Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sprickerhoff: eSentire won 95% of head-to-head sales competitions
“And we won. 95% of the time on head to head competitions.”
Opinion
Sprickerhoff: Canadian founders particularly struggle with founder-led sales
“I think particularly Canadian founders struggle with is founder led sales.”
Opinion
Sprickerhoff: Founders should not take home lines of credit to bootstrap
“And I don't think I'd recommend anyone doing that. Even if you're, you know, if you have a house more or less paid off, which is almost impossible from like these days, right. You know? And so like, I just, I would not necessarily recommend it was incredibly r…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sprickerhoff: Managed recurring revenue now makes up 90%+ of eSentire revenue
“So that's how we fought. We flipped from a pure consulting piece, which was our wedge in to 50%, 60%, and now it's 90 plus percent of the revenue, and that's what it turned into MRR.”
Insight
Sprickerhoff: Scaling from $1M to $10M ARR is startups' next hardest phase
“The first million is incredibly difficult. And then the next nine is the next most difficult. You know, this is where you, you've, you run into, you know, tech debt and just people who didn't, you know, they were happy in the scrub, you know, the scrappy early…”
Insight
Sprickerhoff: A startup founder's core job is chief survival officer
“The main thrust of the book, you get these under all these hats, but you have to be the chief survival officer. All right. And that means don't run out of cash. You need to be the one, like, what does it take to survive every single day? You need to be out the…”
Disclosure
Sprickerhoff: eSentire was founded using a $150,000 home line of credit
“Came back, took a 150,000 dollar line of credit on the house and started this company with a buddy of mine who had known since the first grade and just started you know, cybersecurity.”
Insight
Sprickerhoff: Mid-sized hedge funds cannot afford full-time internal cybersecurity teams
“And I recognized that they needed these solutions that a tier one bank would have, but couldn't afford them because they were, you know, a hedge fund that's running two or three billion of money still has concerns, but they can't afford their own full-time sec…”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Sprickerhoff: eSentire's first customer was ING Asset Management
“So my first customer was ING Asset Management out of New York.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sprickerhoff: Early eSentire tool reduced client malware infections to zero
“And so there's this sort of little, we call it, I call it the executioner, right? Executioner. And cause it would just kill this malware. And it just, it took attacks down from five or six for every client. Down to zero for months and months and months.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sprickerhoff: eSentire grew organically at 30% annually early on
“We were growing, you know, 30% every year. Right. Like this is organic growth.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sprickerhoff: eSentire took seven years to reach $1M in revenue
“I think it took about to get year seven, I think. Where we hit a million us”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Sprickerhoff: eSentire scaled from $1M to $10M ARR in three years
“Three.”
Disclosure
Sprickerhoff: eSentire's buyer shifted from CTOs to compliance officers and CFOs
“How do we tell our story to a non-technical buyer? Because it moved a lot from the CTO to the chief compliance officer at that certain point. And that, you know, went up to the CFO when there was audit pieces.”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Sprickerhoff: eSentire raised an initial $1M to $1.5M from Canadian investors
“It was like a mil and a half. So nothing extraordinary. You're just no local, you know, Canadian investors. I think Al-Karim Jivrev, who's with Espresso now was an early investor as well.”
