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Guy Podjarny

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2023-05-24
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2023-05-24
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  1. “Like it has to be short. So you have to distill it. You can say, I do this and this. You don't need to be a messaging expert to know that doesn't work. And so you have to naturally prioritize. It's a great forcing function. And once you do that, I think people perceive messaging as I already know what I'm doing and now I'm just dumbing it down or simplifying it for the world. But it's not. You're actually simplifying it for yourself. You are focusing yourself. If you know that you are solving a problem like for a user, you'll end up building a different product. I can give an example from Snake. So Snake's ethos was always developer for security that was first. That was who we are. And then open source security was our sort of the first product market. And both were needed for us to be able to succeed in the market. But the ordering of them was very important. The primary problem were addressing for companies is that developers were not embracing their security solution. And so that was the problem. And our thesis was always like, it started from use open source, stay secure.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “It's because you basically underappreciate on one hand if you're too narrow that you have to expand it to the use case to the need of the customer and understand their experience end-to-end. And sometimes even if you only provide a portion of it, they don't have a solution for all the rest of it and you're not going to succeed. So you have to think about their entire use case, what is the value proposition that you want to offer them? What is the problem that you want to solve? And similarly from the platform perspective, people underappreciate the complexity. But once again, they care about their tech. They care about how we'll build that. And my favorite sort of statement to tell founders is nobody cares about your product. They care about the problem that you're solving for them. And so why are you talking about your product all the time? You should really lead with what is the pain, what is the problem that you're approaching. And so messaging is a forcing function to first of all understand what is the value proposition that you have, what is it that you are doing for a customer. It has natural brevity constraints.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “So messaging really forces you to distill what you do into kind of customer need. I find way too often what companies, what founders do is they either, they come from a very narrow thing. I'll be amazing at this whatever sort of open source library that they know codifies, whatever access code and something, and it'll be superb. They love the technology or AI or crypto or whatever. And they don't translate that into sort of a customer need. And on the flip side, people saying, I'll be a platform. I just had a conversation with Action Investment that started by saying, we are the most flexible platform for this and finance, we're in beta. Well, like that just does not work. And so I think what messaging does is it helps.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I think first market is poorly defined. What does matter is being a leader in a market and having some gap. And to do that, you have to have something that is differentiated in an area that matters. If you're doing something that's a little bit more wild, a little bit more different, so if you're first to market with that approach and you successfully execute on it and win some order, then you have differentiation and being differentiated in a market that matters. And so it really is just about leadership and about differentiation more than about time being first market is just one way sometimes to achieve that.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I think especially in early stages, when you're talking about the idea, you don't know how the market exactly would evolve. You have to focus on value. Within that value, you have to size it, okay, how many dollars do people typically pay for that type of value? Like, there has to be a dollar component to it, but you have to start from just magnitude of value that you provide. And then the dollars go from there.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Market size in their investment thesis. It is very important. You can't be big, you can't be bigger than your market. It has to be proportional. And so you have two options. You can ignore the TAM conversation and hope that your investor figures something out that matches your needs. Or you can actually try to walk them through it and think about it and explain why you think the market is big.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah, I think people have a lot of sort of cynicism around market size. I think you have to separate between the existingly defined sort of market sizes as whatever what Gartner at the time said about application security market size. Those are transitory. Those would change over time and I think they're not important. You shouldn't make decisions based on those. They change. They have proven to change over time. I think the second is the market size as actual kind of value proposition that you think you can deliver the world. How many people would need this? How much value you're providing? And I think for me, I never had any doubt about the market size there. We're helping make software development secure. The value proposition is the multiple of the number of developers of the size of software development and the importance of security. Both of those will just continue and the multiple is huge. I had conviction it was never a bother. What I do think is important for founders to appreciate is when you talk to an investor, like it or not, the investor is going to need to have a”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Take longer if you get stuck in them for a couple of years. You don't regret taking that step. And so you try to figure out the destination, figure, of course, your upcoming step, have a sense of what the next step would be. You don't really know past that. And you get going. And so if you get stuck, you still have something that you've built that is of value and you continue. And sometimes you find yourself on a different path and maybe that's okay and maybe not.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I think it's very hard. AI is especially disruptive at the moment, and I do think that there is AI as a whole will totally dominate the world. Specifically, there's a certain kind of a honeymoon period happening with GPT and LLMs, which I think will find the right limits to it. I think typically if you're immersed in a space, if you come from a space and if you have sufficient sort of ability in it, it can roughly get market timing within a plus minus two years time horizon. Plus, minus two years is like life and death for a startup. And so you do have to navigate the journey. I guess again, my system over here is not so much to sort of perfectly language. You're making a bet. You're saying, I think this is necessary. You've asked the question about whether it'll be more necessary moving forward, or you have a thesis about your sort of theory of change and how you would do it. I try to apply this sort of big vision small steps type lenses. And so big vision, and you have to be working towards something that matters at the destination, but it has to be sequence of steps towards it. And ideally, you don't regret taking any of those steps if they...”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “It really starts by asking the question, but it tries to step away a little bit from being stuck with something that is exciting to you to do today, but you're really just plugging a hole versus solving a systemic problem. Sometimes the fact that something will be less relevant in five years' time, it doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. It just means that you should invest appropriately. It might mean that it's okay to put something a bit more tactical about how you address it. It might mean you shouldn't rely on that as your growth vehicle. And when you're founding a company, if the answer to the core value proposition that you have isn't yes, if you can't rationalize why it is more needed in five years' time, you should pick a different idea because you wouldn't be at any sort of scale if you're just starting in five years' time. That's when your idea should be most needed.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Can build on top of that. So you can build bigger and bigger pictures building on those components. And sure, you'd be able to drill down into one of these tracks a bit more than maybe someone who just hears those principles. But I think it allows you to think bigger if you codify the world that way. I think the other piece that's very important to it, though, is that once you do that, you need to get into the habit of anchoring in the future. For instance, I love to ask our product managers and evangelical investments that I make, this capability you're building in five years time, would it be more or less necessary in the world? And why? Why do you think that is?”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I think the key elements are first of all, like try to break things down into first principles, not just I see that X is happening, but rather why is this happening? Why is whatever DevOps disruptive to security? What are the fundamentals? You break it down, you get down and say, well, it predicates around independent teams. Okay, so it's independent teams that are at the core of this sort of agile development approach. So how do you do security in Azure? So if you break it down into sort of the core principles, then you can now try to relate them to needs or to where you think has legs to evolve and where not. And so I try to break those down. The other thing that happens when you break it down is that you can grow your thinking. Like even if you can hold a ton of complexity in your head, it's still limited, even the best people around it. But when you think about a topic and you reduce it down into this sort of core principle, like you say, okay, DevOps builds on, blamelessness, continuous processes and independent teams. Now, even you yourself cannot bother yourself with all the sort of the mess that is behind those statements.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I like selling and I don't like deal making. I love getting people to fall in love with an idea that I have with a concept, with something I'm building, with a perspective I have. And so that's selling. That's really getting someone to believe the promise, believe the potential, believe in you. And I think that's very exciting. I separate that from the sort of the deal making, sort of, okay, and how much are you going to pay for this? And I think that aspect maybe you can actually be a very successful founder and not be very good at it. You might be leaving some percentages on the table. But I think if you're not good at selling, if you can't get your idea through, if you can't empathize enough with someone looking at the market and get your message through, I just don't think you're going to be good at building the company unless maybe you can hire someone to do that for you. But that's probably more co-founder than employee in that case.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Knowledge of devil is much deeper than probably it would have been because I founded a company in the sort of performance space in the DevOps space versus if I had worked that type of surrounding.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I actually think entrepreneurship is a profession. So maybe I'm on the opposite side of that spectrum for that comment. I think there are some things that you only learn by being an entrepreneur. So if you want to, fundraising is probably the most obvious one. But also just the sort of the initial journey of finding product market fit. Starting from a blank slate is just not something that typically is a reality in any adverse surrounding. Getting the first hires and figuring out how to do it, convincing people to join you. The number of people that turn me down, definitely in blaze and even in Snake is unpleasant. And so I think there's some things that you learned there. But also, I think what happens is that I like to say that if you're comfortable, you're not growing and that there's like a Freud better statement that says there's no growth without pain. Startups are mightily uncomfortable. You're throwing yourself in a surrounding in which you need to learn things very quickly, figure it out, run around. And so I think when you immerse yourself in a space, you build a certain perspective, like when you found a company, you learn a ton very quickly. I feel like for me, for instance, my”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I think more than anything I'm running away from tribalism, from this sort of notion of like I'm in this group and this group is better, there's elements of that in sort of Israel and while the army kind of gave me a bunch of successful starts. I have fairly severe disagreements with how the sort of the occupying kind of army in Israel is handling today. It goes to the way I approach company building and selling a London and Tel Aviv office, but making sure where there's never like Hanas versus them. And even the sort of the core business of Sneak and sort of developers and security and embedding that in it. the deglobalization process that is happening in the world and even my sort of charitable kind of agenda and all of that it really focuses on inclusion and on being one as opposed to being a part of the tribes uses a line”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “about bringing a DevOps ethos and a lot of my sort of learning doing angel investing and from the first startup and all of that into the world of security and application security.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “I am so excited for this. I remember we first did a SASTAS show many years ago. We get to do this in person now. I've known you for many years. So thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for having me on. Always a pleasure. I want to start today with a little bit of context. How did you make your way into the world of startups? So, most importantly, how did you come to Found Sneak? So I've been working in startups throughout my professional career. I was in the sort of the cyber parts of the Israeli army and then went into a startup in the APSEC space that got acquired by another startup that got acquired by IBM, Israeli, moved to Canada in the process, left IBM to found a web performance startup, accompanied some more in the DevOps space, making websites faster. And so at that point, I had shy of a decade of sort of application security experience trying to get people to appreciate that it matters, trying to shift left, get developers to embrace it, leaving them got my entrepreneurial of founding startups experience going with Blaze, which ran for about two and a half years and sold that to Akamai where I was CTO for about three and a half years and moved with them to London. And so Sneak was basically once I was ready to leave Akamai and found another startup, Snyk was a bit of the culmination of those journeys.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Today, they really did make such a difference. But before we dive into the show today, you've heard me talk about how Coda is the doc that brings it all together and how it can help your team run smoother and be more efficient. I know this because Coda helps me. We have many researchers in the team who bring all the content together for the show and they need a single place to work, collaborate and collect notes, data and information in any format. And that's where Coda comes in. They can help your team run smoother and be more efficient. Coda allows your team to operate on the same information and collaborate in one place by putting data in one centralized location regardless of format, eliminating roadblocks that can really stop your team in their tracks. And that's what slows down productivity and collaboration. It's time to get projects across the finish line faster. So help your team run smoothly, more efficiently with Coda, get started today for free by heading over to coda.io slash 20 vc. That's coda.io slash 20 vc.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source