Storm Ventures

🚀 Excited to announce the launch of AirMDR! Our Autonomous SOC as a Service, powered by AI-driven Virtual Analysts. Anthony Morris and I started on this journey almost a year ago. We have both run SOCs, worked with SOCs, helped transform SOCs - but felt that the best SOC transformation is yet to come. Way too many tasks in SOC are still being done manually. And, automation has not paid the ROI for 90%+ of the enterprises. Here is the full story behind why we started AirMDR - and why we are doing this as a service. https://lnkd.in/d4hWgVtD I really want to thank all our design partners, some of whom have become customers in helping us build the SOC they always thought should exist. And, I want to thank our investors Sid Trivedi and Tae Hea Nahm - who backed us at the stage where it was just an idea. And one of the most important things is the people you work with. I am grateful to get an opportunity to work with a very talented team, and some very seasoned executives like Srikant Vissamsetti, Anand Ramanathan and Carolyn Crandall A huge thank you to advisors and friends who helped all along the way.. Mahendra R., Pradeep Aswani, Kane Lightowler, Anshu Sharma Abhishek Shukla Tushar Kothari Atif Ghauri Nicholas M. Chris Castaldo Ashu Garg We are just getting started.. Press Release: https://lnkd.in/d-CZF_5R Why AirMDR: https://lnkd.in/d4hWgVtD #Cybersecurity #AI #Innovation #AirMDR

Today, Zscaler announced the intent to acquire Airgap Networks, a leader in cybersecurity solutions for business-critical networks and the creators of a pioneering network segmentation technology, which will propel our leadership in #ZeroTrust SASE forward to further disrupt legacy firewall technologies. The combination of Zscaler’s Zero Trust SD-WAN with Airgap’s agentless segmentation technology will extend Zero Trust to the LAN, protecting east-west traffic between branch offices, campus and manufacturing facilities with critical OT infrastructure and providing comprehensive cybersecurity protection without the need for site-to-site VPNs. The cloud-native, proxy-based Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange serves as the foundation for Zscaler Zero Trust SD-WAN, which enables enterprises to securely connect branch locations and provides fast, reliable and secure access to the internet and private applications, while maintaining operational simplicity. The integration of Airgap’s technology provides a seamless, policy-based access approach to Zero Trust segmentation that gives enterprises the ability to easily scale and bring branch locations online in an efficient and cost-effective manner. This development reinforces Zscaler’s ongoing commitment to providing our enterprise customers with innovative, AI-enabled cybersecurity solutions that help them accelerate their business, while staying ahead of emerging cyber threats. For more context on today’s announcement, please read the blog by Naresh Kumar: https://lnkd.in/dNqBGvcS

So, you want to sell your software to the mystical enterprise. It won't happen. You’ll sell to a specific person, with very personal career goals - and urgent pains. Successful enterprise sales happen when your product fits into the pains and ambitions this person has and you can replicate the same pattern over a large number of enterprises. Over and over, the same pattern emerges: Through heroic founder sales, you got your company to 1M ARR 💰. You’ve gone and raised a great round, and now everyone - your team, your new and old investors, and your parents 👫 - have huge expectations. Sadly, you can’t clone yourself and just do more sales yourself. Sadly, just throwing more money at sales and marketing at this point won’t help as well. There’s much more to it. You might have your sales process neatly laid out in your CRM solution of choice. The problem is: your customer doesn’t care. 😕 They care about their own career, nothing else. This is what the Hero Customer Journey addresses - it revolves around customer empathy. ❤️ Over the next few weeks, I’ll cover each step of the Hero Customer journey to provide you with a framework you can apply to your own sales journey. It all starts with the champion. 🏆 We’ll look into how to identify that mysterious figure in the next post. “Ok, but why is there a surfing unicorn?” 🦄 - That’s easy. Enterprise sales are like learning to surf. 🌊 First, you paddle. It’s high touch, you learn a lot and adapt every minute. This is the phase of heroic founder sales. Then, there’s this pivotal moment where you learn how to catch the wave. This is what this series of posts is all about: Unlocking Growth. The last step is surfing: This is where you actually scale your growth. 🤙 The Unlocking Growth methodology was developed by Tae Hea Nahm, one of the founding partners of Storm Ventures. This series of posts will obviously only be able to provide a pretty superficial overview of the topic. Please check out the Survival to Thrival website below, where you will find a lot of more information on the Hero Customer Journey. Happy to engage in a discussion on what your experience in enterprise sales is. At Storm Ventures, we’ve invested in many European B2B SaaS leaders over the last years and want to do much more in this exciting market. Please get in touch! 💬 The Hero Customer Journey 1 - Why buy now? The Urgent Pain 2 - Why you? The Date Wow 3 - Why you? The Marry Wow 4 - 1st contract 5 - 1st value 6 - Standard Workflow 7 - Full Deployment 8 - New Use Cases 9 - The Hero