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How to Scale Success in Cyber with Serial Entrepreneur Stuart McClure (Recorded Live at GoSec 2024)
130 Plays2 months ago
How do you know what’s a winning idea? Serial cyber entrepreneur Stuart McClure sat down with us live at GoSec 2024 to record his thoughts on go-to-market strategies.
Stuart was the founder of Cylance, the fastest company to record $100M in ARR, and he’s the lead author on a book about hacking techniques. In short, he talks the talk and walks the walk.
In this episode:
💡How to tell a genius idea from just a neat feature
🤝How to build and scale without repeating the same tired playbook
🧠 How a background in psychology equipped him with the skills for business
⚡️Why being able to make fast decisions is so important
This episode was produced with the support of GoSecure.
————————
🏆We’ve been nominated as Podcast of the Year for the SANS Difference Maker awards! Voting is open now through Oct 4. 🗳️ Vote for the show here: https://www.sans.org/about/awards/difference-makers/
Thank you for your support!
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Transcript
Live from GoSec 2024 with Stuart McClure
00:00:06
Speaker
Hey listeners, George K here. This week, we're bringing you an episode recorded live at GoSec 2024 in Montreal, Canada. Today's guest is Stuart McClure, a serial CEO, entrepreneur, and business leader with 35 years of experience in tech and cybersecurity, including having founded Silence, the fastest company on record to get to 100 million in ARR, which was later acquired for 1.5 billion by BlackBerry in 2019.
00:00:35
Speaker
Among his other titles, Global CTO for McAfee and Intel. Needless to say, Stewart knows what he's talking about and we were excited to talk with him at Gosec about go-to-market strategies and how cybersecurity innovation can succeed. And many thanks again for Gosecure for sponsoring our trip up to Gosec to record these episodes with these industry luminaries.
Introduction to 'Bare Knuckles and Brass Tax'
00:01:02
Speaker
All right, friends, this is Bare Knuckles and Brass Tax recording live from GoSec 2024. You know the story. This is a cybersecurity podcast that tackles the human side of cyber. Trust, respect, all the rest. I'm George Kay with the vendor side. And I'm George A., Chief Information Security Officer.
00:01:20
Speaker
And today we are talking with Stuart McClure, serial CEO, entrepreneur, business leader. You have been in the cyber game a long time, author, let's see, also founder and CEO of Cylance, which was one of the fastest companies to record 100 million in ARR, later sold to Blackberry, and now the CEO of like three different companies.
00:01:43
Speaker
You're doing a lot.
Impact of COVID-19 on Innovation
00:01:44
Speaker
I'm not bored. That's for sure. Yeah, absolutely. Trying to keep myself busy. I think COVID did the opposite to me. It made me think and live inside my head, which is not a good place for me to stay. I need to get out. I need to interact. I need to engage, create, inspire. And so that was a big, big driver for me to really start to take what I was doing and expand it even further than I was doing beforehand.
Building for Innovation vs Acquisition
00:02:10
Speaker
So yeah.
00:02:10
Speaker
Nice. Well, the rules of the game are you are on the vendor side, which means the CISO gets first crack. Great. Awesome. Bring it. I love the attitude, Stuart. So I really love your background. I love the fact that you are a serial entrepreneur and you're someone who has to quickly kind of assess and determine whether or not there's validity in a lot of new ideas very quickly.
00:02:38
Speaker
We live in an era of point solutions, right? If you went to RSA before, like this year, or you went to Black Hat, there was a lot of startups that seemingly were building features, calling them solutions, and it's like they built their company to be acquired, and that's the whole purpose of it. Which, you know, in my opinion, perhaps as a practitioner purist, I think, you know, you should be innovating to make society better
00:03:07
Speaker
to disrupt something, to cause change, not to simply be acquired and do it all over again to make a couple hundred million here and there. So how do you pick which problems to solve and what makes a good idea, a committable idea in terms of a startup for you?
Tackling Big Problems with Simple Solutions
00:03:24
Speaker
Oh, God, I could talk all day on this topic because that's exactly what you see in our industry. But you see even worse, not just companies that build companies around a feature or two, but they build a company around a solution looking for a problem, which is the harder scenario to justify. People just spinning around, burning cash left and right.
00:03:47
Speaker
I will tell you, I mean, my primary thesis in life and professional career as well is to find a big, big problem in a big, big market. That to me is my driving passion and why I wake up every morning because I want to be able to make as big of an impact as humanly possible, affect as many people's lives as humanly possible in a very positive way. And being able to do that actually with a very elegant solution, simplistic solution,
00:04:15
Speaker
To me, if you can't show me within 30 seconds, like show me, kinetically show me what your product or your solution does for me specifically, then I'm out. So it's sort of the age old adage of, you know, I think it was Einstein that, you know, is quoted as saying, if you can't explain it to a four year old or fourth grader, I think for him, I go down to a four year old, then you don't know it yourself.
00:04:42
Speaker
You don't understand the concept, you don't understand the problem, you don't understand your own solution. You have to be able to explain it incredibly simply. An old friend of mine used to say it like baby food. You don't even have to chew it. Put it in the mouth and it dissolves. Write down. Perfect analogy. Make it super, super simple. Make the value self-evident. So when you see it, you're like, wow, I get it. And then create a sense of urgency.
00:05:09
Speaker
for that person.
Understanding Client Biases for Trust
00:05:10
Speaker
So how important then is being able to convey that message in your own words to the ability to actually create a genuine trust-based relationship with a prospective client? With respect to what? A prospective client. So let's say you're pitching a prospect. The fact that you can take your solution or your service and talk about it in plainly your own words, not the script,
00:05:37
Speaker
Do you think that actually plays a big influence in people's buying system? 100%. In fact, I'm a big believer. Well, first off, you can't know other people unless you know yourself. So you really do have to start to understand, okay, who you are, what drives you, what motivates you, what inspires you.
00:05:55
Speaker
then you can start to understand others. Now when you start to understand others and what drives them and their unconscious cognitive biases that they work with every single day that they've survived for many years trusting on these cognitive biases that they think are perfectly good for themselves. If you don't understand them and then start to speak inside their language and as the receiver of the information that's far more important than the deliverer. I'm just delivering some
00:06:20
Speaker
spewing forth some verbal vomit, and no one can actually process it in a way that I want it to be processed. Well, then everything's lost. I mean, the whole message gets lost, the whole purpose and intent and everything else. So I'm a big believer in understanding your audience.
00:06:37
Speaker
And to do that, you got to understand yourself. And you have to put it into their vernacular and their speak, if you will. To do that, not only understand the traits of the individual, but you have to understand really the cognitive biases that they bring forward together. These are these unconscious, people aren't even aware of them. 99.99% of all people don't even realize they're doing this, these patterns, these fixed, structured rigid patterns that they live their life. So try to figure out what those are.
00:07:07
Speaker
try to work around them, try to expose a bit of a broader viewpoint and perspective really, really quickly. These are all important things you have to figure out within a few seconds or at least a minute or two. Otherwise you're going to lose the audience for sure.
00:07:23
Speaker
I mean, it's not lost on me that you also studied psychology. Exactly. How can you tell? So I'm going to get to a different question about the market and some trends, but you led me here, which is you have that understanding. You have successfully founded companies. You have the zeal, the idea. How are you scaling that ability that you have as somebody who studied psychology into an organization that goes from, you know,
00:07:52
Speaker
10 people to 100 people to because what I've seen is and what George is referring to is often
00:07:59
Speaker
You get the Series B, Series C, the sales team, the inside sales folks, the BDRs. By the time you get to that level, so much has gotten lost in translation. They're not close to the idea, so they're just being taught some script, and that's where we get into a lot of the bad behavior we've been seeing. Exactly, and you get the telephone game problem. Yeah.
Challenges in Rapid Hiring at Cylance
00:08:23
Speaker
Where you say one thing and you start it in a sequence, and by the end of the sequence,
00:08:28
Speaker
What they think you said is completely different than when you actually said. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so I saw this quite, I guess, full frontally at silence. So we grew so incredibly fast. There was a period of time we hired 600 people in seven months. This was somewhere in 2015. And 600 people in seven months. And I still utter it and I think to myself, that's not even possible, is it? I'm like, well, we did it.
00:08:58
Speaker
Now, did we do it well? Probably not, right? We certainly hired a lot of incredibly smart, intelligent, dedicated, loyal people. But were they in the right spots with the right team, working on the right projects? Maybe not. It could be argued. However, we did adapt as quickly as we could.
00:09:21
Speaker
Try to identify people that were struggling or being challenged or hitting headwinds and then pivot and move them into right spots and educate them or onboard them better or all of the myriad of things that you have to do to just get talent on quickly.
00:09:38
Speaker
But yeah, it's a big, big problem. And like you said, culturally, it's even bigger problem. So the mechanics of it are hard enough. But then you talk about trying to maintain the same culture that you built the company with, which is mission driven, purpose first. Money comes far way, way down on the list and empowering everybody to make their own decisions.
00:10:04
Speaker
If you don't have a really large team at the top, I think you're doing yourself an
Leadership and Culture in Growth
00:10:09
Speaker
injustice. So what I mean by that is like, take Jensen at NVIDIA. He's famous for having 55, 60 direct reports. Now, I have personal friends with a couple of those, okay? And they tell me exactly what it's like. I mean, you basically go to a meeting, a big exec staff meeting, and you get yelled at for 5, 10, 20 minutes for something you've screwed up on, right?
00:10:31
Speaker
And then you're supposed to disperse after that. You don't really get a chance to come back to Jensen and say, well, gosh, what did I do wrong? And why is this wrong? And blah, blah, blah. You got to take it on the chin, understand quickly what he's trying to get at. And you take his view, his vision, and now you infuse it into yours, into your teams. And then that each individual on that exact team then also has 35, 50 reports.
00:10:53
Speaker
If you don't do it that way, and if you take the traditional like, well, 10 people, 15 for exec staff, and then each, you know, have maybe less underneath, what you get is a telephone game problem, where I'll share my vision, my edict around how we work and operate our business, you know, ethically, morally, fiscally, all that stuff. And within two direct reports, it's gone.
00:11:19
Speaker
And you get all these micro cultures, which is just a fascinating phenomena. Yeah. We're certainly at the top. I think, oh, well, everybody's following my lead in my culture. No problem. And then I, I, and this is what I used to do.
00:11:33
Speaker
and I'll still do it as we grow bigger, is I would spend a week every month sitting in a new department. So like I was- Just as a silent observer? Yeah, just sit there. Like I would literally bring my backpack with my laptop, I'd sit there. So customer success. And I would take phone calls. Like I'd usually tier one or two. I'm not gonna feign, you know, tier three anymore. But I would absolutely, hi, I would make up a name and say, you know, I'm Jack with silence, you know, how can I help you today kind of thing.
00:12:02
Speaker
And then I would do it in data science the next month, and then I would do it in marketing the next month or events or whatever, because that was the true test of how is my culture getting down to the truth. Because you can sense it. You can feel it. You hear it in their voices and how they interact with each other and how they engage each other and how they work and how committed they are and all kinds of stuff.
00:12:25
Speaker
I thought that was just incredibly valuable. The one thing I would change is I would probably make bigger teams. I would have at least 30. I mean, I had an extended exec staff for sure, which is probably about 30 people, but we met like once a month.
00:12:37
Speaker
Not like every week. So I would probably change that going forward. Do you find that, however, based on your argument, that the OKR model, then, would be, we'll say, a less than effective approach to running an organization at scale? For reference, you know what I mean by the OKR model, right? Like John Doar?
00:12:55
Speaker
A lot of organizations see this based on what he did in Intel, based on what he did in a few other shops, as the way to build a scaled-out multi-level organization. Do you think then that's wrong? How do we scale properly in this generation?
Scaling: Sales vs Product and Marketing
00:13:13
Speaker
I think it depends on the level, like where you're starting to scale. If you start to scale as a startup in a smaller company, I think that that's a mistake. I think, however, if you're trying to get into an existing company, one that's been around for quite some time, has a lot of history, a lot of built-in process.
00:13:29
Speaker
Yes, absolutely. Building to an OKR structure and measuring quantitatively as best you can all the way on down the line is probably the best way. But that's like moving an aircraft carrier, you know, like it's going to take a lot. You know, you spin the wheel and a mile down the road, it kicks in. Right. So I think it just depends on where you're inserting yourself into the evolution and maturation of the company. I think if you're in a younger company, makes perfect sense.
00:13:58
Speaker
I mean, OK, ours are fine, but I would keep it to five or six. Like you don't need this vast, you know, detailed, in-depth, multilayered OK, our sort of structure to measure performance and improve. So that I still I have this question I want to get to, but you bring up these other things. So one thing that we've talked about on the show frequently is this pattern of.
00:14:22
Speaker
seed to series A and then you get that series B money which is your sort of a quote unquote hyper growth and the first move the product is probably not yet mature maybe you have market fit
00:14:34
Speaker
But the big move is usually because of those sales targets to go hire sales teams and scale that fast. We've talked with some people who are like, you should scale product marketing first. You should scale development first. You should mature the product before. Anyway, we've seen a lot of the same movie before. So now that I have you here and you've started many companies, just curious on your take, like where you, you mentioned something about like where you scale, which is what caused me to think of this question.
00:15:01
Speaker
Right, so obviously the first phase is you have an idea. You build usually a product, sometimes a service, but whatever the resulting solution is. And then what everybody does and typically make a mistake unless you hit a grand slam home run with the tech.
00:15:18
Speaker
is they start to just scale sales. And usually marketing is actually an afterthought because they just think, well, sales guys and gals, they can just figure it out. Or I'm going to go hire a bunch of enterprise people with these deep Rolodexes and they'll just sell this back to their old customers. Exactly. Tap it in and copy and paste, rinse and repeat.
00:15:38
Speaker
And that is a thrashing cycle that very, very few come out successfully on. Well, I've been there, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So what I always recommend, and it's painful to do, by the way, of what I'm going to recommend. We're here for pain. Pain is the only way to gain, is my view. But you have to ensure that the lead generation in the marketing is nailed before you ever hire a number two salesperson, number three, number four, whatever it is. Right.
00:16:08
Speaker
Have one, no problem, build some core basic structure and scaffolding around the sales motion, but you have to get that demand gen, lead gen, and nurture process working.
00:16:24
Speaker
Now, how do you measure that? Well, it's real simple. Just put two or three metrics in place where it's like, hey, A, I can get enough MQLs, you know, qualified leads, and B, those MQLs can turn into something like a sales motion of some sort. Even if you lose, at least it's selling motion. Because you're beginning to see how it works. Exactly. You do the demo.
00:16:45
Speaker
Okay, it's cool enough to do a POC. Okay, it's cool enough to get to the end and start to talk about contracts. You might lose, but at least you can show a good flow of that whole process. Now, then and only then, after you've proven that the MQL and MQL to the SAO cycle works, and you realize that, hey, I can get through a POC and be on the fighting edge of winning.
00:17:10
Speaker
then you hire your number two salesperson. I mean, I got to tell you, like I've had this more than once gone into a company, seen this just thrashing back and forth on marketing sales. You guys can't close, you know, anything to save your life. And sales go, I'm getting crap for leads or these, you know, it's just infinite warfare that just never goes anywhere. And my recommendation is literally get your top sales rep and fire everybody else.
00:17:41
Speaker
Now, get your top marketeer and maybe a core team that might know what they're doing and double down on them. Figure out what's working, what's not. What's the story? Is this going to take six to 12 months to get through this? I mean, this is not going to be an overnight thing because it's most likely there's a major problem with demand gen, lead gen. So anyway, going into that, really rolling up the sleeves and figuring out what is going on and fixing all of that first and then just sucking it up, taking the shots.
00:18:10
Speaker
hey, we're gonna have three or four quarters that are gonna be flat to down. I'm sorry, I don't know how else to fix it. We gotta start there, and then go from there and start to build it back up. Well, you do that properly, and I've seen it a bunch of times. It works, and it really does start to scale and bring the business back. Yeah, I think you have the benefit of patience because you've been there. It is, and you have to have patience. And you have to set the right expectations, you know?
00:18:37
Speaker
talking to the board and saying, well, hey, I know you brought me in to save the day, but I'm telling you, I can't save the day, at least for 12 to 18 months, because I've got to fix this thing. And they either believe in you and high five you and run around cheerleading with you, or they'll be like, you know what, you're not our guy. But at least you know, and you don't want to set the wrong expectation.
Podcast Award Nomination
00:19:06
Speaker
Hey listeners, in a total shock to us, Bare Knuckles and Brass Tax has been nominated as Podcast of the Year for the Sands Difference Maker Awards. We're honored, and I can't emphasize this enough, surprised to be counted among so many stellar shows. Voting is now open until October 4th. Vote for the show with the link in the show notes. Thank you for listening. Thank you for your attention. We appreciate you, and you are the reason we make the show every week. Thank you again.
Post-COVID Changes in Cybersecurity Buying
00:19:41
Speaker
We've talked a lot about from the product side and the leadership side, but over the course of your storied career, have you seen any shifts in the buyer behavior in the market? We have a hypothesis that post COVID, and I don't know if that's been some unprocessed trauma for cyber teams, just the way that people were sold to in 2019 is not germane to today, like the
00:20:08
Speaker
The buyers have literally changed in terms of generational shift, but also expectations. We call it like the SAS 2.0 era of selling. The traditional quote unquote kind of cheesy, typical kind of pitch that you'll get every time you go to a conference. Kind of a funnel metric where we just go cold call like 3,000 people and work the percentages down. Yes, yes, yes. OK, I got you.
00:20:33
Speaker
Yeah, I will say there are a few observations that I have on this topic. I mean, first is it depends on also who you're selling to. Like, traditional selling in cyber is selling to the CISO, you know. It used to be, in the old days, 100 years ago, you would sell to the CISO and the IT or the networking infrastructure because they ultimately had to deploy and maintain your technology, right?
00:20:56
Speaker
Now, the lines are really blurred between those two. It's almost one now, and they're so well-trusted together. But like for Quiet, we're selling to devs, the software engineers, and their culture is completely different. I mean, yeah, sure, we have to sell and make sure the CISO is aware and, you know, bought on to the solution of what we're delivering on.
00:21:19
Speaker
But they're the budget holder. They're not the decision maker, decision maker, developer. So I think it depends on that audience first, like who you're really selling to. But I think in general, you have to make it so, like we talked about, so super simple and so easily digestible and have that self-evident value just pop right out instantly.
00:21:39
Speaker
And yeah, a lot of the whole, like, you know, buy the billboard on the 405 for RSA. Like, I was just, you know, we did the RSA thing. And I noticed there are a lot fewer billboards out there than it used to be. I mean, I'm probably one of the biggest culprits of doing that. I, you know, back in 2015, 2016, I mean, I was taking over airports all over the place with silence. But that was the day to get eyeballs on for our buyers because it was cyber and a lot of them were traveling.
00:22:10
Speaker
So it just depends. I think you've got to always adapt to the market as it evolves. I do think we have a much more sophisticated buyer now. It's not as it was in the past where you really did have to help educate everybody. But I will tell you, I think one universal that I'm still seeing even to this day is the knowledge of the threats.
00:22:32
Speaker
is wanting. Not many people I could pick out in my keynote, I'm sure, if I did this and pulled out 10 randomly and asked, well, what's a SQL injection attack? Or what is a remote code execution attack? Or how would I hack your mobile phone? Give me a couple ideas. Nobody knows this still.
00:22:59
Speaker
And I think they believe that they don't have to know it. Like threats are threats and I don't really need to know it, I just need to prevent. But if you can't, just like if you can't understand your audience, you can't communicate. If you can't understand what drives all action of cyber teams,
00:23:13
Speaker
It's all threats. I mean, there's nothing. I mean, there's a risk view onto the world, but there's no way there's a risk or compliance or policy mandate unless they're threats. So it really does boil down to, hey, do you understand what the threat actors are doing, how they're performing their actions?
00:23:31
Speaker
and bypassing your controls and your technologies to gain access into your environment and really cause havoc for you. I think that will always remain to be an area of development for us in the industry. So I think if you boil it down, whatever solution you're delivering on and boil it into that world of let me help you understand that there will threat and make it not hyperbolic, make it real, make it very easy to prevent
00:24:01
Speaker
and focus on prevention, I think there's a lot of value to be had there. So there are some similarities I see in the market and there are some differences. I do think one of the other differences is just how you get to the buyer. I think obviously there's a lot of different ways to get the buyer now.
00:24:17
Speaker
that you just wouldn't normally naturally think of before and whether it be social media or newsletters or other forms rather than just events and broad advertising, Google ad search kind of thing. Nice. All right. Well, we're going to shift gears here in the second half and just get down to brass tacks. So do you want to kick us off?
Evaluating Startup Ideas
00:24:38
Speaker
Sure. So my kind of question would be going back to your core skill set as a founder.
00:24:48
Speaker
You probably get dozens of different ideas, either your own ideas or other people's ideas, friends, close folk, associates, float ideas across your desk every day. What?
00:25:01
Speaker
How do you know, beyond just your gut instinct, what determines a good idea to you? One that's good enough for you to put your money and your time and your effort behind it and try and execute it versus an idea that might be novel, might have some validity, but you don't make that decision. So what kind of- Like litmus test.
00:25:25
Speaker
Yeah, I do, I do. I probably get at least, you know, pitched maybe a handful of times every single day through some format or another. And I actually started an AI incubator and initially had this same problem, which is, well, how do I filter out all of the interested parties that want to build companies inside of AI? So let me back up real quick. So when I left Blackberry after silence was acquired,
00:25:53
Speaker
I took some time off. I think it was about three or four months. I was itching like crazy. I couldn't stand it, but I forced myself to do it. And it was one of the best things for me to do. COVID then hit, and I was even more solitary.
00:26:08
Speaker
and couldn't really put into action any of the plans that I had, so sort of like bypassed all that. But what I realized is that what we perfected at Silence was this application of deep learning models to prevent bad stuff from happening. And I had always been wanting to pivot Silence from a cybersecurity company doing AI into an AI company that does cybersecurity as one of its modules, features.
00:26:38
Speaker
So when starting this AI, this incubator, I thought, OK, let's focus on all AI. Let's focus on predictive, although generative now we're also including on. And we have to find the right solutions that, again, solve a big problem in a big market.
00:26:54
Speaker
that maybe focus on, you know, four or five domains. And in the cybersecurity domain, obviously, that's to be something pretty special for me to be all that excited. I mean, gosh, 99.99% of every pitch I see on cyber, it's the same stuff, guys. I mean, it's exhausting. And they think it's like fresh and new. And I sit there and I'm like, oh,
00:27:19
Speaker
Okay, so this is just like a new PKI structure, right? Yeah, well, no, no, no, no, it's this and that. But isn't that what PKI is? Or whatever it is, you know, example. This was just my recent one, so it's fresh top of mind. And I just feel, I feel bad. Like they don't even understand what's already out there and how they could be better so they can't explain it to me. So that's a quick litmus test. That's easy to get and get people off. But the other thing is, look, is there a predictive AI component
00:27:49
Speaker
meaning I'm going to learn from the past to predict the future to prevent the attack. Or is there a generative AI solution that really changes the whole landscape for cyber? Because otherwise, for me, it's not as interesting. Now, outside of cyber, it really does come back to the fact of, hey, is this a big problem in a big market? Because even if you screw up and only get
00:28:13
Speaker
1% of the market or 2%. If it's a big, big market, it's going to be 100 million, 200 million bucks in revenue. It's like some of the new ones that are like safeguarding LLMs. And I was like, that sounds cool because LLMs are in the news. But if you look at the actual number of companies that are either going to license or build their own proprietary LLM, that number goes down rapidly.
00:28:38
Speaker
I know. And look, a former few folks from silence went and started, you know, Hidden Layer. And I had that same struggle, you know, when Tito came to me. Love those guys. Super wicked, smart people. I knew they would build something really cool, but the question is, how big is this market?
00:28:57
Speaker
And even though it was fairly hyped up, still sort of is on the whole securing your LLM, I just really still struggle to this day. Like, well, where's the market for it? Like, who is really going to be buying? I mean, service is that part I get. No problem. But a product to do this, I couldn't quite get my head around. So it's those kinds of things that you just have to ask those two or three core questions.
00:29:25
Speaker
you know, where's the self-evident value? How are you creating a sense of urgency? And then what core problem does this really solve? And see if there's a big enough market for it. Because that's one of the biggest mistakes they make. All right, so we're going to close out here.
00:29:43
Speaker
The cultural anthropologist in me loves how much you have studied the psychology, studied the buyer. We were talking before we were recording about how many technical founders are very bad at telling their story. You have said
00:30:01
Speaker
I need it in 30 seconds, needs to be digestible like baby food. So in a practical application like what would be your advice to other founders who find themselves like in their mind it's this amazing idea that sings and then they go in front of VC partners or they go in front of their friends and they're getting those like looks like I don't quite understand. Once they hit that moment of friction like what's the advice like this is how you got to tell your story.
Simplifying Startup Pitches for Broad Audiences
00:30:27
Speaker
It's as simple as this, and I often make this recommendation. I say, do you have a niece or nephew? Do you have a son or daughter? How old are they? If they're anywhere from five to 15, tell them what you do.
00:30:40
Speaker
tell them the problem, and then tell them what you do. And if they get it, well, you probably are pretty close. That's awesome. You know, that's also like Richard Feynman use that technique to like, explain quantum physics, right? Real simple. And if you can't do it, you probably don't understand it yourself.
00:30:58
Speaker
It's funny, but I used to use the same thing. I've used this example before on the show, but when I was working in big consulting, uh, I have a, like my, my mom's an immigrant. It's like, she's, she's very Arab lady. Like she has very passable high school English. Um, but I used to practice my pitches to her. Ah, yeah. We caught the mom test. Yeah. So if I can get her to understand what I was trying to pitch, then I usually nailed it with the client.
00:31:22
Speaker
Yeah, especially like my mom who has a very hostile relationship to technology. So, you know, she'll put her hands up in the first. That would be more challenging. Yeah, because you have all that history and almost baggage of understanding the world in a different way. Whereas like the kids these days, I mean, you know, my kids now are what, 20?
00:31:41
Speaker
to 20, almost five. And I actually do the pitches to them. It's, it's quite illuminating, you know, because I mean, yeah, they're super wicked smart. I mean, one's about to graduate from Virginia tech with a mechanical engineering far smarter than I will ever be, but
00:31:58
Speaker
If I can't explain it to him and he can understand it and repeat it back the value to me, then yeah, I'm failing. Yeah. Awesome. Well, on that note, Stewart, thank you so much for your time and attention. Thank you, guys. Really appreciate it. You got a great show. I love it. So keep me posted. Awesome. All right. Well, thank you, GoSec audience. We will be back with some other guests and stay tuned.
00:32:27
Speaker
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