How new security categories emerge: the Security Adoption Life Cycle (SALC)

Lately I've been talking with several "security pioneers": companies that are trying to convince the world to adopt new types of security products.  They are offering solutions for emerging security problems, or perhaps for security problems that have been around for a long time but for which awareness is still emerging.  What I've observed is that companies trying to pioneer a new security category often target the wrong kind of accounts in their sales process, and listen to the wrong feedback in validating their market assumptions.  They should be following what I call the Security Adoption Life Cycle, which can guide both whom to target and what feedback to value.

The most valuable security technologies don't make you more secure

There's been a baby boom in security startups, and a lot of people I know are involved in young security companies now.  Over the next few years, we can expect this startup cohort to generate a bunch of exits; so there are interesting Design for Exit questions to think about here.

As noted in the title, the assertion of this post is that the most valuable security technologies - many of them, anyway - aren't used to make their users more secure.  In fact, a Fortune-50 Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) told me flat out: "my job is not to make my company more secure."  He proceeded to explain that in fact, his job was to make his company more productive, within a given security posture.  And, I claim, that's the same job many companies are "hiring" security technologies to do.

How to turn $5m into $100m in 18 months

Here's a view into the bizarre economics of mergers & acquisitions.

Suppose you're a startup with $5 million funding and a couple of dozen clever engineers.  You set your engineers loose on creating a killer 1.0 product, which takes them a year and a half or so.  Now a fast-growing Hot Public Company decides they really want a product like this, and they are doing a build vs. buy analysis.  What's it worth to them to avoid having to build the product themselves?

Judging an M & A beauty contest

Yesterday's post gave advice to sellers on how to improve the odds of winning an evaluation that uses a comparative business case, based on an M&A process my friend Bob is running right now.  The comparative business case is one of the more common tools buyers use to analyze potential deals; unfortunately, in this case at least, it's also one of the less helpful.  This post turns to the question of  how a buyer should be looking at the decision in front of them.

Winning an M & A beauty contest

A friend today related over lunch a choice he's currently facing: which of three competing startups to acquire.  How does he think about this choice?  Here's a great chance to see Design For Exit principles in action.

Let me lay out the scenario.  Bob (I'll call him) is the newly-appointed business development exec for a unit of a Big Company.  His business unit needs a key technology to integrate into their product, and they'd rather buy it than build it.  The business unit's technical evaluation has narrowed the field of many small companies to a short list of three choices.