Evan Reiser, CEO and co-founder of Abnormal Security, walks students through the methodologies needed to lead a company from day one, from picking a co-founder to building the initial sales team. Prior to Abnormal Security, Evan recently led product and machine learning teams at Twitter after co-founding successful companies including Bloomspot, acquired by JPMorgan Chase, and AdStack, acquired by TellApart.
Evan: So I think the most important thing is that you just have to have an underlying layer of implicit trust. And, that doesn't mean like you try, you always [00:46:00] trust every single decision right.
From your co-founder, but I think you, you have to trust that they're really optimizing for the same thing you're optimizing for, which is the company success. So if you believe, if you believe that whatever that other person is going to do, that they're doing it with the company's interest in mind right now, when they have a difference of opinion, It's you don't have to second guess, what are they trying to optimize for? You already know they're optimized for now. The question is, okay, what additional contacts do they have that I don't have is leading me to a different conclusion or maybe what is being flawed in one of our decision-making processes.
If you're optimized for the same thing, that's all this. And so now, when you have a disagreement debate, It's not about, let me tell you why you're wrong. Let me tell you why I'm right. It's Hey, let's explore this together. Let's try to debug, What context are we missing?
Evan: Or what is flawed in our, on our thinking that helps us get the right answer right now, you're working together as a team to get to the right answer for the company. So I think that's only required when you have this kind of underlying layer of trust. I think you also need to [00:47:00] have, you're just good communication where, both people can, not everyone needs to be, masterclass speakers.
But I think that everyone needs to be able to communicate, here's the context, here's my opinions. Here's, what's informing my beliefs. I think that requires some sort of, this relationship requires humility, curiosity, And also some comfort that as co-founders, that you're going to divide and conquer, There's going to be some things I'm going to work on some things you're going to work on. And we have to both trust that. In each of those domains, we're gonna, we're gonna kinda do the best thing for the company. So I think that if you have a co-founder, you've ha you feel like has trust.
You can have engaged in that debate and argument, and you really feel confident in our ability to go execute in other areas of the business without you having to worry about that. That is a, that's an amazing dynamic, right? And companies can become very successful very quickly because all the noise around coordination and alignment, Kind of all goes away. You can just get right into, building and ultimately, solving customer problems.
