Tony Perez On Security, Business, And Life
Running a business is the most exhilarating and challenging experience of my life, rivaled only by my tours overseas. What I've learned in a very short time is that very few people actually know what they are doing, while most of us are just trying to figure it out. Here I hope to share my own insights and opinions, in the hopes that my experiences can be of some value.
If you’re looking to exit your company, building the financial structure for your business will be important. It will be the most important piece of the equation in any future conversations. Unicorns need not apply.
It is the most under appreciated. They will get you to the promise land, but then they will also fall back into the abyss. There are only a few groups of people that really care about your financials.
When I talk to organizations that are entering a new market I can quickly identify the ones that will succeed. I do so by looking for answers to two questions:
Lacking appropriate visibility, that assessment often comes at a distance and fueled with personal bias (impossible not to). It can be defined by paying close attention to a) the way they position themselves and b) their understanding of the customer, specifically the customers journey (which is reflected in their positioning).
It’s only recently that I have grown a deeper appreciation for personal brands. Prior to 2010, the idea of establishing a personal brand was a foreign concept to me. In 2010 Dre Armeda came up with perezbox, and the rest is history. It’s perhaps the single most impactful thing I have done for my own individual personal and professional growth.
While I don’t believe everyone needs a personal brand, I do believe that as a business owner it should be part of your larger go to market strategy.
This chapter in my life began March of 2011. I was invited to join the team by Dre and Daniel. Coincidently, it ended on the month that I officially hit 6 years with the company. The idea was never mine, it belongs to Daniel; it was his vision, his idea. It was something I found fascinating and challenging, it was something I felt I could execute against.
We often joke that it’s about the experience, and what an experience it has been.
When we first started, our pricing by all accounts was absurdly low. In my last post I chronicled the details of our pricing journey at Sucuri. Developers were finding that the cost was low enough that it was easier to send websites to us rather than invest their time, that could, at the time, run $40 to $100 an hour or so. Also, contrary to the traditional Information Security (InfoSec) domain, focused on the enterprise, there weren’t that many players in the website security domain focused on the everyday website owners. There were a few competitors in name only, not in product or quality of service.
Here are a few things we were working with:
You will undoubtedly undervalue your product or services, and your pricing will be wrong; this I am sure of. It will be echoed by every seasoned business person, professional coach, and everyone in between. You will start researching and googling how to raise your prices and you’ll find over 7 million results offering you advice.
Your inability to make any sense of it will be frustrating, and with every article you read you’ll find some qualifier that holds you back. The fears you feel – “what if we’re wrong”, “can we just revert?”, “what will the impacts to the brand be?”, “will my market work with this change?” – never really go away. Your frustrations won’t be that you don’t understand the idea of raising prices, but more along the lines of how.
While we are all accustomed to reading advice that starts at the conclusion, I instead want to focus on our journey. Specifically our journey with pricing at Sucuri. The real insights come from analyzing how someone reached a conclusion, because what we’re really after is the thought process more than the end result. How do I navigate the process of raising or changing my prices? I honestly have no idea, but I’ll tell you our story.
We have all been in those talks. You know, the ones in which they are telling you to measure all things? Test everything!!! The one in which they share the secret to achieving a 300% growth! How it’s impossible to make a decision without data? How data will set you free? You know, the talks that make you question everything you’re doing and leave you so confused at the same time?
I’ve found myself in the same situation as most, struggling to grasp the discussion. Not because I didn’t understand what they were saying, or disagreed with the logic, but I was having very different results and the experiences with the journey of testing. My failures in the domain were overwhelming and exhausting, especially since the rest of the industry kept saying this was the way to go.
I had become content with my thoughts of confusion until I heard Beka Rice, with Skyverge, speak at WooConf this past week and was compelled to revisit my thoughts on the subject.
What is it about customer support that drives us mad? Not just for those of us that manage and provide customer support, but ourselves as consumers. Is it that as a society we have lost all faith in the ability to get what we perceive to be quality service that we immediately begin each engagement with a chip on our shoulder?
As a consumer myself, I can attest to this feeling. Try picking up the phone, calling your bank, maybe your ISP, or god forbid a government agency. All I want to know is why my bill is so high, or why my network is performing so poorly. You follow all the phone prompts and somehow the call is disconnected, or you’re in the wrong group. Let’s say you get to the right group, but they’re unable to assist and have to push you over to another group, but that group is unfamiliar with your problem and you have to start from scratch. Sound familiar?
This is the sad reality of customer support these days, and as someone that runs a company that also provides customer support, it provides for a challenging dilemma. Whether we like it or not, it’s these experiences that create an overly negative disposition to working with support that our teams have to work with.
When you think about your competition, how do you account for it? Do you stress over them? Do you find yourself constantly looking at what they are doing? Maybe comparing yourself to them?
I know I did, and sometimes still do. Every move felt like it would change the game for us.
It rarely did! It rarely does!
The idea of implementing a process is one that should provide insight and guidance. Yet, I find myself conflicted when I think about the idea of putting them together. Not because they lack value, but because I know that their intentions will be lost over time, and they’ll inevitably be leveraged as a crutch and seen as an absolute.
This bring about a fear within me around the idea of processes. There is no denying their effectiveness, but you also can’t deny their ineffective attributes; like their affects on the innovative qualities your team sometimes requires. Granted, there are obvious situations in which you require them.
It’s been about three years since I last wrote about social media, specifically its affects on businesses. Unfortunately, nothing has changed, albeit one could argue it’s affects have intensified.
No one reading this should be a stranger to the polarizing affect social media can have on society. We’ve seen how it can topple governments, dismantle organizations, amplify social debates, and positively and adversely affect a wide range of other issues and topics. So in reality, nothing of what I say here in this post should be surprising, and yet I feel so compelled to share my thoughts.
I read a fascinating piece by Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator, in which he talks to the Post-YC slump. The premise of the article revolves around two very important, yet simple, points: fake work and momentum. Specifically, it’s affects and importance on the companies once they leave the YC cycle.
Quick Aside (over-simplified description of what they do):
If you’re not familiar with YC, it’s a tech start-up incubator out of San Francisco. They focus specifically on providing seed funding to startups; seed funding being the earliest stage of fund-raising an organization can do. They are unique in their configuration, as they have 3 month cycles in which they bring every startup they invest in to work locally with their team and help build momentum for their respective ideas / projects / companies.
Regardless of industry, there is always a constant in that every day you’ll be presented with new challenges when running a business. I believe that these challenges introduce insecurities in our personas in which we often fear that our lack of knowledge in a subject makes us exceptionally vulnerable to failure.
To account for this we look at others experiences and try to find similarities in their stories and experiences. What I come to realize though that no one really knows what they’re doing, we’re all just trying to figure it out. What sets people apart however are their experiences and insights, and more importantly their ability execute.
Lately I have been having different conversations with people in which I talk to the idea of Knowing and Doing and how they are not mutually exclusive to one another. I think a perfect example that best illustrates what I mean can be found at conferences.
I believe there is an important distinction to be made. It comes in understanding that the idea of knowing something doesn’t necessarily mean you know how to apply that same knowledge.
We have all sat in, or watched a presentation, in which we listen to the speaker and think to ourselves, “Man, they have their stuff together!” or we hear them speaking at a get together, and think, “Holy smokes, they are on it!” This is in fact attributed to knowledge, and often comes down to charisma and a well crafted delivery. A skill-set in it of itself, there is no denying that fact.
I think there is an elegance to being removed from opinion or bias. Too often we tend to shake our heads at the other and think, They just don’t know…
This clouds our way of thinking, and in some instances blocks our ability to think beyond our norms. I ask myself every day, with every decision, what is driving this decision? Is is it previous experience? Is it my curiosity of the outcome? Is it my own stubbornness to be right or wrong? Yes, you can be stubborn in wanting to be wrong.
What exactly does it mean to be Naive?
Recently I spoke at WordCamp Minneapolis 2015 on Building and Running a Global Workforce: The People Aspect of a Remote Company. While I usually speak about security, in this talk I share the challenges of a remote work force and speak about people issues, culture, growth challenges, scaling, and everything in between.
In June of 2014, I stepped into the role of CEO of Sucuri. In the presentation, I also share some of the lessons we have learned at Sucuri throughout the past five years of doing business at a global scale.
Check out the video of my presentation:
When was the last time you were in a cab? How awesome of an experience was it when you did? Was it memorable?
I’ve spent the past two weeks on the road, splitting my time between Las Vegas, San Francisco and Minneapolis. I found myself spending a lot of time getting from point A to point B and often using a cab, for a variety of reasons.
In Las Vegas, they are the only option; granted there are car services providers at the various hotels. In San Francisco they are just outside the hotel door and give the impression of convenience; at least getting around town. Same applies in Minneapolis.
It’s really no wonder that services like Uber have been so disruptive to the industry.
I sometimes sit and wonder how things ever got started. I wonder if it’s something that could be reproduced, or if it was just a luck of the draw.
What I do realize however is that alone I don’t believe much could have been accomplished. In the beginning there were three of us at our company, today there are two. Alone however, would have likely been disastrous for any of us.
Even in the beginning, before my involvement. There was a dynamic between the pair. One was highly technical, the other was also technical but highly artistic. It worked at the time, it was what was needed to move in a direction (right or wrong is indifferent).
With time, things have changed, yet again we find ourselves with one pair. One is still highly technical, the other somewhat technical but more business focused. Again though, it works. It balances the scales and provides good momentum forward.
I can’t remember when it became necessary to know it all. Can you? Somewhere in our psyche though, as we’ve evolved we have found this need to have an answer to everything question. If we don’t have the answer, we somehow feel weak or incapable, and worst yet feel that others will look down on us. Why is this?
This might not be you, it might not be me, or it might not be someone you know, but it’s the reality for many.
Ask yourself these three questions:
This past weekend I spent some time with my friend, Chris Lema. He’s a fascinating man with great insights in a number of areas; the one we stumbled on this Saturday was people and leadership.
Over the past few months, as I continue to evolve into my role, I continuously question my philosophies. It’s a process of self-improvement that I find very helpful. In the discussion we stumbled into different personalities, characteristics traits that we, I, find fascinating. Of the various options, one resonated with me — Personal Insecurities.
I, like many, struggle with insecurities. The difference though is probably in how I handle / manage them. A number of trends and thoughts became apparent as we discussed it, and it was enough that I felt it’d be worth sharing.