Welcome back to the Career Hacking Village. Many of us think, do I really want to go
work for somebody else? Do I want to, you know, report into an employer? Maybe I really want to
start off on my own. So we're very happy that one of our own, who has done a phenomenal job
starting his own company, wanted to share with us sort of the back end of what it's all about.
So Bryson, share with us what it is about starting your own company.
Welcome to Entrepreneurial Adventures, Starting Your Own Company. Kathleen, I'm going to correct
you on one thing you said, done a phenomenal job. All I can say is I've been doing this for
eight years, and I've started three different companies. I gave a keynote at a college a few
years ago, and we were talking about entrepreneurialism. And somebody asked me,
well, what's the metric of success? Like, how do you know you're successful? And I was like,
I have no idea how to measure that. Every day that we get to continue to make payroll,
and the company stays alive, is how I see success. So I don't know if it's been phenomenal,
but I do appreciate the opportunity to continue to pursue the ideas and the passion with all of
the great folks that I work with, and the fact that our companies have done so much for the community.
All right, so I got a tweet that I wanted to include from Mark, and it was a great quote.
An entrepreneur is someone who will jump off of a cliff and assemble an airplane on the way down.
I guess the definition of success here is you don't crash.
So who am I? I'm the guy who dresses up like a unicorn. So I founded Grimm eight years ago.
While serving a large client, they gave the initial spark for the idea that became Scythe,
and that's now my full-time job. I co-founded the non-profit, the ICS Village,
and I'm a senior fellow at the R Street Institute, as well as the National Security Institute for
National Security and Cybersecurity. So I have experience with a non-profit,
a services company, and a product company. All right, this is me. I am not a lawyer.
This is not legal advice. I'm not even one of the best entrepreneurs out there.
I just want to really highlight this one. So besides my two dogs, that golden couch there
is where I sat on day one, eight years ago, when I started Grimm and went, okay,
so I've done the big adventure. Now what? That's where it all began. So starting with,
why do you want to do this to yourself? Asterix, the reason we have so many people here on the
screen is that it takes more than you to start a company. Your friends, your family, all of them
are going to be a part of this journey for better or worse. And so when you're thinking about that
question of why do I want to start this company, you need to think through why do we want to start
this? The startup curve. When you actually finally take that leap, it's the honeymoon period. It's
jumping into the great unknown. And it is so great. And it is wonderful for as long as it
lasts. In my experience, it took about three to six months before that reality sets in.
And then you're down in the, okay, what have I really gotten myself into?
For the first two to three years of a company, you will find yourself every single month being
confronted with some insurmountable challenge, some existential threat to your ability
to continue to go. And you'll make your way through it. And at some point, you'll hit that
point where things start to click. Things start to work. Those crises don't keep happening.
And at some point, then people start to know who you are.
And they start to come to you for that solution. And it takes off.
So to be an entrepreneur, I believe requires only two primary skills. Passion,
intolerance for bullshit. You don't need to be the smartest. Look at me. What you do need
is a passion for an idea that each day that you're not doing that idea, it hurts you.
There's an itch that this idea needs to get out there into the world. And when you're in charge,
you are in charge. You are the CEO and you're the janitor. Nobody else is going to clean up.
Nobody else is going to pick up everything. The buck literally stops with you. And so that
tolerance for bullshit is you need that patience and the wherewithal that each day you're getting
up, you're going at it and you're doing whatever needs to be done, which are going to be some
really glamorous things on the high points and some not so glamorous administrative, HR,
state registration, all of the litany of things that need to be done because nobody else is there
to do them. That's your job. So you don't need to be the smartest. You do need to have some
that you believe in. Do not do this for the money because that's one of the big jokes is
starting your own company is one of the fastest ways to lose money.
So what is the idea? The ideation phase. All right. First of all, if you've got an idea,
talk to people. Then talk to some more people. Have them introduce you to even more people and
talk to those people. And by talking, I mean, listen. So a lot of folks get so afraid to share
their idea. They're like, hey, I don't want somebody else to steal my idea. Personally,
if somebody else can do what I'm doing better than me, I am happy for them to do it because
I shouldn't be doing it. But people are afraid. People are scared that if I give somebody something,
they're going to take it away from me. You have to kind of get out of that because you're going
to find that if your idea is really that good, most people can't execute it. There's a great
phrase, and I think it's usually attributed to Ben Franklin, even though he probably didn't say it,
which is that genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. Great ideas are a dime a dozen.
The execution, the follow through, the day in, the day out of doing that makes the difference.
And then, again, you, the entrepreneur, it's your network. It's who you talk to. It's them
being willing to help you. And I can speak from personal experience. When I first started my own
company, I came out of a very small closeted world in the intelligence community. I didn't have
really a lot of contacts in the civilian world. And it took me a while to figure out how important
that was. And as I started building those relationships, by asking and asking for help,
people want to help you. Let them. The best technology doesn't win. So, the idea here is
that we're looking for this concept of a value proposition. By talking to lots of folks,
we figure out how to explain our idea, how to shape the idea, and more importantly,
why would someone buy this idea? That's the value proposition. It's a very short,
this is what we do that makes us money. And then, the expression of that idea that comes into code,
into practice, that is the minimum level of features that somebody would buy it,
is the minimum viable product. So, products versus services. This is important because
we need to understand the economic model of what's underpinning our idea. If we're a services
organization, we're going to grow organically. We're going to have people, one hour of a person's
effort equals one hour of pay. Products have the allure of one hour of effort is worth whatever
somebody's willing to pay for that. That multiple is why you see those kinds of acquisitions that
seem very exciting, where people pay a lot of money for a product. You don't get those same
multiples on services because people don't scale. When I started Grimm, I had folks in the private
equity and VC community coming to me and they would be like, well, what's your business model?
And I would explain, well, we hire the best team of hackers. And I emphasize that the team because
hacking really is a team sport these days. You can't just have the single prima donna who can
make everything happen. It needs to be the best team. And they're like, all right, well, that
sounds great. How are you going to grow that? I was like, well, as much as we can continue to
find the best team that we can fit that with. They're like, well, that doesn't scale. No,
it doesn't. Unless you're going to give up on that idea and try to figure out some other way of
commodity people, which is really the pyramid of I have some expensive people and then I just hire
lots of cheap labor. And even then, you're still scaling by person and the money that they're
making is still one hour of work for one hour of pay. So you want to do this. First thing,
incorporate. You need to establish a legal structure. So the different kinds of structures
are limited liability corporation and S corporation or C corporation. To start with,
the simplest one is a limited liability corporation, which is just providing you
the legal protections so that you as an individual have legal protection and coverage
for doing work. Check the name availability. The IRS and states have the ability for you to look
up the names that already exist. There are also ways that you can use names that don't necessarily
have collision. Like I used an acronym to start Grimm, SMFS, to keep this PG rated. I will not
share what that stands for, but use your imagination. And then we use Grimm as the
doing business ad. So that's the trade name that actually ties to our logo and what we're doing,
just like Scythe. With the IRS then, you need to go and register for an employee identification
number. So you go to the IRS website, you request an employee identification number,
they come back to you. That's basically the social security number for you. Why does the
IRS want it? Because they want their taxes. They want you to pay them money. When you make money,
they want it. Then at the state level, you need to create a local registration for each state
that you're doing business in. If you have an employee in that state, you have to register in
that state. If you sell in that state, you'll have to register in that state. I'm not going
to go into a lot of the details, but the clever states to register in are one of the most well
known, which is Delaware, and they are the the paragon for the ease of use and simple business
friendly laws. A couple of others that are variations of that that are also well known
are Nevada and Wyoming. As always, I'm not a lawyer. So make your own choice. And then a lot
of places, you also need to register down at the county government. While you're doing this,
I also recommend that you register with the U.S. government for procurement purposes.
So this is not the U.S. government. This is not the side of the U.S. government that wants to
take money. This is the side of the U.S. government that helps you get money. And so the two ways to
do that are with the SAM system. I believe that's just sam.gov. Register for a CAGE code, and then
Dun & Bradstreet will give you the same thing. Register and you'll get a DUNS number. They're
free. It doesn't cost anything. It's actually fairly easy to do. And that just sets you up in
place that if you ever need to do any kind of that stuff, and there are a lot of commercial
companies that also will sometimes request a CAGE or a DUNS number, you're already set up and you
don't have to worry about it again. So starting with your best friend forever. This is, of course,
a common challenge. Business never goes as planned. And you can destroy a lot of relationships and
friendships by doing that. So starting with, be clear on what are the roles, what are the
expectations. One common mistake that a lot of people make is they immediately set the percentages
of equity at the start. You don't necessarily have to do that. So, for example, you might decide,
hey, we're going to start this business. And after the end of the year, we're going to look and see
what's happened. And then maybe that's when we'll assign what the equity percentages should be.
And the advantage for doing that is that you can actually make it fair. Maybe somebody started off
and then, for whatever reason, decided to go do something else. You're not now still tied to that
person with them owning a percentage of the company because it's not even a financial question.
It can also be a question of control. Equity decides who gets to make the decisions in the
company. So what if things change? What does success look like? That's something where
that question where I got asked at the college keynote, what does your success look like? And I
was just like, well, I keep going. I don't have some measure of success for what I'm doing for
any of these companies other than particularly with Scythe. I just have a particular idea that
I think really can help the industry. And I want to see that get out there. Now, that's not to say
that money is not important. Money is the lifeblood of a company, especially if you have employees.
You don't put food on the plate with ideas. You put food on the plate with money. And so making
sure that with your friend, you both have those ideas of expectations. Who does what? What's the
compensation going to be? And then what are you trying to accomplish? And what does that success
look like? To raise or not to raise? That is the question. So let's start with the easy one.
Starting a services company, probably not. You're growing by people. As you make more money,
you hire more people and you grow organically. Very little reason and very few investors that
will invest in a services company. As with everything, there are no absolutes, but just
as a general rule, probably not a good idea. Products, you probably are going to look to
raise at some point because there's going to be some element of speed to market to expertise.
So my own personal example, I had a consultancy, Grimm. Grimm generates a good amount of cash.
We use that money to invest in incubating the idea of Scythe for a couple of years and doing R&D with
the Fortune 50 client that we were working with. And then I realized, okay, I want to take this
software to market. I know absolutely nothing about commercial software and how to go to market.
And so it wasn't the money that was important to me for the investors, but it was finding the
right investors who could help provide me that expertise and experience so that I didn't learn
some costly lessons that might kill the idea and successfully bring it together. So you're not just
looking at it from a money perspective. You're also looking at it, what do they bring to the table?
I wanted to call out, Haroon Mir had a great video on bootstrapping ego and really looking at that
perspective again, where we talked earlier on the BFF slide about control with equity. You're
constantly in this balance because as you bring other people in, and of course they bring and buy
their money in, what they're buying is part of the company. That equity in that company represents
control. And so there's this balance of how much control do I want to give up for other folks,
balancing that with the potential that that capital can be used to really grow us.
So I highly recommend checking out this video by Haroon to go in more detail.
So the types of investors, all investors are not created equal.
So the venture capital types are, there's funds and there's private equity. So these are the big
institutions. And the biggest thing that I would say is if you are looking at raising,
it takes some time to start to learn what the different types are. And particularly at the
seed round, there are not a lot of investors who actually invest small amounts at that level,
because it's a different time commitment for them. It's a different amount of risk.
And they typically have very large funds where them writing a $500,000 check is almost a waste
of time for them because they need to write really big checks to get the funds that are
sitting there out. Save yourself the time and ask upfront what they do. What kinds of check
sizes do they write? What rounds do they typically come in? Because you're going to find that there
are a lot of later stage investors who want to chew up your time early and they're not going
to give you money. Angels are smaller investors. They typically are writing check sizes of 25k to
$100,000, sometimes more, sometimes less. That's just a range. These are typically folks who have
been successful. Typically they were entrepreneurs. They want to continue to keep their hand in
supporting other entrepreneurs in the industry. They're going to be very friendly and supportive.
There's always friends and family. Friends and family are a good way to get started.
Then there's this other sort of side concept called incubators, where what they'll do is
it's typically a program that provides you office space. Pre-COVID, office space used to be a thing.
Now that it's not a thing anymore, I don't know what incubators do other than perhaps they connect
you to online seminars where they'll introduce you to different executives that might be in
an industry that's a potential buyer. They'll introduce you to other VCs and investors and
introduce you to other entrepreneurs. And then finally again, the government has a small business
innovation fund called SIPR. The link is here. And different elements of government will put out
different proposals. So if your technology or your idea matches one of those potential areas
of interest, this is free money. They don't take equity with this. It comes in phases.
Phase one is typically I think like $150,000 to $150,000. Excuse me, phase two can be $150,000 to
$250,000. And then phase three, where they're trying to help push and scale into the government
as well as commercialization, you're looking at a good half a million, $750,000.
And so again, that's like free money. So just something worth considering.
All right, so you've decided after all this thinking, you've got this idea, you're passionate,
you want to do it, you've fleshed it out, so you're going to raise. You need a pitch deck.
There are five core elements to the pitch deck. One page, what's the problem? One page,
how does your solution help with it? You could use a few more pages after that, but if you can't
condense in one slide how your solution works, you probably don't have it refined yet. Proof,
do you have beta customers? Do you have examples? Tell me what you've got other than,
that sounds like the greatest thing since sliced bread, that tells me that somebody else
thinks about this. This is how investors are trying to fit. Is this just a great idea in
somebody's, you know, in the proverbial engineer's garage? Or is this something that other people are
going to believe in? Funding, how much do you want? This took me a while to get around that.
I'm supposed to actually say how much money I want to actually do this. I just got so carried
up in the selling, I forgot I needed to actually say how much money do I want from you? And then,
what am I going to do with that? And then your vision, what does that look like? The schedule,
the milestones, when will we get to a minimum viable product? What does that look like?
Now, a lot of people get caught up on this part because investors might ask for, hey,
tell me the potential addressable market, which we'll talk about shortly. They might say, hey,
how am I supposed to know how much money we're making in two years? They're not looking for you
to tell them a correct number. What they are looking for is your thinking. How did you get
there? Does that make sense? Is it logical? So they're really just trying to get a better
understanding of going inside your head. At the end of this presentation, I have numerous lists
of wisdom from different entrepreneurs. This part includes Rangoola as well, and a link to
more details on how to put together your pitch deck. And again, don't be afraid to share your
pitch deck. I've had numerous folks send me examples of their pitch decks. I have shared my
pitch deck, which I have spent two years refining through different versions as I've continued to
learn what the hell I've built and what the hell our team has built. And I don't know if that one
ever goes away, if you ever figure out exactly what you built in completion. Maybe once you're
Apple, you have figured that out. And even then, it seems like they're still coming up with new
things. So the process. All right. So first, caveat. Everything Cishet white male founders
tell you probably will not work if you're not in that group. I am a Cishet white male founder.
So the point here, and my good friend Katie provided this quote here, is the raise process
is a very insular community. I can speak to one bias that I personally experienced, which is the
West Coast bias. A lot of VCs, a large portion of the money, are on the West Coast. Now, that has
been shifting, and there have been numerous centers of additional innovation and investment outside
of it, but it is the main draw. And numerous West Coast investors that I talked to, the first
question they would ask me, because I'm on the East Coast, is, so when are you moving to the
Valley? I'm like, well, I'm not moving to the Valley. I'm going to stay on the East Coast.
And that was a non-starter. Then there's a challenge which we see in InfoSec and IT in
general, which is the tech bros. The, hey, I'm a tech, you know, I'm a guy, and there's an inherent
bias about anybody who doesn't fit the certain way that they look. And then, of course, the
challenge here is because the community is so insular with the investments, it is based on
relationships, but you're stuck in this chicken and this egg of how do you build those relationships?
And so this is an area where, again, having built that network can help you crack it, but Katie
sums it up really well. This is a very insular community, and you're going to hear a lot of
advice from the Ted style talks of like, well, this is how you do it. And a lot of it won't apply
because that privilege doesn't automatically just confer. So capital. All right. Taking capital,
getting an investment is like getting married. You could have the prenuptial, which is a convertible
note or straight equity. So there's really two different ways of doing this. One,
convertible note is almost like a loan under set circumstances that once a round is finalized at
some point in the future, the money that they invested converts into that equity in that future.
And then, of course, there's just the straight equity, which is I'm buying this amount.
I'm giving this amount. I get this amount. I think it is an apt metaphor to talk about this
like marriage. Whoever you're jumping into bed with as a part of your company, they're going to
be there for a long time. And if it goes poorly, it's going to be very, very messy. So think very
carefully. Do not get caught up so much in the money assigned to a name and really think through
who and why you want to work with the various folks that you're bringing into your idea.
Some of these folks who are the major investors are probably going to want to have formal
influence through your board. And there's really two formal roles there. One is a director,
which means that they get a formal vote as a part of board assigned to the amount of their control,
which we've talked about. And then observers, where they don't have a formal vote, but they
are allowed to be and to talk at the board meetings. And then there could be other kinds
of folks on the board, like some people bring in independents, some people bring in folks that
represent that are independent, that represent different potential customer types for the
industry. But that board is going to be the captaincy that provides the advice for execution.
So this is probably the biggest thing that I've seen a lot of founders and CEOs struggle with,
is in most places, you do not work for the board. The board works for and with you. They're there
at the end of the day. They have their meeting, they say their things. It's the CEO who's
responsible for going and executing that and making sure that that actually happens. And yes,
they're accountable to the board, but don't get lost in the fact that the board is there to help
you, not just tell you what to do. So addressable market. Addressable market is
really, really, really, really, really, really, really hard to do. Like I said, it's more around
the thinking. The best way to do an addressable market buildup is saying, okay, I think there are
these kinds of customers. So I have a blue unicorn or red unicorn and a purple unicorn
who represent different kinds of customers. And they're willing to pay roughly this amount,
or this amount and this amount. And I think there's this many of them.
This is the preferred way to try to build up an addressable market as opposed to
vulnerability management. It's a $4 billion market. I think I can get 10% of it. Therefore,
my addressable market is $400 million. And that's not going to cut it. They want to see
you understanding, hey, I think that I can charge this kind of customer this amount. And I think
there are this many of them, this many of them, and this many of them. And then put that together.
And now you can show all of your thinking. Like I said, they're not looking for the correct answer
because they don't know. This isn't a test. You're not being graded. It's really how believable is it
and does it make sense? Is that something that somebody could see playing out as you execute?
That's how you get your overall addressable market. So, economics. A person does not cost
a person. Most people think of what a person costs, or in this case, a unicorn. I love my
unicorn references. And it's not just the salary that makes up what a person costs.
Whoop, going the wrong way. So, hourly salary is the base cost. And then on top of that,
you have multiple elements. Fringe, general administration, and overhead.
So, fringe is benefits. Health insurance, holidays, paid time off. What are the different
kinds of benefits that are 401k match that are offered to an employee? Then you have the back
office element. So, there's two elements of back office. General and administration is like
headquarters. What does it cost to administer the overall company? Overhead are specific project
costs. So, in a product company, you're probably not going to have specific project costs,
but in a consultant company or a services-based consultant company, you might have specific client
costs that you need to have. And those roll up, and that gives you this multiple. So, on average,
you're going to see a multiple of an employee costing anywhere from about 1.3 times their
salary up to the low to mid 2. So, up to about 2.5 for a very high-end expensive company.
Hiring. Hey, you know people, right? And that's typically where you start is in the very beginning
when you're looking for those first hires, you're probably going to be looking at friends in your
network. One of the challenges that come with hiring and when a company is small is the mistake
that folks make around rank. Chances are the person that you hire to be in charge of sales
or engineering or business partnership, they're probably not going to be the same person that's
in that role if you do become very successful. The difference between running a company in sales for
a company that's small and 10 people, that job changes when it's 500 people. Their ability to
grow with that becomes challenging and that rank can make it difficult for them to grow into that.
So, that's something where in the very beginning try to punt that as much as possible. The real
big part on this of course is incentive. What are the different kinds of incentives that I can offer
for this? I remember when I first started Grimm and we were three people and I was looking to
hire engineers and one of them was just like, well, how much of the company I'm getting?
I was like, I mean, we've been in business now for a year and a half or a year, whatever it was,
and you're not bringing anything to the table. You have a salary and all of the benefits,
you put no blood, sweat, and tears in this, and fundamentally you're not going to help
grow the company. Equity really wants to be tied to like serious growth. Now, what I've done is,
so I want everybody to feel like they're a part of it, is hey, maybe you're not getting like
significant equity, but we are going to align everybody by giving out, all employees are going
to have options in the company, which ties to equity. So what an option is, is a way to be a
non-taxable event. Again, not an accountant, not a lawyer, but the phrasing here is important
because if I give you direct equity, which is worth something of value, that's a taxable event
immediately. If I give you options, which are essentially saying, hey, today's price for what
we're valuing this at, the company's going to grow, you get to benefit off of that delta,
that's what an option does for you. So that as the company grows in value, you have an option to
take advantage of that growth. And then finally, of course, is the bonus, which you want to make
sure is clear on that. Keeping in mind, particularly as a young company, bonuses can be very
challenging because you need that cash in the beginning to grow because cash is king.
Cash is king or queen. Cash is royalty. We're going to be correct. So we talked about benefits.
One thing that I'll throw out there to help make your life easier, I'm not necessarily
advocating for it, I've never used them, is the PEO, the Professional Employer Organization.
So there are companies out there that what they do is effectively you and your employees
become an employee of their company. And you benefit from the scale of all of those employees
to provide savings back that you're paying for. So they provide all of the benefits and the health
insurance and the 401k, they'll do the HR stuff, and you pay for that, but it costs you less than
it would to go and get it on your own, is the theory. So just another option on how to do
otherwise, like we talked about earlier with tolerance for bullshit, you will have to go and
learn all of this yourself. I personally went and I learned more about health insurance than I ever
thought I would know in my entire life. And that's the way it goes if that's what you want to do.
Back office, other considerations for back office, support for contracts. Most folks are not experts
in reading through terms and conditions. You are going to get lots of terms and conditions because
any customer is going to have a formal element there. Legal, you need to get counsel. We talked
before, I'm not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. You will want counsel to help with some
of these elements. As you grow, human resources will become more important because in the very
beginning, everything's very simple. You don't really even need policies probably. At some point,
I promise you, somebody will do something dumb. You will get to that scale. That's where you really
need to preempt those with having human resources and policy to get ahead of that. Payroll, people
need to be paid regularly. You cannot screw that up. Somebody should be doing your payroll.
Accounting, accounting is critical because this is the system of record. If money is the lifeblood
of the company, accounting is what tracks where all that money is going and keeps you out of hot
water when the IRS comes knocking and saying, hey, we think you paid this amount. You owe us this much.
And then finally, business insurance. You are going to need to have various kinds of business
insurance, anything from general liability to errors and omissions if you're doing professional
consulting, different kinds of property insurance. What I would recommend is that first contract that
you get from a customer is going to stipulate exactly what amounts of insurance you need to
have. You will have enough time between getting that first copy and having to sign it and execute
it to go and get insurance from somebody specifically to those amounts. So just me providing
like a little cheat there. They'll tell you what to get. Go get it when you need to get it. You
actual office itself. So now that COVID completely is a thing and nobody knows what an office is
anymore, the remote work from home element is much more common. Really pay attention to the culture
and the scale to do that. In the old days, getting space was something a lot of people rushed out to
go do. Like I need a place to hang my shingle because I don't feel like a real business until
I do that. I think that the pandemic has helped make that easier where folks don't feel
obligated to do that anymore. But it is a consideration if you want. And of course, we
talked about incubators as an option, but there's also dedicated, of course, now shared workspaces
depending on what you want to do. And then on top of that, of course, is where
do you want to put your equipment? What are you doing for storage? And tracking different assets.
Intellectual property. So intellectual property is how you formalize what's valuable inside your
company. Most obvious that everybody knows about are patents. A patent is where you go and with a
lawyer file for disclosing what the idea is. And there's different kinds of patents. I won't go
into the details there. And then there's this concept of trade secrets, which are, hey, I'm
doing something that's proprietary to me. And by not disclosing it, it's essentially my own IP.
Not as well protected, though, as a patent where you formally identify that. And then two other
elements, which are trademarks and copyright. Trademarks are I have a particular image,
like the Scythe logo is trademarked. So that somebody can't come and work off of that.
And then a copyright is anything, any written work that you publish is yours. Somebody can't
take it and just do whatever with it, claim it as their own.
Talk to a lawyer. They're usually not this good looking.
How to get clients. So, we are running out of time. So, I'm going to try to speed through these.
Go to market is this concept of once I've built an idea, how do I take it and scale that across
being able to sell it? Acquisition, though, is where we're just looking at, like, how do we go
and get those clients? And again, this is where your network comes in handy. They will introduce
you to potential clients. They will introduce you to prospects who are like, hey, yeah, I'm
willing to try that out. One of the most interesting things I didn't really understand until I became a
software vendor, because everybody picks on the vendors, right? Oh, vendors are like this and
vendors are like that. At least they have good swag. And I love the free booze at the parties.
Like, that's all vendors good for. Is there a lot of folks who understand, particularly in
the InfoSec community, we in InfoSec don't really solve problems, right? We solve pieces of it,
which clients then build out to a defense in depth measure. And there are a lot of clients
who understand that they need to invest or they want to invest in being early adopters on what's
the next technology, because they believe that can help make everything better for everybody else.
We talked about contracts. The tissue paper of contracts is what's called the non-disclosure
agreement. This should be a very simple document. The good news is when you're starting out,
most of your clients already have all this paperwork for you. And so you can just follow
along with that. The contract for the work itself, being very explicit with expectations,
the period of performance, and then of course, how and when do you get paid?
One of the things that was the hardest part around doing a business is I thought that
getting the work was the hard part. Doing the work was easy because we're an expert,
we know what we're doing. I didn't realize the hardest part is getting paid. Clients do not pay
on time. Clients, you have to chase them. You have to focus on getting paid. A lot harder than it
sounds. In conclusion, every month, you will face a random existential crisis that no amount
of planning can prepare you for. You'll get past it. You will survive. And at some point,
it's not happening. And you're not alone in doing it. I wanted to throw out some resources here.
There's a Security Founders Slack. There's a Future Founders channel for those who are
interested in getting started but aren't quite there. Some recommendations that I have that for
ones that have done well for me, Gusto providing all the payroll and benefits administration.
Pilot is easy and cheap accounting. The challenge there is it doesn't handle a lot of complexity.
They only show up monthly. I liked Brex because that was a credit card that I could find that
was not tied to my personal credit. Since then, additional credit cards have come out that
also do this. So, I'll just throw out a handout. I think Stripe also does that now and I think
there's two others. And then, any entrepreneur that you know will be happy to help as best as
possible. I like to think of being an entrepreneur as like joining an exclusive club where the only
requirement is the desire to join because every member will help you.
And then, I have numerous entrepreneurs here who have provided their advice. So,
all of that will be available in the slides. And I'm ready to take questions, I think.
And questions will be in Discord and other venues when we share them with the community. Bryson,
this is great. Absolutely wonderful. We might not be able to get to the remainder slides
in the YouTube recordings. Yeah, I don't expect that. I'm just going to make sure that the slides
are shared so that everybody can go through them on their own. So, where should people
find those slides? I will post that in Discord when I figure it out next week when this airs.
Sounds great. I just want to make sure we have a solution provided before we do it.
Well, great. That was just absolutely wonderful. I thought that you were very methodical about
laying it out because there are so many people, as we know in the community, have a really great
idea and they want to charge out and do it and don't understand that infrastructure and passion
and your tolerance for bullshit are really key things that need to happen. Bryson, I know you're
really busy. Thanks for all you do for the community and thanks for being part of DEF CON.
Take care. Thanks for having me.