do that training with videos and you do phishing simulations by sending fake emails to the inbox.
• 8:38
  And that is very difficult, difficult to do with all the security filters that are out there.
• 8:42
  The barracudas and defenders and mimecasts of the world are blocking these phishing emails that are designed to test users if they'll click or not.
• 8:51
  And we tried that for a long time and it was difficult to support, difficult to implement.
• 8:57
  And we had an aha moment, a pivot moment, which was there has to be a better way, a better mousetrap for teaching people about the number one way any SMB or mid market company and smaller are breached today.
• 9:12
  This has been true for 20 years.
• 9:14
  Phishing emails with links to either malware or credential theft or session theft, session token theft are delivered via email.
• 9:21
  And we pivoted to something that came back to me from psychology.
• 9:26
  It was this idea that no punished behavior was ever extinguished.
• 9:31
  And that's what phishing typically does.
• 9:33
  It punishes users for clicks.
• 9:35
  Studies since then have shown that people who get fail a phishing test and are assigned some remedial training spend 10 seconds watching.
• 9:42
  If it's a video, they only watch for 10 seconds.
• 9:44
  So it's not accomplishing the outcome everybody wants, which is educated workforce who click less.
• 9:51
  But when you think about psychology for 75 years, operant conditioning, B.F.
• 9:55
  skinner, all his history of cybersecurity, of psychology, says rewarded behaviors are internalized and repeat it.
• 10:04
  And think of it an analogy like this.
• 10:06
  The cybersecurity industry was training dogs with shock collars when they Made a mistake, you zap the employee.
• 10:12
  And over time, if you think about what happens to a dog, they shut down, they stop participating, apathy grows, they don't want to, they hover in a corner and they're not learning anything.
• 10:23
  We decided to train dogs with treats or train humans with positive reinforcement, with gamification.
• 10:30
  The things that psychologists know encourage engagement, retention, behavior change, internalization.
• 10:38
  That's a very new approach that is unique to us.
• 10:41
  And we did that in a pivot moment.
• 10:44
  And that was critical to our survival, Dave, because that's what began the product market fit journey where people saw what we did and they go, oh yeah, this is like dog training.
• 10:54
  That makes perfect sense.
• 10:55
  Or someone else would go, oh my God, that's like parenting.
• 10:57
  You don't spank a child for a temper tantrum.
• 11:00
  You teach them to use their words or, you know, go down the list of analogies.
• 11:05
  Everywhere we look in the world, it shows that reinforcing good behaviors is better at outcomes than punishing bad behaviors.
• 11:12
  So that pivot was key and critical to our journey.
• 11:16
  And then having.
• 11:17
  I'm not a coder, so the two other co founders that are coding, they were able to build this magical machine that bring, brought that to life.
• 11:26
  And it's been a game changer for us.
• 11:29
  Okay, and what you're saying with the psychology principles makes perfect sense, but you're saying at this time, like I guess 12 years ago at this point, you're saying that type of like rewarding the right behavior did not exist
• 11:42
  within the industry.
• 11:43
  It barely exists today.
• 11:45
  Yeah, we're just now seeing some of our competitors pick up on this.
• 11:48
  The gamification, positive reinforcement, it was all focused.
• 11:52
  If you know of the.
• 11:53
  I don't want to throw names out there, but almost every major venture in this space, the biggest was bought by venture capital for $5.6 billion.
• 12:01
  We're really, really good at fake email phish testing.
• 12:04
  And they could give you 75 levers to pull and different scenarios to send out.
• 12:09
  But it was all prefaced on deception based emails delivered to the inboxes of end users who would either identify it as a phish and not click or click.
• 12:20
  And when they clicked, they failed.
• 12:21
  And they were forced to go through 30 minutes of video training.
• 12:25
  They didn't watch the videos, they didn't change the behaviors.
• 12:28
  That just led to greater and greater negativity in these companies.
• 12:31
  Negative emotional affect.
• 12:33
  It didn't change behaviors.
• 12:35
  But I'll say this, Dave.
• 12:37
  We took three or four years to make that pivot.
• 12:39
  We were trying we were building a platform that delivered video trainings, and the phishing was a second part of the component of the platform.
• 12:47
  We also did governance policies.
• 12:49
  So there was a whole bunch of things being built into our platform to build a robust cybersecurity program.
• 12:55
  And that pivot, that one pivot really helped us appeal to the mid market and S and B market and the MSP space.
• 13:03
  Okay, so prior to that pivot, right, when you're kind, you're trying these different things, you're a young company, you guys still have jobs, you have this vision, you're trying to get it right and things are not going right.
• 13:15
  I mean, was there, was there ever a point in time where you thought.
• 13:19
  About giving up when we were running out of money?
• 13:21
  Yeah, yeah, we did think about giving up because, you know, I went to my folks, my parents, and fortunately my dad was a dentist and they had some money and they said, well, Craig, you know what, if you
• 13:32
  need a loan of X amount of dollars, we could wait to give it to you when we're dead or we could give it to you now.
• 13:38
  So they gave me a little lifeline.
• 13:40
  I had already gone to my 401k, which was then a Roth IRA.
• 13:45
  I had converted it and I withdrew the principal, which you can do without penalty, to help fund the company.
• 13:51
  So there were some desperate times, right.
• 13:54
  Ultimately, I think what saved us was I had a consulting business as well, a virtual CISO consulting practice called, funnily enough, cyberhoot Professional Services.
• 14:05
  Cyberhoot, the product.
• 14:06
  They were two separate companies.
• 14:07
  We merged those because the consulting business was very successful and it was generating a lot of income.
• 14:13
  And we used the experiences of our virtual CISOs.
• 14:18
  This is going back 10 years now, and the breaches and the attacks they were seeing, that was a closed loop back feeding into our platform of video development for training videos.
• 14:28
  What topics do we need to cover?
• 14:30
  Well, what we were seeing in the field fed our content development, and then it also fed the development of the platform.
• 14:37
  So all the different components and features.
• 14:40
  And that marriage got us through.
• 14:42
  So it was really the combined effort of some personal income and a merging of our consulting practice, which at that time represented like 80% of our revenue.
• 14:52
  Now it's down to 20% of our revenue.
• 14:54
  It's reversed.
• 14:55
  Okay, all right, so you desperate times, like you said, you did what you had to do to survive.
• 15:00
  You kept going, even though it was very difficult, and then you decide to make that pivot.
• 15:05
  So when you make the pivot, what happens?
• 15:07
  Well, the story gets so much better when you're sitting down with an MSP and asking them, what's your biggest problem?
• 15:12
  Well, we have to protect our clients from breaches.
• 15:15
  They keep clicking on links, but our method of training them isn't working.
• 15:19
  And we go and say, does it sound a little bit like shop collars with a dog, your method of training?
• 15:25
  And they go, yeah, these emails and people get upset.
• 15:27
  We sent out an email at Christmas about a Christmas bonus, and we had two people quit the company because they were so mad they got fished with a Christmas.
• 15:36
  Last week, I was looking at Reddit and there was another, you know, day off email to a company, and the whole company erupted in chaos because it was a phishing test, not the overworked employees who all need a
• 15:49
  day off, get a day off because of the CEO said so everyone clicked on it, everyone failed, and everyone was Madden Hornets.
• 15:57
  Right.
• 15:57
  It's so easy to really get it wrong and upset your user base and teach nothing when you're doing these fake email phishing tests.
• 16:06
  And so what we did was we said, there is a better way.
• 16:11
  You don't have to upset your end users.
• 16:13
  You can actually get them to enjoy the training.
• 16:15
  Like, we have 90% positive thumbs up on our videos, which is not germane to the fishing, but fully 65 to 75% of people said that hoot fish exercise I did was fun.
• 16:29
  I actually learned how to fish instead of, you know, getting sent the same old, same old, or the really angry email about, you know, dress code changes or a day off or Christmas bonus.
• 16:41
  Okay.
• 16:42
  Wow.
• 16:43
  Wow, that sounds just cold.
• 16:44
  What, a Christmas bonus phishing test email?
• 16:48
  Yeah.
• 16:48
  Yeah.
• 16:49
  It's amazing what people can dream up.
• 16:51
  Yeah.
• 16:52
  Okay.
• 16:52
  All right, so then what, what was the response and, like, the impact on the company?
• 16:58
  Right, in terms of, like, you were struggling kind of barely just getting by as a company.
• 17:02
  Once you made the pivot, how did things change?
• 17:04
  Well, we started to form partnerships with different organizations out there as well.
• 17:08
  One was a major MSP provider across the United States.
• 17:11
  And that single partnership really helped us solidify our place.
• 17:15
  I would say within a year of that pivot, we became profitable.
• 17:19
  And it was small profitability, but it was profitable nonetheless.
• 17:23
  And it's been profitable every single year since then with, you know, a cager in the 50% range for five years now.
• 17:30
  It's really doing well.
• 17:31
  We're growing like hands, hands very, very well.
• 17:34
  Never as fast as you want.
• 17:35
  You want growth, like straight up.
• 17:37
  Right.
• 17:37
  But we're, we're growing at a healthy clip and people are getting the word is out there.
• 17:42
  You look at our G2 reviews, we're at 4.9 out of 5.
• 17:45
  So our customer base really loves us, what we do when they.
• 17:49
  When they get wind of it.
• 17:51
  But there's a.
• 17:52
  We are paddling upstream a little bit, Dave, in the sense that everyone's doing it one way and the water's flowing this against us, and we're like paddling like crazy, saying, there's a better way.
• 18:02
  Take a look at us, please.
• 18:04
  And it's a jump.
• 18:05
  It's a leap of faith for some IT providers or security professionals to say, what do you mean?
• 18:09
  There's like a $6 billion industry moving in that direction, and you want us to go this way?
• 18:14
  That's a tough sell sometimes.
• 18:15
  Right?
• 18:16
  But when they see it and when they get the feedback from their end users who actually say, I'm learning things here, this is great, it becomes an easier sell.
• 18:25
  So we give long trial periods or people can try it.
• 18:28
  That's also another trick, because it was not a trick.
• 18:31
  It's.
• 18:31
  It's a.
• 18:32
  It's a healthy way to win new business.
• 18:35
  So it's been really quite enjoyable since that pivot, both for our customers, our resellers, and cyberhoot as well, the end users and cyberhoot.
• 18:45
  Okay.
• 18:46
  All right.
• 18:46
  And throughout that whole process, what's been the hardest part for you?
• 18:49
  Well, you know, with four co founders and our decision tree is we all have to agree or the majority have to agree many times even.
• 18:59
  Well, the pivot was self evident.
• 19:01
  But there are other development decisions within our platform where, you know, two people want to go this way and do it, and two people want to go that way and do it, and we're like debating the same topic
• 19:11
  on a call for an hour, and we're like, we don't have this kind of time.
• 19:14
  We got to make a decision.
• 19:16
  But I think we should go this way.
• 19:17
  No, I think we should go that way.
• 19:18
  So understanding communications and finding common ground and guess leadership of a sort is difficult where you have three or four strong leaders in a company and all.
• 19:31
  Who all have a vested interest in succeeding and also want to do it in different directions sometimes.
• 19:38
  Right.
• 19:38
  So what's the next big feature we're going to develop?
• 19:41
  There's four opinions on it, and we have to come to an agreement.
• 19:45
  That's been a hard thing in the past.
• 19:47
  Now we're pretty good at it.
• 19:49
  We have a really good system.
• 19:50
  We understand where people's roles are, definitions.
• 19:54
  We rarely have that extended debate over things.
• 19:57
  We sometimes call it timeout and we'll come back to it.
• 20:00
  But that was hard.
• 20:01
  Is learning how to communicate.
• 20:03
  Oh, and by the way, Dave, we're 100% remote company, which many investors won't touch us from an investment perspective because they want people in the same room.
• 20:12
  The synergies of all of that.
• 20:14
  We get on zoom calls every day, multiple times a day with each other, but we're in four different states.
• 20:20
  The co founders.
• 20:21
  Wow.
• 20:22
  Okay, so a hundred percent remote company.
• 20:25
  Yep.
• 20:25
  And you've been in business 12 years and like you said, cash flow positive for.
• 20:29
  For six plus years now.
• 20:31
  Yeah, since COVID Okay.
• 20:33
  And what like where's.
• 20:35
  What's next for cyberhoot?
• 20:37
  Well, we keep brainstorming new ideas and doing new things.
• 20:41
  We're growing partnerships, we're growing our footprint.
• 20:44
  We added 17 languages for our videos and our training modules in the last year.
• 20:49
  So we can do we sell internationally now, all over the world, primarily through MSPs Managed Service Providers because they're a force multiplier.
• 20:56
  They bring our product to bear and it helps them with retention.
• 21:00
  One of the nicest parts of our feature versus some of the other tools is that when you're tricking people, you're eliminating or reducing goodwill and value from the MSP to their clients and their employees.
• 21:13
  So retention can suffer a little bit.
• 21:15
  We noticed with cyber who with the positive reinforcement relationship and the gamification and the enjoyment people get out of actually learning cybersecurity skills, we improve retention.
• 21:26
  So I think it's more of the same.
• 21:29
  We're looking.
• 21:29
  We added leaderboards recently, Dave, and so we're just constantly adding new features.
• 21:34
  The leaderboards was really interesting because we've traditionally had difficulty getting our C level employees like the CEO, cto, cfo, doing their training, their cyber literacy training, they're all overwhelmed with email and busy and why do I have to
• 21:49
  do this?
• 21:49
  I'm smart.
• 21:49
  I won't click right.
• 21:51
  They don't think they're.
• 21:51
  They think they're immune to it, which they're not.
• 21:54
  They've been every incident I've been a part of and incident response through our v sisos has led usually down the path to someone senior clicking on things or doing things they shouldn't.
• 22:04
  So they really did need to do it.
• 22:05
  But this leaderboard, it's an anonymous leaderboard where you see your rank in the company of 20 people or 50 people or a hundred people.
• 22:13
  And the leadership would see themselves sitting at dead last and they'd be afraid people would find out somehow.
• 22:19
  And so they started doing their training and when they did their training, they realized it wasn't so bad, it was kind of fun and enjoyable.
• 22:26
  So they get further behind the tool and make people do the tool and they'd offer prizes for the high compliant individuals and further gamify it when they got engaged.
• 22:36
  Right.
• 22:37
  So the leaderboard was our singles best iteration.
• 22:40
  We didn't expect that, but it was quite amazing.
• 22:42
  So where we're going is adding more of those gamifications, more psychology behind it.
• 22:47
  We're looking at an assessment module coming up.
• 22:49
  We've got all sorts of great features and products and partnerships.
• 22:53
  We want to keep, keep, keep building and keep growing.
• 22:57
  We're not really interested in selling.
• 22:59
  We're still of a size where, you know, the multiples wouldn't make sense for us to try and exit the business.
• 23:05
  But we are absolutely a hundred percent beyond like our bhag, if you want to know if you know, big hairy, audacious goal is to train a billion people.
• 23:15
  That's a, that's a big ass.
• 23:16
  We're nowhere near that.
• 23:17
  So we really want to, we really want it because we believe in the approach.
• 23:21
  We believe we've got a better mousetrap for training people.
• 23:24
  And the world's just getting more and more dangerous with AI and so many other attacks going on.
• 23:30
  It's, it's never been, unfortunately it's never been more important to do human firewall building.
• 23:36
  Right.
• 23:36
  Build up the skills within your user base.
• 23:38
  Okay.
• 23:39
  All right.
• 23:39
  And Craig, when you look back at the whole journey, right from starting in this industry so early, 20 years in corporate, losing your job, having this epiphany.
• 23:48
  Good.
• 23:48
  Taking the risk, starting the company, persevering through the hard times and now growing it to where you are and having all these exciting initiatives on the horizon.
• 23:57
  Looking back at the whole journey, what's been the best part of it for you?
• 24:00
  Well, the freedom to run my life and to build a company the way I, the co founders and I thought we should run it.
• 24:08
  Right.
• 24:08
  We were asked to do a lot of things in our corporate jobs that we wouldn't otherwise like to do.
• 24:14
  Right.
• 24:15
  In corporate America there's a disproportionate amount of revenue.
• 24:19
  Profitability goes to the elite leadership of companies, large multinational companies and the folks in the mid, management and below are asked to do more and more, year after year for less.
• 24:30
  We I worked at a company where I got no raise for five years but the bonuses were all handed out at the top of the company.
• 24:38
  It's very dissatisfying.
• 24:40
  It was dismotivate you know, I wasn't motivated to do my very best.
• 24:44
  I did.
• 24:45
  But you know, it's one of those things where when you can be the top dog in a company, I'm the CEO here, we can have things that reward engagement, that reward employees, that follow even our own principle of
• 24:56
  positive reinforcement of good behavior.
• 24:58
  So we can build a company that fits our guess, our gestalt or our view of big picture of the world and build it the way we want it to be run, which we think is much better than corporate
• 25:10
  America, if I'm being honest.
• 25:11
  So being your own boss and all that is true, but let me give a little healthy dose of before you hear this and you go, oh, I'm going to do that.
• 25:19
  Right.
• 25:19
  If you.
• 25:20
  I asked the AI this the other day.
• 25:21
  I said, okay, Cyberhoo's been around for over a decade, 12 years.
• 25:25
  What percentage of companies that are startups last 10 years have profitability at year six, continue into year 10 or 11 or 12 and have these metrics in terms of LTV, customer retention, all that stuff.
• 25:40
  We're in a 1% group, right.
• 25:43
  1% of companies get to where we are.
• 25:45
  That's a very small percentage.
• 25:47
  You're more likely to get struck by lightning maybe, I don't know, maybe not.
• 25:50
  Probably not.
• 25:51
  But the reality is this is not something that I think we had a lot of luck.
• 25:56
  We had a lot of hard work.
• 25:58
  We had a lot of lucky bounces and breaks.
• 26:00
  We had some, fortunately, some backing from family and some other things.
• 26:04
  So, you know, it's not for the faint of heart, I guess, is what I'm saying.
• 26:08
  Okay.
• 26:09
  Yeah.
• 26:09
  Appreciate the honesty.
• 26:10
  And that's what this channel is all about.
• 26:12
  And we certainly appreciate you telling us your story and how you made it through some of those times and kind of, I guess how exciting it is on the other side of that, when you really persevere and you
• 26:22
  get to this stage of the company.
• 26:23
  Thank you.
• 26:24
  Yes, yes.
• 26:24
  It is rewarding if you can succeed.
• 26:26
  Okay.
• 26:27
  All right.
• 26:28
  And Craig, if people want to find out more about Cyberhoot, what's the best way people can find you online?
• 26:33
  Well, you go to cyberhoot.com I will share this.
• 26:36
  There's a couple of benefits that we have for wonderful folks like you, Dave, running a great podcast like Beyond Fulfillment.
• 26:43
  If you register for a free trial, you get a 30 day window for that free trial with Cyberhoot.
• 26:49
  At Cyberhoot.com, we'll give you 20% off if you use the referral code.
• 26:53
  Beyond.
• 26:54
  The other thing is if you just want to boost your own personal cyber literacy, we give our product away for free cyberhoot.com individuals.
• 27:03
  And if you just want to email us for more information or to book a demo, you can go to salesyberhoot.com, just email salesyberhoot.com and someone will reach back out to you.
• 27:14
  Okay.
• 27:14
  All right.
• 27:15
  We will link all that in the show notes for everyone.
• 27:18
  All right.
• 27:18
  Well, Craig, thank you so much for taking the time to be here and sharing all this incredible wisdom from your journey with our listeners.
• 27:24
  We greatly appreciate it, Dave.
• 27:25
  It was my pleasure.
• 27:26
  Thank you for having me.