The benefits of an anti-exec leadership team

Cybersecurity is a small world, full of familiar faces constantly making the rounds, often in new guises at new companies. The headlines have become commonplace: former C-level executive at a well-known company strikes out on himself, bringing senior leadership with him. With years of experience and track records of success, they start with a hefty VC investment.

The problem with this image is that those new teams inevitably bring the old structure to a new venture. It may be a new brand, but the same personalities with a 10,000-foot view run the show. The past success of these “new executives” makes VCs feel comfortable writing start-up checks, but the result is a new company rehiring the backers to actually do the job.

For example, how would a former VP of sales at a large, established company go back to selling as a salesperson? How would a VP of Engineering start coding a product from scratch?

Cybersecurity doesn’t need the layers — it needs fresh ideas from the bottom up, not only to keep up with threat actors, but also to simplify the complex day-to-day experience of using legacy solutions. It starts with leaders who are comfortable on the front line: they are low level enough to review code, support escalations, configure the product, and talk to users without marketing gimmicks. These are the future leaders who are likely to have innovative ideas of their own to solve these problems.

Feeling the pain firsthand, an individual contributor who may not have a C title on a resume can bear the scars of the struggle to become a good A-level leader who cares about the customer experience and the pragmatism and perseverance to make it happen .

Step 1: Get the right leads

The right leadership team encompasses more than new faces – it must be those who have weathered the challenges and want to prove they can do better than their previous management. As individual contributors, they can dive deep into customer issues without ego and aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty.

Can the product management leader write the requirements himself? Can the engineer lead the design and defend the architecture, or should they hire an architect? These cannot be middle managers.

Every member of the team (even if in marketing or sales) should have engineering and technical chops with the ability to implement or debug the product. They must be well acquainted with the problem space or have the ability to research and understand it. And they must be equally willing to share knowledge and learn from others on a technical and design level.

Leaders can come from any geographic region, but they must have the cachet and network to hire people in those regions around them. Cross-border collaboration can bring innovation, but playing multiple time zones is very inefficient. Ensuring that leaders can list names of who to hire and convince them to join makes the difficulty of hiring easier.

You need people hungry for the chance to do something big.

Step 2: Build the right support for leads

The biggest pitfall these new leaders will face as former ICs is trying to solve every problem on their own. There are two primary ways to counter this.

Priority one is to ensure that each initial core member has the relevant domain and execution expertise. This builds the center of gravity where all initial team members speak the same language because they have previous experience in the problem space. The execution expertise comes from whether an engineer has previously developed in this language or in this way. These can be Python-based serverless cloud native lambdas or endpoint security agents.

Priority two is to encourage leads to hire people who actually have more experience than the leads themselves. It’s common to look to junior engineers possibly because of cost considerations or the age-old optical problem of two colleagues now reporting to each other. By ignoring these, the leaders should now have their first officers to lean on to take ownership of the various components, instead of putting all the pressure on them to manage the micro level development process.

With this in mind, the hands-on leaders get a strong support system around them to boldly build a disruptive product.

Step 3: Fly!

The natural path for any successful business is to grow, but growing at all costs and building an empire is not the wisest approach. Fortunately, your leaders want to do the work, not just talk about it, so the focus should always be on the product and customers. This is why the anti-exec philosophy continues from engineering, to product and marketing, to sales and beyond.

If the hiring is right, every leader on the team should be personally involved and feel responsible for improving the product. That is your growth engine.

Kunal Agarwal is founder and CEO of dope.security