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.
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.
I often hear this phrase, It’s better to be lucky than good! and I’ve always found it a bit of an odd statement.
Do I believe in lucky? Perhaps.
I think that luck exists in a lot of forms. The guy that’s never played 21, yet blows everyone away on the first hand. The person that walks into the local 7-eleven and buys the winning ticket to state jackpot. I think there are many events like this that could be easily attributed to Lady Luck and all her glory.
When it comes to business though, I prefer to think of it more as, It’s better to be good enough to create your own luck.
I have a friend, Chris Lema who loves to write about how much he says no, so much so that he has an entire tag dedicated to it. When you think about it, it makes a lot of sense.
Your ability to decipher the noise from the rest, is a bit of an art, and saying yes to the wrong thing could take you down a rabbit hole that will never let you see the light of day. I’ve seen a number of companies fail to this, always chasing the golden nugget.
It is however, a bit misleading to you as an entrepreneur, more importantly as a manager and leader (there is a difference).
For the better part of the past 7 months, my business partner, Daniel, and I have been infatuated with our culture. All aspects of it, what it really means, what it means to us, and more importantly, how is it defined.
I think the basis of the question has really been, who and what are we about?
I think we have always known, but we never really took the time to sit back and really capture it in a way that made sense to us, and even our own team.
Interestingly enough, what we’ve come to realize is that your culture is not really something you define, it’s something you are. I know, that’s deep!
I think it was at our Quarter 3 board meeting in 2014 that we really started to capture, appreciate and recognize the culture that we had set in our business. Mind you, our business first opened it’s doors January 2010.
Like most first-time entrepreneurs though, our thoughts were nowhere around the idea of a culture as much as it was, figuring out if we really had a business.
As humans I think we like to over-complicate things by putting things in boxes that we can come to terms with. Boxes that we can appreciate or that might make sense. I fear that this type of thinking truly inhibits us from being transformative in the way we think and behave.
We not only define and create these boxes, these molds, we also strive to be in them.
In a recent conversation, this statement was recently directed at me and I found it weighing on my mind. It was specific to being the CEO to the awesome company, Sucuri.
What exactly did they mean?
One of my few advisors recently told me, “Tony, you guys function as if you have a Chip on your Shoulder.”
I couldn’t quite figure out if this was good or bad, it almost felt as if it was a gentle way of telling us something negative. Either way, it’s weighed on me for several weeks, kept nagging at me, just couldn’t shake it.
Then yesterday I saw this Tweet from Kevin Hart, because I always go to Twitter when I’m stuck on an issue:
I’ve been watching the Sony Hack with a lot of interest, for a variety of reasons. Mostly because of my interest in the security and enterprises environments.
Yesterday however, we all witnessed perhaps one of the biggest disruptions to an industry that has gone largely undisrupted for many years.
For the first time, I think, we saw the release of a new movie release, by a prominent movie producer – Sony – take their work and forgo the release in traditional movie theaters, instead opting for an online release. In my eyes, this has the potential to be the most accidental disruptive action to what I consider to be an old past-time for many people.
You don’t fail because you don’t have enough friends. You don’t fail because your idea isn’t unique. You don’t fail for lack of ideas. You don’t fail because of funding issues. You don’t fail because you were too early or too late to market.
You fail because you can’t execute. You fail because you can’t focus. You fail because you fail to embrace the grind.
When I sit back and study those that I aspire to be like, there is always one undeniable fact that makes them successful – their ability to execute. There ability to see something from beginning to end. The understanding that whether you are a team of 1, 50, or 5,000 this one simple concept will set you apart from the rest.
There is, however, a difference between blind execution and meaningful execution.
Too often though the more common execution type employed however I see blind execution, work to do work. To those external it appears as if something awesome is happening, yet to those close it’s clear that nothing is really being done.
This past weekend I was reading Paul Graham most recent article, Mean People Fail. If you don’t know who Paul Graham is, and you’re in the tech startup world, do some homework.
He’s one of the most influential minds in the space today, followed by every would-be and successful entrepreneur in the world. I can’t think of a single person in the space that I have engaged with, from CEO’s to investors, that have not heard of or don’t read his articles.
This notoriety actually makes his most recent article all that more interesting to me.
I think perspective is determined by the side of the coin on which you sit. For instance, I read his article and I thought, “Who would knowingly be mean to Paul G.?”
Running a business you will be faced with more decisions than you count or track, what will set you apart is your ability to make a decision.
Indecisiveness is the one trait you cannot afford when tasked to be a good leader.
The risk of indecision is preferable to the terror of indecision.
Mainmonides
To date, I have made more bad decisions than I care to admit, but have yet to come to a point where indecisiveness paralyzed me. I may get weighed by my own analysis or thought process, but I attribute that mostly to the process of trying to make the best decision possible. Note that I don’t emphasize on making a good decision.
In hindsight everything will always be clear, a success will be attributed to a good decision and a failure will be attributed to a bad one. The reality is though, that a success might be reached via a bad decision as much as a failure can be attributed to a good decision. Such is the conundrum we must bare with every decision we make.
What I am coming to terms with is that there really is no good or bad decision when you’re in the process of making it, just what is and isn’t and what will and won’t happen.
I spent this past week in San Francisco, attending events, meeting and collaborating with interesting people. To say I’m mentally tired would be an understatement.
On Thursday, I had the opportunity to attend an event called Sales Hacker Conference. I honestly had no idea what to expect. What I did know was that I knew very little of this weird, and what I left with after the event was that I knew even less than I thought. That unfortunately becomes harder for a number of reasons as your company continues to grow, and at some point you start to yearn for a more sustainable, repeatable, approach. Hence attending this event.
I was pleasantly surprised with the content and caliber of information being shared. Who knows, maybe it was my lack of knowledge on the subject that made it so interesting.
Whatever the case, I was especially keen on one talk by Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski.
I’m truly fascinated by the WordPress business ecosystem.
I’m frankly not sure why; when I look at it, it feels so young and at times exhausting, and yet so fascinating at the same time. I always want to fast forward 10 years, just so that I can look back and admire what it becomes and the trials and tribulations it went through. In my eyes the ecosystem is truly still in its infancy, and there is something beautiful as you watch it mature.
Yesterday I read an interesting article by the the SideKick team, titled Pricing Update: Feedback and Lessons. SideKick is a platform that allows you to create an interactive walkthrough for any website, plugin, theme or web-based platform. In reality, it’s a really cool feature set. I remember when it first came out, and I believe it was initially designed to target WordPress. They received advise from a number of folks and it looks as if they’ve morphed their model to be platform agnostic, I commend them greatly on this move.
I can’t stress the importance of being platform agnostic, it’s easy to be drawn the market share of 23% and growing, but never put your eggs in one basket.
By the way, looks like they’ll officially be launching November 14th or so, keep an eye out so you can try it.
To think I was not going to attend the event.
It was already later in the year, November, and besides, as my beloved friend Chris Lema pointed out, I had been rejected to speak.
Forgive @perezbox and his tweets. He got a rejection letter from #wooconf without even applying to speak.
— Chris Lema (@chrislema) November 3, 2014
I didn’t even get my name in the hello.
If you’re anything like me you’re constantly on the go, well at least in my mind I am. At least virtually you’re constantly moving, jumping between social streams, reading posts, updating posts, pushing posts, it’s our own little chaos of a world.
For a while now though I’ve been really struggling with a clean way to save interesting links. That’s compounded by the fact that I am constantly on multiple devices (i.e., desktop, notebook, iPad, mobile, etc…). For a while I was still using Delicious, seriously, I was. But that’s just not very useful, at least it wasn’t to me.
I was talking to a friend of mine, Cory Miller (at least I think it was him, if not, oh well he gets the credit), and he introduced me to this app called Pocket. At first glance it looked cool, but as if often the case I kind of shrugged it off, I get a lot of recommendations for apps.
Finally settling in at home though I started playing with it and quickly realize how cool of an app it was – more importantly how awesome the user experience is.
At an event recently a friend of mine was cracking jokes on my online appearance. Although only joking, you can always tell when there is some truth to it.
It was enough where I started giving it a bit more thought.
In the process, I realized he was correct. So I found myself thinking more and more on the subject. As your personal brand equity begins to increase you give little thought to it, until all of a sudden it slaps you in the face.
It begins with random pings to be friends, emails, Skype messages, etc… Before you know it, it consumes your day and the lines between personal and public become non-existent. It really struck home when I published a picture on Facebook and my wife asked, “Who is that?”
I honestly didn’t know, other than it being a friend request I received and felt obligated to accept.
Decided to update my email subscription feature and in the process set out to find a more effective solution.
I had been rocking the Jetpack plugin and using their subscription module, but it left a lot to be desired. Mainly the lack of control, or appeared lack of control over my own data (my emails). For the average site though it might be perfect, and right what the doctor ordered.
For me however I was looking for something specifically to integrate with MailChimp. I actually didn’t even know that there was a MailChimp plugin, I thought I would have to do a form myself (as I had done before), but oh how the things have changed.
Turns out that in my absence, a few months – maybe years, things continue to evolve. How awesome is that!
Turns out our friends at Crowd Favorite built a free MailChimp plugin. #hattip
While in San Francisco this past weekend I had the opportunity to attend a conference, WordCamp San Francisco. I didn’t sit in on that many sessions, for a variety of reasons, but there was one that I attended, mostly because I know the speaker and he delivers a good and impactful talk – Chris Lema.
His talk was on Building Your Brand with a Blog – yes I stole the concept for the post title from that.
He defined 6 key elements to a successful content marketing strategy:
If you have never heard my Chilean friend talk, you really need to, oh and don’t worry you have a lot of opportunities to. I encourage you to grab a glass of your favorite drink and go through the various videos, he’s a phenomenal speaker, and he writes about it too. But look, this post isn’t about my friend, it is however about his 6 key points.
This has been on my mind for a while, likely because of how big of an issue it is for me. I didn’t realize how big of an issue it is though until I started doing some research.
I came across the most eloquent description:
It means that if you bitch loud enough, you’ll eventually get your way.
If you’re unfamiliar with the term, phrase, and you run a business you should acclimate yourself with it quickly. As an entrepreneur, as your business grows you will have to contend with it on a daily basis. I find it a very dangerous dilemma.
I was in Europe this past week for WordCamp Europe. I was accepted to speak about security, go figure… :)
Of the several talks I sat in on, the one I found most fascinating was the interview with Matt Mullenwegg ( WordPress Co-Founder, Head of the WordPress Foundation, CEO / Founder of Automattic). I am not sure why, I have often found myself in the crowd listening to Matt give a talk of some kind, whether it’s in a Town Hall setting or an interview.
I have crossed verbal swords with him on posts and twitter, extending and interpreting his words based on my own personal biases, etc… This time however, for once, I just listened and tried to really appreciate what he was saying.
Sometimes when you shut up, it’s amazing the things you really hear…