Dean Sysman
person on 1 show · 15 statements across 1 episodes
On the record as a speaker too: Dean Sysman across every show, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
15 statements about Dean Sysman, every show
Scaling to $10M ARR requires translating founder sales into an AE recipe
“What you need to ask yourself is if the way I got from zero to one, Gave me a recipe that I can pick up an AE from the street and make them be able to do the same thing I just did. If that's the case, then you're gonna accelerate from one to 10.”
Sysman's previous startup reached $1M ARR purely on hustle, lacking market fit
“That's sort of what happened to me in my previous company, we got to a millionaire. But to be honest, there was no real market opportunity there. It was because we were hustling as founders, right? Like we made enough people like us enough and knew we would wo…”
Enterprise sales teams should never criticize a buyer's existing technical architecture
“Never call anybody's baby ugly. So like a lot of times we would find gaps that could make people defensive, right? Like we'd say, Hey, This controller, this, like, architecture, there's a bunch of problems with it. So instead of going and telling these people,…”
Axonius scaled from zero to $100M ARR in 4.5 years
“And we went from like zero to one, I think in about a few months less than a year. And then we went from one to 10 in like a year and a half or something. And then from one to a hundred million, it took us four and a half years. So one of the fastest ever, eve…”
Axonius failed many proof-of-concept trials before closing its first customer
“We had tried many different POCs before we got to our first customer and many of them failed.”
Fortune 500 CISOs validated the Axonius problem directly to seed investors
“Every single one of them told that VC, That investor, this is one of the biggest problems I have, and even more so, nobody's trying to solve this.”
VCs are deterred by startups trying to solve historically unsolved problems
“It's very easy for them to invest in a next gen something or invest in a new category. But if you're telling them, Hey, this problem has been around for a long time and nobody solved it, that scares them.”
Startups must show rapid, low-effort value to eliminate enterprise buyer risk
“The thing that people don't understand, this is even truer, the bigger enterprise sales you go, the more this is true, is that companies have budgets, they have resources, and they will put those into buying products
But only if they can trust the outcome.
Thi…”
Near-immediate time to value drove viral adoption for Wiz and Axonius
“And then they asked him, well, why? And he said with both of them, that time to value was almost immediate. I had spent very little effort to see an immense amount of value. So I think that was the key factor for them and for us as well.”
Wiz leveraged rapid fundraising and rising valuations as a brand-building tool
“One is they used their fundraising as a brand tool, which is, you know, it has its pros and cons, but they kept raising Many, many different rounds kept raising their valuation, and that's a very dangerous game, by the way, but for them, they were able to pull…”
Winning in new technology vacuums is a race to build brand recognition
“The other kind of journey is I think when there's a new area of technology that's a vacuum, and then people have no idea what to buy, but they're trying to buy something... It's sort of a race. To what becomes the industry standard. And the way to win there is…”
Next-gen replacement software startups win primarily through superior sales execution
“Those companies still need to do product well and marketing well, but the way they win, the way they become dominant is by being the best at sales because they understand the deal mechanics the most. They understand how the buyer's gonna make a decision, and t…”
Axonius built over 1,300 API adapters connecting to existing enterprise tools
“And we built all these adapters today. We have over a 1300 of them that you just give us an API key or a credential to all your existing tooling.”
Enterprise sales rely on navigating individual stakeholder incentives, not organizational benefit
“When you're trying to get something to happen in a large organization, it's never by just making somebody realize it's good for them. You have to have an understanding of what influence each player has over a certain decision, what incentive each player has ov…”