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.
So I think the best time to start a startup is when you feel really prepared for that journey. So great companies take 10 plus years to build. And I think there's many people that jump into startups because they want to start a startup.
not really thinking, not really planning with the end in mind. I think the best entrepreneurs, right? They acknowledge they're going on a 10 year journey and they think about what should I be doing in the early days to best equip myself to be most successful there. And if you're going to this tenure race, you probably don't want to start off sprinting.
Evan: You wanna spend all your time And so I think the best entrepreneurs will invest time and energy, maybe a year or more to really make sure they're personally equipped to go on that journey. they may spend a year really making sure they have the right destination in mind and really get the plans ready before they jump, jump off.
I know it's common advice for people to just come up with an idea and run with it. But, if you look at the most successful companies, that's rarely the path they went down. It's much [00:01:00] more common a world. You have much higher chance of being successful. If you are really intentionally planned for that journey, really have a strong thesis about the market.
Evan: What customers care about, why are going to win? what is it, what kind of team is gonna take for you to be successful? What will it take for you personally, to lead that, that journey and really make sure that you spend the first, five, 10, 20% of that, decade plus, adventure really preparing to, preparing for success.
