Why Early-Stage Sales Is All About Precision, Not Volume – Abigail Maines GTM Advisor YL Ventures

Are you struggling to transition from founder-led sales to a scalable sales-led model in your cybersecurity startup? Wondering if hiring a team of reps is really the fastest way to drive growth, or if there’s a better approach? Curious how senior sales leadership involvement early on might speed up your journey to true product-market fit? If so, this episode is packed with insights for you.

In this conversation, we discuss:
👉 Why early-stage sales are all about precision and defining your ideal customer profile (ICP)
👉 How bringing on an experienced founding CRO can optimize growth and quicken feedback loops
👉 The impact of thoughtful, targeted marketing and third-party attestation in launching into new or mature markets

About our guest
Abigail Maines is a seasoned cybersecurity sales leader, former CRO at Hidden Layer, and current Go-To-Market Advisor at YL Ventures. She’s worked with industry innovators at companies like Cylance and Checkpoint, and is the co-founder of FIERCE, an advocacy group focused on empowering women in tech and sales.

Summary
Tune in for Abigail’s contrarian approach to building an early-stage sales team—why precision trumps volume, and how the right sales leader can supercharge your trajectory. If you’re ready to rethink your sales strategy and learn actionable tactics from someone currently advising top cybersecurity founders, don’t miss this episode!

Connect & Learn More:

• Abigail Maines on LinkedIn
• YL Ventures
• Book a 30-Minute Meeting with Andrew Monaghan

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Transcript

Andrew Monaghan:
There are lots of opinions about how companies should move from founder-led sales to sales-led sales. Everyone really has the same goal, which is to get to the point where they can scale revenue and go to market and become one of those rocket ships that everyone's hoping for. But the actual steps they take to get there can vary and the recommendations can vary depending who you talk to. In this conversation, I'm talking with someone who recommends doing it in a way that probably doesn't fit neatly into one of the conventional paths that people talk about. You're going to hear from someone who's been a sales leader in cyber for many years. Recently she was the CRO at Hidden Lair and now she is a go to market advisor at YL Ventures. So she's got the experience and the credibility to back up her approach and she's actually advising founders right now about the things that she's going to talk about in this episode. So I'm delighted today to be welcoming Abigail Mains to the podcast.

Andrew Monaghan:
I'm Andrew Monaghan and this is a cybersecurity go to Market podcast where we tackle the question, how can cybersecurity companies grow sales faster? Well, Abigail, welcome to the podcast. It's going to be an interesting discussion for us all today.

Abigail Maines:
Thank you. Happy to be here.

Andrew Monaghan:
You have got a storied history, let's say in cybersecurity. It goes back quite a bit, Right. You've been at different companies laterally. You were the CRO at Hidden Lair, which is the AI security company which won the innovation sandbox comp at RSA. What, 23, I think it was. Is that right? That's right, yeah. Tito got on stage and presented in front of thousands and came through and won that. That was awesome.

Andrew Monaghan:
What a great moment as a startup, right? Being able to do that. You're also the co founder of Fierce, which we're going to come back to in a little bit. And currently you're the or a go to market advisor at YL Ventures as well. So you're in a really unique part of the industry for this conversation.

Abigail Maines:
Very fortunate. Yes.

Andrew Monaghan:
Well, let's go back to Hidden Lair. So, you know, my recollection was that Hidden Lair came out the blocks fast, right? It got the attention, it was capturing the buzz, I guess, the wave around AI in that timeframe. But you went into Hidden Layer super early as a CRO and people don't do that. So let's go back to that moment when you were there. Why did you go there? What was the attraction and why go in as a CRO at a company so early?

Abigail Maines:
Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I went in early with some colleagues that I had known at Silence and I had a. I have a lot of esteem for them and respect for their technical acumen. And so I was actually an advisor first before we raised the seed round of funding, which was in the spring of 23 or 22 actually, and I joined formally in September. I think I like the opportunity of building something from the ground. I had never started as Employee 30, although I shouldn't say that. I did one time early in my career back when I was in Buffalo, start very early. But I like the idea of building go to market motion from scratch.

Abigail Maines:
And that's exactly what I was able to do. They afforded the three founders, afforded me a lot of autonomy to do that because really when I joined it was a couple of engineers, a research team and me. So it was kind of an interesting era. And I really understood because we all had come from Silence, I did understand predictive AI and what predictive AI was vulnerable to because we had and unfortunately had a breach at Silence on our predictive model which how we came up with the idea for Hidden Layer. So I think I like the technology, I like the space, but I really like the idea of being able to build it myself. Because to be honest with you, having spent time at Silence, Checkpoint, Cyber Reason, even Absolute Software, which was more on the physical security side, I would say there was, in my opinion, lots of opportunities to enhance or innovate and go to market that I hadn't yet seen in practice that I wanted to try out there. And I was definitely given that opportunity.

Andrew Monaghan:
And you went in there as a, let's call it a proper CRO. Right. Sometimes tight are elevated, let's say when people go in, for whatever reason you weren't, you know, the common thinking right now is, is around. Well, you know, the founder, the move from funder led sales to sales led sales, hire some people, more junior, maybe hire two or three people, get some coverage, work with them very closely and then kind of, you know, maybe in a year or two you bring in someone who's the true, true CRO. That's not what happened. So what was your experience with that and how did that shape your thinking about how best to do this? You move from funder led sales into sales led sales.

Abigail Maines:
You know, I see that, I see the description that you're giving with founder led sales to some junior salespeople quite often. I did prior to Hidden Layer And I still see it now. I think in particular when you're talking to very strong technical founders, there's a little bit of a misconception about what sales really is early days. You know, I think there's this concept of we need to do a lot of demand gen and cold calling and demos and then closing and. And really in my opinion, early early stage sales are much more characterized by crafting a message that resonates with more folks. It's much more about defining the ICP because you don't really know that particularly in a new category like hidden layer was. And you really don't fully understand what is going to land in terms of the customer feature set that ultimately gets you to their product market fit. And I don't think junior salespeople can accomplish the sort of the laundry list of the latter items.

Andrew Monaghan:
And.

Abigail Maines:
And I think to put that on the founder early days when they have other competing priorities, whether it's building the team, dealing with investors and just technical go to technical moat building, I think that results in a gap in between sort of the cold calling and the demos and then the founder that I was able to fill at hidden layer early days because I had an appreciation for the level of sophistication one needs to be in order to sort of get from 0 to 10 million. I also think one of the major lessons of hidden layer that I definitely talk a lot about with the YL work codes that are early sort of stealth through a. Is early day revenue is not a really a volume game at all. It is much more a precision game. So this concept of having a huge top of funnel motion or a huge number of leads because you went to an event and then you're going to whittle that down into something compelling I don't agree with. I think that it's much more important to be able to find yourself on talking to customers who have the problem that you solve or at least appreciate the problem that you have to solve. Potentially have a project, maybe have a budget, maybe not, but at least are aware of the problem that you're solving. That requires from a founding CRO perspective, a lot of marketing acumen.

Abigail Maines:
It requires analyst relations that are really crisp. It requires SEO that is really targeted because ultimately that's where our early leads at hidden layer came from that were compelling. Like it was very precise. And we had to make sure the customers that had the problem were finding us first. And that really helped with our speed, with our momentum because we were not chasing big numbers. We didn't have MQLs moving to SQLs. We had customer has interest and customer has intent and that basically meant we wanted customers with intent. Right.

Abigail Maines:
We were really focused on the precise ICP that cared about our problems. So that's what I learned. And I think when you don't, when you don't have a business person thinking about that, what you will find is a lot of friction in the organization because you're going to find lots of different voices coming from the field through those junior sellers. Not that it's their fault, it's not something personal about junior seller, just they don't have maybe the cross functional expertise to understand that just because that customer took the phone call doesn't mean we want to redo our entire product roadmap to meet that customers.

Andrew Monaghan:
You said something there, Abigail, which was counterintuitive to me, which was it helped with our speed. Now if I was, if I was a founder, I might be thinking speed is hire three or four people, let's put the foot down, let's go acquire a whole bunch of customers. You know, I want to get real revenue and real money in the door, not, not investing money all the time. Right. And yet you're saying, well actually doing it your way, doing it with the really super savvy, experienced leader, actually help with speed. So you know, dissect that one for me.

Abigail Maines:
I can definitely sell faster than three or four or five junior salespeople for sure. Yes, I, when you like, you get a lot of friction with more people, period. Early days. So we're talking early days. Right. And so, so when I say slow, what I mean as somebody like myself spending a lot of time talking to four or five salespeople or a founder talking to four or five salespeople who are not equipped to make sort of the complicated trade off business decisions about what's relevant or what's not relevant to the company and to the customer. What customer, what person within a customer has credibility to even bring that feedback back into the organization? They just are not equipped to have the expertise really to be able to weed through that. So what happens is you bring that information back into the founder in the absence of sort of a founding CRO.

Abigail Maines:
And the founder has to do that. So now the founder is not talking to customers, not talking to investors, not talking to employees, they're talking to a sales rep to try to figure out what the opportunity really. And that to me is the slow. And if you magnify that by three to five people, that's two or three jobs for the Founder to do. And so you can't do it. And so what happens is now you've got that group talking to your product team, talking to your engineering team, talking to your research team. And then, then there's a lot of chaos that's, that's ensuing. And so when you have one single throat to choke on, go to market.

Abigail Maines:
And this can last for a while. And one single throat to choke allows the organization a lot more clarity on the mission and then a lot more detail about what is going to help each individual person in the company help the mission. But when there's like 17 missions happening or there's, we can't even talk about the mission because we're too busy dealing with the urgent versus the critical, then you find yourself slow. You are slow. And smoke is killer. Me, slow is killer. Everything that I always try to do is to be fast, right? I always, and I still say you have to give the ball back to the customer. Customer needs docs.

Abigail Maines:
We got to stay up all night and write those docs, get them back to the customer the next day, because it's so pivotal in the beginning to demonstrate how ready you are for sort of their engagements.

Andrew Monaghan:
One of the interesting things about how you were talking about all that was that a lot of it was the feedback loop back to the company. You're out there, you're at the pinnacle, you're at the coal face, talking to prospects and then feeding things back. Now, I think that's not a common sales role, right? The sales role is giving my stuff, let me go and, you know, knock down some doors and, and try and get some customers. How much of your role did you view as we have to get revenue and how much of it was we have to get feedback?

Abigail Maines:
Oh, I definitely felt the revenue pressure the most, but I think in my opinion the best way to get to revenue was to be really explicit and detail oriented with the rest of the organization about what was going to lead to revenue. So, like, by default, it led to a prioritization of features requests and roadmap additions based upon the likelihood of revenue. And I think the key piece that I was able to help, not just internal to the company, but also into the external audiences, like customers and partner prospects and partners, was to really like demystify some of their ask as we did try to, this was early days in a new category. And we did try to spend a lot of time scoping what exactly the ask was down to the workflow and the feature. And I think that's another piece that is probably difficult for early salespeople to do because it requires a lot of vulnerability on both sides of the table. So you have to say, I, as. As a. As me, I don't understand that feature.

Abigail Maines:
Can we talk about it more? Like you kind of have to keep peeling back the onion. That being said, I'm not a sales engineer, so we did early days before I hired salespeople. We did have sales engineers and AI architects because it was a very technical sale and so they would help with some of that scoping. It wasn't just me as an example. We had a technical founder that was also very instrumental. But we did have to really unwind some of these asks into very specific requests such that they was productive. And that did lead to revenue. We had to sort of jump through a lot of hoops, not just on the pure, you know, security product side, but also on the enterprise readiness side.

Abigail Maines:
And that was. That afforded us the opportunity to move pretty quickly too. That customer base at the time was characterized by very sophisticated Fortune 100 customers, highly regulated entities. So it required pretty senior engagements.

Andrew Monaghan:
Thinking back to that time, it was kind of unique. It was right after September 22nd when Gen had his big showcase and things went nuts in the world. Ever since then, I would imagine the prospects you were talking to weren't even sure themselves exactly how to tackle all this. Right. Because there was no template. They hadn't done it a certain way for five, 10 years. They haven't done it at all. Right.

Andrew Monaghan:
So I'm kind of interested about how you would think about that. Where you're trying to learn, but you're trying to guide at the same time. And then secondly, if. If there's another founder out there right now and maybe they're in a much more mature segment where they're trying to innovate, do you think some of your learnings was unique to the fact that the market was brand new, or does it apply to mature segments as well?

Abigail Maines:
Yeah, great question. So for your first question, absolutely. It was a journey for lots of us inside the company, but also for customers. And what I learned quickly is the questions were pretty consistent. And so in the event that we found ourselves in this situation, and because I did all the discovery calls in the event I didn't hear some of the questions that I had been answering regularly for the rest of the day, I would ask them of myself. I would say, I'm sure one of the things you might be thinking about is what is, you know, really the vulnerability profile of a hugging face download as an example because again, this was back when hugging face was just really becoming a thing. So those are again, like that required a lot of vulnerability and confidence in myself to just be able to say that I don't think it's reasonable. When you're building a category to, to go on a phone call, do a presentation and a demonstration, don't hear anything from the customer and then hang up and think it went well.

Abigail Maines:
Like you need a lot of engagement from that. And if you're not getting it, it's because they're not comfortable exposing what they, what they don't understand. And so you, you want to create an environment where you can still be helpful to them and productive. Even if it is like asking yourself, like I was asking myself questions and then answer them because I know I knew that was what was important to your second question around, you know, building a category. Is there lessons applicable to building a new company in an existing category? I would say yes. I would say the two big things, one would be third party attestation. So whether it's a new category, an existing category, if you're a new company and you think you can, you know, get on a phone with somebody who's like, like in my opinion, a security, senior security person and tell them all the features and why your baby is the cutest baby and have no context for like, how does that make their lives better? Like, how does that save them money? Most importantly to me is how does it get them promoted? You're not, it's just noise. They don't hear you, they don't understand what you're talking about, they don't even know why you're talking to them.

Abigail Maines:
So I think third party attestation is mission critical to any new thing. And so I think analyst relations are certainly very important. I think referenceable customers are by far the most important. But that, that can be difficult. I definitely think advisory groups are very important too. People are trusted in this space. A lot of us have lots of friends. Like I like to be an advisor because I like to help companies and I like to put, make introductions for them.

Abigail Maines:
I'm not the only one, lots of us will do that. So if I was an early stage founder, no matter what I would be thinking, am I doing enough every day to drive third party attestation? And then secondly, to the extent I am in front of a customer, they leave the call or meeting understanding how my product gets them promoted, which is sort of a demagogist sentence. But the idea there is to say like, do they understand why we're better, faster, cheaper or why we're not. Do they understand what the differentiation is? Because I was at a conference earlier this week, very noisy I thought. And I didn't. And I walked around the exposition floor and I thought I don't know that any of these folks are landing though. If you buy this, this is what benefit you get and that's what we're all looking for, right? Like when you and I are buying something that's for a reason, like it's an outcome. So.

Abigail Maines:
So I think again like those two concepts are super pivotal for an early stage company regardless of sort of the maturity of the category.

Andrew Monaghan:
When you start talking to a founder today and they come to you with the hey I need help hiring my 5 reps and to get going and things like that. How do you taught them off the ledge?

Abigail Maines:
I say why? Why are we hiring five reps? Like what are we trying to get out of them? Like tell me what your outcome is for hiring the five reps. And then we try, I try to say to them, I always couch it in you and I want to go to the same place. We want to get to whatever the ar. You and I have very different approaches on getting there. So let's just talk through. You want to hire five reps, you want to hire a bdr, you want to jam up people's email inboxes. I don't want to do any of that for these reasons. I want to focus on their prioritization.

Abigail Maines:
I want to focus on analyst relations. I do want to spend money at Gartner. I don't, I'm not mad at Gartner. Like there are good people, high people listen to them. So that's how I started is like we try to start with the common goal and then work the tactics down. It doesn't always work. I think there's a lot of pressure on founders from investors to run a certain playbook. I think part of what I advocate is probably somewhat controversial in terms of risk profile because I am saying over invest in a certain type of person because that is what I'm saying.

Abigail Maines:
I'm saying that like this role, this founding, whatever you want to call this entity is a is going to create your go to market moat and be a colleague to the CEO in such a way that you are going to be able to take your innovation that you have this techn, this amazing technical mode around and bring it into scalable or repeatable revenue. Like that's the, that is the go to market and that needs somebody that a has done it, or B, at least has an appreciation for it. If you hire reps, their motivation, and this is not, this is totally what you want their motivation to be is quota attainment. But quota attainment, before you've identified icp, before you've identified the message, before you've identified product market fit, before you've identified how does our product get people promoted? Is not going to result in the outcome that you want and you're going to burn your people because you're in a cheer over reps. And that is crushing. That's crushing from a customer perspective. I was talking to somebody yesterday about channel strategy and I said, you know, I know many, many channel partners who will tell you I am not returning a phone call from company X, Y, Z until that rep has called me for at least 12 months without any return phone call or email because they, nine times out of 10, they're not going to be there in 12 months. Which is so true.

Abigail Maines:
Right. Like if you're on the other side of the table and. And Abigail's calling you from company X for like six months and then Abigail starts calling from company Y and that's what works. So it's really crushing to have turnover in the teams too. So that's another. I don't like to sell my idea here with this role with fear, uncertainty and doubt, but there is a little fun to be had and I think we've all my peers and I spent lots of time talking about turnover and how to minimize it. And in my opinion, part of having this early person to sort of set up the infrastructure is to make sure those early sales hires the straight salespeople, 50, 50 comp guys and gals are successful so they don't turn over like they're a customer of the CRO to like they need to have. And if I don't think you would ever want to hire somebody without some pipeline, in my opinion.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah. It feels like for the founder, they probably need to get a sense of the type of partnership they want to have with, let's call it sales. Go to market. You got two different partnerships there. One is very much a go do this and go find customers and whatever. Right. And then they'll have to filter through the feedback if there is any. And how much of it is excuses and how much of it is just good, good raw insight.

Andrew Monaghan:
Right. Versus a partnership with one person who is experienced, who is going to get the right meetings with the right people and then be very collaborative with you afterwards about what, what we learn along the way. That seems like a very. Two different. Very paths. Very different paths. Right there.

Abigail Maines:
It is, it is. And it's. This is early days of that model. I can tell you for being like maybe the sole advocate of the model, although I would tell you that a lot of second time and third time founders, I have a lot more like it resonates with them very well. Like they appreciate what I'm saying and why and I think they've seen it. So I do think a more experienced folks who have maybe tried a couple of different early go to market models are more open to it and I think they appreciate this concept of having a colleague that they can hold accountable for go to market like they can on the product side with like their CPO or their cto. Like it's a very complimentary nature. But you're right, there's no question.

Abigail Maines:
It's not for everybody. I agree. Like some founders don't want to, don't want to relinquish sort of their role to, of being the intermediary in between the company and the field.

Andrew Monaghan:
The very black and white and not very nuanced view that I've seen out there is, you know, when you bring someone in quite senior, what they're going to want to do is build a whole go to market thing with processes and systems and I don't know, apps and people and people that do stuff for them rather than anything else. Right. I would imagine that's one of the barriers that you can have to break down. But it also means, I would mean, Abigail, the, the population of people who have your experience like you and also have the understanding of this whole learning and feedback loop versus just raw, let's go get some customers. That's not going to be a huge part of the population, I would imagine. I don't know. You tell me.

Abigail Maines:
It's not today. But I think that we, I think there's definitely candidates that can do it. I think there's definitely candidates that are way more, way better than me on all fronts that can do it. I think the way to weed through that has like, I immediately like start to glaze over when you start to talk about like sales process and tools. Like so I think the way to get through that, that mirage of folks would be to really identify like, is the candidate more focused on customer obsession or are they more focused on the infrastructure, the process, internal stuff. The internal stuff. Those folks, I don't think you. That's not what we're talking about.

Abigail Maines:
They won't like the role. The role is Too much work, it's too much rolling up your sleeve. It's too, it's too gritty for that, that crew. But I think there are another, there's another crew of folks that are. Maybe they're biz dead people, maybe they're not like, you know, AES turned rds turned vps of sales. Like I, I do think the profile is probably a little bit different. But if they are customer obsessed in their DNA and they want to build for customer outcomes, that's the person. Like that's what you want in, in the founding CRO role.

Abigail Maines:
In my opinion, like that's just an, that's a way to at least rationalize the people that you're speaking with. Because the, because the folks that are steeped in some of that sales processes are probably not going to be good at the cross functional execution. They're used to having marketing as somebody that they can. I'm not being critical of any of my peers but like when they don't have like marketing responsibilities, that's like a good area to point. Or there's like this is, this is the single throat to choke for an early stage company and it's a high pressure role. It's a lot of work but it's very fulfilling. And so you do have to kind of find people that are obsessed by customers. Like I used to have a list of people that got promoted during my time at Hidden Layer and that's always the most important list to me.

Abigail Maines:
And so like I think you want that kind of a mindset. Those people exist and they're definitely out there. I think we sort of have to. I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you today about this because I think we kind of have to grease the skids for them a little bit to say that this is something that can be done. And they may come from very differing walks of life. They're not all going to be bad carrying salespeople, I don't think.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah, very different profile. Right. I know some people are doing it as well and I see how they approach it as very much, you know, the mindset that you have and they're not sitting there going, well, let's build out 55 fields in Salesforce. Right. They're maybe more in their forecast from a spreadsheet at the start because that's what you need. You don't need a, you know, a massive system to run a few ops and a lot of feedback going back to Hidden Layer. When did you know it was the right time to start bringing on people to Sell or work with partners or whoever it might be.

Abigail Maines:
I think like when we had a couple of those big things identified, we had the ICP defined, we had the customer positioning defined, we had momentum and repeatability in the sales process. Not just sort of from a discovery and sort of a customer engagement, but all the way through poc. So I think that was the sign and I think the maturing of the market. So again because it was a new category, I think we did need the market to mature a little bit. That happened quickly I would say and that was also important. So there were some internal criteria that had been achieved as well as sort of the market being made.

Andrew Monaghan:
What was your second hire at Hidden Layer overall?

Abigail Maines:
Second hire?

Andrew Monaghan:
Your second hire in good market when it went from Abby to Abby plus one. Abigail plus one. Who was it?

Abigail Maines:
A content writer.

Andrew Monaghan:
Okay, tell me more about that.

Abigail Maines:
She, she. I was right during this September. I think she joined in February because that like what we needed. Like again you want to, you want to be found by people who care about the problem. So you have to have content that helps you. You know how all this works. And so she list. That was my first go to market hire.

Abigail Maines:
We had a designer before me but then it was content I think and to be honest with you, it was more on the marketing side. Marketing, sort of enablement of marketing. And prior to salespeople.

Andrew Monaghan:
And what was the first time you allocated a quota to someone other than myself?

Abigail Maines:
Yeah, I think that that would been early 23. So about. It was about 12 months later.

Andrew Monaghan:
And was that a rep or was that a part, a cam or.

Abigail Maines:
That was a rep. It was a rep. It was a rep. I'm trying to think any sales engineers before the rep that was. I don't think so. I think they were all the technical folks were sort of non quotas. I was the only one and then the first rep was in like a year after I joined. They were 50.

Abigail Maines:
50, you know, with the draw like a normal thing. But it, but it took a year to get to that point and then.

Andrew Monaghan:
You got a background with partners. And how did you think about partners coming into the hidden layer model?

Abigail Maines:
Yeah, I think partners are great. I think partners are great at scaling revenue. I think in a new category they're probably a little bit of a secondary decision for the first year anyways. If there's an existing category new company, I think partners are very relevant from the job. In a new category new company, you need to build it a little bit before the partner landscape can support you as much. We did have a channel program that we launched in 24, early 24 and had one person sort of running the channel. But I, I think when early days of a company, the sales people become really sort of hybrid sales and channel managers because so much of their patch is, can be made or broken by having those strong relationships. So that was part of the profile of salespeople we were hiring or folks that did have channel relationships.

Abigail Maines:
Not because we thought the channel was totally ready to bring us to market like it's crowdstrike or something else, but because there's familiarity, there's trust, helps with rapport. But again like it's difficult. Like partners are difficult. Like I told you, they don't want to engage with you until they know you've been there for a minute. So we were respectful of that and that's why we didn't launch the program earlier. We waited to do a good job. We use a third party to help us with the program and we wanted to make our first impression positive. That's what I've learned from, where I've learned from partners is you really only have a couple of like one opportunity to sort of land a ship with them and you don't want to waste it, you don't want to rush it and sort of have a half assed launch.

Abigail Maines:
You want to have a professional launch. They're too busy. They got too many. They got 4,000 folks calling them. You. You have to be empathetic. Just like you have to be empathetic to the customers, you have to be empathetic to partners that they've got more going on than just listening to your, how cute your baby is.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah, I feel like recently the, the whole model's flipped. It used to be that the, the vendors would be supported almost by some partner along the way. And these days it's actually, you know, the partners get to pick and choose who they work with.

Abigail Maines:
You know, they don't need as customer relationships.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah, that, that's who they absolutely 100% care about first. And then you know, as we know in our world, vendors come and go a little bit, especially at the startup stage and you know, suddenly you, you all in on a vendor to get acquired and get sucked into whoever and then your whole, you know, business changes as a reseller into exactly how, how are you going to work with the merged company? So very different dynamic. And it's funny because I was, I was sitting this the other day with one of my clients is that I used to a very kind of, I don't Know, black and white view, kind of like you were saying, right. Partners don't make markets. They, they help you scale or get more traction in a market. I think the one thing that might be a little bit different is, is maybe in the AI space. Right. Because if they're asked a lot by their customers, you know, we think we need to do something for and who's the players and it's a brand new area such as AI security, then maybe, you know, that might be a slightly different view about how to work with them.

Andrew Monaghan:
But if you think you're coming into a, an older segment, a more mature segment, trying to change it up, they're not in the business really of changing things up. They've got maybe renewals to protect for one. Right. You know, reps are sitting there going, yeah, I agree.

Abigail Maines:
And definitely different partner. So GSI is always going to be more type of sphere. Like you know, the GSI will get asked the questions of whom should I'm going to do an RFP no matter what, who should I be looking at? The traditional channel people, I think are the ones that are a little bit more about just scaling in terms of like opening up the market. They're there for ease of transactions, they're there for ease of procurement, et cetera. But it's super valuable. It remains super valuable.

Andrew Monaghan:
Let's have a very different twist here. Now tell me about fierce.

Abigail Maines:
Yeah, Fierce is my mission driven project with my co founder Rebecca Khak. It stands for females in every Role Change everything. And to be honest with you, Fierce is really just an organization that's focused on two things. One, networking women in technology, but just women in general. It does lean cyber because Rebecca and I have been in cyber for a while, but it's for all types of women. And then the second piece is we try to create content such that women don't have to repeat the same mistake. It would break my heart if somebody had to go through the same bad negotiation approach that I've been through once. So we try to share that information amongst the organization and the goal is really just equal representation in all fields, whether we're talking academia, political or sort of corporate.

Andrew Monaghan:
Was there something that happened, you know, in cyber security? Very male dominated. Right. Was there something happened that along the way? You said, you know what, I need to do this at some point to.

Abigail Maines:
Oh, there's been a lot of things that have happened. Yeah, there's been a lot of things that have happened. And you know, I was a participant in a lot of sort of female ergs. Inside companies as well as external women of the channel, great organizations. I think the, the turning point for me was definitely Covid. At the time I was running the Channel for the Americas at Checkpoint. It was an amaz. I have a tremendous amount of esteem for Checkpoint as well as for the people of Checkpoint.

Abigail Maines:
So when Covid happened, I was responsible for Canada to Brazil channel teams, about 100 people and we were doing lots of stuff. I had him working out on Zoom. I had. We were making pizzas on all the things. But within a couple of months, it was very clear to me that the responsibilities of handling Covid were falling on women disproportionately to men. Women had to take care of kids that were going to school. And again, this is from Canada to Brazil. So there's a lot of variance in terms of like what they were responsible for.

Abigail Maines:
Secondly, people started to get sick. If their parents were getting sick, that was falling on women and more disproportionately than men. And then thirdly for women, you might not appreciate this, but being Zoom ready is a thing like we don't like. Just like we would still get up and get ready and go. Like there was no casual zoom for when it just wasn't a thing. So from that those three sort of learnings, we created fears as an erg within Checkpoint. And it was really about female empowerment and collective sort of bonding during COVID It wasn't until 2022 when I left Checkpoint. I think it was a cyber reason.

Abigail Maines:
Then we took it off more of a public. And now it's a legitimate nonprofit organization that has. Does a couple of big conferences and is really, you know, really growing. And it's sort of. It's exciting to see how much momentum we've had over the last few years. It's one of those things where I feel like we should have done it 15 years ago, to be honest with you. So if you're listening and you're thinking about doing something, you should do it. But it's one of those that as much as you'll give it, it'll take.

Abigail Maines:
And so like I balance it with everything else, but it's very fulfilling. And if, and if people are interested, they can go to fiercenow.org and sort of check out some of that content that I mentioned.

Andrew Monaghan:
I think one of the things that's interesting for generally the industry or the market thinking about diversity in our world, right, is middle aged white man seems to be a lot of the something that go to market side is the dominant type of person out There hope no one's offended. I say that it seems to be what I've seen over the years.

Abigail Maines:
Statistically true.

Andrew Monaghan:
Okay, good, good. I'm glad about that. What's, you know, if I'm sitting there as a founder, I've got 50 people in my company and I'm trying to grow my business, how should they be thinking about diversity and making sure they're doing the right things and helping their company? Is it, you know, you hear this thing, diversity drives better decisions. Is that the reality or is that just like a nice kind of slogan that people throw out, you know, during, you know, women's awareness month or something? Ever happens every year?

Abigail Maines:
Well, yeah, I mean, the data shows that. So the data will show things like, they'll show things like it's important to have representation of your customer base in your organization, things like that. But it also shows that women are a little bit more risk averse and so they will do things like provide better organic growth and acquisition and mergers growth. So I think can be a counterbalance of some of the more riskier decisions outside of cyber, in other industries, in particular in the financial industry. And I think in pharma, what you will see is there is some improved market returns if you have a more diverse C suite and board. So those are all stats that we share within Pearson that are publicly available. I think what is so powerful about having diversity, any underrepresented group, not just women, any underrepresented group. I think in the day and age of AI, where things are becoming more automated, less personalized, you can differentiate yourselves by having more underrepresented groups in your company.

Abigail Maines:
And I think differentiation always is important, but it's going to become increasingly important as everything is sort of commoditized down to these bots and sort of messaging that's been written by ChatGPT, which we all know if it's been written by ChatGPT or not. So I think the diversity of voice will even become more important now than it has been. And I think, and it's not just incumbent on organizations to do, to invest. I think women, a lot of what we do at first is we tell women, you know, please raise your hand and say you're interested. Like that's half the battle. So I don't think organizations have a conscious desire not to hire underrepresented groups. I think some of the underrepresented groups need to be a little bit more aggressive. And so that's why I've always felt very fortunate to be in a position where I can sort of share my learnings but also support women.

Abigail Maines:
We spent a lot of time in fierce kind of networking women into roles that we hear about. It's hard, it's hard to find women that are interested in some of the roles. So the more, the more the merrier. And a lot of the reason we spend time, if you're focused on future generations. Today women are about 25, 24% of the cyber industry. They think by 27 will be 30%. I don't know, I mean it's still well under 50, but it's going in the right direction relatively. And I do think younger women are definitely more open minded about cyber and definitely compared to when I started 15 years ago for sure.

Abigail Maines:
So yeah. So I think, I think it is good for companies. That being said, I don't think companies should just do it, to do it like I think it has to make sense for their business.

Andrew Monaghan:
I feel like we've come a long way since 20 years ago, 25 years ago, in all sorts of different ways, but there's probably more room to come. But it's an interesting point. I mean it feels like there will be a swing back a little bit in the pendulum, but we're going too far down the AI created bot run, you know, fewer real people doing real things. And as it comes back, maybe that's the opportunity for some underrepresented parts of the industry to grab their unfair share, let's say of that much more real world that we want to get back to.

Abigail Maines:
I think so. I'm optimistic. I think AI is a force of good and it'll create lots of opportunities that we haven't had before. At our conference this year we had a great speaker, Sydney Stefani, talk about moving from AI awareness to trust and what that means for women. And I think if we can embrace that there's lots of opportunities but also use it more, use it less. And I think a lot of it is like how are the prompts written? Like what are we asking of these AI systems? And the, the more diverse questions you have, the better the models are going to perform. So I think it's like super exciting to think about how that could like the benefit on both sides.

Andrew Monaghan:
Well Abigail, we're up against time here. That's really enjoyed our conversation. Any last thoughts, thought for the audience that you want to share?

Abigail Maines:
I think the most important thing is to remember that early stage is not a quantity game, it's a precision game. And I think if people can remember that and that kind of infuses some of their decisions. It'll help them scale really fast. And I, I want all of all of my companies that I advise scale really fast, but I want everybody to be successful. I don't want to keep that information to myself.

Andrew Monaghan:
Well, thanks for joining us. Thank you, Sam.