BSidesSF 2024 - Founders R Us: Tales from recent security CEOs (Panel)

I'm Leaf uh I work at semrep I'm not the CEO of semrep I just put together a panel of other CEOs and uh we'll let youall introduce yourselves starting with Umma hey guys uh I'm Umma I'm founder and CEO of opal security we work on the ever popular lease privilege and access management space Hi everyone all over all right let's go but super important um Oliver friedricks uh founder and CEO at Pangia um we're building uh components for developers to embed security into their code from the beginning um but uh have been part of a number of startups over the past probably 10 or 20 years now last one being Pangia which became part of Splunk

and is now apparently part of Cisco um before that uh immunet which became part of source fire which is also part of Cisco and uh before that uh security Focus which became part of semantic and then immunet which became part of McAfee so it's a sickness I'm Brooke maada CEO uh co-founder of rad security formerly kok uh we are doing behavioral threat detection and response um my background is uh as a sales person formerly working at bug crowd where I worked with leaf and some other bug prowers here in the audience um I worked at rapid 7 for 10 years and sonat type too hey how's it going I'm Travis mCP formerly security engineer started resourcly two years ago

we are a configuration engine we aim to solve misconfiguration by making it really easy and fast for developers to produce good configuration it's great to be here cool yeah friendly crowd um all right uh raise your hand if you've thought about starting a company oh no all right keep your hand keep your hand up if you've done it okay cool all right raise your hand if you're just here to support your friends that are on the panel thank you thanks um all right first question um uh it can go to anybody but um tell us about the first customer that got it and fell in love with your product I can go so I think when you when you

start a company at least if you're like me you have this idea and it's just an idea you have to make that into a product that requires a ton of customer input so it's a very iterative process and until you actually have a customer it's a it's a science experiment it's a it's a hobby for the IRS standard so the first customer is really important I think the easiest way to do that is you build a design partner program which is kind of a low friction easy Stakes customer and then they understand your products very early and they iterate with you so I remember the first one of those that we had I'd started March 2022

we had our first signed design partner that paid some small amount of money to us by October 2022 um and at that point I thought okay there's at least something good enough here that people are willing to engage with us and put us through a small legal process it was a it was a good feeling of relief but it's also a feeling of pressure because now you actually have to deliver something for them so 3 months later by January the design partner was very patiently saying like Okay where's the product when can I take a look at I'm like all right yeah hold on a sec we'll get [Music] there that's true uh anyone else

wanted yeah so I think um I mean one definitely from The Phantom days uh and it was public so Uber was one of our very first customers back in the super early days when they were building their security team and uh it was the team that originally built a very similar product at Facebook so they literally built like an internal platform called Blackbird that was their sock automation tool where they basically tied together all the different tooling and their sock teams to execute and they just didn't want to do it again right so in 2014 when we started Phantom we started talking to them and it was just obvious that look they they knew how much work

it was to build something like this from scratch the source space hadn't really existed yet right so there was an opportunity to kind of create a new category but also to solve a major problem for companies like uber so they got it right away you know Joe sullon was the ciso obviously Infamous now but uh really got it and brought us in to to help the whole team there and four you know went on to to run Amazon consumer as well so another well-known ceso so they just they just knew security really well and got it very quickly yeah um this is kind of a combination of sort of both of these answers a lot of your

early sort of customers even paying customers who might buy you you know they're looking for like a point solution or like a point feature that's like going to get something solved for them quickly that's just like the economics of like you're talking to a startup you're a big company you get me access to databases sick but kind of touching on Oliver's question or or response when you find kind of that product Market fit um it was very similar for us at opal so like for background I had built an internal tool similar to um if any of you went to the Discord talk uh for their internal access tool or like Leaf build access service segment um we had this kind of

initial cohort of customers who had gone through the pain of building building it internally at their old jobs so for instance uh figma's team had built a Dropbox Maru uh Folks at scale had built that segment Folks at data breaks have built a Capital One and so they just they just grock it right like they they show up and they understand and to your point they know that it's not going to scale after a certain point and so you know it's like the market kind of moves and you get the timing right and you get those initial attaction of customers and that's just like feedback that's gold like absolutely gold you will never like get that level of feedback from somebody

who so intuitively understands your product yeah building stuff is fun maintaining stuff sucks so oh yeah yeah and uiux like like you know the nice thing about security is it's like a little bit more product focused now and the thing about products is you have to maintain them they have to like actually account for different user personas Etc I was just going to say and if you are Venture backed the clock starts ticking when you make that first sale for us the most exciting sales uh were ones that came in inbound because they did have that product Niche need um and an actual approved project we spent a lot of time talking to our customers and

slack and understanding use case like why did you buy us what was the budget need and that allows for us to create repeatable motions that otherwise we wouldn't be able to create cool um on a similar topic uh this one came I think from LinkedIn but how did you actually land some of your early design Partners when you were just getting started so for rad security um we hired a woman named Cooper who's amazing uh she's got tons of experience in demand gen and so having her on our team definitely helped to Kickstart uh demand gen funnel um my co-founder Jimmy mea and I have been in security for a minute and so we were able to reach out to our

LinkedIn Network we also use technology to help um amplify our voice a new technology that we adopted recently I was just telling Kimberly about it uh it's called amped and it's basically if you've heard of it uh AI that allows for Jimmy and I to replicate ourselves and it's sends out messages on our behalf since we've had like 20 meetings scheduled this week it might be terrible but no I said terrifying it is terrifying but it's amazing because uh I spoke to another founder who said he wakes up at 6 a. every day to send out messages and like we have those messages automated so like any any cheat codes that you can create uh for yourself when

there's just a lean team I suggest you try them yeah it's got to be a combination of everything I think I at least had this idea that you know you build a product and it's so good that everyone's just banging down the door and like as kind of a naive engineer that was my view going in and I realized that is not the case there's a whole bunch of go to market magic that you have probably haven't thought about unless you've done this job before so it's really a combination of everything you use your investors your angels any kind of friends like in the beginning I was just trying to have conversations and find out if we're in the right

ballpark so some of those turn into design Partners uh outbound you know as as was mentioned here and then any kind of um PR you can get around like what your company actually does because in the beginning you understand what you're doing nobody else even knows probably that you exist so we got one from our fundraising announcement for example it's kind of just a it takes a village to go out and get combination um at scale not a lot of companies want to be design Partners it's kind of a pain in the butt for them so it's really a special kind of company that has that mindset and you you just have to use every possible means to go find

them one thing that we discovered at bug crowd uh in the early days was that people who were really interested in amplifying their voice in the security Community oftentimes were early adopters and so if you can find those people to your point that actually want to be early adopters and try something new and uh innovate and then maybe work with your product team to help innovate for them specifically it helps and sometimes the people who have the loudest voices on like social media happen to be those people yeah I mean to to both your points like this is not if you build it they will come people like it is that is is not how the

[ __ ] Works um uh you have to grind uh and then I think people mention sort of different parts of it so security if you think about it usually does not really become a market demand until you're at a certain size of skill and complexity so what that means is Enterprise um but but early adopters are not usually that same profile and uh they're usually maybe high growth tech companies uh or product Le companies or consumer tech companies where just thinking about these things in maybe a different way so you want to kind of do two things not to go too much into jargon broe mentioned demand generation so this is like your armies

of people who spam you all and you guys are like please never email us again do not ever do this again I will never talk to you again get me off your [ __ ] mailing list um uh and then there's account-based marketing which is this idea where you pattern match on certain kinds of companies so if you know that if fintech really gets use out of your out of your uh uh products like maybe other fintech companies will as well so you you do have to kind of think about it from first principles and then and then you just have to do it even if it's painful and embarrassing as an engineer yeah and I think I I think that like the

days of cold calling to get a design partner are pretty like hard it's doesn't exist anymore like it's super hard to to do that um it's warm introductions it's like Travis mentioned three your investors relationships having been in the industry um or even just making your product like dead simple to access right like at both at Phantom and penia we had like a a plg approach like you could download phantom for free we literally got a Fortune 50 customer who did that right and access the product and they they mailed us saying how much is it like holy crap like I don't know Eric he's sitting over there like how much was it right it's

like it's one of those things so like making it super easy to access and then I mean like the product does have to be impressive right you can obviously compensate with product by better sales but if you're like an early stage startup it's so noisy out there like someone said there's like 5,000 security vendors now I mean I don't know where that number comes from someone probably made it up but but there's a there's a lot right so like how do you you dis separate yourself from all that noise of all of these other vendors it's super difficult so I mean you have to have a personal connection in some way or come here or RSA and build it right and be in

those environments firsthand to build that kind of connection yeah um next one this one was also from uh from Twitter from Casey who from bug crowd might be up here but um how much has selling and marketing to security people uh changed in the last decade I think oh uh Oliver definitely said it with cold calling like we're not hiring armies of sdrs and bdrs to just like harass you and call you on your cell phones although that probably does happen to some people in here often um I you know I think building Better Together stories is really important now and being part of an ecosystem um where people can just plug you into you know whatever Integrations

they're using for us it's eks or GitHub um of course like the normal Splunk and Sim sort of Technologies as well so and doing that stuff earlier like you know back in the day at rapid 7 and even in the early days of bug crowd we could wait a minute like nowadays startups have to like build those Integrations immediately so that's definitely changed in go to market as well I'm not qualified to talk about this I wasn't selling 10 years ago I mean I think look you actually getting in touch with the SEO now is very very difficult at least in my opinion right some people may have more success but like they usually delegate

like one level down or two levels down to their teams and actually you know rely on their team's input before they make a buying decision in most cases again because it's so noisy right I mean I don't know even even in the last 10 years since when we started Phantom like it's totally different like waking up and starting a new company and trying to repeat that that same model I mean it just doesn't work right like you said sdrs bdrs um that like I I I personally just as a CEO of a tiny company get literally dozens of emails every day and I I can't respond I just delete them because it's like yeah so noisy trying

to sell me SDR bdr business actually right I'm like no uh next up uh who should or shouldn't start a company I'm passionate about this one I'll go first I think I had a lot of first of all I read the hard thing about hard things anybody that thinks they might want to start particularly Venture back company should read that book Ben Horwitz talks through his personal hell um something that he had to do as a CEO um I don't want to dissuade anybody from starting a company but I do want to give info so that you can go in with eyes fully open it's not a job for sure uh I can tell you that my brain has not

disconnected from anything about this company in the last two years you know I'm even when I'm on when I'm on the company I'm on 100% should be like 10 out of 10 at all times if you come in and like you're you're like low energy seven out of 10 employees investors customers they're all going to think like what's wrong um so be ready to bring the fire and do that for a San period of time uh also um in doing that since it's so all consuming and it's a full job I'm like a half dad like even when I'm with my kids I'm like half there half doing something with the company you just have to be ready for

all that stuff it's it's very intense very consuming I love it uh but just anybody that does it should realize it will probably be way more intense than you thought it would I agree yeah I I think I'll say something that sort of touches on this but is maybe a little bit more positive but no less intense insecurity Is Not a Bad Thing insecurity breeds ambition ambition breeds survival Instinct and the the number one thing like all successful companies all successful Founders All success ful like sort of Endeavors have is just like this Death Drive like you're you you cannot you cannot let go of that inag so if people in here have a chip on their shoulder if they if they

can't get over it it's not I don't think this is a healthy thing to say but it's not a bad thing it's not a bad thing at all when you're building a company because it channels that Obsession and over time as you scale the ways in which you interact and sort of like you're this like core it you know you you change the way you like sort of present it but at the end of the day like what you do is you drive you are like the engine the obsession that drives you pull people along with you you pull customers along with you so you have to have a really high pain tolerance but like some people do and you don't have

to hide that and I think that's like probably if you have that thing in you you probably will be successful as a Founder I'll add one more thing too if you have something that's just like eating away at you and you will regret if you don't go try it and you're willing to tolerate you know the discomfort and all of that then then do it for sure I don't think you should get to the end of your life and think like oh I wish I would have gone for it and believed in myself you're never going to feel like 100% about your idea or the market or any of that stuff so yeah it's good to be insecure

exactly and there's a lot of steps that you need to take in the beginning just to like kick it off and they're not as crazy as you might think so like I remember thinking to start a company you need like 10 billion doar and you know crazy VC backing a million people signed up to be customers already and if you think about like the big picture it can be overwhelming sometimes but if you just start with the baby steps like you just need enough money to pay yourself your co-founder and maybe a couple of Engineers to start and then you can do that through Angel fundraising um Jimmy actually kicked off uh starting rad security before I joined and he did such

a great job with Angel fundraising we did a little bit more and then got our first uh traditional VC after but I'm happy to talk to anybody about the process and how it all worked if you want to meet afterwards and um yeah maybe that's a good like next question if you want to just tell a little bit about the early fundraising I think that would be something a lot of people would would benefit from so for rad for our first pitch we used to be called quok but for our first pitch that we ever did we got a term sheet so I had like this false sense of confidence that like all pitches like you're just going to get a

term sheet at the end of it which is not the case um and so um you know we ended up with a few rejections after that um but then uh ended up getting a really solid investor uh in 406 Ventures um but yeah it's definitely not easy like for luckily for me I've been punched in the face a lot as a sales leader and rejected my entire life in that capacity um but still uh you know you have to make sure that you figure out a way to iterate change improve every time to make it so that your pitch really um resonates with investors that's our founding story yeah I I think things have changed quite a

bit like when I first my first job as a CEO was back in 2008 I left semantic to start a company called immunet and never had been a CEO I'd seen it done right the last two companies but like nobody would invest in me it was one of those times where like people still cared that you had an MBA and if you didn't have an NBA you were like you didn't know what you were doing now it's like totally flipped right now if you're a product person like you walk on water right at like mbas you just hire someone with an MBA right but but that's how the valley has changed like there's there's respect

for technical knowledge for engineering for like actually Building Product and that's what gets you funded now right and I think eventually look when you go public maybe you'll bring on a professional CEO at some point who has that scaling experience and not to discourage anyone if you have an NBA I really wanted one for a while um but it was but I think that's changed quite a bit right and I so I think it's gotten easier for you know all of us to to raise funding in this climate with technical abilities and Technical knowledge because that's really what's creating software obviously a few things that uh that weren't obvious to me about fundraising so first of all all of this is for

Venture back companies you can bootstrap companies I think people think Venture back is more glamorous it's not it's a trade-off um in fact sometimes I think about like oh it would be so nice to have a bootstrap company I'm I'm happy doing what I'm doing but it just puts additional pressure on you the second you take Venture money those Venture capitalists want to make at least 10x but ideally 100 or a THX so some companies are great businesses but they're not Venture scale if your company has no Pathway to basically 100 million in Revenue then VCS aren't going to be interested in that um that's the first thing second thing is the importance of founder market fit so

basically ideas are a dime a dozen execution is going to be everything they want to invest in the right team as well as the right space what that means is that you have some unfair advantage that it's going to be really hard for other people to replicate which will give you a head start um and then the third thing is uh a lot of people think about before raising funding that they should go build a POC what investors want is to drisk the proposition as much as possible so unless the thing that you're building is going to be like really technically hard to execute you're probably better off spending your time not building something but going and

validating the market most of the most of the risk in Venture back companies is going to come down to like do people care about this are they willing to buy it is their budget for it do you know who the budget holder is so if you take the time that you were going to spend some hacky demo that probably investors aren't going to care very much about and you give them instead like here's all the conversations I had here's the validation I got maybe with some quotes behind it I think that's going to make a bigger difference to investors yeah I I'll touch quickly on that because I think Travis you hit all the major points like Venture Capital

specifically like you know the big names it's it's power law like all you're looking for is like you're going to make like 100 bets and one is going to be a massive massive exit so they want people have done sort of research on like you know what is there any correlation with like certain factors um or certain variables with like successible companies and by and far uh Market timing is the number one uh your team composition is a close second but like Market timing takes it every single time like think about for example uh there's been like a new crop of like uh fishing software right or fishing or email software um these Security in particular it just goes

through these Cycles right now we're going through a cycle with IM am I would say right and that's why you're seeing like all these companies um so Market validation is the number one thing for Venture back capital and then uh a strong team the founder market fit piece I'm actually like there's one other perspective I think people especially first-time Founders don't think about um especially in early stage uh rounds which is founder alignment so if any of you have ever joined a company as an employee under 10 people you one of the things that like really like your happiness and your success is predicated on is how aligned you are with the founders right and it's actually kind of

the same way when you look for investors really early on you want somebody who like gets you and believes in you and believes in Your Vision because the early days are very hard and non-deterministic and if you have that luxury and that ability of choice like it's a very important thing and it I think it like meaningfully affects your outcome oh one one more quick tip uh investors are like everybody and they think that um that things that they chased down are going to be better than things that come to them and try and sell them something so if you have the ability to to reach out to friends that are already connected to the VCS you want to talk to

and say you know nice things and do a warm intro that way that's going to be way better than you sending a cold email to them that's really good advice I'm so over this like who like who cares just build but okay that's a rant for another I know it's such a game of cat and mouse but it it's true it works um this one's from the audience if anyone else out there wants to submit a question you can go to besides sf.org Q&A but um this one is what is the hardest part of transitioning from either being an engineer or an individual contributor to running a company and bringing a product uh to Market I make a I make no

money I think that's the hard part in the early days is like you just have to be fine with you know I guess trudging through it for a little bit uh at least for me I don't know about you guys but that was a a change luckily for me I my husband um also works in cyber and he's able to support our family while we build a company but VCS aren't going to let you pay yourself $10 million a year if you're a CEO of a company and give you money like you just can't do that so that was definitely a personal Challenge and then you know I really like the B stage of a company and

a series C stage of a company um and all the building blocks to get to from Zer to one your first customer is like that's really challenging to remember after being at more established companies how much work you have to do in the beginning just to get to you know those steps yeah I think I mean having done that I used to for 30 years write code they don't let me anymore but I mean it's one of those you have to expand in almost every direction it's it's like not like you can't not do something like you you have to learn at least the basics like I'm not I'm not an accountant or a lawyer like I I can

review stuff but I'm still not doing that so but but we have what you have to do is learn how to hire people and manage people well right that do that with you and for you as a team and that's really key because we can't all be experts like that's impossible for us to learn all of these domains so like I'm a product person at heart but I've learned enough about all the other dimensions of running a company to to kind of know what I'm doing in most cases but still like you you hire people that know more than you do in every area and trust them and hire people that you know you can work with well and build a

team right and then you succeed as a team so I think being able to let go especially as an engineer like you sometimes you're a control freak because like you want to control everything but you can't like that's your your company will fail if you try to like control every single piece of it so I think it's it comes down to emotional intelligence like you have to learn to be super high EQ and read people and understand people and learn how to manage people yeah yeah in that same vein what's been the hardest thing to give up and why wait I wanted to answer question oh yeah go for it go for it thank you

um uh I think all those things are true I think the hardest thing is perspective shift um I think good good Founders and good good CEOs no matter the size of their company do a lot of altitude switching they can get into the tiniest details and then they can zoom up and you sort of forget that you have a different view of the company and a different time Horizon than now the people even at a 6 10 15 30 person company do and it's really hard to sort of like cognitively be aware that sometimes you think something's going to go incredibly wrong and there's no reason any IC should think that like it's just but it's it's

it's like a very strange mental exercise so I'll just say that I think that's for me personally the hardest part and then you have to learn to kind of like Tamp down your anxiety and like recognize that some things just have to play out it's it's weird even if you've been a manager before or a team lead like I was it's it's a very different it's a very different altitude when I started uh when I started the company I set a hard rule on myself that I was never going to do any engineering work and the reason for that is because you know engineering is most of my background and I had this idea that going out and talking to

customers is hard putting your product out there and somebody says your baby's ugly or even worse they say your baby's great and then they just ghost you that stuff's hard learning how to have the conversations is hard and I didn't want to be able to hide in in the comfort of doing engineering work because I knew it was important that somebody go out and do this hard work and the the full cycle of that is I was in a meeting with three of my Engineers the other day we were talking about some some product feature that involved them going in and validating a bunch of stuff they were they were just going going through the

product and pulling up code and all this stuff and I it just hit me I was like I have no [ __ ] idea what these guys are doing right now like I just I have no idea I I feel like there's a bit of a counter like I I don't push code anymore but like I I still I still run like AR architectural reviews I still like I don't do the code reviews but like like I think it depends like per person per leadership style per company like we're a technical product so I still like to be in the details um but there are also just like you have to let some fires burn and that's just like it's like

Total Insanity like I am I am very very neurotic about hiring especially ench hiring because I was an ench manager and once you start scaling you're like oh I just have to wait till this gets to the Deep Reef I can't do the resume screening I don't know why I'm whispering but like you just have to you have to let things go so that you can actually scale so I'll just say that yeah cool um what's the this one's from the audience what's the biggest mistake you've made that you're willing to admit they're not so friendly anymore no I I I I was actually feel like I've made a lot of mistakes um I got one uh we waited way too long

to fire the first person uh we brought on somebody that claimed that they had technical skills we thought we interviewed them they it was fundamental that they had these skills and we thought okay maybe you know they'll ramp up up fast and whatever by a month and a half into this person working at the company it was clear that they weren't this A+ person that we needed on this core part of the product and you know lad and my co-founder we we talked about it and we wanted to hold this really high bar one of the things that impacted both of us was working at Netflix where they're known for you know hiring the best letting people go when it doesn't

work out and we wanted to hold the same bar but we waited too long we we basically Let It Go for 4 months and should have done it after the one and a half months maybe like one and a half months we realize it's not working have a conversation if they don't improve in another 3 weeks then they're out um Let It Go four months and we vowed to never do that again so since then we've let people go basically if if somebody's going to come in it's really obvious if they are if they're going to be able to do what you think they can do early on and so yeah we don't make that mistake

anymore I think like for me like thematically so this is kind of going back to like what it takes to be a Founder like part part of your job is sort of like to will things into existence especially in the early days like there is sort of this like aspect of like I will control I will I will force this into life and that is both a very powerful and also very dangerous like like dangerous like temperament and this is especially like easy to make mistakes with when it comes to things like you know like I'll give you an example like we've like had like you know deal Cycles where it's very obvious that we should have like disqualified

but you're so used to pushing things over the finish line and course correcting and getting it done like it's it's you know like like it's it's happened like there's two major points that this happened over the course of opal's history and both times like regretted it burned the team out and made like the last the second time it happened like it just people were exhausted it had people quit over it and it's it's painful because like you don't want to take like like there's a part of you like I knew this wasn't going to work that's why I was pushing so hard and like but at the same time like it is your fault it's your fault like um and

uh yeah learning to again kind of like temper the things that both make you good at building a company but like are also like not helpful and Skilling or empowering others like in a business yeah I think one of the the single biggest mistake was probably trying to start a company like after the housing crash in like 2008 like when the market tanked uh Leman Leman Brothers imploded uh there was no funding available and literally I had to sit in my garage for a year writing code like by myself and it was it was like crazy because I left a good job at semantic and you know could have stayed there probably forever and I know I don't know

where it is now but um anyways so so like it's just like timing is matters and you can't control the world around you that's the reality is like there's things that like so out of your control like the economy and budget cycles and now you know obviously covid like all these things that happened in the last 10 years where like none of these things are in under your control so I managed to raise like I think we raised like $2 million in a series 2.5 series a which now like is not even like a seed like that's like preed right that's like one person's check or something like now people raise like $20 million seed

rounds it's completely ridiculous um and we couldn't raise a series B cuz it was like 2010 and nobody would invest right and that was also my first time as a so it was super challenging um and you know we still exited to Source fire but it wasn't what we intended like we literally we're trying to build crowd strike three years before George started crowd strike right so like Market Market timing was like everything we were way too late for antivirus and like way too early for EDR too late to explore the universe just I mean it's just yeah you can't always make the right decision though but passion is what drives you right you want to still prove something

and build something important um when do you think you should hire your first salesperson okay so your first salesperson is not going to look like your salesperson at like I don't know even 10 million in Revenue 5 million in Revenue your first salesperson should be what I like to call bad student good test taker um they're really smart they're usually kind of weird and they can run around the field and they can they can like problem solve like no one's business they're like very creative they're they like they'll wear the product hat they'll wear like the biz hat they'll they'll they'll do what needs to be done if you find someone like that bring them

on ASAP um and and and and it will it will be like magic because they are basically going to be your they're going to be your like feedback loop in some sense and they're going to enjoy it like people like that they really enjoy it like that archetype is usually done by the time you like hit like series B they're like this is boring I'm out but Thrive uh if it's not that kind of person I think like you know there's different factors or different different different things to consider if you have a very technical product I like to I like to say like se's run the technical sale so your se's will almost be more

important than any account rep um who will mostly do coordinating and scheduling so um basically once once people start like once you start like having signals for product Market fit is what I would say oh I was just going to say that um I agree with you the creative piece is really important otherwise you'll end up feeling like oh I hired salespeople too early because they're just the wrong fit for you um but the people who are really creative who can figure out a way to get you know deals across the Finish Line understand objections like they might not close a deal for a while so you have to get creative with comp plans and that sort

of thing but um in the bug crowd days we had a guy in the early days who sent a wheel of cheese to customer customers and for some reason they loved it I don't know why it was very strange but he he did more business than anybody else and he just hustled to get things done and so yeah there's uh that creative persona for the first hire is super important yeah like sometimes it's like an engineer who's bored and is like I want to see what this is like or just yeah they're they're really good if you can find yeah and I think typically like you'll want well if if you listen to VCS they'll want to see the founder close

some deals first typically that is your job like anywhere from like you know 500k to a million in in sales right if it's an Enterprise product for example before they'll write a check because they want to see some repeatability so that they're funding you know a product that actually can you know be sold and there's a repeatable sales motion with at least like a ICP identified like ideal customer profile which is you know they're in healthcare and they're in like the mid market like that's the ideal customer for this product and like we can just fund this company to hire more Sal sales people and repeat that that motion yeah but also it's it's not

just about Investors like you should do founder lit sales because one you you learn what your particular deal like you're not going to learn this like reading on the internet like whatever worked for somebody else's company isn't necessarily going to work like for your there's there's some like common denominators but uh and and the second thing is it's product feedback it's product feedback even if you don't close a deal you learning things that you will probably never get to learn again if you like if you if you become successful so I actually say like at least like 10 million maybe the best the best security CEOs in the world like they still run deals themselves like Nasha Pao runs

deals right like it's it doesn't change just like where you focused us agree this is a friendly panel wasn't there one question that was going to be Deb that was the sales on the sales question was going to be yeah we need some spicier questions from the audience um here's one uh does being a CEO suck your capacity for empathy uh how do you stay connected to the humans on your team somewhat in one sense you have to be more empathetic than you've ever been because you're trying to take in so much information from you're not going to be able to spend as much time with individuals you're trying to take in as much information from them as possible

and really understand their ground truth you know what they're trying to tell and everything and on the other um I'll use I don't know if this is empathy exactly but I found myself you I'll get an email like hey Travis how's it going you know how's your dog whatever and then like to the thing that they actually wanted to ask and i' I've just been replying with like on line answers and the reason I do that is because I have so much stuff going on that if I have to do the whole like I'm great how's your dog you know and then actually do the thing that it's going to sit there for two weeks and I'm

not going to actually answer their question so I'm having to be much quicker and do with some of the niceties but I'd say my ability to empathize with people's actually gone up just because it's it I have to engage it a lot to get the relationship and info I need yeah and I think they're not mutually exclusive I mean being it's it's it's about communicating clearly like what the goals and outcomes are and you can do that with empathy I mean if you're dealing with like a performance issue or someone who's not working out in the company that that doesn't mean you don't have empathy right it's just not the right fit or there's so kind of

corrective action that has to be taken so I think like you're still human and you you can still treat people well despite having to make tough decisions yeah I I think that's a really good point so like I'll sort of delineate with certain things there's a difference between being nice and being empathetic and and there's also this concept of Integrity where Integrity is like doing what you say you will right and that's probably the single most important thing you should hire good people managers there they will make people's lives not everyone's job is to care as much about the company as yours and they're not going to be able to handle the level of stress that you do that's why you're the

CEO um but you should care about people you're it doesn't go away but your job is to also steer and the way you do that is by clearly communicating by doing what you say you will by building trust and by hiring people you trust to also be good people managers I was just going to say and you can't expect employees to have the same sort of level of stress and you don't want them to that you have and so uh uh sometimes when you feel like oh my God I'm not my best self you have to remember that like your it's your job to make sure that you maintain like really good communication at the company to

demonstrate empathy wherever possible but that like the people who work for you don't feel all the same feelings of stress that you feel yeah your job like sort of to be criticized so like you know like it's and and that's that's like hard for any human being and and that's fine but you you should like recognize that take the time to recharge and like show up like that that was that is still hard for me right like you were just constantly like it's it's a stressful job and one decision you make that might benefit the company might actually impact somebody else negatively and so you can never be loved by everybody at all times like that's just

not going to happen all right this next one's from Colleen hi Colleen uh it is when do you fire yourself as CEO parenthesis pick my question Leaf hey uh I think that you should have a lot of self like it's self-awareness is like sort of a constant exercise it's not easy it's not a natural thing and one of the things that's really important is to know I think Oliver you said this what you're good good at and what you're not good at and if you are constantly sort of asking yourself that question you will know at what stage like if you are still doing the job or having fun and doing that well and for

some people it it really depends like some people are just early growth people they're like good students bad test takers they like building the zero to one and then they're done and they hand over some people you know they take a company public and then and then the hand over the rain some people bring in a COO that they're sort of grooming to be like a president um it's it's just it's very dependent on who you are and how willing you are to also change and learn and still enjoy that job like it's it's not one job there's multiple jobs and I think you mentioned this Oliver like old school sort of like company building Playbook used to be like

technical founder bring in professional CEO let them scale it right and and and and now it's a little bit different um but like both models can work yeah I mean it's kind is my baby I want it to be successful no matter what uh that's more important than my own ego I've heard that everybody has some CEO capacity basically where they go and you know maybe you're Mark Zuckerberg and he's been running that company by all accounts very effectively for the last 15 or 20 years or whatever my hunch is I'm I'm not going to be just knowing myself uh I don't really like the little like logistic details that for example public company CEOs have to get into uh

the only question is how far will I go and you know maybe I will develop that capacity but if I ever get to the point where it's like okay company needs some other executive that knows how to do these things and and really cares about it as much as I cared about doing the other stuff I'll be the first person to tap myself out sometimes when companies get to be really big to Travis's point I feel like they become really political like the positions become really political um and uh and so I know personally I'm not the best politician in the world so I'm not sure what that means for me but I've seen lots of

CEOs who have the ability to hire people who have done it before at C at the next phase of growth and if you're good at hiring Executives and leaders that definitely helps because you can't be expected to be a domain expert at every single area of your company so I think it's just like knowing when to also hire a new marketing leader or a new engineering leader or product leader that actually understands what it's like to go IPO or understands definitely helps your Longevity if that's what you're after but self-awareness is important to know like okay it's time to bring in somebody else like that understands how to you know go on CNBC and talk about those you're going to be

on there I don't know all right we have just a little bit of time is there anything that someone feels like they need the audience to hear before we wrap things up I feel like oh go ahead I was just going to say if anybody wants to talk to I'm sure everyone here would be willing to to talk after about like what do I do where do I at your happy hour at at our happy hour yeah our happy hour yeah um so yeah I come by and like we'll tell you we'll give you the VC list like introduce you to whoever to Travis's Point introductions are everything so yeah I mean to extend on that I've never

been part of an underdog group before and most companies fail and entrepreneurs really do help each other so if anybody thinks that they that they might want to do this we're happy to help there's a ton of other entrepreneurs in the community they going to be very generous with their time so you don't have to go out alone cool well thanks for attending thanks for submitting questions and uh yeah