Tony Perez On Security, Business, And Life
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.
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!
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.
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 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:
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:
My friend David, over at Early Growth Financial Services, put out this post on Forbes and it hit the nail on when it comes to the lies we tell ourselves.
We have this Message Of the Day that is plastered at the top of our support queue. We use it share something of insight to the team, it’s not always insightful but it’s usually quite amusing. Today was no different.
Today’s message of the day was provided by our Founder, Daniel Cid, and it went a little something like this:
Me to my dad: “I’m a security architect and I do malware research”. My dad to his friends: “My son fixes computers. He can fix yours”
That made me laugh hysterically because it reminded me of my own conversations with my mom a few years back and it went a little something like this:
One of my business partners sent this to the team this morning and I found myself smiling to myself. I think I was smiling because of how true it was, because of how closely I could relate with what the author was saying.
In the post the author addresses this mystery that seems to be weighing down the overworked, overstressed, co-founder/entrepreneur. Wow, what a life? Who could ever do that? Why would they ever do that?
I got an email talking to a new report by the Startup Genome Project, in it they outline what the Startup Ecosystems look like.
Much to my surprise, Los Angeles seems to be exploding as of late, but more surprising to me was Tel Aviv. TechCrunch did a great job taking a first stab at the report, but note that the document is about 160 pages so put your reading glasses on.
I have read their reports in the past and I am sure this one will be very interesting.
My good friend Chris Lema put out a good post today: The Most Destructive Thing You Do: Overshoot.
While the target demographic was aspiring developers and designers, I couldn’t help but find similarities in the challenges that businesses and their owners face every day.
I forget where I read it, but it made me think of those conversations you have with fellow entrepreneurs and advisors where the conversation always migrates into all the things you should be doing. One recommendation to all those entrepreneurs, all those conversations often lead to “overshooting,” stay focused.
As many know I am one of the owners of a tech start-up and as of late social media has been kicking my butt.
I often talk about keeping your cool and resorting to your more rational, logical, thoughts before engaging with people and engaging in debate, but I am quickly learning that its not quite that easy when it comes to social media.
What I am learning is that my more rational, logical, arguments often come off as condescending, rude or argumentative. Maybe it’s true, maybe its not, but the fact of the matter is it’s exceptionally difficult to have any rational conversations via any social mediums – i.e., Twitter, Blogs, Facebook, etc… at some point in the dialog, it all changes. And the fact is, it comes down to an individuals perception of what you’re trying to say or imply. Whether pointing out fact from fiction, or vise versa, someone undoubtedly gets upset and it all goes to crap from there.
What agitates me most is the right that people have to put out whatever they want, whenever they want, about what ever they want. Yet, you don’t have the right to respond as harshly or aggressively, oh no, now you’re being mean.