The Art of Timing Your First Sales Hire in a Cybersecurity Startup – Tony Surak, Partner, DataTribe

Are you wrestling with the decision of when to bring on your first sales leader? Wondering if your startup has achieved enough product-market fit before scaling the sales team? Curious about common pitfalls and best practices in building a sales function that can take you from zero to millions in ARR? This episode tackles the pivotal transitions every cybersecurity startup faces when growing its go-to-market engine.

In this conversation, we discuss: 

👉 How and when to hire your first sales leader, and whether founders should lead sales for as long as possible
👉 Building a sales team for scale: transitioning from a few “hunters” to team structures and leadership as you reach new growth stages
👉 Essential onboarding, metrics, and operational insights for minimizing risk and accelerating sales velocity

About our guest
Tony Surak is the Partner focused on GTM at DataTribe, a unique cyber startup foundry where he invests in and co-builds cybersecurity companies aiming to deliver generational leaps in the field. Drawing from his experience as a multi-time sales leader, operator, and go-to-market advisor, Tony has deep expertise in guiding early-stage companies through formative sales and marketing transformations.

Summary
Listen in to tap into Tony Surak’s battle-tested advice on founder-led sales, strategic sales leadership hires, and building a revenue machine in cybersecurity startups. Whether you’re debating your first sales hire or scaling beyond your founding team, Tony shares actionable frameworks and candid lessons learned. Don’t miss this episode if you’re serious about accelerating your go-to-market motion!

Connect & Resources

• Tony Surak on LinkedIn
• DataTribe Website
• DataTribe Challenge 2025

Transcript

Andrew Monaghan:
You know, there's lots of debate out there about how and when to start hiring salespeople at a startup, about what type to hire, types of leaders to hire, the shape of the team. Some say that the founder should stay involved in leading sales as long as possible. Some say there's a benefit to hiring the right type of leader as early as possible, but to tread carefully to make sure there's a fit with the stage of the company to help us get to the bottom of all this is our guest today and he is a multi time sales leader at early stage startups and for the last seven years has been an investor and go to market advisor to startups, mostly in cybersecurity. He has the perspective and experience to give a reasoned advice to founders and also leadership teams in these areas. And our guest is Tony Surak who is the partner focused on Go to market at DataTribe, which is the cyber startup foundry. That's where Tony and the partners invest in and co build companies that want to do generational leaps in cybersecurity. I'm Andrew Monaghan and this is the Cybersecurity Go to Market podcast. All right Tony, well, welcome to the podcast.

Andrew Monaghan:
I'm looking forward to this episode. We're going to use your long career on both sides of the table. You were an operator, ran sales teams, built sales teams over the years and for the last seven years you've been investing, advising sales teams as part of DataTribe. So we're going to bring your experiences to tackle two areas of transformation that companies, cybersecurity companies go through as they grow. The first one is bringing in the first sales leader that the founders thinking, okay, we need to get some proper sales leadership in here, let's go through that. And the second transformation is, okay, we got a small team of salespeople together. How do we grow this from let's say five or so up to more like 2025. So these are the two areas of transformation we're going to explore today, which I know many companies are kind of thinking about right now.

Andrew Monaghan:
Going back to the first one, let me put it to you like this and get your thoughts. You know, if you were to, if anyone out there was to read or listen to, let's call it conventional wisdom out there, you hear a lot of people saying you got to delay the hiring of your sales leader as long as possible. The founder needs to be founder led sales and maybe bring in some, some reps and manage the reps and just as long as possible need to be attached or involved deep into the sales process. Right. But if I look at some of the most successful companies right now, and these are names that everyone will recognize. Right. It's it's island, it's Wiz, it's Snowflake, no Name Access Security got acquired a couple of years back. They brought in, one of their first hires was the person who ended up being their longtime head of sales.

Andrew Monaghan:
They weren't brought in as a junior person. They're brought in as a senior person. In some of those cases, they were the first person in North America. They're an Israeli company, and many of them were the first person with sales and the title. And they've actually worked out all right. These companies are doing well. So, Tony, as you're kind of thinking through working with your founders at DataTribe, how are you thinking about or approaching that conversation with the founder to help them understand how they should be thinking about this?

Tony Surak:
Sure, sure. Well, there's no one size fits all, perfect answer. I will say in general, in my career, both here at DataTribe and prior, where I would get hired as an advisor to companies that already raised money and are trying to build out their business, premature sales leadership hiring is a big problem. I see that fail more often than not. And the key element is until the company has a rough feel for the problem they're solving, who they're solving that problem for, why their solution is better than the other options out there, it's hard to bring someone else on board to own sales and then drive the business. So, you know, people say you got to define your icp, you got to have your, your product market, your message fit. And I would extend that even to include target customer size fit before you start pouring some resources and gasoline on the sales machine. With DataTribe, we're often, well, we ideally look for companies where there's strong founder problem fit, where the team has experience that they developed as a practitioner in cybersecurity.

Tony Surak:
Oftentimes in the intelligence world, where we think we can create a good commercial company around what they're doing, and oftentimes they're the first company in that category or solving that problem. So looking at what we'll call over the horizon type problems, so they will be very strong technologists, usually domain experts may not have any idea about selling or business or starting a commercial company because they worked in the, you know, NSA or worked for, you know, cybersecurity firm or the government. And so we try to augment and help them on the business side, but first and foremost, they're going to be the expert. They have to sit and soak and marinate with the customer and the prospect to understand, okay, am I solving a problem the right way and constantly fine tune their story versus making a big hire and spending money and then wondering how come nothing's happening?

Andrew Monaghan:
How do they know though? So let me kind of back up a little bit. One of the things I've seen is someone more senior on the sales side does come in and they realize in the first month or two that actually that product market fit wasn't quite as strong as the founder would convince themselves it was. Right. The founder with the rose colored rose stated, glasses is not a rare thing. Right. And so they come in after two or three months, they're like, well, we kind of need to tear this up a little bit and do things differently. So if the root of the problem is the founder for some reason is saying, let me hire early, but they need to have that in themselves, know that they got the right fit. How would you advise a founder that, yeah, you've kind of got there or you're not there yet.

Andrew Monaghan:
No matter what you might think, you're just not quite there yet?

Tony Surak:
Yes. I mean, so some of the attributes we would look for in the business is on day one, you probably have zero customers, you probably have no pilots, you have no one. You may be talking to a few folks. So you want to try to get as many conversations you can with prospective people and titles and companies that you suspect have the problem that you can solve and get their reaction and feedback. You know, we like to see at least three, maybe more design partners where you negotiate and you make a deal to give you early access, help you, allow you to shape the product, and in return from the prospect or the company, you know, you give them a good deal, give them some favorable economics and whatever you're doing. So you want to have that first cohort of design partners and then you may move your sales motion to finding some folks for pilots. So these are companies where you're, you'll listen to feedback, but you're not necessarily needing them. You already have the product in some shape or form and you're trying to get them to pilot it and use it, you know, with the, with the end goal for the company to have a number of referenceable companies and users that you can then start building some of your early efforts to close some deals, you know, so the most you know, your, your founder is going to be your best sales engineer at that point because they know the product.

Tony Surak:
The problem the environment and you know, having someone who is just setting up meetings, you're still dragging the CEO and the founder in there. We like to use the analogy that first sales person you bring on board is really a sales hunter. It's like you are the commando that is being dropped on the island. You're the first one dropped on there. You got some basic provisions. You may have radio to talk back to the command post, you may have a machete and your mission is figure out how to go from the beach up into the hill and find that cave we've heard about where there's a lot of gold and wire back to us or call us if you need some help and we try to help you. Oftentimes you may lose one or two of those commandos, but that's the first one you want to drop on the beach. Someone who has the curiosity, the intellect and the ability to listen and navigate a very vague non existent playbook to try to get your product in front of some people.

Tony Surak:
And that necessarily isn't this quote unquote sales leader that we'll talk about later. It's building your first team or the building managing multiple teams. It's really that hungry sales hunter. And it's a rare breed of someone who has sales experience that has proven that has achieved quota numerous times. So they've proven it hasn't been luck and they're willing to leave perhaps interesting environment or working built in a climbing the corporate ladder to go join a company where no one knows your name, your business card is meaningless and you're trying to solve a problem and find some early adopters.

Andrew Monaghan:
All right Tony, let's get to know a little bit more about you as a person. I have a list, believe it or not, of 49 questions here. Now the good news is I won't ask you 49 questions. I'm going to spin this magic wheel to get it totally random. In fact, the algorithm is protected. It's that, is that good? The randomness that goes into it. I've got some fancy encryption, a bit of PGP with a bit of extra quantum stuff on top of it to protect it. And I'm going to spin this wheel and whatever three questions it comes up with are the three questions I'll ask you.

Andrew Monaghan:
Are you ready to go?

Tony Surak:
Let's do it.

Andrew Monaghan:
All right, let's spin it for the first time. All right, number 21, how did you first make money as a kid?

Tony Surak:
Well, like, like most kids back in the day, I cut grass. So did the pushed a lawnmower around the neighborhood, cutting people's lawns for three and five bucks a chop. But, you know, I was an early hustler. I was a salesperson even at a young age, where I Every opportunity, either through school, church, scouting, there's something to sell door to door, I would get involved. So I remember selling fancy Christmas cards out of a catalog, going door to door, and amazing to me, people would let me come in their home, I'd sit in their living room, and they go pick these Christmas cards and give money to someone they've never seen in their life. And then, you know, a couple months later, they ship them, and I go deliver them. And so that's the way I made some cash as a young kid.

Andrew Monaghan:
How old were you selling Christmas cards of interest?

Tony Surak:
Oh, you know, you probably can't do this these days. You know, I was probably 12.

Andrew Monaghan:
Wow. Yeah, definitely can't do it these days. All right, let's spin the wheel again. All right, what's. This is number 33. What's a memorable moment or embarrassing moment in your work life you want to share?

Tony Surak:
Well, so, you know, being involved in sales, a lot of good memories over the years about the teams I've been involved with achieving milestones and making some big deals. One memorable one that was very uncomfortable at the time. I was working for a company that had a big global footprint. And so we travel the offices around the world, and we were in India, where we had a large operation, and a lot of. There's a lot of parties that go on in India and a lot of opportunities for people to sing, dance, act. It was a very theatrical scene. And so for one of our annual meetings, they had the members of the leadership team, which I was a part of at the time, participate in a fashion show. And so imagine we're in this venue.

Tony Surak:
There was a thousand people and this long catwalk walkway with live music, and each of us had to work our way down the. The catwalk, participating as the crowd was chanting and screaming and yelling. So that was. That was kind of bizarre.

Andrew Monaghan:
Oh, my goodness me. I just cannot imagine. Did you have to have your arm twisted to do it, or do you just go, you know what? Screw it, I'll do it?

Tony Surak:
Yeah. I mean, at that time, you know, that's after dinner, so a few cocktails, and people are ready to go.

Andrew Monaghan:
That's awesome. All right, let's spin this wheel one last time. All right, number 48, what's the story of you getting into cybersecurity?

Tony Surak:
Well, you know, I've spent most of My life here in the D.C. area, lived in California a little bit, but I was never involved in cybersecurity and, and having lived here this long, it almost felt like, you know, living in Manhattan and you're not in finance or living in la, you're not involved in the movie business. So when I transitioned off my previous company, where our CEO is having coffee with a friend of mine who is a guy, one of the early guys here at DataTribe, John Funch, and he was trying to describe to me what DataTribe was. It was very early in informative at the time, but it was intriguing opportunity with some really neat people who are very plugged into the intel community and cyber security. And so I thought it'd be a great thing to jump into and get exposed to it. And you know, now, seven years, seven years into it, you know, I'm still a newbie, but as one of my profs used to say at MBA school, you know, you don't become an expert, you just kind of learn to figure out the labels to put on the ranges of your ignorance. So that's, I feel like that's the stage I'm at now.

Andrew Monaghan:
Did you find that is the founder who most often is pushing to say I'm ready to hire ahead of sales, or do you find that you're the one that's kind of going, you're now ready? Believe me, you're ready, you're not ready, go do it.

Tony Surak:
You know, it's a mix. I mean, just you're aware of what we're doing. DataTribe is a seed stage venture investor and company builder. So we're writing usually the first check, certainly the first institutional check into a company. They may have raised some money from friends, family and fools to get up to that point. So it's very early days and we really try to make sure we align with the founder, that we think they're going to embrace guidance and coaching from us, but, but we're going to rely on them to be the domain master. Right? So hiring somebody and say, hey, go in there, make the sales happen, the domain master will know what you know. They usually want to jump in there and be the expert.

Tony Surak:
They don't want to have just a suit thrown in the middle of them to try to make stuff happen and just get in the way. So at our stage, it's very early. We find most of the folks are very open to try to make the deals happen themselves. It makes them very comfortable. Then when they do bring someone on board, they can speak from Experience. They can speak from what they saw in the field. They heard 50 different things, they saw 100 different things. They become very credible.

Tony Surak:
And most techie founders like to be that way.

Andrew Monaghan:
I'm wondering if when you're talking to founders, you hear a pattern where they say, well, we've got. I'm going to make something up. We've got a million dollars of pipeline and we're not ready to pour some fuel in this fire. You're like, well, you know, maybe not quite as good as you think it is. Right. Is there some sort of common thing that they latch onto? Sometimes that you almost have to talk them down a little bit, saying, let's not get too carried away.

Tony Surak:
Yeah, I mean, sometimes we'll see. As you mentioned, a big pipeline, they start building a funnel and getting excited about all these deals that are accumulating there. But the reality is most people are very nice. No one wants to say no. And the founder talks to somebody, they get vibes like, oh, these people have a lot of interest in. And in general, it's someone who's trying to be polite and not slam the phone on you. And they say, yeah, yeah, call me back later. There's a lot more work that has to be done to figure out why someone buys something, did they budget for it, and what problem are you really solving? And we hammer home that the those points all the time.

Tony Surak:
What problem are you solving? A nice. We do a huge onboarding with our new companies that we invest in, where we go through a number of sessions about company building and every role in the company, including sales and marketing. And an analogy I learned early on was you go to Home Depot, you're looking to buy a drill. You're really not looking to buy a drill. You're looking to buy a hole that you have to have done at home. Right. So the drill's got to be able to go through concrete or wood or metal or glass a certain way, quality, cost, blah, blah, blah. But at the end of the day, you don't really care about the specs on the drill as long as you get the hole you want.

Tony Surak:
So we always ask, what hole? What's the customer's hole? What are they trying to accomplish by utilizing your solution? And if you can really get to that part of that matter, then working through the rest of navigating through the chain there to sell something, you really see the real value and how quickly you can move and move stuff in the funnel that, oh, yeah, we got 50 leads. Well, you don't. You may have Only one, because you found out what, what's driving them, and they're very, very anxious to work with you and everybody else. You haven't done the work. You haven't figured that out yet. So that's a signal. We got to teach. Teach the founders.

Andrew Monaghan:
Any other nuggets in your onboarding? I'm fascinated by your onboarding process with your new portfolio companies you're putting money into. Any other nuggets from the sales side, the marketing side, you want to share with us today?

Tony Surak:
Yeah, we have a little, little worksheet. We gather the founders together, we gather the rest of the DataTribe team, which are all former startup operators. We're not trained classical VCs with spreadsheets, though, oddly, we all have MBAs. But first and foremost, we're all startup founders and operators. We get everybody in a room and we go through a little workshop on exactly, you know, kind of the positioning statement. What do you think the positioning statement is? What's the problem you're trying to solve for who? Why is your solution the best versus all the other alternatives, including do nothing? We get people to think about what is the hair on fire problem you're trying to solve, not the nice to do problem. And, you know, we try to vet that early on, especially before we make it to decision and investing, but getting people together even after that first check to work through that, it opens the eyes and gets people open to listening and hearing what they need to look for when they're dealing and working with the marketplace on defining that. And then we'll go back and look at it.

Tony Surak:
We'll do some checks along the way to see how that's what we've learned. I mean, startups are nothing but a series of experiments. You invest money to go through the list of unknowns and assumptions and prove what's right, prove what's wrong, and hopefully you learn something every day. You got to learn something every day.

Andrew Monaghan:
Have you ever had a team come in with instant clarity on what they do, who they do it for, and what the problem they're solving is?

Tony Surak:
Yeah, the ones that have that instant clarity are the ones who came and had that problem themselves in their past life. They sat in that chair. You know, one of our more recent investments, a company called Fionu, the founding team came out of a big bank. They were in charge of this function around attribution in the development process. They knew the problem, they knew the pain. They saw nothing was in the marketplace to solve this growing need, and they started a company around it. So Those are the folks that usually have the strongest drive to, to fill that. Where the other ones may be close, there may be a little bit, you know, we think there's something there, there's some smoke and we feel there's a trend there and we want to shape it a little bit.

Tony Surak:
So they may, that may be a little more raw in the early days. That's why we, we use the, you know, we call ourselves a foundry. We're not a startup studio where we're a foundry where you put a lot of great raw materials, apply a lot of heat and pressure and hopefully coming out of that will come something more valuable. So that's what pulled this mix together.

Andrew Monaghan:
Well, talk about more valuable. Let's take a step forward then. And the team the founders assembled, the hunters as you call them. Right. They got maybe three or four of them and now he's feeling like, or she's feeling like, you know what, I can't be managing these people myself. How do you talk someone through the process and what to look forward. They are looking for that first sales leader coming in.

Tony Surak:
Yeah. So you know, in the first days or the first, the first hire, you probably want someone who's a player coach, someone who's willing to or you know, be the bag carrying sales manager take maybe perhaps they have a quota themselves, they're out there working deals, but they also bring one or two other sales folks along and get them spun up. So you'd have a little broader reach in the marketplace. So you have to find someone who's willing to do that. And not everyone is cut out to be a player coach. Some people may be further along in their career where they've been managing a number of sales managers already. So they, they may not be interested in getting their hands dirty and closing deals themselves.

Andrew Monaghan:
And you're talking about a proper player coach. Right. It's like I'm going to take the last and you know, allocate the team, you know, other territories and I'll manage you as well. But know part of my half, my job is to run the west, let's say.

Tony Surak:
Yeah, yeah, that's, that's again at the seed stage where money is very precious. You're generally not jumping out and hiring a lot of salespeople at the same time. If anything, you're getting that first hunter. That first hunter may be a good player coach and they're jo joining early at that stage because they see the opportunity to grow with the company and that becomes a very attractive, exciting situation for folks that want to be part of that kind of growth phase. So they're willing to be that first hunter and maybe be that player coach. And you know, it becomes a tough job. But that's what you're looking for and you're looking for. People have signs of that in their background, their experience.

Tony Surak:
You probably don't want to hire what I'll call the desktop general, someone who's used to be involved in a much higher level organization or companies that are further along. You know, I chuckle to myself sometimes when they say, oh yeah, I have a startup background. Oh yeah, really? What company? Well, let's see, you know, with, with XYZ. Oh yeah, well, they've, they've raised already 400 million through their series D. Let me tell you, that world is a little bit different than when you're living on 3 million seed money and everyone's looking for you. There's no playbook. So there's a lot of things that need to be accomplished between here and there.

Andrew Monaghan:
I remember talking to a friend of mine, he's a very accomplished sales leader and he was saying he wasn't sure about joining this company because 100 million ARR. They still weren't de risked that much for him. How about the million ARR?

Tony Surak:
It's all that perspective, right?

Andrew Monaghan:
It's different perspective. Yeah, for sure. How do you know that you have someone who. True. I mean, here's my thing, right? Is that people will say, oh yeah, I'm ready to roll my sleeves up again. And I'm not that devolved. In fact, in my last role I was closing deals as well, even though I didn't really have a territory. How do you know you have someone who's really truly willing to realize that in some cases payroll is on their back and they have to go out there and roll their sleeves up properly and go make things happen in their own territory, if not in other people's as well.

Tony Surak:
Well, you know, ideally you hire someone from your own network or the network of the team where they have exposure to the person, the character, their work ethic, the track record. But you know, it's teasing out of the person when you're talking to them. Give me examples. Tell me about thing you're most proud of. The deal that you failed and why did you fail and where are you in your career? Where are you in your journey in general? You try to get a sense of the motivation, what's motivating the person to want to take this kind of role and get dirty in it. So those are the kind of Things you're going to be looking for, looking for examples of did they take on projects, extra projects where they were before, did they get involved in maybe leading, putting together the sales and marketing tech stack or advising on that? Did they bring in some new technology into the sales and marketing mix that wasn't there simply because they were interested and motivated? I mean it's mind boggling. You know, we chuckle that we've seen market maps of 5,000 plus different cybersecurity solutions. There are over 40,000 sales and marketing products out there that can be used and the market map is absurd.

Tony Surak:
Right. So there's a lot of things and people try to constantly bring that stuff in and you can find a motivation with people if they're embracing that themselves. And with AI now there's so many new everything being reinvented and so folks are glomming onto how can I use that to improve my odds of winning?

Andrew Monaghan:
Seems like everywhere you look there's some other shiny object just came out the woodwork that people are raving about. So easy to get distracted right now. Created the pace of innovation is incredible.

Tony Surak:
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And it's funny you mentioned shiny object. You know, we often when we screen for new companies is how do you discern the founder who is truly solving a problem versus they're so enamored by something they built the shiny object or built but they're searching for the problem to solve and that, you know, often can be a lost cause. Spending a lot of money and time searching for that problem with this really cool tech versus hey, we saw this as a problem and we invested time and money to figure out how to solve it.

Andrew Monaghan:
I feel like that happens a lot with the sales tech or sales and marketing tech. Right. There's a lot of oh, I just found this new thing that I can do with some model somewhere. Let me figure out what I can do with it as opposed to the other way around. Let's get back to cyber though. Have you seen any common mistakes that leaders, sales leaders or their founders make as they're looking to grow the team, let's say from 5 up to maybe 15 or 20. Are there common pitfalls that they you have to advise them to watch out for?

Tony Surak:
Yeah, a couple different things. I mean so at that point they are probably outside of the data tribe nest. They've raised their series A round. They've hit typically 1 to 3 million ARR. They, they're going out and raising a round which is going to be, you know, an extra 10, 15 million into the company and you know, they're looking to expand what they're doing. And I'm a big analogy guy. I draw the analogy to the, to the bagel shop. When you are seed stage, you got an idea for a bagel shop, you kind of know what you want to serve, the ingredients, the vibe you play around with, the location, the back office, your hours, the menu, blah blah, blah.

Tony Surak:
And once you figure that out and you're successful, you raise your A round and now you have one location, you're trying to build three. So you kind of have the beginnings of that playbook. You go, okay, here's the kind of thing I want to go find as far as location. You've already decided the product you're selling, the menu, the pricing, blah, blah, blah. And now you're looking to scale that. So you need to find a sales leader who has done that before, someone who's joined a company that perhaps had already several different teams. So they got to see and learn from someone, do and grow this themselves and may have participated in that growth. And now they see your startup as the opportunity to come in and do the same on a new blank canvas.

Tony Surak:
And so that's what you kind of want to find. You know, as a founder, you want to avoid becoming a bottleneck and going in and micromanaging the team and all the decisions. You may want to start looking at some specializations, you know, investing in creating a BDR SDR function, maybe a territory rep versus a big account rep. So depending on your type of business, you may want to have folks who are used to or defined and have experience going after big large enterprises versus mid market or SMB. You know, depending on what your ICP is and which way you're going. You probably don't want to have a all size fits one market. And you need to start looking at your sales ops, start investing on some products that's going to run, you know, the whole, the kind of workflow, gathered the basic data and you know, even at the series A round and you got maybe five or 10 reps, you are getting a first set of metrics. You hopefully can see who after some good training.

Tony Surak:
Training's a key part for your new hires to get them up to speed. But to see who's winning or versus who's floundering. You don't want to have sales reps that may be floundering for three months. You kind of, you kind of at that point know they're going to make it or not to the next level. What you don't want to have someone there is nine months and burning a lot of time, energy, lost opportunity because they weren't a good fit, weren't doing the work, whatever, whatever the problem was. So there's the element of having the right metrics and basic measures. I don't think you have to have at that point very sophisticated rev ops metrics yet those. But those come in to play and become very important.

Tony Surak:
I think when you're at the, you know, let's say 5 to 10 million ARR kind of size where you can get some really good insights, you got to run a little bit on the numbers versus a little bit on the gut feel and what you see right in front of you.

Andrew Monaghan:
It's funny, you know, going back 10, 15 years, if someone had said, yeah, invest in a sales office as it was back then, early you, you people look at you quizzically, you sure. But these days it seems to be, you know, pretty much accepted. You have to, you know, this is an important part of it, right?

Tony Surak:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, in my career prior to here, you would see the expectation was VPs, sales, hey, oh, by the way, go pick a CRM and deploy it, right? So you're now wearing an IT hat, you know, applications IT hat and. And also a sales leader hat. And if you're a player coach and you got three hats, your sales rep and a manager and head of it. And oh, by the way, get the numbers for the CEO to present to the board and give them the final blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And it becomes kind of a really lost. It becomes a tough challenge where people not doing anything.

Andrew Monaghan:
Well, you know, it's funny, I looked on the left here, I've got an advert. I love this. It was a Porsche advert. And the text in the advert says, honestly now, did you spend your youth dreaming about someday owning a Nissan or a Mitsubishi? And I kind of liken that to sales leaders. Did you, honestly, as you're growing up in sales, dream of being the head of your sales it, your head of sales enablement, your head of sales ops and your head of SES at the same time. So not really. So, you know, how do you outsource that or get someone to do it for you as soon as possible?

Tony Surak:
And there's some interesting companies who are like outsourced platforms for revops, allowing the sales leader and the marketing leader to have the right dashboard in front of them. And they're not inventing the dashboard. Right. You're not buying the Tesla. And then, oh, by the way program the screen to show your speed, distance, miles, battery life, blah blah, blah. It's already there. And you just got to make decisions about how you're driving the car, where to go, how you're driving a team, how they doing, where to make incremental investments without figuring out the instrumentation that you need to give you the insights of how well that last marketing program worked, how that recent sales hire worked, investing in shows versus not going to shows, that kind of thing.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah, yeah. You mentioned before about DataTribe being a foundry. How does that differ to some of the other terms you hear out there? Studio, accelerator, techstars. How do you fit into the for founder, how do you fit into their world best?

Tony Surak:
Yeah, yeah, no, so accelerators I generally see as you have cohorts, so at certain time of year you take a bunch of applications, you invite a number of startups, generally early phase stage companies. It could be a single person, you throw each of them 25, 50 grand, whatever it is, and, and then you just see who survives and who bubbles to the top with something interesting. And those are the ones that you support or maybe help raise more money. So you kind of have this Survivor Game mentality. A studio is usually when we were starting DataTribe, way back when we modeled the studio concept, which generally was a founder who found some success in their last company. They weren't ready to retire or go join a VC firm as an entrepreneur in residence, but they want to dabble and stay involved and maybe help and coach new entrepreneurs. So they, they literally create a studio where the people come in and they shape their companies like lumps of clay and they help guide them. But it's kind of loose, it's not formal in, in the foundry method we, we're very selective.

Tony Surak:
We do three, maybe four companies a year. I mean we have money from institutions and other high net worth folks who are successful in cyber and startups, but we're putting that money to work like any VC would. But then we roll up our sleeves with our program to get them from seed stage and hopefully accelerate through the milestones, help them make more informed decisions, help them in every aspect of company building that we can so they can get to the A round metric faster than if they were left on their own. And it's a way of de risking the company in a startup and hopefully see more upside for the team and the investors.

Andrew Monaghan:
It seems so different to what I would call the traditional VC maybe 10, 20 years ago, where they viewed their role as. I'll give you some Good money and some good advice and let you kind of figure out from there. I mean, a little bit unfair, but back in the day it was a bit more like that. You're really rolling your sleeves up with the team and helping them. Seems like day to day. Is that right?

Tony Surak:
Yeah, yeah. No, we have, you know, we have our main office here in Fulton, Maryland and Maple Lawn, a number of cyber startups here, NSA is right down the street, Johns Hopkins Labs is right down the street. And we offer free space for a company so they don't even have to waste time about going, getting a lease or anything. They come in, they got it, they're ready to go. We start through the training giant Gantt. Chart of life of the startup. We have modules to train them in every aspect of company building. From running a board meeting.

Tony Surak:
What does sales mean, what does marketing mean? We have a portfolio of third party vetted partners who can help everywhere from fractional cfo, fractional marketing. Get your website up and running, every aspect of company building. So all of that adding together, hopefully reducing risk and accelerating the time to build and as I like to say, apply a lot of heat and pressure and something valuable comes out of it.

Andrew Monaghan:
What's the DataTribe Challenge?

Tony Surak:
Yeah, so the challenge, this is our eighth annual event. We used to have them in our office here in Fulton. We kind of outgrew the space. We'd have 125, 150 people kind of crammed in here where we would have three companies that submitted to. We kind of call for the challenge earlier in the year pitch competition. We vet it, we shortlist it down to three. We spend time coaching each one of them, fine tuning their presentations and then they present at the challenge with very experienced judges there at a room full of folks and we pick a winner that we think is the most best opportunity and best team. And then you know, at that point they may or may, may not, we may not invest in them, but we have traditionally invested in them.

Tony Surak:
This year we decided to expand the the concept. So we now have a venue down downtown in D.C. at the Washington Navy Yard and look to have now space for 300 plus people. Some really good panels coming in. So kind of a broader cyber innovation day, really trying to build that cyber development community here in the, in the D.C. area DMV, but extending the invitation to everybody nationwide to come in. And so we're real excited about it this year.

Andrew Monaghan:
And what day is that?

Tony Surak:
That is November, I'm going to say November 3rd or 4th, whatever. I apologize, I don't got the exact date. All I know is the election day, so.

Andrew Monaghan:
But we'll put the, we'll put it in the show notes then so someone can look at that. It's funny, I looked at the agenda. Very aggressive. Having the bourbon tasting at one o' clock in the afternoon. If I read that right. Did I read it right?

Tony Surak:
Well, you know, some people would call this the DataTribe Bourbon tasting event with the DataTribe Challenge as a side event. But yeah, I mean this year is a little bit earlier in the day, but it's kind of become crowd favorite where we, we'll bring in hand picked three or four bourbons. Each one with, I like to say, has got a startup theme to it associated with it. Try to get bottles that folks normally can't get on their own or don't want to spend money for it. So we'll have little tastings there and at the end of the day, you know, we have a big party anyway, so expands beyond the bourbon.

Andrew Monaghan:
That sounds awesome. Is there a website people go to?

Tony Surak:
Yes. So if you go to datatribe.com and on there you learn more about DataTribe and you'll see something there that talks about the challenge.

Andrew Monaghan:
That's awesome. All right. I encourage everyone to go there and also get in touch. I'll put Tony's LinkedIn in the show notes as well. Obviously you'll find him on LinkedIn probably just by typing in his name. So Tony, be a genius to do that. But Tony, listen, great having you on. Love the discussion and hope to talk to you again in the future.

Tony Surak:
Likewise. Really appreciate the opportunity to chat with you and hopefully you can make it out to the challenge.