How To Start a Business With a Cyber Security Background

hello friends and welcome to how to start a business as a cyber security professional this talk is for people who are looking to start their own business they are it's a talk for people who have their own business but want to get organized or are looking to grow and it's for cybersecurity professionals who are just curious about all of the insanity that happens inside of the c-suite punch line it's not insanity there's science behind it this is a rear according of the b-sides talk I gave in for besides Greenville 2020 and here we go well I am ruggedly handsome and I do quote my sources so that's my wife she thinks I'm pretty and I believe her I've

been three years as the scholar and residents for cybersecurity research at Clemson University means I've worked with the mba department and the the MBAs to help with figuring out how cybersecurity in business work together my goal was to have people who did business understand cybersecurity and the people who did cybersecurity understand business and that basically gave me the platform I needed to write a bunch of books to use on foreign entities MBA acting entrepreneur and residents at the College of Charleston and this is for digital transformation and cybersecurity than I'm helping those guys out with 20 years in cyber coached over a hundred business owners 17 years as an entrepreneur with one multimillion-dollar exit yep I sold him a company we'll get into

it but here's my favorite bullet point once upon a time I was able to talk trash through the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize winner during a beach volleyball game on Richard Branson's Island and if you guys tuned in and the live beat sides I actually gave more details about that story it is one of my favorites in the world it turns out people are just people and people are delightful which may be contrary to some of my cyber friends opinion anyway all of this stuff starts with a call to adventure meaning that the the current world that you're living and gets disrupted in some form or fashion that makes you feel like I need to change something

something happened at work something that happened personally something has triggered you to want to change your current reality away from the employee employer relationship and makes you curious maybe I should start my own business so let me kind of walk you through it mine was to give you an example I was with IBM for a while and I was a road warrior and I had over a hundred percent travel for three years straight one such point in time I was working with Lockheed Martin in the US Air Force to stand up a disaster recovery Identity and Access Management environment in Dayton Ohio so I was going back and forth from Montgomery Alabama Dayton Ohio Greenville South Carolina and I was

doing that for a very very long time and one section here one one layover that I went through was a 18 hour layover in Montgomery Alabama and I haven't been back I'm sure the airport is nice now but when I was there about 17 years ago it was under construction for refurbish there was no bars there were no no Wi-Fi and it was just it was horrible it was horrible and I sent about 18 hours writing on the legal pack saying I'll never do this again for somebody else because at this point in time when I got home my golden retriever would growl at me the gum retriever even was so mad at me it peed

on my couch once and guys I have to tell you this there's not a lot of tests that are as reliable as if your golden retriever doesn't like you anymore you're doing life wrong so I talked to a buddy of mine who was the director of global security for large corporation and he said hey why don't you leave IBM start your own company and just save me money but you'll also because I can pay a lower rate then I pay an IBM but I can also get you more money because you can take all that money home so I thought well that's great but I have a non-compete with IBM I need to go talk

to somebody to get permission so I went to my manager and I said hey I know this is gonna probably violate a non-compete but I feel like I can take better care of the customer and I feel like I can blah blah blah him all the reasons and I was just expecting a big fight didn't happen what he said was oh wow I've always wanted to start my own company I wish you good luck so I did but the fact that I started it isn't where I'm going to focus for the rest of the presentation what I'm going to focus on is I really curious about that statement I wish I could start a company

but I never have so back to my story eventually thirteen years after all that a Dutch company purchased my company and I won the game I went from one employee meeting me to 21 nerds doing identity and access management consulting and eventually it was acquired by a Dutch company so yay for Adam but let's circle back to my manager I always wanted to start a company so we get it right we there's a lot of reasons that people want to start companies there's a lot of reasons that they give fine right but what they're really saying is they want freedom they want freedom to be in charge of their time their money and have autonomy to work on the things that

they want to work on and not be told what to do so that's what I wanted right when I left IBM I wanted to create a company that let me take care of my people and give them control over time money autonomy I wanted to create a different kind of company and that was my big driving force so you don't want to run from something if you run from the pain the triggering event of being in that Montgomery Alabama Airport for 18 hours eventually I won't be there and the pain will go away you can use that triggering event to be the catalyst to move away from where you currently are but if you're not running towards

something with a cool vision with a cool something you're not gonna have the fuel to get to where you want to go so why didn't he do it why don't most of us do it everyone wants freedom everyone wants the things that were on those lists but there's some really good reasons that people don't first one is they tell themselves that they don't have the time to do it or the security to do it I had a friend saying I'm you're so lucky you started your businesses when you were young I have kids I just can't afford to take that risk or they see an opportunity but they don't know if it's a real business and they don't know how

to test to see if it's real business I got this idea I mean I really don't know is it a thing should I do the thing I don't know and the last is man business is daunting it is a lot of moving parts and we're gonna get into them today but it is a big heavy lift to just try to help somebody's in the form of a business so I've got good news one does not simply walk away from one's day job the worst thing you can do is quit your day job to try to start a company there's some caveats to that if you already have customers who are trying to pay you if you already have

all those things fine but at the end of the day what you really don't want to do is create more risk and more pressure by not having an income I have a real good buddy and she was the director of online education for a major university and she was globally known people were flying her on their dime to lecture at conferences in Hawaii and all over the world and I said wow you were you've put so much effort into this and you just got more responsibility without more money you must love this she said no I hate this I hate this I don't feel supported I don't have that I'm not living the life I want to live and

doesn't want you go do it yourself and she gave me the I don't have enough time and I in this all right here we go my suggestion to anyone who has that is don't quit your day job but do give yourself 30 minutes a night three nights a week to work on your business and my bet to her because I knew what she was trying to do and I knew the market was I bet you that if you give you do a 30-minute a night like skip one episode of whatever your binge-watching and work on your business instead three nights a week I bet you you will be able to walk away from your day job in three months

and if you don't I will give you 600 bottle six hundred dollar bottle of scotch well I didn't have to give her the Scotch she was out of her day job in a month and a half because things move quickly if you follow a system if you understand what you're doing and if they even if you don't you can go through and spend a year starting your business at night anyway what I'm saying is don't walk away from your day job let's jump into some of the better questions here what is a business why should I start wondering how do I do that what is a business a business is an engine that creates wealth and that

wealth and that engine drive a vehicle to a destination so the business itself is not a destination it is a machine that gives you power to do the things that you want to do it's not good it's not bad it's just a machine and that machine is made up of customers who have a problem that they need solved and you have a solution that you can then tell everybody about and then help them buy that solution from you so that you're sustainable and that they get what they need and they're supported through your operations of how you deliver your solutions and how you help them support it by your back-office this is all like the accounting and the finances and all

the stuff the inner workings of the company mix with fuel and oil so you got the engine but it doesn't run without fuel and if it is running the whole engine breaks down without the oil so the fuel is money in the oil our people guys this is a business customers problems solution marketing sales operation back-office people and money and the money goes in and the money gets generated and comes out and this is an amazing little tool let's go and look a little bit deeper about how a business works revenue minus expenses equals profit you need to generate profit because profit is money and money is fuel if your business isn't generating profit then the engine

doesn't have gas to run and the whole thing shuts down and you don't drive anywhere but let's dive into what these actually mean and this is gonna help you understand even if you're not interested in starting your own company or growing your own company but just as a cybersecurity practitioner who wants to know how the insanity of the c-suite works let me show you why all this stuff goes on revenue you are selling a product or service to a customer that is your vice president of sales that's your marketing department all these people are trying to generate revenue your expenses is the cost of producing those products and services and running the back office so that you

can have the solution that you can actually sell and profit is the controls that are put in place to manage those two pipelines they're the revenue and the expense pipeline quota that is the requirements that the chief financial officer puts on top of revenue saying Vice President of Sales chief marketing officer you must generate $100 each month right that is a quota go do that and then they use budgets to control spending chief operating officer you are only allowed to spend 90 dollars a month and that way the chief financial officer has guaranteed to the CEO that if everything goes according to plan that the business will generate ten dollars a month it's those controls that are most

interesting to me because those are the things that make the engine run and if you can understand quota and budget revenue and expense then you can see why cybersecurity is so important if a breach happens and the expense for production goes up let's say there is a a critical breach and someone's hit them with ransomware and they've locked everything down and so now instead of being able to produce whatever they're trying to produce in the right amount of time it takes longer and more expensive now all the sudden your expenses have shot through the roof and now your revenue isn't there to support it and you have negative profit or losses and if you have losses and you don't have

enough fuel in the tank the business will go out of business the company will shut down so cyber security is here to make sure that the controls that we put in place to allow revenue minus expense equals profit to work we are the gatekeepers that makes your business systems function and so if that's our job we need to understand business systems and not just technology so Bravo for you for sitting through this so what kind of businesses are there well i classify them into three different ways I am awesome which is typically professional services I can build it means you can build a product or I know some people which means you're a master networker and you can put

different things together like hey you're a company who needs XYZ and I know a couple other companies that produce ABC let's get you all together I am awesome is typically where we all start this is professional services this is training this is something that you do you show up and you train an hour of your time for a hourly rate or for a retainer these guys are usually self-employed but it quickly moves on to where you can scale that that is exactly what I did I did I am awesome identity and access management consulting I trained 21 other identity access management consultants and then I began to after those professional services out there so I can build it that's when you

actually create a software product this or or any other kind of product but in my track record I have done many software companies and these are very hard because as a professional services I am awesome if the customer gives you feedback you can immediately change it but if you're reselling somebody else's stuff like I was reselling IBM software in if the customer didn't like the software there's nothing I can do and Lincoln scripting code so much around the software to make dance but if the customer wants something different and the software doesn't do it it's real hard to change that and even if you're running your own software product this can be a heavy lift I know some people

those are the communities out there there's a lot of ways look there's value in helping people know how to think about a thing and there's value in helping people find information about a thing and connecting those folks who need the information and have the problem together not a huge draw to most folks in cyber but it does exist so here's what I want you to know whichever one you pick our goal for you guys is freedom what we want is freedom of time freedom of money in autonomy on what you work on and why not when you work on it it that means that how you make your money needs to be independent on you spend your time which means you need

to build the engine and let the engine run and not be a cog or a part of the engine but rather you are the engineer not the engine when you're getting started it's completely fun to be the engine you'll fill all of those roles all those nine roles that I talked about those are gonna be you but you want to be in there with the intention of setting up systems so that you can walk away and do what you want and if you really love one of those parts of the engine feel free to do it but that's that's gonna be a choice not a requirement you still haven't ahna me so business works when you leverage these five

things you get the right people doing the right processes inside of the right systems solving a problem that people care enough about that they're going to pay you money to fix if all this is happening boom you got yourself a business then it's all a matter of getting the engine tuned and doing the right things so let's answer this question and should I start a business and I will give you a pretty good answer this is maybe maybe you should I used to believe entrepreneurship was a silver bullet and then I realized that it is not the silver bullet it is very very difficult what I thought I was getting in for was a different kind of ride it

is not the way you're going to make the most amount of money we entrepreneurs we have high highs and lows lows we the things that stress my family out the most is the in predictability of entrepreneurship sometimes people say they'll pay check your paycheck when an entrepreneur often lives exit to exit if the company doesn't do well you don't have any insurance it's the buck stops with you but you also have control and you can roll up your sleeves for me it was far more risky to be a number on a giant IBM spreadsheet that some CFO somewhere can decide I was too expensive and I needed to be laid off at least when I'm running the engine I have

control I have the ability to get off my butt and make more phone calls to try to contact more people to find out if they have a problem I can help with so for me the risk of doing nothing was greater and and some of the risks of the uncontrolled innothing uncontrolled the the in predictability of entrepreneurship but before you can do any of that what you have to do is answer this answer this question what is the vision that you have for your future if your vision for the future is compelling enough that you can deal with some of the stresses that you can be resilient enough to go after that then you should totally give it a

shot I absolutely agree with that and if you do it in the right kind of way it doesn't have to put you at a huge amount of risk so I am going to narrow it down I'm throwing away autonomy I'm gonna look at two things we're gonna look at time and money for when you have to do your vision because what I'm assuming and what I am positing to you is if you have control over your time and you have control over your money then your autonomy comes naturally that's a pretty big assumption but you know that's just where I'm gonna sit and also it helps this next graph because I don't want to put it on me in here although I guess we

could look an employee trays there time for money you show up and you do a thing and someone pays you so the more valuable the thing you do to the company either you lower expenses by doing something amazing that makes it super efficient or you increase revenue by creating a new product that someone can sell or you help with getting customers supported things like that so if you are providing value into that equation then they give you more money if you they if you don't put value into that equation and you're a commodity inside that you get less money so that's not an employee earns money self-employed are people who trade time and money and take some of

the responsibility and risk in exchange for more money these are your contractors these are your general consultants who handle a lot of the back office stuff an employee for example and I'm gonna use back of the napkin math an employee when I am calculating how much they cost me I take their salary times 0.15 that's all the fully rate for insurance for travel for blah blah blah all the things right training the self-employed person doesn't get the benefits of that and so when you're setting yourself employment you have to make sure that you're getting paid at least 1.5% or 1.5 times more than what your salary is in order to have the same lifestyle that is a risky thing and so

that's why people are gonna do our self-employed well how do I do prices that's important and then business owner they build systems that trade other people's time for money meaning they build systems that employees can succeed in to produce value and then here's the last one trades money for money guys I'm not even gonna talk about I want to have no idea how to do that I'm very bad at investing let's move on I gave so we're talking about time and money so I gave another talk at a earlier besides about show me the money how cyber security people make money and I said there are three tracks the technology track the executive track from the entrepreneur track and I have

to tell you I've had a lot of conversations with some of my drinking buddies who are now vice presidents inside of companies and haha who would have thought well done guys but that's the thing is the executive track in the technology track or senior technology person they can make a whole lot of money with a lot less risk if you can win in that particular track the entrepreneur track has a lot of chaos and most entrepreneurs I know make enough money that they are successful these are a lifetime on lifestyle entrepreneurs most entrepreneurs are not creating google most entrepreneurs make a couple hundred thousand dollars a year have some freedom of time have some autonomy and are very very happy when

things are going well but there's an awful lot of stress that goes in that if you don't approach it in the right way but I could not survive the technology tracked and I could not survive in the executive track because I am programmed to be an entrepreneur and maybe that is you too so let's talk about if you choose to do the entrepreneur track and we talked about the engine now you need to envision your vehicle so if your vision was I want to help people and I want to do all this stuff and you're gonna build yourself an ambulance right or maybe what you wanted is to hey I'm gonna help move this dirt around

well you're gonna need a dump truck right and the engine you build for each one of these vehicles to accomplish your vision is different a dump trucks engine will not serve Ricky Bobby in number 51 because he wants to be first because he knows he's not he's gonna be last and that engine just doesn't work so as you discover your vision your mission what you're trying to get done you can reverse engineer through design based thinking what kind of engine you need to move that vehicle by the way I absolutely love my last bullet point because I'm just picturing a clown car trying to save people's lives and like you know ER a EMT guys just pouring out

of it anyway that was fun for me to imagine I hope you enjoyed it - all right so let's get in the nuts and the bolts how do I start my business there are four phases for launching a business it starts with ideation what can I do let's come up with a whole bunch of ideas all right now we've narrowed the ideas down from hundreds to a few let's test them all right after we have validation from our tests that we've got the right thing let's build it and if you build it and you get a few customers who pay you you have entered startup mode and startup mode is the starting line think of all of this as

training for a race this is all the prep work you do before you get into a game right so ID eight test build startup let's go through them all ideation is the process for coming up with business models business ideas and all of the things you defined the idea you generate and you define your target meaning what is my goal generate the ideas a whole bunch of them collect them but I'm in a bucket analyze them and then act on the one you choose so let's look at define define is getting extreme Claire you know what your goal is I love that quote from president Santos of Colombia said that if you do not have a destination port

your boat just sails around all the time and eventually sinks so you have to have a goal in mind otherwise you're gonna spend a lot of energy be very very busy but not produce anything of value and so having your target in mind is very very important and there's some good goal-setting exercises I can help you guys with but in general it's how do you pick your goal and then how do you reverse engineer back and now that you have a goal in mind for example I had a goal I want to make thirty thousand dollars a month I only wanted to work 20 hours a week and I wanted to spend more time traveling so those were some of my

goals and now an ideated business around it that's what I do so we came up with all these ideas okay you put all these ideas what can I do what can I do who can I help what can I do boom boom boom you come with us as many possible ideas as you can and then you organize them most of the time they're gonna notice a couple themes come up and you start organizing them around these themes and then you need to analyze I love this because I did this this graphic here you got neo and you've got all of these ideas coming his way oh man he has to slow down in order to go fast before he

can pick a bullet out of that whole mix he has to slow all the ideas down and so you're switching gears from this fast-paced ideation I did generation it's a whole lot of fun to slow down and let's go look at each and every one of these things and what you do is you take some of the winners that obviously go that you resonate with and you create a graph and on one side you have a bunch of rows that have all the ideas in it along the top columns you have things you measure how difficult is this to be how expensive is this can I do it on my own can I do it at night what's the next

step and so what you'll have is a whole bunch of really really good ideas but you're only going to have two maybe three that match your goal and the time that you have and the risk you're willing to adopt and all these things and I want you to be very comfortable with having a lot of really really good ideas but knowing that the constraints that you're currently under means that you're only gonna be able to approach a few of these keep the rest of them in your back pocket a cool thing about business is you can always launch more once the system is running you can go play and then you have to act and you

have to choose when you look at that matrix you look at the matrix I like what I did there that was unintentionally intentional once you look at your matrix you'll be able to see that there are a few winners and you'll pick one maybe two and then you won't begin to truly act on it and analyze it and this is how you're going to do that after you pick one or two you're gonna create what we call a lean business canvas in this lean business canvas is how you organize your ideas you're going to define the customer you're trying to help you're going to outline the one two three maybe couple problems that they are experiencing that

you think they need to have solved you're going to list what they're currently doing that makes those problems that that did address those problems right you're gonna list a couple of solutions for each one of those problems then you're gonna say hey look of these solutions this is the unique value that I bring inside those solutions that makes me stand out I'm gonna come up with a cool metaphor I am the this of that I am the uber of YouTube I am the blah blah blah right I am the Netflix of cyber karaoke maybe whatever that is what's my unfair advantage I had a buddy who's unfair advantage he was in a staffing agency was he was married to

the daughter of a vice president and a major corporation and so that guy just bought all of his staffing needs from his son-in-law that's an unfair advantage and that is it is it ethical is it not I don't know probably not but at the end of the day you have to have some kind of unfair advantage it could be who you know it can be your background it can be all kinds of stuff but in order for you to get started and get into the markets there has to be some kind of unfair advantage and don't worry you have won and you can discover it a lot of us would be like I got nothing no trust me if you are breathing

you have an unfair advantage in some form or fashion that we can figure it out then chalice is all about how people want to buy from you this is how do I tell my customers about my unique value proposition and about how I can solve their problems in a way that doesn't make them mad in a way that lets them know about it and then encourages them to take an action and that action is to purchase one of our products based off of our solutions that's your revenue streams and then you have to understand how much is a cost to run all the parts of the company hey guess what none of this matters of you if you're not

measuring it what do they say expect what you inspect you have to come up with a list of key metrics that lets you know how all of these parts are running guess what that is guys that's your back office your back office is looking at all this boom that's the same graphic done in a different way the engine is organized and it makes sense but you're still just doing this you're building an engine customers problem solution marketing sales operations back off as money in people that will produce a result this is what this might look like I'd like to put this up on a giant whiteboard draw some lines and use sticky notes because you're gonna make

some assumptions and you're gonna test them you're gonna be wrong and they're gonna rip the sticky note off boom cut it back on this is an amazing tool because this is a replacement to a business plan you do not need a business plan at this point do not write a 20-page business plan with five-year projections that's called creating writing and that should be in the English department not in the business department you don't know enough right now about your company to write a business plan you need a lean canvas so how do you understand if this stuff you put on the canvas works well you have to test it that means you're going to go through and talk to people

potential customers with a problem interview you're going to do data analysis on what they got they give you the feedback then you're going to create a document that outlines your conclusions and go back to those same customers potential customers and say I think I have a solution would you look at it so the problem interview I want you to go talk to a hundred people that is a kind of air quotes a hundred but you need to talk to a large section of people and I'll get into why that's important later in order to understand have you clearly defined the problem do you understand the existing alternatives and what is the pain and what triggers

it so you want to know who has the pain and what triggers it if it's a chief information security officer si ISO has the pain they're not able to do auditing in a timely matter what triggers that pain well the thing that triggers the pain is the fact that they don't have what they need in order to report to the CIO or briefed the board of directors and if that's what causes the pain that that's what triggers the pain you need to know that because then your solution has to say look not only can I complete these audits for you but I can deliver them in a timely way that let makes you look like a rock star in front

your board of directors you see how that's a different solution then I just do audits no no I do audits in a timely fashion that makes you look like a rock star from the Board of Directors so you will learn that by having conversations with people after that you take the data and you run through it you review it you define trends and insights and you develop possible solutions this is another matrix so you put together that tracks all this stuff and then you develop solutions and look near the reason that you're doing this is probably because you know a little something about what you're talking about and so it's real important not to be

bias about the solutions in your head saying well I am really good at access management in the dendy management so every problem is an ldap problem or a portal problem or whatever problem and therefore my solutions no you need to be open-minded about this by this point and then you have to be honest with yourself can you create a solution or do you know somebody who can create the solution that meets these people's needs and then you go back to them and say hey look guys here's a report I talked to a hundred people like you I aggregated all of your information and I created a industry report on problems bla and here's my findings by the way these are

the solutions I came up with I believe these two or three are the best ones but this one right here is my favorite this is what I'm thinking about charging for it based off of what industries are doing about industry standards and when you're beginning to come up with a price for your solution there's so many moving parts in this you don't need to test pricing right now what you need to do is charge what everybody else is already charging if everybody in your industry is charging 250 dollars an hour for cyber auditing and you're doing a cyber auditing company charge 250 dollars an hour but for your early adopters you can say well because you're helping me get

started I will reduce my price by 20% for you or something like that but don't lead with that give them the price that they are expecting to pay because often you will bring risk into the market into your your customer if they under pay you because if something goes wrong and they'll you don't pay enough you're they going to be held accountable it's weird it's very weird how this budget and quotas stuff works but don't try to figure it out just charge what everyone else is paying right now as long as it fits into your business canvas all right so now you're gonna build you got customers who are like hey this is great I do want that but guess what you talk

to a hundred of them and only ten want it and let's see where is that yeah only ten want it because look at this customers their psychology going on here and not everybody in that hundred even if all 100 of them agreed that those are the problems and your solution is absolutely the one that they need only about 15 of them are gonna buy 15 or 16 because the early majority late majority and laggards need more proof that you can do what your going to do these people buy IBM or are called big-box shop they do not take a risk on the boutique curated security firm that's your innovators and early adopters and so what you could get is very very

depressed if you only get 15 people only get 10 people of the hundred that you interviewed to buy your product service because you can say like nobody wants this know you getting false negatives if somebody in the late majority tells me I don't want that tells me that they don't want my product or service then I know it isn't that it's not my stuff is bad it's just I don't have a company with the reputation that makes it safe for them to buy from me because every single one of these people has to justify their decision to somebody else so you are going to be hunting for your innovators and your early adopters right so now

you're gonna deliver the solution and get feedback but your solution is not perfect at this point your solution is probably not that great at all because we're doing a Minimum Viable Product let's pretend that we know what the end product that we want them to have is a Jeep and so what we do typically this is Ari I'm gonna sell you Jeep you need a Jeep your problem is transportation I think it Jeep is exactly what you need so I'm gonna spend a couple months building wheel then the the frame and then right and at the end of the day you get the Jeep well let me tell you what happens when you do that I had a company

called Atlas fault we did cybersecurity compliance and reporting self assessments inside of a large supply chains so they did self assessments all the stuff was great I spent six hundred and fifty thousand dollars doing the top-line we built the database we integrated with procurement software we built that we got the NIST assessments going and we got the user interface we were the turbo tax for cyber compliance and was delightful knows a dumpster fire because by the time we were done with it we created something that only worked for one customer and no one else wanted it and I've had to shut the company down after two years of development well here's what a real MSP is if the problem

is transportation there are a lot of right answers and if you really ask the person with the problem is like well I'm barefoot and I didn't got to walk across hot asphalt but you know what will help them a skateboard and you can build that fast and then what you do is you test here's my first product you said your problem was you don't want to bring your feet walking across hot asphalt here's a skateboard you can roll across it great well now I want you to picture a bunch of you know old people old executives riding skateboards it's hilarious and dangerous so what do we do we tested and then we designed another product and

that was a like a razor that had like handlebars great much better the balancing is fixed but now it turns out people are getting tired so we've got a bicycle with a seat people get tired pedaling now we put a motor in it and by the time you're done you do get to a point in time when you have a Jeep that has a lot of people studying inside that's protected from weather and all this stuff but if I tried at the beginning of the skateboard level to create all of the infrastructure necessary to create a safe vehicle that was approved and roadworthy and emissions and all of these other things my company goes into the dumpster and I

light it on fire you have to do small MVP Minimum Viable Product testing and development so you don't go out of business if you are trying to start a travel company a transportation company thirty-eight minutes a night three nights a week you can't build a jeep but you sure can build a skateboard right so another little warning this is about false positives and false negatives we had one customer who wanted the product that was an early adopter I thought that the entire market needed my product they did not I did not talk to a hundred CI SOS about how they were handling transparency of cyber risk in their supply chain and I wasted a bunch of

money so now you deliver the solution and it's very simple you do the work in an amazing way you get feedback and then you ask for referrals and when you're doing the work something will go wrong you don't have a real customer until something goes wrong and then you fix it in a way that delights them right we've all been on the call where someone complains let's pretend websites down and you get everybody on that big conference call and everyone's like it's not DNS and it's another firewall it's not access management it's not this is not websphere it's not blah blah blah everyone gets on the phone saying who it isn't if you're the one person who gets

on the phone and say I don't know who it is but I'm gonna look into this I'm gonna take responsibility for my side I'm gonna be a problem solver I'm gonna provide amazing customer service when you provide amazing customer service even if everything goes wrong the people will love you how you show up matters why you show up matters how you help people matters if you can show up do the work handle things when the things go wrong and then you ask for referrals those 10 customers you got from those hundred interviews will give you another customer and again and again and eventually by asking for referrals from customers you have delighted you will grow your company and you will have

reached the startup yeah you've got the starting line yeah you did it congratulations you are awesome and I am proud of you this was a long journey but you finally got to the starting line and you have a functioning company and with those 10 customers you know became 20 customers with 30 customers you have quit your day job and you are rocking and rolling whoo good job yeah but guys this stuff is complicated here's the emotional journey the emotional journey on the right is my face showing how I have gone through all of this stuff it is tough so I want to find a way to help you guys I it has been suggested to me that what

I really need to do is create a workshop to kind of guide people along share some of my experiences I'm gonna do that so I'm going to offer workshop i when I originally did the b-side stock a lot of people raised their hands and we had about 122 people on the call and uh you know turns out the early the early adopters and the innovators raised their hand I got about 10% to say yes they want the workshop so I know 10% of the people listening to this are gonna want a workshop it is still in MVP mode so you go ahead and head to the cyber startup calm raise your hand that you want to be a part of this workshop and

then I will get you in to the system wherever we are with our MVP so the prices are gonna vary it's all gonna be up in the air because I am actually doing what I just presented to you guys with this company but I'm gonna be completely transparent so every step of the way I'm gonna show you guys what I'm doing and so while you're going through the workshops and I'm teaching I'm also going to be sharing life lessons and we're gonna be helping you get to the point where you have confidence in handling those three pain points of not enough time not enough security not knowing if you actually have a thing that is real or

not and actually hey you know it's business stuff is complicated but now I have a framework and a format and I've got people to help me along the way so head to cyber security I'm sorry head to the cyber startup comm and let's do this thing I think what I'm building is the CISSP for cyber security entrepreneurship I think that's my I think that's my tagline I can't wait to hear if you agree alright guys thanks again