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In earlier Sorenson Security Playbook articles, we highlighted creative new go-to-market (GTM) models that early-stage companies use to attract customers and gain rapid market traction.
- Read how Bridgecrew (acquired by Palo Alto Networks) used open source to develop a product-led growth go-to-market motion here.
- Read how CloudKnox (acquired by Microsoft) used a proof of value model to create an efficient B2B sales process and improve conversion rates.
- Read how OpenPath’s strategic channel partnerships to gain market momentum and accelerate revenue growth.
In this article, we focus on the people driving the GTM process and why we’ve become nerd-seeking missiles at Sorenson.
Let’s begin by saying Sorenson loves nerds, AKA highly technical founders. We’re not ashamed to admit that we’re big nerds ourselves. Our nerdiness may have led to many awkward moments and lonely Saturday nights in high school, but it has turned out to be a superpower in our careers as investors.
While nerds are well recognized as product builders–know how things work; have the technical chops to design and build new, better solutions–they don’t get much respect for their ability to sell. What we’ve learned is that the best nerd founders figure out how to both build products that solve critical customer problems and sell them to the nerd buyers who are suffering the most urgent pain.
In the security sector, the most logical buyer is the Chief Information Security Officer or CISO. Unfortunately, CISOs are usually too busy fighting off hacker attacks; lobbying for more budget; and assuring everyone that their systems and sensitive data are secure, even when they don’t believe it themselves, to evaluate and buy new technology.
That’s where nerds come in.
Good technical founders know that nerds are the true architects, innovators, and keepers of the enterprise kingdom. Although they are often overlooked and underappreciated, enterprise nerds not only keep the trains running on time, they also figure out how to make those trains run faster, better, and safer.
Many of our most successful early-stage cybersecurity companies take advantage of their nerdiness or founder-market fit–deep domain expertise mixed with a good dose of customer empathy and authenticity–to create highly effective Nerd-to-Nerd sales playbooks that take advantage of their ability to sell to other nerds.
Airgap Networks is a great example of how the Nerd-to-Nerd sales approach can be successful.
Airgap provides a managed SaaS solution that protects critical networks with agentless microsegmentation. That may sound complicated to non-domain experts, but enterprise network nerds know exactly what it means and why it’s important.
That’s no coincidence.
Ritesh Agrawal, Airgap’s founder and CEO, spent nearly two decades working across a variety of roles–engineering, product, and sales–in Juniper Networks’s enterprise security and networking groups. Building networking security products and meeting regularly with large enterprise prospects, like the world’s biggest telecommunication companies, Ritesh learned to speak the customer’s language, understand their problems, and how they operated in intricate detail, including how they prioritized, budgeted for, and bought new security products.
Most importantly, he recognized that, despite his and Juniper’s best efforts, enterprise customers were gradually losing ground to bad actors. They needed to take a different approach to attacks that proliferated laterally. Based on his Juniper experience, Ritesh realized that he could apply a telco-like, anti-malware architecture to the enterprise environment to address ransomware attacks and eliminate the internal spread of malicious activity more effectively and cheaply than traditional security offerings.
That’s when he founded Airgap.
Once the first products were built, Ritesh drove the company’s early sales efforts. “When customers realize that you understand their problems and the best way to solve them, they gain confidence in you and your company,” said Agrawal. “They begin to think of you as one of them. Nerds don’t need much convincing. They just want to try your products. When the products work, the whole sales process goes much faster and easier.”
Tom Pace, NetRise’s Co-founder and CEO, has a similar story. Starting as an infantryman and intelligence specialist in the U.S. Marines, he’s worked in almost every cybersecurity job imaginable: cybersecurity technician and analyst, engineer, incident response investigator, and Cylance’s VP for enterprise security solutions.
All of that experience with highly distributed government, military, and commercial systems helped Tom and his NetRise Co-Founder Mike Scott realize that billions of connected hardware devices–for example, network routers, smart thermostats, and connected medical devices–aren’t getting the attention they deserve in terms of security risk. They knew that the problem would only get worse as devices proliferate, systems become more distributed, and infrastructure is increasingly digitized.
That’s when Tom and Mike started NetRise to create an xIoT and firmware security platform that was purpose-built for industrial control systems; IoT and medical devices; vehicles, and telecommunications equipment. Securing firmware may be the kind of thing that only a geek could love, but that’s ok with Tom and Mike.
Tom says, “What we do isn’t buzzy, but protecting xIoT firmware is critically important for large organizations. Security teams know that. They appreciate that we speak their language and provide an easy-to-implement platform to automatically monitor and analyze device components and manage their xIoT vulnerability management program. Once they recognize that we’ve walked in their shoes and understand their situation, it makes our job selling to them a whole lot easier.”
Don’t let the taped glasses fool you. When it comes to enterprise security sales, nerds can be more charming–and more successful–than you think.
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