Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / 121: Theo Nasser, CEO at Right-Hand cybersecurity, on ditching corporate sales life and starting a cybersecurity company

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121: Theo Nasser, CEO at Right-Hand cybersecurity, on ditching corporate sales life and starting a cybersecurity company · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: Before we get into today's topic, I have one favor to ask of you.
• 0:37
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• 0:54
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• 1:06
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• 1:17
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• 1:20
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• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Sales Bluebird provides tips, tricks, experiences, examples, and ideas from people who've been doing this for many years at many companies.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: I am your host, Andrew Monahan, and our guest today is Theo Nasser, the CEO at Right Hand Cybersecurity.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: Theo, welcome to the podcast.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for having me, Andrew.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Looking forward to this because it's it's a really interesting story that we're going to be talking about today is how you've how you made a change in your work life and done something I think that many of us wish we could or or did do.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm interested to hear about your journey along the way the last kind of decade or so.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Before we get into that though, I do want to say to listeners, I'm now at the point with the podcast on taking sponsors.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: I've got the first sponsor coming, I think next week or the week after.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: If you're looking to reach cybersecurity sellers, sales teams, sales leaders, this is a great way to do that.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're interested in finding out more, if you go to salesbluebird.com, look on the top menu, there's an option there that says sponsors, and in there will be a whole bunch of details, and then you can always reach out to me or click to find out more, and we can talk from there.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: So salesblue bird.com and then sponsors at the top.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: Theo, back to you.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: So before we get into professional life, six questions to get to know the real you.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: These are very quick answers.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: There's no debates, or it depends, or maybes, or or let's talk about it for five minutes.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: These are very quick ones to get to know the real Theo.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: So, first one is dive bar or a cocktail bar?
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: Dive bar.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: Sweet of the four seasons or cabin in the woods?
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: Sweet of the four seasons.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: Trip that Jeep or German car with all the gadgets?
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: Jeep.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: Beach or mountains?
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: Beach.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: They say home is where the heart is.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: Where is home for you?
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: Home is now in Scottsdale, Arizona.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: And is that where you're from?
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: Is that where you grew up?
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: I'm from the Bay Area in California.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: I've bounced around a lot over the last 10 years, but over the last year plus now it's been Scottsdale, Arizona, and I plan to plan to be here for a while.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: Nice.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: And how did you first make money as a kid?
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: My first job as a kid, I was a coach.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: I was a tennis and a swim coach.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: I've always had a love for sports, dating back to playing them when I was really young, and sports had had run in the family with both my mother and my father's side.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: So I was exposed to sports really early.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: And so the first way I started making money was I was a kid's tennis and swim coach.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: I probably wasn't much better at tennis or swimming than the people I was coaching.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: I definitely wasn't much older, but that was my my first job.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: It started in middle school.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: And these parents trusted you with their kids in the swimming pool?
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: They did.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: They did.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: I was kind of like a junior coach.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, there was a much more senior coach that was running the camp, the summer camp I was at, but I was helping as much as I could.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: Very good.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: Looking at your work life, I mean I looked at your LinkedIn profile.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: It looks like you started off in cybersecurity about eight years ago or so with FireEye.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: What uh what led you to FireEye and what were you doing there?
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: I I actually first started, Andrew, with FireEye as an intern.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: I was a student at Santa Clara University, and I went to a career fair.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: And FireEye's headquarters was in Molpitas, just in the backyard of Santa Clara.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so they had a booth at this career fair.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: I had never heard of FireEye.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: I knew nothing about cybersecurity as a marketing major.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: And spoke to them.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I still remember the individual I spoke with.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: He was a recruiter on the FireEye team.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: He made a very compelling business case around why cybersecurity was a great industry to start in and why uh FireEye was a great company to join.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: And he was right about both of those things.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: Fast forward a couple of weeks through the interview process.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: I ended up getting an offer to join as a sales development representative intern.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: It was five, this was FireEye's first intern class.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: So annually they had done a like an internship program that they established.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I was part of that first internship class that they had for an entire summer.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: It was fantastic.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: And that's how I started with FireEye.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: And after the end of the internship, I joined full-time.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: So on the pecking order in sales, an intern as an SDR is kind of it really is the starting point, right?
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: It is, it is.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: But I, you know, even to this day, what I had learned in that internship, I still practice as CEO.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: I joke with my friends, or like my friends will ask me, what's it like to be a CEO?
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, well, you actually sell, you you spell CEO as SDR, you know, especially at an early stage startup.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: I still do a lot of the same things, and I have done a lot of the same things as a CEO as I did as an SDR.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: I make cold calls, I do outreach, I prospect, I have the discipline to take what I had learned those many years ago and still uh apply them to my practice and my my routine today.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: But it was a proper intern program, right?
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: They were educating you, they were you you learn a lot in the process.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I had to learn the entire process.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: I I didn't know what sales development was.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: It was my this was my first corporate job.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: So my my first, you know, work work for an organization and I had a manager, I had a mentor, I went through a sales boot camp.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: I had to learn about cybersecurity as an industry, learn about the products I was selling, what was my ICP, who was I selling to, what do they care about, you know, all the basics.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: And at that time, was Fire public or or not yet?
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: This, when I was an intern, they were in the process of going public.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: So they had not yet gone public.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: And during that internship, or shortly right after, during my transition, is right when they were going public.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: So if I remember rightly, that's when Dave DeWalt was the CEO.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: They'd just gone through a whole bunch of hiring right before the IPO.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: It was almost like the hedge to make sure they got the sales capacity to hit the numbers afterwards.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: It must be an exciting time to be there.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: Dave was leading the company.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: It was this massive growth trajectory.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: The company was growing wildly.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: I remember during my internship, I think the first intern class was like 30 or 40 people across all different business units.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, they'd have events where we would go out as an intern group and you'd have your mentor.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so there were these internship events with over a hundred people.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: You'd have a showcase, almost like a science fair where you got to showcase your project of what you worked on throughout your internship, and the whole company would be invited in the cafeteria.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: It was a uh it was a really, really fun time.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it sounds it, yeah.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: And and what happened after being SDR?
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: So after after the internship, I joined full-time, and and the role I actually took with them was not as a full-time SDR, interestingly.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: I, you know, I spent a lot of time during my internship just trying to learn as much as I could about the business, learn as much as I could about cybersecurity.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: I spent a lot of time just asking people questions, understanding how this whole engine really worked and how everything as a business moved forward.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I gravitated towards the managed defense business unit.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: It was FireEye, you know, they had this acquisition of Mandiant at the time and bringing together the services business and the traditional FireEye product business.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: They had brought those two together to provide a subscription service where they managed the FireEye products and uh on a customer's behalf to do real-time and 24-7 advanced threat detection and response.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so I was really interested in that business unit.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: So I actually joined that team full-time.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: And it was based in Milpitas at the headquarters at first.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: But like you said, it was during this rapid ascension and growth period at FireEye.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: And so they they very quickly wanted to scale that business unit internationally.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so they ended up wanting to grow that business in Singapore and in Tokyo and in Australia, and they were looking for people to relocate from the US headquarters to those regions.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so the timing was was really interesting.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: I ended up raising my hand for a relocation, and after going through uh an internal sourcing and interview process uh a couple weeks later, I was packing my bags.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: You probably couldn't have believed your luck.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: You end up at this place that's just on literally on fire, just growing like crazy, opportunities to grow quickly in a career all over the place, and then you end up in Singapore.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: Well, what a trip.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: It was there was definitely a lot of luck involved.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: Timing was definitely on my side, and of course, just the I wouldn't necessarily call the success of the company luck.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: We had a lot of really talented leadership and people who just knew what they were doing and scaling a global business.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so I my fit in all of that was definitely lucky.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and it's definitely exciting, but very challenging as well when things are growing that fast because infrastructure doesn't usually keep up and there's a lot of things to be working on that need to be fixed at any point in time.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: So, what were you doing for the business in APAC then?
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: We we were essentially taking this US template of Fire Eye Manage Defense, that business unit I described, and our job was to replicate it in Singapore first.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: So when I had relocated to Singapore, what I had signed up for was a six-month relocation.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: I was planning to be there for six months to spin up, manage defense, and build a security operations center in Singapore, uh, which we did.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: And after those six months, at about the four or five month mark, I quickly realized this probably wasn't going to be a six-month gig.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: Ended up staying in Singapore a little bit longer.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: And when that project officially wrapped up, the company wanted to continue its Asia Pacific expansion and basically duplicate what we did in Singapore in Australia.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: And then after doing it in Australia, they wanted to do it in Tokyo.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: So a six-month project turned into a four-year project where I was bouncing around Asia Pacific for four years, helping them spin up security operations centers.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: And was it during this time that you first started getting the inkling that there was something needed with right hand and you needed to think about starting your own thing as well?
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: There were kind of a lot of things going through my mind during this period.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I always looked at my time at FireEyes almost like entrepreneurship for dummies, entrepreneurship light.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, I had everything teed up for me.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: I had an incredible team that I could leverage.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_01: I had templates of how this business model needed to grow and expand in the US, a management and mentorship team that really helped me along the entire journey.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: But in an essence, what we were doing, we were spinning up small business units in each of these markets.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: So it was a taste of entrepreneurship every single time we built one of these security operations centers and all that that business entailed in each of these markets.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: And then, in regards to the nature of this business, when we would do this advanced threat detection and response, we would do investigations into security incidents and breaches that were happening for our clients.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: And what we traditionally found is that a lot of those incidents, when you looked at the root cause of why it took place, it traced back to human error, it traced back to uh an employee making a mistake.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so that that definitely was an idea that was planted in my mind at the time around, well, if you know, we're so focused around creating perimeter defenses to stop the adversary from coming into an environment, maybe a little bit more attention also needs to be focused on risks and threats that can permeate from the inside with employee risk.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: But you did with something which most of us don't do, which is you take a dream, an idea, a thought, uh God, I should really, I would really, I wish I could into reality.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: How did that come around?
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: Well, with uh a lot of debate, um, both with with myself and and with my wife at the time, just trying to understand starting a company is something that I had always wanted to do, and something that we had always wanted to do, just her and I, just from a one-team support system perspective.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: And it just came down to what were we gonna do, who were we gonna do it with, and where were we gonna do it.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: And it kind of got to this point where I felt confident between the network I had accumulated combined with the problem that I had identified, that I felt like it was the right time to take that plunge.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: Now, having said that, there's more to the story.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_01: My wife and I were expecting our first child.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: We were living in Singapore as Americans, so we were expats overseas.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: And obviously, with starting a business, there's a ton of financial risk.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_01: There's a there's just a ton of risk top to bottom in doing that.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_01: And so I what I did is I just asked myself if if I wanted to take this plunge and I wanted to pursue entrepreneurship, what can I do to de-risk the entire situation as much as possible?
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: I'm never going to eliminate the risk, but how can I just try to manage it as much as possible?
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: And as a first-time founder, the the big thing that was just staring me in the face was the fact that I'd never really started a business before.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_01: I had had these experiences with FireEye that helped me in a lot of ways, absolutely, still help me today, but it's different when you kind of venture off on your own.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so what I did was I actually joined an accelerator program.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: I joined an incubator in Asia called Entrepreneur First.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: They essentially identify and build these cohorts every year of aspiring entrepreneur, uh, entrepreneurs, people who want to start their own business, but don't necessarily have the experience of doing it before.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: And they help guide you and put you through these workshops, they connect you with a co-founder.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: So when I had heard about that, it seemed like a great opportunity for me to de-risk some of these things that I'd identified around being a first-time founder to hopefully ease the journey a little bit.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: So that's what I that's what I did.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: So in a in a situation where you didn't have the experience, the accelerator kind of, I don't know if it gives you the um the training wheels a little bit or at least the support structure, is that right?
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: To to the mentorship to know what to do next.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's a great, it's a good way to, I think that's an accurate way to describe it.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you it was still wildly difficult, but I was surrounded with a community of like-minded people who were going through this process of leaving their jobs to start a company.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: And so that was definitely reassuring and comforting and also gave me confidence seeing these other people succeed.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, this cohort and this program will bring in all of their alumni who had successfully done what I was doing months and years before me to share their best practices.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: So having that community, that ecosystem, it was huge.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: It definitely helped.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: So you you leave the security of the job, you you you go to the accelerator, you've got the idea for the business, is that right?
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: You kind of had an idea, this is the sort of thing I want to do, but you didn't have the co-founder.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: So, how did the how did you manage to figure out who in that big group would be the right person to be the co-founder with you?
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, so the the dynamic of this accelerator is interesting.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if you look at Y Combinator, one of the most well-known, especially in the US, one of the most well-known incubators for for startups, typically teams will enter into YCOM together.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: They'll enter as a team with a business plan, a pitch, maybe even an MVP or customers at different stages of their company's maturity cycle.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: With the accelerator that I joined, they're known to have aspiring entrepreneurs join pre-product, pre-company, and most of the time pre-team, meaning you join as a single aspiring entrepreneur who hasn't yet found their co-founder.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, let's say there's a hundred people in a cohort, you've got 50 people that they bring in that have more of the commercial and business background, 50 people that they'll bring in more with the engineering and technical background.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: And the idea is that you almost do this speed dating experience over the first couple of weeks.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's a six-month program, but you you do this speed dating experience in the beginning to identify someone who compliments you.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, at the end of this program, you know, there's a hundred people that go in, and by the end, there's only about 10 teams or 20 people that actually graduate and you know get funding and get to propel the business forward.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, the best analogy I would give to that whole process of finding a co-founder, it's this mix of the bachelor and the hunger games.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: Because on the one hand, you want to be extremely desirable, right?
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: You want someone to want to work with you.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: You want to showcase your diligence and your intelligence and your ability to build a successful company.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: But at the same time, you know that you're competing with, as someone more on the business and commercial side.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: I've got 49 others that are probably targeting those same future CTOs that I'm targeting, right?
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's very competitive as well.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, you end up forging these great relationships with these people in your cohort, all 100 of these people, everyone, you know, really became close because you're kind of in the trenches together.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: But at the same time, it is competitive.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_01: But it it worked out for me in the sense that I found an incredible co-founder who's there.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you spend so much time with the co-founder, it's wildly important for any entrepreneur to find the right one.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_01: The the question that I really asked myself in the process was do I see myself spending 10 years with this person, you know, potentially up to 10 years, maybe more, with this person, building a global and you know, a successful business.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_01: And if the answer to that question, if I has if you hesitate at all, it's not the right person.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_01: So you want to make sure you have that confidence and conviction in who you start a business with.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: What a process.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: It sounds like it's challenging and fun and exciting all at the same time, but you know, you realize there's a lot at stake, right?
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: You want to make sure you get the right person.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: But then you get the right person, and then what happens?
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: Is it you straight into build mode trying to get the MVP ready, or is there steps before that that you work on?
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I I used to think, I mean, even as early as going into this program, again, as a first-time founder, I always thought entrepreneurship, Andrew, was this brilliant group of people that had these incredible ideas.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_01: But what I had realized, and what this incubator had taught me, and what I just have realized now during our two-plus year journey of right hand, is that entrepreneurship is just around being immensely curious and listening to people and identifying a very specific problem that you want to solve and talking to as many people who face that problem and understanding the intricacies of those problems.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_01: And from there, what you realize as an entrepreneur is a lot of the solutions present themselves from those conversations.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think entrepreneurship is just about a brilliant person having a brilliant idea, because that's I wouldn't say that's me by any means.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: I am immensely curious.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: I do ask a lot of questions and I spend a ton of time with customers.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I think what I had learned was the most important thing in that process is just having an open mind and you know, allowing your vision of a company to form and adapt based on the needs of the market.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: So my curiosity takes over at this point then.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: So uh you're going through the process, you're asking questions of your target market.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: Let me let me say, I mean, I you obviously not the first company ever to uh attack the human side or the the employee element of protecting your environment.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: There's security awareness training out there, there's all sorts of you know anti phishing or or phishing type experiments or or exercises.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: What did you learn that said, yeah, I've got we've got a different way to approach this that could be really valuable?
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the the security awareness industry is it's interesting because you know, if you look at it today in a lot of ways, you've got a situation where a security team needs, for whether it's compliance purposes or some type of requirement or or regulation, they need to deploy some type of awareness or training to an organization, to a workforce.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: But in so many ways, that workforce, nowhere in their job description does it describe anything about security, right?
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_01: You've got 0.1% of a company that really has a job description around security.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_01: You've got sales folks and marketing folks and human resources and recruiters, these people don't have a security background.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so what we're trying to do in our industry is in so many ways, force feed content and you know, hour-long training modules and educational resources to these people that simply don't want to consume them in so many ways.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so, what we had realized is you know the importance of truly building something employee-friendly.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: How can we change this narrative and eliminate this friction of security awareness to your everyday employee and building something truly employee-friendly, something that employees will enjoy, something that won't interfere with their day-to-day operations.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: So, what we do at right hand using this model is we provide very short, bite-sized, gamified, and adaptive training to users based in the moments when they need it the most.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_01: So the best analogy I like to give is you know, imagine that you are on a diet and you're trying to improve your personal physical fitness or your health.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: And you walk into your kitchen and you reach the top shelf to grab a cookie.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: Now, as you're in that motion of that behavior, taking that action of reaching for that cookie, you immediately get this nudge.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_01: Something that says, hey, instead of grabbing and reaching for that cookie, here's a couple other alternatives of something else that you can eat.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: It just kind of gives you that nudge in the moment of your behavior, of the action you're taking, of an alternative, something that might be better for you to do, right?
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: Directing you to that to that apple as an example.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: Now, what we do at right hand, it's a similar concept.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's just like a real-time nudge in the moment of a behavior that's being taken, trying to push and nudge somebody towards a more security savvy and security hygienic behavior rather than one that could potentially inflict risk to themselves or the organization.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: So it seems a more modern approach, right?
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: If I if I think about, you know, I've worked at some of the biggest and most well-known cybersecurity companies, and the cybersecurity training you have to go through is awful.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: And it's it, as you say, it is the one-hour, two-hour long click-through with little cartoon figures and just gas because you want to get through it, right?
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's just whatever I don't want to have to listen to all this stuff.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I can't believe that anyone learns much from that.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: It was always my impression.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: It was always, you know, it's some sort of regulatory thing that they had to put us through.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: So you're taking away that approach and making it a much more modern and just in time way of encouraging the right behavior from employees rather than just training at them.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: Is that a good way for me to think about it?
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's right.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's it we're trying to pivot away from a check-of-the-box behavior where you know people will just go through the motions and pivot more towards something that will instill long-lasting behavior change, something that's not gonna necessarily interfere with the very long period of time in someone's day.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: We don't want to interfere with their day jobs.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_01: We just want to train them what they need to know when they need to know it.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_00: And in that process then of getting to an idea of what the product's gonna look like, what would you look back on and say, that was a key moment that I was really surprised about, or wasn't really expecting to get that sort of feedback or that sort of direction from either from your co-founder or maybe from uh from potential clients?
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we we've got a very open relationship with all of our customers just at this early stage.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_01: Like I personally have a relationship with every customer we have, and my co-founder is the same way.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so, I mean, throughout that journey, the very early journey, right?
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_01: We're coming out of this accelerator a couple of years ago, from that point when we're just building out an MVP and we have a couple design customers that are you know helping us through those early motions of building out a product to even today, where you know, we we've got something that is being used by enterprises and universities and organizations across Asia Pacific and the United States, uh, even today, like we we have those open lines of communications with our customers because it kind of goes back to that concept of you know, an entrepreneur, I think at least the most successful ones that that I've had the opportunity to learn from or listen to, right?
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's just a constant evolution of learning and adapting.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so we've changed our product.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_01: Like we've thought we've had something right, and the more that we've tested it with customers and collected feedback, we've realized that there are things that we absolutely need to change and improve on.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so we're we still go through these iterative processes today, even though we we've got something that you know has scaled to organizations and into the enterprise.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_00: Is there an example recently that springs to mind when you think about that?
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_01: When you look at what we do, right, it comes down, one of the main things is delivery, right?
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: So I talked about these real-time nudges.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: Our philosophy that has become at right hand, you know, nudge or train the user wherever they prefer to work.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, in our early stages of our product, we we had done those nudges just via email communications, right?
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_01: Someone just gets a direct email saying, hey, um, we want to train you or nudge you based on this one specific thing.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: It goes to their inbox.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_01: But what if the user wasn't didn't have their email open?
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's not really in the moment if they're not on their email.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_01: So what we've continuously built is you know, train the user based on where they prefer to work.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_01: And and you know, this includes building a mobile app, which we've launched, a cybersecurity awareness mobile app that our employees can download if they choose to, right?
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_01: If they prefer a web interface, we have that, and and we've adapted to building a mobile interface.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_01: Integrations with communication networks, Slack, right?
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: If people operate on Slack, building communications and nudges there.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, this is an example of the type of iteration that you you know you can go through as an entrepreneur, but you arrive at those conclusions so much faster the closer you are with your customers.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's uh so compelling when you do it that way around.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_00: And along the way, you move back to the US, right?
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: You move from Singapore back to the US.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I would imagine you're you're starting to think about you go to market motion and and the sales team.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_00: At what point does that come in?
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: Well, coming from a sales background, I I our approach, my approach, was I wanted to, once we had a product that was you know ready for market, I wanted to get in the trenches myself.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I joked at the beginning, you know, you spell CEO as S D R.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: I made cold calls and I, you know, I I've built sales playbooks before and other roles, and our playbook at right hand has leveraged learnings from those previous experiences, but there's been a lot of nuances and change changes that we've had to develop into our sales playbook.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: But I built the sales playbook based on doing it myself.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, everything that we articulate in our sales playbook from what you would consider an SDR function with the top of funnel lead generation, outreach, prospecting, identifying your ICP, the messaging and outreach, all the way through running an entire sales cycle through closure.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_01: I still live that very much myself.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, especially in the early days before we had anyone on our sales team, I learned on the job and you know, documented my learnings into a playbook.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_00: How did you know you were ready to hire salespeople?
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_01: Once you start finding that your playbook is repeatable, meaning you know, what you're doing from a prospecting perspective is working and working and working again and again with different clients.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_01: Once you're able to identify trends, right, whether that be your ICP and you know that you've got a very specific group of customers that you target in a specific industry or a specific size or specific title, like you know, profile of person that you want to sell to within the security team.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_01: Once you are able to actually run through multiple iterations and wins and probably more importantly, learn from your losses and derive trends from your losses.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_01: That is the point where we started to feel this is repeatable.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_01: And once you have something that is repeatable, it makes it a lot easier to onboard somebody.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's it's hard to put the expectation on someone else to say, hey, go figure it out.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_01: If you're not willing to do it as a founder, how do you expect someone else to?
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so that was that was the approach that I took with figuring it out, and and then once we we did, start to hire.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: In talking with sales leaders at cybersecurity companies right now, one of the biggest challenges that everyone has is attracting and keeping great sales talent.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_00: As you think back to as you brought on the first few hires at right hand, any tips for someone going through that process right now?
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, when we were doing our first hiring, we we didn't hire salespeople first.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_01: Our first hires were engineers to help us build and establish our product.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember hiring, whether it was those early engineers or the early people on our go-to market team, you know, you're you're hiring for a brand that is relatively unknown.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_01: You're you're hiring basically on a vision, right?
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_01: And you're you're selling the mission of what you want to do and the vision of what you want to ultimately, the potential you want to unlock.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so any type of advice I would give to an entrepreneur, a founder looking to hire their first members of their team, whether really whether it's sales or any role, my advice would be to build in public.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: And you know that that of course assumes you're not in stealth because you can't if you're in stealth.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_01: But if you're able to build in public, because I think a lot of people that join early stage startups join for the mission, they join for the vision, they join to be paired with the founders, right?
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_01: If if you're if you're an early member of a team, you work directly with the CEO or the CTO and the founding members of that company.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you're an entrepreneur trying to find those people, if you can build in public and you know, use any of the platforms that are available to all of us today, like LinkedIn, you know, by building in public, you can basically publicize your culture, you can publicize your momentum, you can publicize your mission.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I think people become attracted to that.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_01: And it almost creates this concept of wow, I I would love to be part of something like that.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_01: And and I don't think that this is a tip, Andrew, I should clarify it, you know, for someone trying to hire someone right now.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_01: This is probably a tip to build you know a team over the course of multiple months and really years, right?
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_01: But by building in public, I think people can become attracted to that and you can lure in some great talent that way.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_00: So for people that follow you, they can follow the journey and see the sort of humans that are involved and and the vision that's going on.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: And over time, you know, the right people will be attracted to that.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_00: By right people, I mean the people that you want to be attracted will be attracted, and therefore there'll be hand raisers saying, Yeah, I'm kind of interested in chatting to you guys if I join it.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_01: I believe that.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, just think of how many people I mean, I'm I'm a very avid LinkedIn user.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_01: There are countless people that I I follow and have followed for years, even before my time at right hand, where I've, you know, you think to yourself, you're like, wow, that I mean, that just sounds so fun.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_01: Like what a journey.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_01: Like, think about just the learning curve that that person or that team must be on right now.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_01: And what an exciting win that they're publicly celebrating and acknowledging the people that helped them achieve that goal or that that win.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_01: I do believe there's an element, whether it's subconscious or something that people act on.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's an element of people that would want to join something like that, but they'd never know if you don't publicize it.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_00: I love that a lot.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: So it seems like, you know, looking at from the outside, you're on a heck of a journey.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: You've accomplished so much in the last couple of years.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_00: You get the first team members on board, first clients on board, first customers on board.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_00: Seems like the future is looking pretty bright for right-hand security right now.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_01: We hope so.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_01: We're, I mean, we've got a we've got a great team.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we've got a great set of investors that believe in what we're doing and and see the value in what we're doing and what we're trying to disrupt.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_01: Our customers, many of them who have been with us from the very, you know, very early days, still with us today and and believe in what we're building, and we do everything we can to always accommodate and listen and and truly care about the problems that they're facing so we can more effectively solve them.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_01: So I think if we continue to do those things, our trajectory should continue to be positive.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, we're we're having a lot of fun building right hand.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_00: And for anyone listening to this, Theo, that that's interested in reaching out and and chatting to you, what's the best way for them to do that?
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_01: Well, LinkedIn is a great way.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_01: Theo Nasser is the easiest way to find me, Theo Nasser at Right Hand Cybersecurity.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_01: And you can email me too.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_01: My my email is Theo at right-hand.ai.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_01: I'd always welcome and would love to talk to any aspiring entrepreneurs, existing entrepreneurs, or anyone in the security space.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_01: If you just wanted to have a chat, please feel free to reach out through through either method.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_00: And final question for you is there a sales question or a sales saying that you when you hear it just grinds you and you wish you could dispatch it into the far reaches of space somewhere.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_00: Never get heard from again.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_01: I knew you were gonna ask something like this.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_01: I've listened to your other podcast episodes, so I knew there was gonna be a hook question at the end here, Andrew.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean there are.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_01: So you're looking for something that I would just like to evaporate from the sales vernacular?
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_01: I would say when a sales rep kicks off a call asking for their prospect to do an introduction about who's attending the call from their team.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_01: I think that it's on the sales rep to do their own preparation and speak with their champion before the call takes place to understand who will be attending, what are their roles, what do those people care about.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_01: So you can actually kick off a call acknowledging that you know exactly who you're meeting with and that you're prepared for this meeting.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_01: And if you know the customer wants to elaborate on that, that's fine.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_01: But kicking off the call showing that you have not done that research, I think is a pretty big red flag.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know, I think it I agree with you, by the way, on that.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's a little bit of a, I don't know if lazy is the right word, but you just don't take it too seriously.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_00: But I think the other thing is if you have a big call, you can waste 10 minutes to do introductions.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_00: And and something you want to go, you know, a short one, 20 minutes left to really get to the the whole point beneath it.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd really like the ones where people say, let me just quickly tell you for my team who is here, or remind you.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_00: I remember I've got Jim from this and Bob from that, and Jane from there.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_00: And the main topic we're thinking about is this, and you know, it just kind of cuts the chase a little bit, especially if you've done the prep work beforehand, it kind of makes sense, right?
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_01: We've gone as far in some meetings that I've hosted and our team has hosted it.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_01: If you have one of those big calls, and you know, every every AE will have these types of calls where there's going to be seven people from the customer side attending, right?
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's just gonna be, you know, you've got someone from finance, someone from security, someone from all these different functions.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_01: I again just something I learned from someone on LinkedIn.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_01: Do your research to find out who those people are, find them on LinkedIn, copy paste their photo, build a slide, and actually start your meeting with the slide saying, hey, it's great to meet everyone.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_01: I know who we're meeting with, I've I've already done my research.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_01: You've got their faces now on a slide with their titles.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_01: So everyone, you know, the introductions are done instead of in 10 minutes, they're done in 30 seconds.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so you can really just jump right into the meat of the meeting, and you'll actually find that your prospect appreciates that because they'll be able to recognize how much you how much value you put into that meeting.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that is uh awesome to wrap up on.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: What a great idea.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_00: It shows all sorts of good behavior and cuts the chase a little bit to get on to the point of people.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, thanks so much for joining us on the Sales Blueboard podcast.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_00: Wish to you all at right hand nothing for the great success this year and onwards.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much, Andrew.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_00: I enjoyed it.