Victoria: 0:02

I'm Victoria. I'm calling in from California. I've been on the West Coast for three years, although you might be able to hear him from the UK originally. And I founded a startup while I was at business school, it is in the cybersecurity space. I've had some experience in sales myself before that, a little bit of experience with PR and on the buy side at Salesforce. And all of that led me to start working on this idea and the solution, and I'm really, really pumped to be one of the apparently only 70 female founders in cybersecurity over several thousand. I saw that yesterday, Salesforce used to want to build everything in-house, like not MNA would buy out companies, but actually became a vendor that served Salesforce as a seller. That was really, really hard to do. There was a lot of red tape around that. So, we wanted to make that process happen better for sort of innovative entrepreneurial startups that could serve Salesforce as a supplier. And so, we were trying to find ways to cut around that red tape basically, and I was part of that buying motion, bringing vendors in at Salesforce. Quickly realized that it's really, really frustrating when you spend all this time on the buy side, getting the right people in the room. Salesforce is a globally distributed organization and everyone works nine to five, just lots of different time zones. So, I as chief of staff would spend weeks trying to get the right people in the room for a vendor pitch. And then the vendor would pitch and then we'd find out in the call that, hey, like they don't solve the problem we thought they solved, or their pricing is well out of whack versus our budget, or hey, they can't even demo. We've got all this effort and time together and they haven't even got a sales engineer on the call if they're not ready to demo. They're trying to qualify us. Erika, I know you're on the sales side, so I'm sure…. I'm sure you would never do this to Salesforce but we did experience that and it was frustrating and it was painful and it sort of made me think about why is it so hard to figure out the basic information about a vendor before you go and take the call? Why can't we just put that information in an email or a database or something like that? And then went and did the director of sales role. So, I've played both sides. I'm a double-crossing agent. I've been in the shoes of a director of sales at a MarTech company selling into companies like Salesforce. and I was tasked in generating new business and I was doing cold outreach. I was the one spending out hundreds of messages per day on LinkedIn, desperately trying to find any common ground with anyone that might be a buyer, and being like, hi, John, I noticed we went to the same cafe five years ago because we both Facebook checked in there.

Maril: 0:08

You're like, I'm double insulted now to add insult to injury. But that's why by the way, everybody, little PSA, that's why I have a little emoji in front of my first name on Linkedin. That way if someone's using a bot or they're scripting out, pulling someone's first name from their profile and cold DMing people, it will pull the emoji in with it because it's grabs it…. but if you've typed it out, you'll leave the emoji off. Obviously, you're not going to be like, hi, flag Maril Vernon. So that's one of the things I do to know if someone is bot spamming me or if someone took the time to actually type out my name and write me a message. Small PSA. Okay. But anyway, you were what? You're in the trenches. You're doing that?

Victoria: 0:10

Hot. I thought I was going to be so good. I thought I was going to be the best sales person in the world. I thought I had all these connections, fancy schools, like all this, careful personalization. And then three weeks into the job, I'm like looking at my stats and it's like, okay, 8% took my LinkedIn request. 3% are interacting with me, one and a half or whatever are going into a meeting. I'm turning into a meeting and I brought that to my CEO and I was like, I'm so sorry. I suck. I'm the worst, I shouldn't be doing this. And he looked at my numbers and was like, this is really good. You're twice as good as the other guy right now. So just realizing that you get a pat on the back for like 8%, 6%, 4% conversion, that's better than industry average and that's seen as the baptism of fire. That's just how it goes. That's how you do sales. That's how you learn. But what about the other 92% or 94%? 96%? Like that's noise that you're throwing out into this big black hole of the LinkedIn universe. You're hurting your brand maybe, right? You're, you're pissing people off. God, juju, I just, I don't like it. I don't like it. It felt very, very wrong and very broken that the entire industry has just decided that this is how this works.

Maril: 0:12

Erika’s triggered. So, you realize we're getting the wrong people in the room. You're like your budget is not a match for your product. This sucks. This is broken. Those are the more junior members of a sales org typically. That's where the volume versus value piece comes in. Erika, that's where people just whoop you and tell you to sit down and just do what you're supposed to do, even though strategically it makes no sense, right? It's just that 1% and that 2% is enough. It's better than nothing, and so they're willing to do the 100 outreach for each of them John Overbaugh as well, Kendricks. There are a few really great early design partners that have been working with us on this, but we work with CISOs and security directors, security managers when they have an urgent need, so they come out of an audit, they come out of a review. They have a new budget allocated for the year, or they have an upcoming renewal. At that moment when they're like, okay, I need to go to market and find the right vendor or review who I'm currently using, that's when they can use quality and run a search basically through us. The other side of it is the vendor side, obviously, and I can see some of our, maybe James on the sell side. We have over a hundred vendors already signed up for kind of changing the grain and basically giving us information into our database around their differentiation. Not the sales and marketing stuff, but like, what do you do? Erika, what problem does your product solve? What's the job to be done?

Victoria: 0:18

Yeah. Completely. That's the thing. The problem is that when you Google something like I need to buy a sim, the thing that you're always going to end up on is a vendor's white paper, which can be valuable, but it's not something that buyers trust as much as a third party. Which are shoes that you'd think would be filled by like Forrester, Gartner, Optiv, but like, hell no. The problem with those guys is they're so…. One size fits all. Pay to play. Exactly. It's not actually a clean lens on the market and it's not a curated lens on the market. You're not putting filters over the magic quadrant to tell you, okay, as a financial services company, at stage two security maturity with this tech stack running these adjacent vendors on our platform already with this experience and this budget. Like, that's the lens that we kind of apply to the market when we're working with a buyer's needs. I'll preface with, I obviously don’t know how a guy in my shoes would be treated. I can just see other successes and failures from the sidelines. And I will also preface and say the majority of folks in the industry have been great, have been warm, have been friendly, have been receptive and open. Not all cybersecurity professionals fall into what I'm about to say, which is that there have been situations that have forced my jaw to hit the floor, right? I think I've been kind of lucky honestly…. until now. I was like, obviously a feminist, but I wasn't like, oh, this is something that keeps me up at night. I'm running into sexism in my everyday job. It just wasn't happening because I was in like decent schools and then consulting and then like these big institutions, Salesforce and like there's always a HR department and there's always a policy and there's always examples of like when someone did cross over a line, things went wrong for them, right? There's justice basically. When you are just on your own, going into a big company and pitching to them, you don't have HR. No one is protecting you, no one's watching you. There's no structure. So, people can really abuse that unfortunately. One example I remember very vividly where this really happened for the first time, I was driving; I was on a phone call. it was on the vendor side actually. Because initially it was explaining like the AEs and the sales folks on the vendor side would love us. To like immediately be like, yes, you're giving me everything I need to know about a buyer. You're telling me I don't have to pay for a meeting unless it actually happens. Like, yes, yes, yes. Let's do this. So, we had brought this buyer profile to a vendor I will not name. The AE was all fired up, was the best, like, so excited about us, championing us internally, everything. He was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we just need to get approval for this budget to come from the channels of the partnership guy, and I was like, great! Get him to call me. So, I'm driving my car to Palo Alto or something and then I get this call from this guy and I'm, and I'm expecting it, so I'm like, hi. Like I open it very friendly, like ready to do my little introduction. He doesn't introduce himself, doesn't ask me anything about an overview. He just goes, Victoria, okay then I'm just going to say this out of the bat. We're not going to pay you for this. Just so you know, like, I appreciate what you're doing as a woman trying to make it on your own but we're a pretty big international company. I don't know if you know, we're like a billion-dollar international company, and if you're going to try and serve us, you're going to need to accept that some things won't go your way.

Maril: 0:24

I sat down one time at a meeting and someone immediately opened and it was obviously a gentleman and he goes, listen sweetheart. And I was like, I didn't hear anything you said after that. And I told him later, I was like, by the way, when you open up like that, you are automatically turning off anyone who you're aiming that comment at, or who is an ally of that person because you have now just isolated yourself as being an idiot. Sweetheart? I am not your sweetheart and even if I was available, you wouldn't even make the cut, dude. My friends were like, just leave it alone. He's not worth it. Like, you don't even know this guy. And I was like, no, you know what? This is a learning opportunity. And I educated him very sternly but very diplomatically on exactly how incorrect his assumptions were and how he is not to assume who people are and what they can do based on how they're dressed and how I can look however I want and be however capable I want. They are not mutually exclusive and we walked away and ended that conversation and I was like, I hope you do better, do better in the future. And he actually went and found me on LinkedIn and messaged me like the next day because DefCon was still happening. And he was like, I just wanted to say, I'm so sorry for my comments. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. And like he's like, I promise to do better. I don't know what I was thinking. And I'm like, yeah, me either, but good. I'm glad to see. Turn over a new leaf.

Erika: 0:28

Exactly. Well, and I think it's Amanda, she said she gets the dumb blonde assumption. Totally happens for me. My hair's purple and then it goes to blonde because I tone it purple. And a lot of times they think that I'm just like somebody that's hired for marketing or the dumb blonde comment and I'm like, I probably have more degrees, which doesn't always mean something. So, for all you naysayers against degrees. But like a double master's degree came from being poor, I lived in my car at one point. Single mom, what's your story? What's your excuse? Oh, you went to a college that your parents paid for? Yeah. I lived in my car and now look where I'm at. And if I'm too aggressive, I get talked to and I need to control myself. So, I've learned in my career to put people down the way they put me down, but with a smile on my face. And you'll never know that I'm actually insulting you until after the conversation's over. I mean, it's true because you don't know what somebody's been through and what road they've walked and that's just like, treat people kindly. It goes back to just being a human. What are some other challenges that you've had, Victoria, being a female founder or CEO in cyber? Other than just people you know, assuming you're a dumb blonde or what are some other challenges of being a startup? You said two things. You said two things that I want to hit on. You said that you have mentors. We have talked about branding and mentorship in the past on Cyber Queens. And then you said you don't have to have degrees. We've also talked about that. So that is amazing to hear that from a CEO and Founder. So go ahead.

Victoria: 0:34

Yeah, exactly. No, obviously everything just gets harder and harder. . So, it felt like everything was pointing towards us going into one of those spaces. Cybersecurity has a macro resistant budget, something that doesn't…. you can't really stop spending on security during a downturn. There were a bunch of reasons why that felt like the best space to go into, especially because CISOs unlock a lot of other industries as well. Everything runs through a CISO when you're buying DevOps or Info or data patches as well. So, there were all these flags that were telling me like, you are onto something huge. This is the place where you should do it. And then the one thing holding me backwards, but I'm not technical. And I started doing a Coursera, like a night course on cybersecurity for a while because I just felt like I had to make up for that absence for that like, lack and it was so deeply technical. I was scratching my head at it. And you don't have time as a CEO anyway. Like, like you just don't have time to do night school, basically. Like you can do a lot of stuff, but you're not going to be able to pick up a whole ass degree on the side. But then I started doing the work and like doing vendor sourcing for our first clients, running around, doing research, understanding what they wanted, doing the research, running around a conference with a questionnaire and trying to fill it in and deliver that back to the buyers. And they were like, this is great.

Erika: 0:38

When somebody says I'm not technical, that doesn't mean that you won't realize that you're technically coming into cyber. So, a lot of people hold themselves back from coming into this field because they think that they can't do it. I found that I was technical over the years being a salesperson, you know what I mean? And I'm like, I could go be a CISO right now. I just don't have the credentials

Victoria: 0:40

I think being very conscientious around what you need to be good at to do your job . Coursera’s introduction to cybersecurity, very interesting, could have gone really deep into that. I didn't need it to do my job, that I was just thinking about doing it to signal to others that I'm smart enough to do the job, but like the actual content wasn't what I needed. What I needed was those sales commercial level insight that Erika's talking about that actually over time makes you pretty technical because talking to 15 vendors who do a similar thing, you walk away and you’re like okay, I get the space, I can talk intelligently about the different technologies that are employed in endpoint security, for example, or all the different kinds of sim out there. Like that's a content piece that's actually we’re publishing today. Just figure out what you need to be good at and then do reps, do reps, do reps, and be willing to ask super questions. I did definitely play the whole card of, hey, I'm not technical. Can you explain this to me like you'd explained to someone who is not like, not quite like I'm five, but explained it to me knowing that I am not technical? And weirdly enough, that approach actually really helped with what we were doing, which is getting sellers to stop using crazy abbreviations and nonsense terms and just explain like, I'm five. Like what does your product actually do?

Maril: 0:42

Next year you'll be on a dance team. I can't wait to see it personally. I'll come out and root for you. But mentors, mentors, you hear it over and over again in people's journeys. How I got started in pentesting so fast was I had mentors willing to sit down and take the time to hold my hand. And actually, met one of them just in DC last week, who's known me for four years, since I literally was like, hi, they just need me a pen tester and I don't even know what that means. Can you help me? And he was like, I was worried for you when the questions you were asking me, I was worried. I was like, I don’t know if she's going to make it, but I'll give you all the resources and you can try. And he was like, I'm really proud to see that. You took off and stuff. But mentors, you will do it bigger, better, faster than us because you will benefit from our experience and not make our mistakes hopefully. Get them in…. and if you're not mentoring somebody, mentor somebody,

Erika: 0:46

So I'm just going to say, don't be afraid and just try stuff out. If you come into cyber and you're like, it's not for me, at least you tried it or tech at all, at least you tried it. But don't get in your own way like Victoria said. I have grown so much as an individual over time, and the last 12 years have been amazing in tech. Find a mentor, reach out and ask people. There are people that will charge you to mentor you but not everybody charges. So don't be afraid to ask. If you feel like this is too male dominated for you, this is a phenomenal story, go follow people like Victoria, myself, Maril, who have broken down all of the…. we're myth busting right now because you can do it. Just don't give up. And again, I've said this so many times, we need you. Please come to cyber.

Victoria: 0:48

Yeah, I would. I completely agree with that. I got this tattoo after becoming a founder. ‘No fear, no fear.’ Specifically, because that was holding me back more than anything else. But yeah, what I would add to that is if you're listening and you're at the start of your career or if you're playing this back and you're at the start of your career, you are so lucky right now. You don't have kids, maybe, you don't have a dog or a car or a mortgage. Like now is the time to take massive risks in your career because you are only answering, I hope, to yourself at this point in your life. As you get older, you get more set in the things that you can do in your career. Not just because of the things that I mentioned, like personal life developments, but also you take a certain degree, you take a certain job, right? Your options narrow, whereas you're younger and you have more options on the table. Take those risks, start a company or go and teach yourself something brand new. It becomes harder to change lanes later in life. And I know I'm like 27 so I'm not exactly like weren't qualified to give this whole sort of, oh, your life's kind of over advice, but I have noticed the narrowing of the channels and I think that I wish people had told me earlier in life to just go and take more risks and dive into stuff. And I think that's just the key thing for me is things will only get a little harder to pivot into as time goes on. So do it now while you still have all these options on the table in the whole world. I am linked to another meeting, so I do have to get going. This has been so fun. I have enjoyed this so much. I just want to say once again to all of you women out there, happy International Women's Day, whatever it is you're doing, whatever it is you're dreaming, keep going and reach out to anyone if you need help. Victoria, one more little wrap up line about Callity. I want you to use the line that I love.