Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / 115: Mark Parrinello, CRO at SentinelOne, building the revenue organization for hyperscale and IPO

Transcript

115: Mark Parrinello, CRO at SentinelOne, building the revenue organization for hyperscale and IPO · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to episode 115 of the Sales Bluebird Podcast, which exists because at B2B startups it's hard to get go-to-market fit, grow revenue, and scale the business and the sales team.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: Sales Bluebird provides tips, tricks, experiences, examples, inspiration, and ideas from people who've been doing this for many years and in many different companies.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: I am your host, Andrew Monahan, and our guest today is Mark Parinel, the CRO at Sentinel One.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: Mark, welcome to the podcast.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Andrew.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Good to be here.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Excited about the next 35 minutes or so.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know, I'm looking forward to it as well.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's a great story about what's been happening with Sentinel One and your leadership of the sales organization over there.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: Before we get into it, I do want to ask the listeners.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: For the first time, I'm now taking sponsors for the podcast.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to reach a bunch of sellers and sales leaders, mostly in the cybersecurity world, with whatever messages or sponsorship messages that you have, the trick to do is go to salesbluebird.com and at the top menu, there's an option there for sponsors.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: Just let me know what you're looking for, and we can have a conversation and figure out something that's right for you.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: I've got some special early adopter pricing because we're just kicking this off in terms of taking sponsors.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: So if that is attractive to you, you might want to go there soon and see if we can get you lined up early on.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: Mark, back to you.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: So I've got six questions to get to know the real mark.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: These are not up for debate.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: They're not either ors and maybes and perhaps and it depends.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's a simple pick one and let's get through it.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: You know, a few second maximum answers.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: Are you ready?
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm ready.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: First one dive bar or cocktail bar?
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: Dive bar.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: Suite of the four seasons or cabin in the woods?
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: Suite of the four seasons.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: Tricktout Jeep or German car with all the gadgets?
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: Both?
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: Kind of both.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: I I'll go with the the the German car with the gadgets, although the gadgets start to confuse me if there's too many of them.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and they start failing.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: Beach or mountains?
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Beach.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: They say home is where the heart is.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: Where is home for you?
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: Los Gatos, California.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: And for those of you that may or may not know, Los Gatos is about it's right next to San Jose in the Bay Area, and it's about 40 miles south of San Francisco.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: And how did you first make money as a kid?
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: My first job, I was uh in fifth grade and I sold newspapers.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: I did newspaper routes in the morning.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: I'd wake up at 4:30 and run across the street and bundle them all up, take them and deliver them, and then go collect throughout the day.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's a lost art now, but that's what I did back then.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: I I was, I think, 11 years old.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: There's probably people listening to this going, people delivered newspapers?
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there's there's a lot of millennials who have no idea of that concept, right?
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: But so many people growing up, I remember, you know, I grew up in Scotland.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh my cousins did that, you know, up early.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: You have to get up super early, get to the store, get very early to get out there, right?
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: Rain or shine.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's a hard job for an 11-year-old.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no kidding.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: No kidding.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: And Los Gatos, is that where you grew up or is that just where you've been for a while?
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: No, no.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: I I I was born in Detroit, pretty much raised in Phoenix, Arizona, made my way to the Bay Area and uh the early 90s, and been here 25, 26 years now, something like that.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm a I'm a west coaster.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: So it feels like home now, right?
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: And you went from the the cold and the, I don't know what the right word is, uh Detroit, let's say stereotypical Detroit, to Arizona, which is hot for most of the year.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, in the mid-70s, which is when we moved from Detroit to Phoenix, a lot of people from Detroit, New York, New Jersey, Chicago were moving out of the cold and into either Florida, Houston, or Phoenix.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: So so I got Midwestern roots, people that always meet me and know me think I'm an East Coaster.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: That's probably because I got that little Detroit edge to me.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: But I am a West Coaster, been out in the West Coast, other than a stit in Texas for most of my life now.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: And was your dad in the car industry?
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, he likes cars, but he wasn't the car industry.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's uh usually the thing in the Detroit area, right?
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's such a big area.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's all about cars and destroying.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let's go to your LinkedIn history here, Mark, and let me see if I can just quickly pull out a few things from this to run by you.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: So, what I see is someone who has been in this world of enterprise sales since the mid-90s.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: You start off, you know, these are all big names, well-known names, blue chip vendors to work for, in my eyes.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: You got Dell, Platinum, CA, NetApp, Nimble, Cohesity, and then Sentinel One.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: There's a rich, rich vein of really successful companies in there.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: I'm wondering which ones perhaps were the most formative stays for you.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: I'd say two.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: One, which you didn't list on there because it's before the Dell, which by the way was EMC, the EMC days, and that's Lanier.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: My first sales job was selling copiers.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: And that is the hardest job in the world.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it was the hardest thing I'd ever done.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: I learned raw selling skills and went door to door, literally door to door, not cold calling on phones, door to door in San Francisco.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: That was as informative, that was as formative as anything I'd ever done.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's not listed on what you just talked about.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then I think if I had to choose, you know, I got into leadership sometime at Platinum, but NetApp was a really amazing experience for me because I really truly, I was always a culture guy, and I was always working hard at teams and collaboration and team building and promoting and career pathing.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: But I think NetApp was an inflection point for me where I learned what cultures could look like long term.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I'd say that NetApp was a big, and I could go on about that, but but NetApp was a big inflection point for me in my leadership days.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: And were you there when Tom Mendoza was there?
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a great leader, a great motivator, a great speaker, and a passionate leader.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I heard him on a podcast recently, and I was very what a very impressive person, right?
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: And all sorts of things.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: He's great.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: He's an he's a he's an impressive person, he's a great human being, he's a mentor, and he's a friend.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let me take you back, Mark.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: June 30th, 2021.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: Big day all around, the day of the Sentinel One IPO last year under the ticker symbol S.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: Looking at the the stats out there, and you can correct me if I've got any of this wrong, but on the first day, the stock closed up about 20-21%.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: It gave the company a$10 billion valuation, which at the time it may be still be the case, it was the biggest cybersecurity IPO at the time.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I saw the pictures, and you were on stage there helping to ring the bell.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: Is that right?
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: I was.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it was a great experience.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I'd uh I'd been a part of public companies and startups, but this was my first time in the New York Stock Exchange ringing a bell.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: So it was it was a fun experience and a good experience.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: But I think, you know, the larger discussions are around leading up to that, which we'll get into obviously, and what does it look like after that?
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: Those are kind of the more important pieces for sure.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it'd good to have the everything on lights and have that experience, I guess, but it doesn't all happen by accident, right?
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: When you joined Sentinel One February 2020, interesting time to join a company, I would imagine.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: I joined a company, and I think at the time I had in my sales organization, which is sales ops and all things up, revenue operations channels and all that.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think it was about 120 people when I joined and the pandemic, I went off to a kickoff in Tel Aviv, and then the pandemic hit.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: So the first sense a year, you know, I had to lead an organization and build relationships and make changes and tweaks and build for scale in my house, like the rest of the world.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: But it was a little challenging and different because of the pandemic.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: I could go on about that for a long time.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: I think the main lessons learned were for me, I had to evolve as a leader because I'm a field guy.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so I the way I lead and build relationships and inspect is I get into the business and I earn the right to inspect by being in the field.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I couldn't do that.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so I had to work on different skill sets, you know, frankly.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: Kind of like uh if you follow basketball, a player that comes to the league who's really fast and agile and can jump over everyone over time has to develop post-up skills and different things as they start to slow down.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: So I had to develop other skills, frankly, and other things I had to work on to build the relationships and do it differently than I'd never done it before.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: It worked out.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: It happens that I joined a company that was growing and technology is great.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so we were, they were doing well before I got here, and we really took off in this pandemic because work from home, work from anywhere, that concept and protecting, you know, endpoints, laptops, desktops, I think accelerated more than ever in this pandemic uh world that we lived in.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: So it worked out fine, but it was it was an interesting time.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh one of the things I did in the lead up to this interview, Mark, is I I went out to some other of your peers, CROs in cybersecurity, and said, What questions do you have for Mark about the lead up to um the IPO?
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Chris Smith, the CRO at ECWA, he had a really interesting question.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we know what it's like to take over an underperforming team, but that's not what it seems like Mark had done at Sentinel One.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Nick Warner was running a whole bunch part of the business, and he kind of went up and brought someone in, you, to take over as a proper CRO.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: So the question was, you know, how does how do you get your design prints on a successful team, knowing there's probably some things you want to make, but you don't want to break the momentum, right?
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: You don't want to do anything to screw things up as you kind of improve things.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's a really interesting question because you're right.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: This business was doing very well when I got here.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: So it wasn't a rebuild.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's always a tweak.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: There's always things to work on.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: I think fundamentally, if you were to ask Nick about this, there's kind of two things at play.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: There's so many other aspects of the business that he had to go work on.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: So he needed someone he could hand over the keys to the car, so to speak.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: And he did that.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I was I had some trepidation about that, frankly, because I know how I am as a sales leader.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm I wasn't sure if Nick would be able to do that.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: He did it, and I thank him for it.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: It was an amazing turnover, frankly, and he trusted in the business in me, and it's worked flawlessly.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: I think he would also say what he needed was someone to take it another level in terms of building the process, the infrastructure for proper scale through hypergrowth mode and into an IPO.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's presumably the next place you're going to go, is one of the things you put in place for IPO.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: But I think Nick was astute enough to know he wanted to hire someone who knew what a post-IPO sales organization need to look like.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: And he had other things he had to work on, so he went and found someone like me to do that.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: So, what were the things that you had to start working on to get the right foundations that might not be in place already?
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, first and foremost, I'm not sure I came here knowing we would go IPO or think even thinking we'd go IPO.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, how many companies go IPO?
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, really?
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: You know, what percentage is that tiny, right?
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, everyone talks about IPO, and that's always what you want to do, but how many do is a different discussion.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure I ever knew or thought we would.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason I point that out is when I was at, I point to a company you mentioned in the past called Nimble.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: When I went there, I think when I got there to run the Americas, they were four or five, six months IPO.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: So I knew what that world looked like in a post-world IPO sales organization.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: A and B, Nimble was an operational machine.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: So I learned a lot about data, dashboards, metrics, process, tools for scale.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think what I'm trying to articulate to you is I didn't put things in place for IPO.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: I put things in place to build a machine, a machine of a sales organization that can scale, whether it's the IPO or something else, right?
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: So when I say a machine, I mean that in the early days of a startup, through the first couple, three years, whether you're getting to 10 million and then 50 million and then 100 million, it's running and gunning and spraying and praying and just chaos.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: And we were doing that.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: But at some point you have to move from sporadic closing, selling, forecasting to building that machine, that built-in velocity play with routes to market, a truly effective business model, a forecasting methodology with a framework, a framework in place that you can enable everyone on that framework.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: Therefore, you can have a repeatable sales process and sales cycles where the sum of a thousand deals can equal a reliable booking forecast.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: So I set out to build that machine and that infrastructure, you know, sales approaches, styles and methodologies that can be taught for repeatable and a well-oiled, by the way, a well-oiled enablement program.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: Sales leaders like myself sometimes take the enablement programs for granted.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: I would argue one of the things we have to do early in the process is build out enablement, right?
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: And make that a well-oiled machine.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: So enablement, revenue operation, sales structure and process, tools for scale, these are all the things that I think that I was brought in to do and we did.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: And then because we built these things, we kept going through hyperscale mode.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: And when the IPO came, it wasn't like, oh, what do we build for IPO?
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: It was like, oh yeah, we built all this stuff.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: We're going now.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: Were some of those things starting to get in the way, or or not having those things were getting in the way, and you it was pretty important to get them done quickly, or was it just you got ahead of having to put the right structures in place and the right processes?
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'll say it this way.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm someone who wants everything done yesterday.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a big urgency guy, as I'm sure most of the listeners would call themselves on this podcast.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: But five, seven, eight years ago, I would have tried to do all of that stuff in my first six months.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: The pandemic, here's the interesting thing about the pandemic: it slowed me down.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: I got here, and all of a sudden it's like, hey, don't spend because we're not sure what the hell's gonna happen.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: So, what it allowed me to do is indirectly was slow down and sort of map out first quarter is some organizational shifts.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: Second quarter is enablement, third quarter is channel changes or tweaks or growth.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: My fourth quarter is revenue operations functions and process and so forth.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: So, does that make sense?
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: So all of these things added up.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: We changed a lot in the sales organization, but I did it in bite-sized chunks because the pandemic forced us to have to do it that way.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: It actually worked out to my advantage because I was the new person, and I may have come in and tried to do all of it too much too soon, and it might have been too much to throw at the field.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: But because I was doing it in bite-sized chunks, I was bringing the sales force along with me, A, and B, more importantly, building relationships with the customers and the partners and my organization along the way to build trust so they understood and trusted what I was going to do was going to make us more successful.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: So it allowed you to build a proper roadmap as opposed to just saying everything's ASAP, right?
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm just being very frank.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure I would have done it as properly and as succinctly if there wasn't a pandemic.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: I might have just tried to do all of it in six, seven months.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: So at what point then, after you joined, did it become the obvious next step then to say, look, we're gonna get ready for IPO?
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: Which where in that year and in three or four months did it start becoming real?
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I think I'd been here about seven, eight months.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: Clearly, we'd had a couple, three quarters under our belts where we were doing well despite the pandemic and the trepidation.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone sort of adjusted to this new world.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: The market was hot, security was hot, and the CEO made a decision we're going.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: And we frankly weren't ready.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not saying that necessarily in sales we weren't ready.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think as an organization we were ready, but the CEO had a vision of the market dynamics are such, we better go now because you never know what the hell's gonna happen, right?
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: Turned out to be proven true.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: So so I think seven months in, and I was already putting the pieces in place for foundational, you know, for that scale.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: So I didn't have to change anything I was doing.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: The company had to make a lot of changes, and it was a race to the finish.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: We pulled it off.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: The one thing I've learned through the process is I was really, really fearful the company was not ready for an IPO.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: But now that I've gone through it, I realize I'm not sure any company out there picked the most successful ones.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure any of them are ever quite ready.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: They do what they do, and it's the proverbial, you know, duck on a pond, right?
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: The duck swims and looks smooth and underneath, you know, they're pedaling like crazy.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's probably 95% of the people that go IPO.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: That was us.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's probably everyone else, too.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: I think also as well, Mark, you know, if you say, let's take three years to get ready, you'll take three years to get ready.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_01: If someone says we got three months to get ready, you'll be ready in three months, right?
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: Andrew, it's a great point.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: And that's that's a CEO's job, a visionary, to say, you know, I understand your trepidation, folks.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: I understand the concerns.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna go because the macroeconomics are such, so let's do the best we can.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: And we did.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, the one thing I learned through that process too is it's not like you build everything and then you're IPO and you're done.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: Some stuff you're still not quite ready for, and you're built in after the fact, too.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: And we're still doing that.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: Always, right?
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_01: Another question I got was from Brian Gumble, who's the CRO at Armist.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: And Armist are, I think, pretty public on the idea that they're marching towards an IPO at some point.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_01: Brian's question was leading up to the IPO, how did you, how did the company decide what growth rate you were going to tell the street that you would hit, knowing, of course, that if you didn't hit it, the stock would tank.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a balance there, right?
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_01: You're gonna be aggressive, but not too aggressive.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: So I think, you know, the obvious statement is you always build in a strategy that allows you to beat and raise.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I think I'm stating the obvious there because I think everyone knows that.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: And frankly, the markets know it too.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: If you didn't beat and raise two quarters in, you probably have a big problem with the stock, right?
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: I will tell you, it's a great question.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: I will tell you that your the people, the bankers and the investors that bring you out are well experienced in this and they help you with that.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: They sit down, they go through the books with you, they understand the forecast, and then they help build the plan for you, too.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's something that I was not aware of, how involved they are in the process.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: But they are.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: So they'll help through that process.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: I think the larger point that as a CRO you need to solve is that forecast, that methodology, that repeatable process that I mentioned earlier better be in place.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: You know, so I think those are the things that a CRO needs to focus on is how do you build that velocity play?
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: What are your routes to market?
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: Is that tightened up?
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: Do you have the proper dashboards and metrics to manage against?
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_00: Do you have a forecast methodology?
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: Do you have, by the way, I'm a big believer in this, and I've now used it three times in a row.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: I've got a product that I buy that is an AI tool that sits on top of Salesforce.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: I never look at Salesforce for forecasting.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: I've got a tool that sits on top.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a big believer.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: You go out and you buy a tool like that ahead of time.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's not the end-all be-all.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: The tool's not going to tell you what to forecast, but it's a barometer.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's another thing to measure.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's science against your art.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: There's a little bit of science and art that we all know goes into forecasting.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: So these types of things you have to put in place, then the bankers will help you with some of the other stuff.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: So they're coming back to you saying, well, let me, so growth is a thing, right?
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_01: You know, profits is is is a distant second.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_01: It seems like growth is what gets valued.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: Until it's not.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: Until the markets change their mind and they want profits.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: But yes, you're right.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_01: Growth is is what's valued until it's not.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: Now, Sentinel One were on a tear, right?
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not like you were thinking, do we do we go with 30% growth, right?
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: Or 35%?
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: Your S1 looked like you know 100% year over year growth, things like that were in there, right?
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: So you were on a great tear anyway.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: But then I think Andrew on that point there.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I want to hit on that point that, and I'm remembering reflecting back now, that we were looking at what our peers had done around the rule of 40.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: When you go public, if you got the rule of 40, then their market's gonna love you and they're gonna give you, you know, they're gonna buy and all those things, right?
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_01: Hold on one second, rule of 40.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: What do you what does that mean?
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's pretty specific, but a rule of 40 is a thumb about it, it's measuring your profitability and your growth and comparing them.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so all these other companies that had gone out that we were comparing ourselves to, and you could name the companies as well.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: We wanted to be put in that category, these companies that were had$150,$200 stocks, okay?
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: All of those folks, when they went out, they were somewhere around 70, 80 to 100% growth.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: So we decided that we needed to talk about 100% growth.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I will tell you that then we built a playbook as such for the following year that said.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: You know, what is the hiring we need?
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: What's the plan we need to sustain 100% growth year over year?
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's part of what that went into our methodology.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: That's where I was going with that, right?
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you if you've got the foundation, you've got the model starting to crank, then the question is, well, how do we move the levers so that we hit the growth numbers that you want, as opposed to sitting there going, I don't know, I guess we'll throw some bodies at it, right?
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: Which I'm not saying people do that, but uh you know, proper planning, correct.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_01: So having the foundation is what allows you to then work with the bankers and with the CFO, CEO to get the right execution happening beforehand, sounds like that's right.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: And and having the vision of what you want to look like, you've got all these, if you've got six or seven companies that are like-minded and you've had they've had successful IPOs, then do you want to look similar?
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: Well, how did they go out?
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: What do they look like?
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: What was their rule authority?
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: What was their growth?
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_00: And then you build a plan around that.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, another question from John Mayhall, he's a CRO at Cyber GRX, around how do you maintain focus in the team?
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, people when the company start knowing either officially or or the kind of hear and see things, and you can get, I guess people get distracted, right?
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's like excitement around it.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_01: How do you keep people focused on doing their job?
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it that's as important of a question as any you could ask, especially if you're running a sales organization.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: And there's no right or wrong way here.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: I can tell you some things that we did that I did, but every culture is different, but it's such an important piece.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: I will tell you that I messaged a lot over and over and over because the world, and I and I hit on this earlier, the world of a pre-IPO is gonna look so much different than the world of a post-IPO, and the culture's gonna shift a little.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the days of the sales rep calling up the controller and getting his deal approved to book because he bought her a bottle of wine two quarters ago, that doesn't work in a post-IPO world, right?
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: So that spraying and praying and running gun that I'm mentioning, hey, I'm calling someone up, I'm getting something done and winging it, just does not work.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so the world feels different to the startup people, the sales reps who are running gun, I'm selling.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: Why are you trying to prohibit me?
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: Why are you putting this process someplace?
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: Why do you need this from me?
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: So, what I think to keep the culture is so important to do is message over and over and over.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the things I would do in every all hands is I talked about the what and the why and the when.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what we're doing.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what it means to you, here's why we're doing it, here's what it means in the change in the process.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: We're moving your cheese because of this, right?
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: When we're doing it is best as I can tell you is this time frame, because ultimately in the IPO, it means this, and the end result will mean this for all of us, right?
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: The what and the why and the when.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I messaged it and I gave examples over and over and over.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm telling you, every two months I talk about keeping the culture and persevering through these changes.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: And knock on wood, it worked for us so far.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_00: We've kept that entrepreneurial spirit in place.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: We haven't lost hardly any of our four and five and six-year veterans who were here when it was nothing and they're still here and we're big now because they bought into the concepts.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I just, it's a really, really important question.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not telling you what I did or I'm telling you about is what everyone should do.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just telling you why I did it and to work for us.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_01: So if I was a seller, would I be able to be in connecting my million-dollar deal to saying, you know, this is the increase in value of the company or or something?
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: Here's why this is so important, therefore I can't be distracted.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_01: I can't be distracted.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: Would they get down to that level again?
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: I think I think if you're a seller in Chicago and your territories, you're going from, I used to have the Midwest, now I have Chicago, and you're putting three more reps in and you're segmenting out um healthcare and sled, and I don't like it because you're you're shrinking my ability to sell.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: The discussion is around if you're with a company where you're not carving up territories, you're the wrong company.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: That means they're not growing.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: So just socializing what that means to them and what it can mean to them monetarily, and ultimately what it means is at 100% growth in a post-IPO world, then we can be a$10 billion company and the stock will be 40 or 50 bucks.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: And what does that mean to your pocketbook?
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: Sort of taking what's happening to them in the field, right, and articulating what we need to do as a company and then what it means to them long term.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's what I'm referring to.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: No, I like that a lot, actually.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um it happens, it does happen, right?
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you if someone takes something away from you, supposedly, there's this an emotional reaction to it, right?
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: And you do need to understand this is good, right?
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_01: It'd be really, really bad if we weren't taking stuff away from you.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's why I call it moving my cheese, right?
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: I woke up and my cheese got moved again.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_00: You know, my cheese keeps getting moved, you know, every year.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: But now, as we march towards an IPO, Mark, you're moving my cheese every month.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: I've got a new operations person to talk to.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: And we've got this new process.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, yes, but here's why we're doing it.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: And you can expect more of this.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: You've got to adapt.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just interested how your CEO kept the focus of the big why about what Sentinel One's trying to achieve in cybersecurity as the big why, versus the why being we're going to IPO in six months or a year or whatever, and become very financial and things like that.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: Was that something that you you talked about as an exec team?
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: We did.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I think I think the CEO's perspective was security was and is still so very hot that the macroeconomics were such a way go out.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_00: So we did talk about it.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: There was a lot of things that went into why we were going out, and security was a part of that, but not the only reason.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: Part of it was macroeconomics.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_01: Question for again from John Mayhol from CyberGRX.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_01: How did customers respond?
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I think customers are really excited because they're part of the process.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: They they take a leap of faith by buying you and they watch you grow up and they coach you along the way and tell you what you need to improve in.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: And they attend your customer advisory boards and they always give feedback and they feel a connection to you, and then they hear you going out and they're really excited for you.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_00: I think on a whole, that's what our customers' feedback was.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the flip side is just like I talk about messaging with internally, who's moving my cheese and wine, you got to do it with the customers too, because the customers are concerned, they know full well in a post-IPO world, you've got a different boss now, and the boss is the markets and the shareholder value.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so they do worry about are you gonna go try and buy other companies?
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: Are you gonna lose sight of the products that got you here?
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think having a lot of conversations with them about that, getting their feedback, talking about what our plans are, and as I mentioned a minute ago, customer advisory boards to invite them in and hear them out is half the battle.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: Let them be heard, let them talk to you about their concerns, address those concerns.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_00: But we it was mostly excitement, but there was some trepidation for customers as well.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_00: You have to address that head on.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I would imagine though that an IPO is a pretty attractive thing compared to being acquired by a big company and and then who knows what, right?
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I think that's a great point, Andrew, and that most companies are most customers are more excited about your IPO because they know you're gonna keep that culture intact that they like and buy into versus some big behemoth buying them.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_00: Now they're not sure what's gonna happen to the roadmap.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, roadmap is up in the air, that's right.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think 95% positive from customers, just a little trepidation around what you will become.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_01: When you think back about where you spent your time before the IPO and after the IPO, was there any big change in there just because of the nature of what was happening, or was it just going down the same path, down the same march?
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's it's it's probably not the answer you're looking for, but my job has not changed that much.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I and I think it's because going back to my earlier comments, I was obsessed with building the infrastructure, the foundation for a hyper-growth company.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: I think when I got here, the ARR was 55, 60 million, and we just you know hit a hundred hit 300-ish.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: So I was fixating on building that either way, IPO or not.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: So nothing really changed.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_00: The pressures changed.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna state the obvious.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone, I liken it to going out in your front yard.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: You know, during the pandemic, we were all working at home and you know, and walking around our front yard on the phone and so forth.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_00: I liken it to going out in your front yard and your boxers get the mail and everyone sees you.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_00: Now everyone knows what my numbers were last quarter.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't know that in a pre-IPO world.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_00: So the pressures are a little more mounted.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: Your buddies and your friends are texting and calling, and hey, I saw you did this and that, and what's with this purchase of this company?
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: So there's some of that, but honestly, Andrew, that my role, the things I focus on have not really changed in the past eight, nine months.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I can see that.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_01: Especially if it is this March you're on, right?
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_01: We're constantly getting better anyway.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's just not something going to change because we're with different uh structure in the company.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's still all about execution.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, for sure.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_01: One of the questions I got, Mark, was from Chris Smith again at Aqua.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_01: And he was asking some questions about culture and things like that, but one of them was about trust.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_01: So, to his question, trust is the cornerstone to any functioning team as we're working together and making these changes are happening and and we're on this march forward.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_01: How do you think about giving and gaining trust from the team?
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_01: And how do you instill it throughout everything that they do, either internally but also externally?
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'll first say I'll talk about e-staff for a moment before I get into you know Chris's specific question is about my building my trust with the team and all that.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_00: But I think an important element of successful IPO is trust amongst your peers with the e-staff.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_00: Every company says they've got a candid culture, and about 10, 15% actually do.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: I will tell you that, and it starts top down.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_00: If the CEO allows candid feedback in an e-staff meeting, then you're gonna have it, and it's gonna permeate and you're gonna have a great culture because of it.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_00: Our CEO does.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_00: He'll he he has no problem with you pushing back and us debating issues and strategies.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so we have this really candid e-staff.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_00: We debate one another, we get in fights just like anyone else do, but it it it's a mutual respect, and that candidness then permeates down into the field.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_00: And that's ultimately what key creates a great culture, which I'm telling you a hundred percent anyone you talk to will say Set No one has.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I start with that above the CRO and at the E staff level.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I think Chris's question is I could spend a lot of time on this, but I I call, I just hired America's person recently, and and he's out in the field, and I and we we agreed that he'd be in the field for the first six months, customers, partners, reps, SE's, channel, just meeting people, building the relationship.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_00: I call it earning the right.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because sales leaders, we have to inspect the business.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_00: We have to lead, we have to give tough decisions at some point, tough messages.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_00: But I believe you can't really start doing all that until you're in the field and earning the right.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: So I would start with that.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: That it's and I'll tell you, there's it's a delicate balance because when you're a CRO, you can't just be in the field all day long because you got to go back to corporate and do the foundational stuff.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_00: So there is a balance there.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_00: I learned that the hard way too.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_00: I used to be only field.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_00: So I would just share with you that I think that earning the right is a part of that process.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: And the only the last piece on that is it was harder to do in a post-pandemic world.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_00: So you know what I would do?
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I would just talk on the phone from 6:30 a.m.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_00: till 7 p.m.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_00: at night to everyone over and over and over and talk about their families and their friends and all kinds of things.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_00: You hear that and you go, like, oh no shit.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, we all do that.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: I just over-rotated on that for literally six months because that's all I had to do.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_00: I couldn't travel.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_00: So I couldn't earn the right the way I'd normally done it.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_00: So I just spent a lot of time.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, the, and I, and the last piece, Andrew, I'll tell you is the all hands.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: I went from doing one all hands a quarter, I was doing them monthly.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: Messaging.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the changes we're making, we're implementing this process, here's why.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: Again, the what and the why.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_00: Remember, I talked about those other skills that I honed in.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_00: I started doing some things differently to earn that trust and the message.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_00: The more they saw of me, the more they felt comfortable with me.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'd send off Saturday clips.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_00: I'd be on Zoom and I would just do a top of mine.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, this week we did great.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: We had two great wins.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_00: Here's something I'm concerned about in the business.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_00: I might be changing this, or we might be looking into this.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: Stay tuned.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_00: And it would literally be like a one and a half minute clip.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I would send it off the field and they would click on it on a Saturday, but then they got to know me and see me in my living room, or I'm in the office right now.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_00: This is not prison behind me, it's just a brick wall in my office.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: So little things like that, I think help build that trust.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_01: I like that so much because you're right.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if you're used to breaking bread with teams, you know, showing up in person to their meetings, to their customer dinners, to their whatever gets going on, and that's taken away, then you lose that chance to really get to know each other, right?
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_01: And it seems like you've managed to overcome that with your over-indexing on talking.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: There was so I could spend a lot of time on, but lots of tricks that I learned and did, and you know, and and and a lot of people did it.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: We all had to adjust to this pandemic world.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm not special at things I did.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_00: We all did them.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just sharing some things that I did, some little pieces to the puzzle.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_01: Last question about the journey that you were on at Sentinel One.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_01: As you look back, you mentioned the roadmap and getting the chance with COVID to do a roadmap as opposed to do it all now.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_01: What else did you look back on and say, you know, we were kind of lucky how that played out.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_01: I wasn't expecting that like that, but it all worked out pretty nicely.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and reflecting back, hopefully I'll get to this.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_00: And if I don't ask a question again, because I I was reflecting back on something that I would change, frankly.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_00: And it might not be the answer you're looking for, but it's important.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_00: I wish I would have enjoyed the process and the event more.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because, you know, I'm a big believer your strengths ultimately become your weaknesses.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_00: And a strength of mine, probably like a lot of people that are in my position, is a strength is to very quickly take a very successful quarter or a successful year and move on from it.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: What's not assess what's not working in the business, what needs to be fixed, and then move on to that execution.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so I quickly move, and again, it's a strength, quickly move to what's not working and move on.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll never forget, you brought up this up earlier, Andrew, sitting in the New York Stock Exchange, which is one of the most famous floors in all the world, and I was on that balcony that we've seen presidents and dignitaries on for a hundred years, and there was 15 of us up there, whatever it was, 16 of us.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I was looking down, and I was we'd invited about 85 people from Sentinel One to come and party and celebrate for a couple days.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_00: So they were all on the floor looking up, we're on TV, clapping, you know, the thing that all of us see.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I got off the stage and someone said to me, like, Mark, you you didn't look happy at all.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason why I don't look happy is because I was looking down at the 85 people, and I was thinking, we got to go sell.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_00: All these people are partying and taking the weekends and bringing their spouses in and celebrating, and we got a lot of shit to sell.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I was already in execution mode, and it's not a bad place to be in, and but it just, I wish I would have appreciated and enjoyed that moment more.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then not just that event that I'm referring to, but all things leading up to that.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_00: Man, this is exciting.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_00: Let's really enjoy this, the learning process, the post-IPO learning process.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't think I enjoy it enough.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_00: I took it for granted, like we always take things for granted, and I just went right in execution mode.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_00: So that might not get to the hard year question, but I think for me, that's one of my lessons learn and takeaways.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_01: That's enlightening.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, it happens so much in sales, though, that we, you know, when you're in the weeds and you feel the pressure about delivering all the time and incessant things going on, sometimes, you know, people struggle with taking a step back and just saying, you know, I'm in a great spot.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_01: Things are good.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_01: Life is good.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's it's the nature of hypergrowth.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_00: We had a great quarter, but next quarter we got to do this, and we're not doing well here.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_00: And and we all do it.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_00: And and so for those out there that are eyeing an IPO or gonna have the amazing experience of having it, I would say really enjoy that.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_00: The execution, the need to go sell some shit, as I say, that's always gonna be there, but really enjoy that moment.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I just didn't, I took it for granted.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_00: Like we take a lot of things for granted, frankly.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_01: Well, uh, however at Mark, things clearly worked out well.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_01: I was looking at the latest release, uh, earnings release that you had recently, and it showed to me what was 123% year-over-year ARR growth.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_01: Clearly, momentum is continuing, and you're guiding really high as well into this fiscal year.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, looking in from the outside and hearing stories from you and a few friends that I have over there, it seems like an incredible culture, incredible vehicle, momentum that's building over there that must be fun to be part of.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I really appreciate you joining me on the chat on the podcast today.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's been a great experience.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_00: As I say to everyone, we're only in chapter four of a 12-chapter book.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_00: We got a lot of work to do, a lot of things to tweak, but we're having a good time.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_00: And thanks for having me on.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_00: I've enjoyed it.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I I like these things because we can all learn from each other.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so if me spending some 35-40 minutes with you and people can take away a couple anecdotes or a couple things, a couple notes to improve on what they're doing, great, because I surely I surely see the value out of these things.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_00: So, anyways, I enjoyed it.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me on.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yep, and if anyone's looking for new opportunities at Central One, I imagine your careers page is probably the place to go.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_00: I just hired in my organization.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the the short answer is yes.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_00: I just I'm laughing because I've just hired about 165 people in four months.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_00: So we're always hiring.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_01: That's a great way.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Mark, I really enjoyed the conversation.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for joining me.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.