Evan is the CEO and co-founder of Abnormal Security. In this class, Evan breaks down what a functional and effective culture of leadership means at enterprise startups, and the best ways to foster that culture. Prior to Abnormal, Evan most 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.
So I think the super short answer is you got to solve a problem that customers care about solving and value solving, and they want to solve it right now.
every enterprise customer is extremely busy. They've got a hundred things. They have a thousand other, [00:04:00] start-ups calling them to sell a bunch of junk, But every customer does have a list of like 10 projects they want to do over the next six months, 12 months, whatever it is.
Evan: And so I think that, the best, the best thing you can do is to go talk to customers and find out what are some of the problems they really care about that are unsolved. They don't know what the right project is, the right solution is to go solve that thing and find out how do you go do that?
And if you can do that for a handful of, if you talk to 20 customers and you can find some. Five of those people have in common, some sort of problem that they feel like they really care about. They want to solve, they want invest time, money, energy, into solving, and they don't know what the path is.
That's true. We're five out of 20 customers, right? That is a, that's a very strong signal that you could be onto a really powerful business. that matters. I think it's also a function of, what the business model is. Most enterprise software companies have some sort of enterprise sales motion.
although many new companies are taking more of a kind of bottoms up product, product driven growth model. I think, especially for, any sort of enterprise [00:05:00] sales model. you have to have a, you have to have kind of customer value. That's, commiserate with how you plan to go to market.
Evan: If you're going to be hiring, enterprise field sales, which are much more expensive, right? As a distribution vehicle than a website, you have to have a business model that supports that you have to sell your product for $50,000, a hundred thousand dollars, $500,000 somewhere in that range. And if the value of the product, if the, yeah.
If the cost of the product is not proportional to how you plan to distribute it, You end up with a business model that has a very high cost of distribution or sales and marketing.
