Let's give a warm Georgia Tech. Welcome to Mr Kevin Hines. Thank you so it's a pleasure to be here today. My name is KEVIN HEITMAN if you were here to look for started this point. But I'm going to be filling in with her today she is actually C.E.O. of them and is out on the west coast couldn't make it. But the story that I want to tell you today is I want to take you through the journey of a start up pretty much from the beginning to the end. And while I've been at the ball a for just a few months. I'm going to be talking most of the time today about spied on Amec switches the previous company I work for and that was a company that really was experienced the whole lifecycle of the startup but. You know before we go ahead and get into all of this. I want to take a little bit of time you did get an induction of who I am. But. I want to tell you a bit more about my background. I graduated from University of Texas in Austin graduated with a degree in finance. Went on to get my M.B.A. from Rice University in finance and accounting when I graduated from Rice. I had two job offers. I had one from a bank and I had one from a consulting company that built accounting software for the oil and gas industry. And as many of you might be going through right now when you talk to the placement office they say well you know Matt match up your long term goals with the company goals and you know are you going to be a good fit and go through all the analysis and things like that and I did but then when it came down to it. You pick the offer that pays you more money. So I became a consultant in the software industry and for the last twenty years I've been building and launching commercial grade software applications and what I've done actually for the last ten of those years I've done that in a senior manager management role that's a role director and above I manage teams large is one hundred fifty and I've also me. Managed organizations as small as four so run the gamut. I have built software for large companies like Bell South and I.B.M. and small companies like them. Bala and inspired dynamics and truly the the joy and the passion that I have is building building software for small companies and building growing small companies and hopefully one day the small companies will become large companies. I've had ten years of consulting background. That's where I got my start working with companies and helping them launch their software and then I moved in house and started taking full responsibility for the end software development life cycle. I've had four years of remote experience leading remote teams both onshore and offshore to help supplement the local development staff and building software more efficiently and I'm currently the vice president of engineering at which is. A small startup here in town located right across the street the Biltmore and I'll be talking a little bit about what Tamala does later in the presentation. So before we get into too much I want to talk about spot an Amex is anybody heard of spot and Alex. Probably not. Spy was a local company here in Atlanta. It was founded in one thousand nine hundred ninety nine by a couple of guys from my assesses X. force at the time in the late ninety's I assess was really in its growth stage and they came diocese management with an idea that said there is a security problem in web applications and we think there would be a great product that would be able to solve this problem. Well the ISIS management didn't think that it was going to be that good of an idea so these guys quit I assess they went out they got some funding and they made their own company called Spot on antics. And what spy produced is it produced an assessment tool that would assess web applications for security vulnerabilities. Basically what this tool would do is it would. Could it would act like a hacker be automated attack of a website and it would tell the user. OK here's the holes within this website. Here's the data in the damage that someone could do if they broke in and here's what you have to do to remediate those problems. The target markets for a product like this would be pretty much anybody that's got a large web presence any Fortune five hundred or Fortune one thousand company that if they got hacked. You know they would end up on the front of the Wall Street Journal. So it was Fortune one thousand that was federal as large international glamour it's we had verticals like the health care space there was a lot of. Need to protect patient information. A lot of need in the financial of the insurance space to protect all of our money that's online in manufacturing. There's huge supply chains within large manufacturing organizations and all of it is web based and to make sure that the vulnerabilities of one company don't flow in through other companies it was very very important to protect to have applications that would help protect that. So we sold this application into Q.A. organizations they would test web applications before we go into production. And we also sold it on in the production teams that would test this application against production web sites to make sure that there wasn't anything that was introduced new vulnerabilities that were introduced in the field in production. So let me give you a little bit background about where I was in my career leading up to spot Amec so I had been working in large corporate environments up to this point. I've worked for companies like ours and young. I've been in Atlanta working for World Span managing large organizations large development shops but at that time I was really looking for something different. I was looking for an organization that I could really build from the ground up and along came spot on Amex and by was in the security space and one of the things that really attracted me despite an. Next was security security was important. Back in in two thousand and two and I joined the company. It's very important now and I think security's going to be important in the future. And here's a couple of reasons why I think security matters most and first and foremost is that technology is changing quickly back in the early two thousand it was all about web one Dato right now it's web two and we're even talking about web three Dato and as new technologies introduced those new technologies in a deuce more complexities and those complexities require more security because there's more and more attack vectors that can come in and actually cause security flaws within an application. Also the brick and mortar organizations long gone. In fact I'm not sure we even use that term anymore but the concept of having an organization that can really secure itself by lock and key doesn't exist anymore than organizations are blended in. There's not really a clear delineation between when one organization starts and another organization stops and if you take Wal-Mart for example when you go buy something a Wal-Mart and it scans at the cash register that information is sent to a distributor somewhere that looks at inventory and says I need to send more more product to Walmart to restock their shelves and that could be many different companies along the way and all of those companies are connected through the Web And so as as these organizations become more connected. There's a need for protecting all of that data is more important. Data is now digital in real time. I mean in the generation that the generation in this crowd and even generation from my kids more and more data is streaming it's available to us at our fingertips and protecting at massive amounts of data is a complex task. That's moving to the clout the cloud is not a buzzword anymore a cloud clouds a reality. You can do you can process in the cloud applications in the cloud data sits in the cloud. You may not even know where all. All of this stuff exists you just know that you pull your phone. Now you pull your laptop out and things work protecting all of that is a very very complex task. It's almost the same kind of concept that the old mainframe systems more or you had a Central host you had a bunch of dumb terminals the difference though in that kind of a complement and that kind of a model is that a mainframe model be can be self-contained and all the security within the mainframe is self-contained but in the cloud you have so many different technologies that are interacting together that protecting that data is a very very complex task and then everything's connected. You know you can log on to a website now and change the temperature in your house you can stream your movies from your P.C. to your T.V. and you can download Netflix and things of that sort. So as things become more and more interconnected all of that stuff and we become more and more dependent upon the data. This is the security of this is going to become more and more important in our lives so that is one of the main reasons why I chose to join spot on an excess. And I joined by I was the vice presidential nearing my responsibilities at Spa included. Development Q.A. customer support. Production operations professional services training all with a staff of three people. So we had lots of responsibility. We had not a lot of people to do all of that stuff. And when we were it's why when we first were getting started. It's by we had a great idea the idea was this web application security product had a lot of passion around that product but we didn't have any sales we didn't have any customers and as we're going to started we quickly ran into a lot of challenges. And these are just some of the challenges that we had as an early start up first the need is unknown. When we go out and talk to prospects. If a prospect had not been hacked and they didn't have any loss of data. They'd say I'm not really. Sure why you're valuable to me. I don't feel pain. I've got a hundred other projects that are higher priority than your project. What is what is the need that. Why do I need to have your product and they didn't know why it was important. They would say things like well I've got a vendor that just sold me a far wall and they told me it was going to solve all my security problems. So why are you telling me now that it doesn't solve all of my security problems and I don't feel any pain. So I don't have a need to purchase your product. Third the business value was unknown. We didn't have an aura why we didn't have any customer that we could go to that said hey you know we've been using this product for two or three years and it saved X. amount of money or it's protected us and such and such a way so we had a generator own our ally and we did that using what we called Fugger fear uncertainty and doubt. And when you're using fund you can you can come up with worst case scenario and we can't do it out of an approval. So you just got to wait until the next budget cycle you just can't wait until next year a lot of times with these customers we'd have to go in and sell them just the initial the initial sale and see if we could grow this account as more budget became available and in future years. No established credit that was an interesting one where I came from in large organizations if I needed to buy something for my team. It was really easy to do I could call down the procurement I could say hey you know I need X. number of computers. I've got approval in my budget and then once you go through an approval process these things just magically show up on your floor and you can use them in a small company you can't do that small companies are having credit. We couldn't just call up Dell or H.P. and say hey I want to order some machines they would say well you have to pay cash. You have to put on a credit card and if you pay cash. It's not that easy to to have a cash transaction between two companies anyway so we spent a lot of a lot of time putting money on a personal credit cards most time was my personal credit card. And one of the lessons I learned on this one is that if you actually charge more than your annual salary your credit score will go down even if you pay off your bill. So we did that that happened for that was about two years until we could establish some some credible payment history and then start building some credit for the company so that we could start buying stuff for ourselves. And finally we had a shoestring budget. It is a myth that once you get funding that you now have the money that you need to go off and do this great idea that that the V.C.S. have given you money to do we didn't have a lot of money especially when you're using somebody else's money. There's a lot more scrutiny on that. So there was a lot of reach in one pocket and saying how much do I have and what are my needs and reach in the other pocket and trying to map those things together so that you could grow the company prudently but not outgrow the company out grow your sales and get yourself into trouble. And find a way that that you could actually get your job done with the budget that you had. So what was the approach that we had to solve some of these challenges Well first and foremost we wanted to act big while being small. We were a company of about ten to fifteen people when we started off and when we walked into a customer. We wanted to act like we were I.B.M. we wanted to have a professional looking website we want to have the glossy decks we wanted to have a sales presentation that looked very professional. We wanted to have a we wanted people to recognise who we were. We wanted to act big and look big. We didn't want customers to look at us and say hey these guys are so small we don't even know if they're going to be around in a year or two. Why should we take the risk on them. We also want to be small. We want to be able to pick up the phone on the first time it rings when a customer calls. We want to the person that talked to that customer to be able solve that customer's problem and they didn't have to get transferred to two or three different people before they were able to solve the problem. We wanted to be able to react to customers when they saw problems out the field. And we could get them fixes to the software very quickly. So they're not waiting for six months or a year wait for the next version of the software. So we wanted to be able to be very nimble and then mature the product very quickly. Secondly we wanted to stay focused and this is probably one of the biggest lessons that we learned as a small company but when you're working when you're when you're in a startup and you're in a brand new market. There's lots of different opportunities or lots of different things that you could focus your time on and it's very easy to get distracted and it's and if you get distracted too much and you have too many balls up in the air. You're in drop all of them. So we want to stay focused on one and only one thing and that was a difficult thing for us to do and the lesson that we learned is when we got started with Spot on AMEX the spy actually was an acronym that stood for secure protect and inspect. And the model that we had was we were going to have three different product lines we're going to have an inspection product line that was assessment tool that we were selling we're going to have a protection product line which was going to be a web application fire wall that would protect against vulnerabilities on the inbound side and then we're going to have some secure product which may may have been a forensic product or something we hadn't really thought that far ahead at that point. So that was our business model and in fact that business model was one that I assess had used and had been very successful with it so it was a proven business model one that we felt we could replicate in a new part of the industry and we started building both the inspection product as well as the protection product where we got to the point of almost releasing a beta protection product and we killed it. And the reason we killed it was because we knew it wouldn't focus the company. We knew that if we released two products. They would have to sell into two different parts of the organization. We'd have to have two different sales teams would have to have two different skill sets our marketing would have to be two different types of marketing campaigns support would be very. Very different and as it stood we were we were stretched pretty thin trying to handle one product two products would have we wouldn't have been able to support both of those products in fact both would have failed and looking back. That truly was a company. A company saving decision. There were several companies at the time that got a lot of V.C. funding focused soley on the the protection space only on the web application far wall and none of them made it the web application Farwell market really didn't materialize for about five years after that and so we were ahead of the market and it just would not have worked so so that was that was a huge lesson force. Next is clarifying the win clarifying the wins all about execution. It's all about making sure that everybody in the company is working toward the same goal and goal setting a something that they probably teach you in business school. It does actually work you need to make sure that it's communicated well that everybody understands what needs to be achieved and then when you achieve those those wins. You need to celebrate those successes no matter how big or how small. Next is work on the business as well as in it. This is straight out of Stephen Covey. This is making sure that you do work on strategy at a startup you can spend all your working hours in the details of the business and still not get everything you need to get done completed but you need to make sure that every once in a while you pick your head up you look over the trees and you say OK are we going in the right direction. Do we need to make adjustments what adjustments do we need to make and then you put your head back down and you start focusing on the execution you pick it back up and you do it again if you don't do that periodic Lee and you just and you're in a new market and that new market is emerging You could completely miss the mark. Finally need to know your customers knowing your customers. Better than they know themselves when. We're in a new market and the web application space was was brand new at the time customer didn't know what they wanted they didn't know what they wanted to day and they certainly didn't know what they needed twelve months from now. It was our job to figure out what that was was our job to become the industry experts the thought leaders if you might that will be saying this is the trend. This is where Web applications security needs to be going. We spent a lot of time speaking at conferences publishing white papers educating the market educating our customers and it started to work after about twelve months eighteen months customers started coming to us and they started asking for our opinions we would have. Trade journals and newspapers start calling us up and getting quotes when when things happened in the news because we were recognized as at thought leader and we didn't know our customers very well. So these first five bullets are all about. I think about the company overcoming some of the challenges the last two are just more personal. The first one is one of the lessons that I learned as do what you do best. I think it's a misnomer that the boss is the one that has to be able to do a job better than anybody that works for me. If that's the case I would have been in the whole lot of trouble. At spy. We had I was responsible for the operations. Group and up until spy. I had only worked in software development I had managed a data center. I didn't have any hardware in my background. I really didn't know what what to do when it came to running a data center. So I knew that I wouldn't be able to do that and do that very well but I hired a player who did know how to do that. I gave him guardrails I gave him gave him guidance and strategy where needed to go and then I got out of his way and I let him do his job and he excelled at that and turned out that we had a Operations Center that was second to none. Particularly for a small company the the level of up time that we had was surprising for. Based on other people within our industry. And then lastly have a passion for what you do if you don't enjoy what you do if you if you have to motivate yourself and push yourself just to get out of bed in the morning. You know you really take a hard look and say Is it the environment is it my attitude. Maybe it's the work that I'm doing. But if you're not enjoying it. You're not going to excel at it and look back and in your life and look back in your career and say OK what were the the aspects that that I found that I really did well. Or what job was and what was it what was it about that job that I truly enjoyed and then try to match that with your skill sets your education to come up with a win win. So here are some milestones along the way for Spot an Amex just to kind of give you a brief history of how the life cycle of a company received a series a funding in December of two thousand and one that was about. I believe it was about three and a half million dollars was was the A around the funding and with that money we hired a sales team hired a marketing team and I came and joined to run the engineering group. We didn't have revenues that first quarter revenues next to nothing customers next to nothing but we started to get some traction and by the third quarter we had about a million dollars in revenue. And by the end of that year we had signed our hundredth customer. We really start to get some traction and by September third quarter of two thousand and three. We're now doing about a million dollars a quarter and we're really seeing some good growth. January two thousand and four we got our fiftieth employee and when you hit fifty employees you really move from the start up mode to more of the small company mode it's not quite the same feel as you have when you have ten or fifteen people. We start and we continue to grow through two thousand and four and two thousand and five we hit our big milestone in two thousand and five and became cash flow positive and from a company. Perspective when you become cash flow positive in your fear running under venture capital money. That's the time where you become self-sustaining. And you don't have to lean on your event venture capital capitalist to continue to pump money into the organization. So we became casual positive in two thousand and five. September of that year we hit ten million dollars in annual revenue in. About fifteen months later we doubled it again to about twenty million an annual revenue and somewhere in between we hired our hundreds employee and really started to get some good growth. First spring of two thousand and seven thousand customer with signed and then we had the acquisition Hewlett Packard came in Madison offer that we couldn't refuse and in July two thousand and seven we were acquired by Hewlett Packard. And I'll be honest with you when the. When the acquisition started come in. We spent a lot of time focused on the transaction of the acquisition and we didn't spend enough time thinking about what's going to happen after the acquisition. And our lives changed significantly and significantly very quickly. During the due diligence process of the acquisition despite an Amex we had about three people on the due diligence team H.P. had close to one hundred all of whom or asking for our time at all hours of the day and night and we were burning it pretty hard as part of startup but when you go through an acquisition process it steps it up to a whole nother level. So we had we had some challenges we had some things that we didn't expect we move from about one hundred forty employees at the time to an organization with an H.P. H.P. has about three hundred thousand employees. It's one of the biggest companies in the world one hundred twenty billion in revenue the division that purchased us was called H.P. Software H.P. software alone was three and a half billion dollars And if you stop that and started out. All by itself it would probably be in the top five or six. Largest software companies in the world is just a huge organization. So we had some challenges. Once the acquisition occurred and the challenges probably the biggest one was getting recognized within the broader organization H.P. is huge and it has relationships at the highest levels of all companies with in the world and they and so it was very easy for H.P. to to be able to get in front of decision makers to sell its products which is very different than when we were at spot anomic So it was very very hard to get to the decision makers we would have to start lower in the organization and work our way up. The challenge was was you just couldn't call up any one of these companies and say hey I've got a great new product here we just got bought by H.P. look at it we actually had to sell ourselves within the H.P. organization and compete against all the other H.P. products for that time in front of the customer. Which So we it was almost selling before the selling that we had to go through and stay focused. That was something that we had to do as a sign at the start up it's something you have to do with it when you're within a large organization but it's a different kind of focus. We had H.P.. A large corporate wide initiatives that were designed to to push costs out of the organization millions and millions of dollars in costs just to give you a quick example where I got a I got an email one day. That said hey we're going to do to print duplex on all of our printing as default. It's going to save the company fifty million dollars. Now it's like that's a lot of paper. You know our our business you know is only about twenty million dollars but it just goes to show you how large an organization is when something as simple as that can save that much money. So there was a lot of these these enterprise wide initiatives and you had to balance your time between. Something for the corporate good which is going to cost time and resources within your department as well as with the individual goals that you had for your business unit which you're still responsible for and so you had to make sure that you stayed focused and balanced between those two things. Marketing and extra communication changed and changed drastically where to start up it's very easy to go out make a marketing campaign talk to our customers whenever we wanted at H.P. It was very different we needed to make sure that we communicated to our customers within the broader broader brand of H.P. that we were able to talk to our customers and there wouldn't be any conflicts with other products and how those prosper talking to our customers. So we had to find new ways to communicate with our customers to stay relevant. We actually created a a channel through the product itself that we could push communications down to our users so they could be notified of things that we felt were important that we needed to get out or user base that we couldn't get out through other marketing channels. However we had new sales channels H.P. has verticals and in pretty much every industry across the board there are one hundred eighty countries around the world all H.P. customers that would be interested in using new products like a a a web application assessment tool and so our sales our sales team could go out and find a lot of low hanging fruit from the existing customer base within H.P.. We also had challenges around customer retention in around staff or tension. Whenever there's an acquisition. It's always going to breed uncertainty and when you have uncertainty. There's a lot of fear. And so we spent a lot of our time post acquisition working with employees on staff or tension working with customers on customer retention Fortunately at the same time our main competitor purchased by I.B.M. So there wasn't too much difficulty in the market. With customers one to jump ship to maybe another customer that would be more stable at the time. So customer retention was actually a little bit easier but staff or tension after the first twelve months are Trish Enright wasn't any different at H.P. than it was at spied on Amex and over the first twelve months that's really when the employees are going to be most at risk for leaving. Facilities hardware and Budget were always a challenge your challenge as a small company is going to challenge at a big company but like staying focused there was different kinds of challenges one story I like to tell is that when H.P. purchased by they wanted to consolidate the office space H.P. has a facility out in Alpharetta so they wanted to move us out to Alpha right up. And spot was a Dell shop obviously H.P. doesn't like Dell's and they said well we'd really prefer that you don't bring your Delic Wittman with you but I didn't have any budget to buy H.P. equipment. So and they didn't have a budget to give me to buy H.P. equipment so I convinced him I said we got to be able do our job or software company. We need our computers. So the agreement that was made was OK. Bring your delicate but as you get budget you need to replace Ed eloquent with H.P. equipment. OK no problem. So we move into the facility. We have our lab. I finally get a new budget. I buy my nice H.P. server that's going to be able to replace you know a whole rack of old Dell still systems that are in the end of the useful life anyway so I called out of Sylvie's and say hey I got my new H.P. server I'm ready to shut off all these these Dell systems but I need additional electrical work done in the lab so that I can plug the machine in and I get the response No I'm sorry we can't give you any more electricity we're out of electricity. That's an electricity how can we be out of electricity innocence twenty first century. Well turns out the facility they were in. Actually produces its own power and it was at maximum production of power and they. Unallocated anymore power to our lab. So we went through a process of having to convince them that our footprint would actually be reduced if we shut down this rock of twelve servers and we brought up just one server but it goes to show that you see the point the story is that we spend an awful lot of my time focused on internal issues focused on getting ourselves recognize focused on kind of getting through all of the bureaucracy and the barriers within the organization so that the rest of the team can stay focused on delivering the software and meeting the customer's needs and really not having inner interruption of the delivery of the software because of the acquisition with H.P.. So what are some of the lessons learned. First off if you don't hear anything else you'll you'll never hear at a startup. This is how it's always been done when you get into a large organization might hear that all the time but certainly in a startup you won't hear that and it's mostly because it's never been done before and a lot of times when these two types of conversations happen you have so many kind of scratch your head say yeah you know that that's a good idea probably important for us to do. Well we need to do it. So you kind of look around and you say OK well all the assignments that I've given to everybody are also important things that we have to get done. So you can't be afraid to roll up your sleeves and go ahead and do it yourself and in a small company you're going to wear a lots and lots of different hats and that's one of the exciting things about working for start up. You need to build process process is a is kind of a tricky thing within a startup you can't introduce too much process too early because you will blog down the company's ability to execute on a company's ability to be flexible but you can't stay chaotic as you grow because it's not sustainable and it's not scalable. So you need to be able Internews process a little bit at a time and then be. Able to mature that process as the company grows and that's not an easy thing to do and you have to be able to convince people that process is an important thing to do but only enough processes that we need to have for our current needs. And finally need to celebrate the small successes as I was talking about earlier in terms of clarifying the win win win you clarify the win and set the goals and then execute that no matter how small they are you want to make sure that you celebrate success along the way and that builds momentum. It builds a lot of Mork. It builds a lot of positive energy around the company and that that that just snowballs as as the company grows and a very very important part of a of a startup. So what's next. Well now it's time to do it all over again spot I was acquired by Hill a Packard in August two thousand and seven the acquisition into Hewlett Packard took over two years to get spine into Hewlett Packard. And now that I've worked for a big company turned out turnaround work for a start up and now work for a big company again. I want to do it all over again I want to work for another startup and hopefully grow that thing so that it'll be purchased for a lot large company work for a large company for a couple of years and then maybe be back here to speak in four or five years from now after Deval it does a great thing. So I'm working from Tamala now the ball is very similar to spot an Amex in the early days it's running under venture capital money. We are not cash flow positive yet we are growing. We're about fifty employees. We're in the security space we build an appliance that sits on a corporate network and detects the presence of bots and malware. Unlike web application security was back in two thousand and one two thousand and two this technology is a brand new technology. And we're running into a lot of the objections and a lot of the challenges that we face. Well now it's fired an Amex but having been through it once we can better anticipate how we want to react to those challenges from our from our prospects. So there's a lots of risks and there's lots of questions but on the flip side of that there's lots and lots of potential so. That's what I have today. Thanks for your time and the only question. We've got to when I got to my coming down here. You said you're a do it all over again. You know a lot of folks behind me we lose a ton of Margery to the west coast into a locations because these startups seem like they are they. They seem to form better they have more advantage. Maybe if they start up and. Would you do it now that you're doing all glad you're in Atlanta. Would you recommend to tell everybody stay in Atlanta is this the place to be for a start up. Yeah so I'm probably not the best guy to ask that question because a startup startup. Industry here in Atlanta is not a very good one. Certainly not when you compare to the west coast or technology triangle or maybe Austin or something like that and there was a study done here at Georgia Tech about a year ago about the venture community here in Georgia and how well it actually breeds startups and it wasn't very complimentary of the Atlanta market and I would tend to agree with that but my family's here my roots are here and Atlanta is where where I want to stay and one thing that that that study did did show that I'm not sure that I completely agree with but I think it said that eighty percent of all startups leave the Atlanta area. And I would look at spot on an excess and say well we were quite. By Hill Packard which is a West Coast country company but we did not leave the area. We just our headquarters got moved but all the staff stay here and I have a feeling that that does happen same thing with I assess eyes was acquired by a V.M. but you know their headquarters and their staff are still here so I'm not I'm not sure I fully agreed with that study but anybody that is interested in getting into the tech munity and startups here in Atlanta. I think there's a lot of potential because there's a lot of virgin territory here in Atlanta. So I would I would encourage you to stay stay here. Well you mentioned that you never hear what is was always been done with your startups. I mean if you can glean from me. If you just try to I think you can take with us on. I'm sorry could you repeat the question I know. You mentioned in a start of you would never hear the phrase that's not always been done. But you're at a new company and so did you glean any information from your previous Toronto. Yeah so we run into in fact I ran into it this week we really don't have a good way of doing or fulfillment within and we haven't really had a need for that and we're just having a discussion or like well we've never done anything like that before. So as we walked around the table. We said OK well how we've done in the past. What would be the best way of trying to introduce that here in this organization and what do we think would work. So we reach back into our past experiences on how we've done things before and then we apply it to the current situation. Anyone else from if you go back and sue. Startups again or you're the one person from the original. No so so spy when we're about one hundred forty people. H.P. retained about one hundred twenty of the staff through the acquisition. Since then we've had several of the members of a leadership team that have moved on to other startups are C.T.O. and founder is now in a startup on the West Coast. Our sales moved on to another startup I've moved on to another startup. So we've given our time over to the acquiring company I wanted about a two year commitment to make sure the transition was smooth and there's a lot of emotional capital that goes into the startup that you want to make sure it lands well in the acquiring company but once you've done that then you kind of look around say hey is this going to be a long term commitment or do I want to go somewhere else and then everybody's got to make their own individual choices in that case. Or one over here. So Dumbo I hear their primary system is designed to protect against Boston attacks on corporate networks. And others wonder if you could explain to us a little more about how that system works. Is it more of a blacklist or does lackluster does intelligently detect threats or is it all proprietary information that's a great question. So you've done some research on them. Mala. The ball is an appliance that sits in the network and it will sit. Behind the DNS server behind the proxy server or at the points and it will look at D.S. traffic and when it sees a request from an asset that's going out to a. Host that's known to be a bad host it will flag that as a compromised asset and so there is a blacklist component to the to the application. There's also what we're calling a reputation component to the application because a lot of these bot nets they change their. Their IP and. Their you their their IP and host name and so what we have to do is we have to look at these requests and say OK well you're making a request out to someplace that has a suspicious type of a reputation. Well we can't say for sure that it is a Bad Guy dot com but it might be and Bad Guy dot com actually might be sitting on a legitimate site so it might be a legitimate requests being made. So we have to go through an algorithm to determine whether or not that that is a suspicious or a compromised request. To have any enjoy investors and if you didn't. How do you convince venture capitalists to invest in your company. So the ball has been around for about four years. It's an interesting story and had had received a couple rounds of funding was actually founded from a couple of your Georgia Tech its original business model was to actually stream. Information about bot nets and. And malware and then allow companies to to get this and use this as a detection Texan product well there wasn't a lot of money or they really weren't able to figure out the business model behind that type of a product so about a year and a half ago they changed the model and have have built an appliance and have put software on the appliance and there's and we're now starting to get traction with that model. So it's a little bit different from were several years removed from an angel around of investors and I and I wasn't around in the in the early days so I am working now with the current round of venture capitalists and this is actually our C. or D. round. That we just now we closed about a year ago. My question is What would you say are the characteristics of a successful startup and then the characteristics of someone who works well within a startup. It's a good question. I think the characteristics of a successful startup will be the impact that that startup is having. Within its industry so that could be a number of customers it could be sales. It could be that there was a transaction at the end where it was an I.P.O. or an acquisition a lot of startups are are looking to say OK that's really truly the definition of did I do Was I successful some startups just go on to become their own companies. I mean look at Microsoft. It was a startup at one point in time. But truly the people that are successful within the startups if they had had any characteristics that maybe some of the other ones that I didn't put up there would be a passion for learning somebody that has a just an insatiable curiosity about. Whatever their idea is and and is. Just has a focus around that to where they're There's always going to be a lot of noise but he'd be able to to get through all of that noise and say this is what we have to do and this is going to work and I know it's going to work because there's going to be a gut feel to it to a lot of the stuff when you're when you're working with a startup. That's the characteristic. I think of a good leader within I a startup is is really knowing how to differentiate and or navigate those waters through all of the various distractions that you might have and keeping your eye on. And game. Question. Video many folks actually go and start ups after they've had experience in larger companies effect the average ought to do or has experienced a larger company before they turn the store to first significant venture and that was sort of your case to a click with disappeared. I guess my question for you is a many of these students may go through a similar type of transition. What was the biggest surprise in terms of going from a big company type of environment to moving into a store and it's sort of how did you handle that transition the transition I thought was actually pretty easy because most of the surprises were welcomed surprises. When I was prior to spot an Amex I was working for World Span. Typical day at World Span would probably consist of seven eight hours worth of meetings of which I probably needed to be in about fifteen minutes of those you go to a startup and all of a sudden there's nothing on your calendar nothing on your calendar for all week. You know and you're the one that actually has to start figuring out OK how do I want to create an organization around this. So you don't have a lot of the bureaucracy and the the stuff that really at least for me find just kind of. Is not motivating. So I found that going to a startup and having a lot more control lot more flexibility on how you want to organize and do your was was a welcome surprise. The most difficult part of raising your series in a in two thousand and one. You know we raised the Series A We closed in December of two thousand and one obviously it was shortly after September eleventh September eleventh came and the V.C. money actually. We we probably would not have raised that round had we not hired. Brian Cowen who was C.E.O. of Spawn Amec see was had some gray hair. He had been through this once before and had experience. As a C.E.O.. So he brought the maturity that the vcs were looking for to give them enough confidence that they would be willing to invest in this company without that I don't think that the B.C.S. would have would have given us the money. That combined that it was it was a great idea. And the product at the time would sell itself farmer one meeting that we were in. We actually took the product and pointed it at the V.C. website and hacked in and I remember our C.T.O. he says well let's make spotting them as one of the portfolio companies will just make this change right here and they that allowed the V.C. to understand the power behind the application and the value that it would bring you know questions. You know the Georgia Tech for John thank you.