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Chapter 21Discover Your Position

At a cocktail party one evening at RSA—a massive annual security conference—a prominent cybersecurity leader confidently worked the crowd. A “made man” in security, senior executives from a wide range of companies walked up to him with warm hellos and genuine interest, asking, “What are you up to these days?”

The executive, Brendan O'Conner, was the former Chief Trust Officer at Salesforce and Security Chief Technology Officer at ServiceNow—titans in their respective industries. After seeing first-hand what was lacking in cloud security, he decided to create the solution and co-found a startup, AppOmni.

As often happens with startups with a new way to solve a problem, they wanted to describe what they do using equally new language. Brendan wasn't yet sure what would work, so he went to the party testing a prepared talk track on each person who asked him what he was up to.

Nearly everyone's response to any variation he tried was, “Is it similar to what [company X] is doing?” or “Oh, you mean like what [existing cloud security tool] does?”

When it came time to process the evening's learnings, it was clear that even for people with deep knowledge, talking to a person they respected and trusted, they made sense of AppOmni using what they already knew. It was a powerful reminder that people need to start with what's familiar to understand what's new.

Brendan was a bit surprised by how much he had to position his brand new product using existing products ...