Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / 159: Adam Gavish, CEO of DoControl - People don’t sell, people buy.

Transcript

159: Adam Gavish, CEO of DoControl - People don’t sell, people buy. · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone's a friendly until you ask them to pay money.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: That's what said by Adam Gavitch, the co-founder and CEO at Do Control, as he talked about winning his early customers.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: Find out more in this episode.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Sales Blue Board podcast, which exists because at cybersecurity startups, it is hard to get to repeatability and scale the business.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: Sales Blueboard gives you tips, tricks, experiences, examples, ideas, and inspiration from people who know a thing or ten about building great cybersecurity companies.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: I am your host, Andrew Monahan.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: Our guest today is Adam Gavish, co-founder and CEO at Do Control.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_01: Adam, welcome to Sales Bluebird.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_01: Hi, thank you so much for hosting me, Andrew.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: Looking forward to this conversation.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: But Adam, before we get into the uh nuts and bolts of the business side, let's talk about yourself a little bit.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: I have a list of 35 questions here.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: The good news is I'm not going to ask you all 35.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_01: What I am going to do is ask you to pick a number randomly between one and 35 three times, and I'll tell you what the question is that corresponds.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, that would be 14.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: 14 is window or aisle.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: Window or aisle.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: 100% window.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Why window?
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: For good reasons, because I sleep very well for the most part.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: I can fall asleep anywhere, but not when people hit me in the aisle, and especially not when people who, you know, when they come to hand over food for people, they always hit me up with that.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, I'm not gonna spare a grand over an international flight uh to get a bump in my in my elbow.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: You get bruises on your elbows, right?
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: I've been there, don't worry.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: All right, another number, team 1 in 35.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um three.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: Three is tricked out Jeep or German car with all the gadgets?
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: German car all the way.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: All the way.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: Italian cars are even better.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I had a chance to ride a Ferrari 488 in last black hat in uh 2021.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: That was fun.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my god.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: What an experience.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: I highly recommend, especially when you don't pay for it.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: Who was running the driving event?
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: Was this was the company that was running the driving event?
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, yes, for sure.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was uh yeah.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: Fair enough.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: All right, one more question, one more number between one and thirty-five.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: 23 for the one and only MJ.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: Ah, yes.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, what was your best subject in high school?
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Best subject, the one I liked the most.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: Studying nothing.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: I was a really bad student.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: So my best subject was just going.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: Honestly, I was a wave surfer in the ocean for the most part.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't spend too much time in class, unfortunately.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: But I made it up a few years later.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let's let's let's go with that.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, you're uh you said you're uh you're wasting your time at high school.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: How did you first make money as a kid?
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's funny.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I actually uh worked in uh in a land shop, which is basically 18 computers connected in a land network, and I was a network administrator, and I set them up with Counter-Strike uh servers so that they can play and kill each other.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and we had like cleans and we we played like tournaments, and it was a lot of fun.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: I was like 15 and I made some good bucks and had fun and free pizza.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: Good bucks and having fun at 15 is that's not a bad combination, right?
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: And what was your first real job?
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: My first real job, I was uh a network security engineer at an internet service provider.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: So I was in charge of you know securing the network of 10,000 devices and more, making sure that all the different edge endpoints are connected correctly, that all the configurations are set up, uh doing some upgrades over the night, etc.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let's let's fast forward then.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: So now you're the the CEO founder at Do Control.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: If I was a CISO, how would you answer my question?
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: What does Do Control do?
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: Well, first of all, if you're a CISO, I would first ask you how are you?
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: Where are you from?
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, what do you like to do in your spare time?
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: Because for real, I I think that before everything else, we're human beings.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: And especially when you're trying to explain people what you do, you have to first earn their trust and make sure that they like to speak with you at first, right?
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: And from there, I will still not talk about what we do.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: Ask you about what it is that you're trying to solve in the domain, in the area I'm particularly working on, which is cybersecurity.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I would ask questions like, you know, what's your uh data loss prevention strategy, what are your main threat model, uh, what kind of talent you have in place, what kind of security solution you have in place.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: And only then, based on the information I would get from you, which of course is different between each and every CISO, I will go ahead and tell you, okay, you know, I understand you have an IDP in place to protect the identity, you have a zero trust network solution, a network access solution to protect a network access from any device in any location.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: But when it comes to the SaaS data itself, you're quite exposed because the lack of granularity those SaaS apps provide you natively.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so people expose information internally and externally, which add a lot of risk and liability to your organization over time.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's like setting up like the main pain point we're dealing with, again, without even explaining what we do, because I'm trying to build a report with you.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: I'm trying to make sure that we are on the same page.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: There's a 50-50 situation where you don't even understand what I'm talking about.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you are too high-level CIS or not in a detailed Model executive, or maybe you don't care about it, which is totally fine.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: You know, every company has different strategies.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: But if you do care about it, which we see all the time, then I would tell you that, you know, Do Control is a modern SaaS security platform helping security teams to identify technical debt, how much data you have, how is it exposed, by whom, and then help you to quickly remediate that at scale, and then prevent that data exfiltration from happening moving forward through automated workflows.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's like on a 10,000 feet level.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: Would you change then how you describe just just now what you do, depending on what they said beforehand?
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: I would change what I focus on because sometimes they already understand what you do.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: You can dive deeper into how you solve the particular problem, which makes a lot more sense because again, I'm trying to be very respectful for your time as a CISO.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: You're very busy.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: You're doing me a favor by giving me the call.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: Always remember that.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to talk to me, I have to talk to you.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so by picking your interest and narrowing down the scope of the call, I'm able to be more efficient for the both of us.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're very interested in one, two, three pain points that I know we can sum, I will just double down on those.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: If you're talking high-level, which may infer to me that you most likely have reportees who have more hands-on detail on the problem, I'll just give you like a more strategic uh high-level overview of what we do and what the overall benefit for you as an organization.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: And do you commonly deal with CISOs?
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, of course, all the time.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: Is that a buyer for you or who drives the sale inside the organization?
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so we're top-bottom, basically.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: So we start with the CISO.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh sometimes we start with the director and then he gets the buy-in from the CISO.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: 99% of the time the CISO is involved because they own the budget and they own the entire charter for the security program, if you like.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: But eventually we have to adjust ourselves to multiple personas, right?
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: Because the CISO will never ever run the actual POV.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: They will never ever actually dive into the data, understand the risk, understand what the remediation plan is, all of that good stuff.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: They don't do it.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so we have to adjust the pitch, the messaging, everything for different personas to make sure that we are speaking in their language.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: And when you were describing or asking the questions about different problem areas at the start, I got the sense that you were kind of touching on more traditional areas such as CASB and maybe even like uh data protection or DLP, maybe, and also IDP.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: Is that are you looking to replace a lot of these tools or augment them?
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: You're touching the right uh point, which means I'm doing an okay job.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: Our up-to-day slogan is basically modernizing CASB and DLPs to secure SaaS data.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now you're gonna ask, okay, what to modernize in the first place?
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so in reality, Zero Trust took away many of the benefits that legacy inline CASB has provided to organization.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: Now you don't need the inline data protection, but you still expose from a SaaS data perspective because people just work and collaborate and share that information and download it before they leave and so on and so forth.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so we have our own a number of differentiation points where we help organizations benefit from a lower total cost of ownership, right?
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: We help them to benefit from a better performance in terms of the visibility and remediation you get across SaaS application, and we help them with the with the customers' customizability.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's a long word.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: But what it means is that we are trying to give security teams a platform that helps them customize the remediation plans the way they want it, not the way we think they need it.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you look at traditional Cas B and DLP players, they give you hundreds of different predefined, opinionated policies to choose from, right?
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: Which are amazing and highly valuable.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: But what we see in reality, especially on the larger organization, they have to tweak it.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: They have to customize it to a very low granular level so that they can achieve a more deterministic approach that lets them collaborate internally with business units and have no security people fired.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it seems like the bigger the company, the more edge cases that you have, right?
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, exactly.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: The bigger the company, they have more nuances and more uh internal politics that we need to overcome.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: And what's the big innovation then you're bringing to market that's under the covers?
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: Is there some technology that's allowing you to do all this in one place, or is it just bringing everything together that's the big value problem?
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_01: No, 100%.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: 100%.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: That's a legit question.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: The biggest innovation we bring in is the fact that we are able to streamline every SaaS user and third-party SaaS OWASP app activity event.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: It could be download, upload, share, whatever it is.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: We streamline all of those activity events generically supported across 15 different apps.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: We're talking about thousands of different event types.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: We streamline them all into our proprietary workflow engine.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: From there, you can truly pick up any of the events, and through a no-code, low-code user experience, you can narrow down the scope and condition based on whatever makes sense to you.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: Either from directly from the event, who's the user, what's the email, what are they doing, as well as from our horizontal integration with your IDP, what group the user is from.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: From your HIS, is the user living the company?
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: Or do you want to run an approval with a user manager?
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: From your EDR, is there malware involved with this file?
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: We bring in extra business context to our workflow so that you can effectively break down the workflow as a decision tree into multiple very clear branches and then remediate with confidence.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna give you the most simple example.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: Let's say you're a SharePoint customer, very famous, and then traditional CAD will give you a capability to automatically remove any external sharing from the SharePoint across the block, across the organization, which is good because it's gonna close down butches, but it's bad because it's gonna slow down business enablement.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: Business people actually need to collaborate.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: What we are able to give you is the capability to say, hey, you know what?
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: Block sharing only from those five different SharePoint sites where I know there is PII involved, HR, finance, legal, or vice versa, don't let finance people, legal people, HR people to share externally.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: So you can protect that from multiple angles, either from the data source perspective, from the identity perspective, from the extra business context perspective, the whether the employment status or the group membership and so on.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: That is like, I know it's a lot, but that is the nature of our innovation.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_01: And is the vision to add in encryption at some point?
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: So it would be okay if the file went out as long as it's encrypted or protected in some way?
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: What we're trying to do is to focus on the unsolvable today, right?
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: And listen to the market and get the input from our customers and prospects.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: Encryption is a huge deal that we don't deal with yet.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: There are vendors that are doing it, there are native SaaS solutions doing it.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't need to do it so far.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: So far, we were asked to focus really on the data access, making sure that no unauthorized access is allowed, making sure that no unauthorized identities have access, making sure that no unauthorized third party or apps have access because they have risky permission, right?
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh making sure that there are no uh unauthorized misconfigurations done.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: Those are the kind of, you know, the mission critical threat models we focus on.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_01: This is a complex world you're living in right there, right?
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: You've got different technologies, you think I think about scale of how to make decisions that scale is gonna happen.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: So that's hard to do.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: Another thing I would imagine that you're thinking about as well is how on earth do we rise above the noise in the market so that people actually pay attention to us and we get our fair share or unfair share of attention from people that you want to talk to.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: How do you think about that as a company?
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: I think about it differently, every quarter.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's the working product, right?
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: Because when you start from the beginning, nobody knows you.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: You're completely unknown.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: So you have to flow the market with reach out, and hopefully somebody will reply to you back and give you a conversation and you're gonna get feedback.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: And based on the feedback, you start putting together your messaging with a simple one pager, maybe a little longer deck, maybe like a full-blown pitch deck, and you take it from there, right?
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: The good thing is that, first of all, we're not alone in the market, right?
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: We have competitors, we have uh legacy players, we have gardener experts.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: Like there is a lot of entities in that domain helping us understand what is working versus what's not working, right?
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: The best thing I think we do is that we constantly challenge our messaging every quarter, internally and externally.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: Because we hire really good people who have seen a thing or two and they sold many, many security products, and they just challenge us, hey, improve that one pager, or that slogan doesn't make sense to me.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: Or and of course the biggest feedback is from our customer.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because once you establish a connection with a customer and you truly help them, they're gonna give you all the feedback in your face.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: Not gonna hide anything.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what you need to be successful and improve your messaging.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: As for raising above the noise, this is the biggest challenge.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: Because you're unknown.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so what we chose initially to do is by, first of all, never ever talk shit about any other vendor, ever.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: Like truly respect the market and the different technology innovation being done in the market.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: That that's a must-have.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's a given.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: And from there, find our way, find out what sets us apart.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: Is it a particular threat model we solve better?
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: Is it a technology innovation that is working much better, performance-wise, right?
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: And then you hold on to your successes.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: Every small success is like something you can make a party out of it.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: A new customer, a new partner, another round, and so on.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: So it's constant iteration, right, as you're learning along the way.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like Yes, we learn a lot.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: And that is the reason I quit on my job to do so, because I wanted to learn more.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to go into the wild.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let's talk about those first customers then.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: You know, getting the first 10 real, you know, non-friendly, paying money customers can be a real challenge and often there's a journey, right?
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: These ups and downs.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_01: Any takeaways from what you were doing and and how you went about doing it?
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, 100%.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: I I again it's all trial and error.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: There's no like uh there's no book for it, right?
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: But I think what we did good is that we we didn't wait until the product is perfect in order to onboard the customer.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: We did that fairly early on, uh, with the assumption that, hey, we're gonna get better, we're gonna improve it, it's gonna be fine.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: It paid out uh because we had like 10 customers onboarding, they saw the value, we fixed a lot of bugs for them, and we solved the meaningful problem.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then the big the biggest test was okay, can we make money?
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because you mentioned friendly customers.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody's funding until you ask them to pay.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: They will give you advice, they will do a POV, they do whatever you want until you ask them to pay money.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: Because paying money requires a lot of effort from your buyers.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: They need to pitch it internally, they need to prioritize it over other stuff, they need to make sure that their team members are aligned with these initiatives so they don't leave them.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: They need to explain it to the people who they report to to help make sure they're aligned.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: They need to go to the finance team.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: Again, they need to pitch your product just as much as you need to pitch it to them.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: Why will they do it if you don't solve something meaningful for them?
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: You know?
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: And the only way to know it is by asking them, I want you to pay me money.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: How much would you pay for me?
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: And then we decided to take whatever they gave us.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: We were not picky at all.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: It could be bad, it could be wrong, I don't know.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: But like we started getting like super minor contract, like$2,000 annually,$4,000,$5,000.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's like peanuts in the enterprise world.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: But it still required the buyer to go ahead to finance, to go ahead internally, and we wanted to see that they are doing it, and that they are able to do it with the collateral we provided to them.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: That was the real test.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: And only when we had five, six, seven, eight of those, regardless of the amounts, we were confident to start partnering with a channel, hiring a VP sale, raising another round, doing the big boy stuff, right?
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: But we were very patient about it.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_01: And what did you learn?
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it sounds like you were doing this the selling, right?
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_01: In the first run there.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_01: What did you learn about sales as you were doing it?
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not just me, to be honest.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'm the CEO, but I have an amazing partner, Omri, he's the uh CEO, the chief revenue officer.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and of course, the CTO was in many of the calls to provide a technical uh perspective.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: What I specifically learned is that you don't sell, the people buy.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a popsicle that you're gonna sell in the street.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's a little bit more complicated than that, and it's a lot more money.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's not a yellow thing that is sweet and you're gonna buy it.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's something significant, it has an impact on people, and you demand a lot of money for it.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so you may you need to make people buy the product, not you don't need to sell them.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: And the way I learned how to do it is by focusing on what they need.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: Like focusing on the problems they have and how your product helps them solve in those problems.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: You may have many more features.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: To be honest, we sold some features we didn't even want to even develop, but they needed it.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: So you have to focus on what the customer need, not on what your vision, especially at the beginning.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: Down the road, yes, you can say no to customers who are not in your go-to-market.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: You can say no, we're not going to develop it.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: That's okay if you have the momentum.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: But at the beginning, you know, you just need a shot.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_01: I'm glad I'm glad you said that.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_01: I think that uh one of the huge advantages startups have over bigger players is your ability to be nimble and solve problems in a sprint or two.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if you go to a big company as a customer and say you need a feature, you might get it in a couple of years, right?
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: But working in a startup, you know, for the right reasons, you can go develop that and get it to get it shipped over a weekend if you wanted to.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's funny that you say that because when we raise money at the feed round, all the investors told us, what stopped Okta from doing it?
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: Or what stopped, I don't know, Vizker from doing it?
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, nothing, just time.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: It just takes a lot of time, you know.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: And time is the biggest asset we have as a startup, uh, for good and bad.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't have money, you're losing out of time.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's such an advantage.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and you know, something that I wonder if all startups are really kind of latch on to to see to see it that way.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: But you said something interesting there, Adam, is that uh your co-founder, he has a CRO title.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_01: I'll tell you, I mean, you know this, right?
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's not common to have a co-founder be the head of the commer commercial site as well, right?
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I'm wondering what what your you know why that was and what advantages it gave you early on.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, for sure.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_01: Well, first of all, he's my friend.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: The most important thing.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: He's a partner.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: Forget about the title.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: Founders, partners, they need to be partners first, regardless of their scope and role and the responsibilities.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: I trust him, he trusts me, end of games.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: Very good communication, very much the same mindset.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so for me, that's everything I need and more from a partner.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: Now, specifically, he's a sales exec executive with like 15 years of experience.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a product guy, and the third founder.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: Is a technologist.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: So it was very clear for us that if we join together, you know, I will have to be the CEO because I can tell the story, talk about the vision, or talk explain the language, all of that good stuff.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: And you can basically build out your sales operation from scratch, which is something he did, I think, three times in his career.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's unusual because at first you don't do that.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: You don't build a sales operation, you uh you search for the product market fit, right?
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: But that requires a lot of the skill set that sales leaders have, which is basically making connections, opening doors, getting new traction, getting new new the first few logos, all of that.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so for me, it was a no-brainer that he can get it done, and he did it.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_01: And then what was the who were the first hires underneath him?
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_01: Did you hire AEs or STRs or SEs?
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: What was the what was the flow?
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a good question.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: I think the first hire was we hired uh an SDR.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: Fantastic guy from Boston.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: I really like him, and you know, it was important for us to get an SDR so that we can start, again, testing our messaging early on, understanding what works in the market, you know, picking up the phone, hanging at the beginning, everybody hanging up.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: And then over time we started developing more and more qualified AIDS and even a couple of deals.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what's super good to get ourselves a momentum and build a pipeline.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna have a pipeline because it's at some point it's a numbers game, right?
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: At some point, not at the beginning, but after a while, the more you talk to people, the higher the chances you're actually gonna make money.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so SDRs are super efficient at that.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: And then only after we raised the A round, only after we had a couple of paying customers and logos, we let ourselves hire on our first VP sales.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: Not before.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: Before it was only founder sale because you know we were first time founded, but we we figured that if we don't know how to set it, how can we teach others?
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: Sounds crazy to me.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's a great observation, right?
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: Is that uh you know, when you come in as a as a sales team into that early stage, you're looking for the now gets the knowledge, the experience from the people that have been doing it already, which is the founders, right?
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_01: If the answer is, yeah, well, I I don't really know, that's not a great answer, right?
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_01: If the answer is, well, here's what we've been learning along the way, this doesn't work and this does seem to work better, then uh I think a sales team usually will latch onto that.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not just us, the founders, it's the company as a whole, need to build it first sales playbook.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: That it's a combination of okay, a pH, but also like a POV, how does a POV look like, and you know, what kind of talent you have in place to support that POV and infrastructure and all of that stuff, you gotta build it from scratch.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_00: It took us a year to get that done at the basic level, and then made another observation where okay, we need somebody who's better than us because we took it this far, it's amazing.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: But if you want to build a meaningful business, why not hire people who have done it many, many times in the past?
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: So you can go ahead and focus on some other stuff that the the company needs from you, like culture, like values, like hiring, like you know, efficiency, finance, and so on.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_00: And how big is the sales team now?
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: Not pretty big, no, we're like I think like 20 people or 18 people on the sales team.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_01: And is that a traditional, you know, SDR, AE, channel, SE, is that are they all in there?
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah, yeah.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: Classic.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: What type of channel is working best for you right now?
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: Is it the traditional security resale channel or is it other types of technology partners?
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: I would say both.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: I actually really like the channel that they're not necessarily security experts, but they understand technology and they understand businesses and they understand how companies operate.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_00: So they they can really help you close a deal if the prospect thinks it's worth it.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: Because they understand the processes internally that the buyer needs to go through, especially at larger organizations.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_00: So I really like those channels.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_00: And the other the other type is of course security channels, where they have the know-how, it's like an old machine, they know everything in and out, and you bring them something new that they really like and they start selling it.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh it's it's pretty much very effective as well.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: And down the road, of course, we'll have to do more self-servicing when it comes to all the marketplaces, Amazon, Microsoft, and so on.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think the security channel, you know, one of their big values is access, right?
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: They they have access, you know, the bigger players will have access to lots of accounts that you're probably desperate to get into.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's actually trying to win them over to want to give you access is is the challenge.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: And again, it comes back to the beginning of the conversation, all about relationship.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: I liked how you you started off the conversation, right?
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_01: So I I challenged you with what does due control do?
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: And you immediately went into, well, I want to understand the prospect first.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: I want to understand their so I I loved, love, loved how you approached that, right?
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: I think too often we knee-jerk into, well, my product's awesome and you know, it does all these amazing things and things like that.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_01: And it does all these bells and whistles.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: I generally believe that all products are awesome.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: You just have to find the right audience that thing's the same.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I love that.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Adam, listen, I've I really enjoyed our conversation this afternoon.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, if someone wants to get hold of you and and talk about roles or just continue a conversation to learn more about do control, what's the best way to do that?
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: Best way is go to do control.io, explore.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_00: Again, if you see something that makes sense to you, ping us, contact us, and we'll be more than happy to uh provide more information and understand the kind of pain point you're solving.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_00: And if we can solve it, we'll take it from there.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_01: Sounds good.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Adam rooting for you and do control in 2022 and 2023.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: Wishing you all the best.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much, Andrew.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that was a fun conversation with Adam.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_01: I really did enjoy that.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_01: A really, you know, great human being with great interaction on the podcast.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: And it's clear that for him, you know, people and relationships are important.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_01: So it was great.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_01: Three takeaways from me.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_01: First one is that, you know, throughout this whole conversation, for me, one of the takeaways was how important it is to we're people, we're humans, trying to interact with humans.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: We want to build relationships, touch points with people, get build trust, have empathy for what they're going through, want to understand them.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's all about people.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_01: And sometimes you know, we forget that as we're developing these great products, as they're coming to market, that the relationships are actually what's super important.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_01: The second thing was the thing he said, I think the exact phrasing was, everyone's a friendly until you ask them for money.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_01: And he was talking about in the context of winning early customers, right?
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_01: It was good to get people using their stuff, using the product, getting the feedback from them.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_01: But the real thing when the rubber hit the road was when you asked them for money, what was the action and were they able to go get it?
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_01: As Adam said, you know, they weren't asking for a lot to start.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: Just two, five, 10K just to get going in some of these accounts was what they wanted.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: But even that amount, it requires approvals and buying, uh getting buy-in internally on different things and prioritizing this over something else.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's a great test for the validity of your product, how strong it is, and what they believe the value is when you start asking for money, not just for feedback.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: And the third takeaway I had was, and this was throughout the whole episode, if you listen to it carefully, a lot of what Adam was doing at the start, and still is these days, is learning.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: He said, you know, when we hired our first SDR, we wanted to learn.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_01: We wanted that person to learn what worked and not worked.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um we were engaging with customers early, it was all about learning.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_01: We were looking at differentiating the market and trying new ideas.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_01: We're learning, you know, trying new things every quarter.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_01: That's a great sign.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_01: I really do think that's a good sign for you know companies who are really trying to do this.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes the focus is on let's win customers and get dollars and all the rest of it.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_01: And that's don't get me wrong, that's not unimportant.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: But earlier on, learning is actually what is most important.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_01: Learning from these people, both before they're customers and when they're customers.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_01: The learning process is what's going to make a good market that is clunky and doesn't really work very well, into one that has a great fit and actually accelerates deals and accelerates opportunities into the pipeline.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_01: So I love the real focus that Adam had with the company about learning.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_01: So three takeaways for me, you might have had different ones, but I really am rooting for deep control this year and next year.