00:00:00 - Andrew Monaghan I love chatting with companies on the operational technology or the critical infrastructure side. I get to learn about an area that I don't know as much about as I do on the It or cyber side and just completely different or fresh new approaches to tackle cybersecurity. Colin Dunn is the CEO of Fend and they have built something unique, if only because It's hardware and and software combined. Listen that in this episode for why there is hardware involved, the big impact Fend can have on any country's critical infrastructure, but especially the US's. How he started building the prototype, the initial reaction he got from investors, and also, what's the one song Colin could listen to for the rest of his life? Don't go away. Welcome to the Sales Bluebird podcast, where we help cybersecurity companies grow sales faster. I am your host, Andrew Monaghan. Our guest today is Colin Dunn, founder and CEO at Fend Incorporated. Colin. Welcome to Sales Bluebird.

00:01:13 - Colin Dunn Thanks for having me, Andrew.

00:01:15 - Andrew Monaghan I'm looking forward to our conversation, Colin, for a couple of reasons. One is we're going to go into an area that I know a little bit about, but not enough about, which is critical infrastructure, operational technology, that whole area. We've had two or three guests on over the last year or so who are experts in that area, spend all their time in that area. And every time I talk to someone, I'm always learning. The other thing is that this is interesting because I think often or almost all the time, what I'm doing is talking to a founder who's founded a software company. And what you've done is founded a software plus hardware company. And there's good reasons for that, obviously, because of what you do, but I think it presents sometimes a different dynamic about how you go about selling it, some of the challenges of getting it into the market and building things that aren't just lines of code. So I'm keen to understand more about that. A quick break to say that this episode is sponsored by It Harvest. With over 3200 vendors in cybersecurity, it is hard to keep track of all the latest developments, as well as research and analyze categories and subcategories within cybersecurity, which is where the It Harvest cybersecurity platform comes in. Want to know which subcategories in cloud security are growing the fastest? You'll get it in a few clicks. Want to know and track everything about your main competitors and keep up with their hiring and news? Simple search to be done. Want to know the top 20 fastest growing companies based out of Israel?

00:02:53 - Colin Dunn Easy.

00:02:53 - Andrew Monaghan Just a couple of clicks to get that. It Harvest is the first and only research platform dedicated to cybersecurity and it's run by Richard Steenan, who has done it all in cybersecurity. From the VP of Research at Gartner, a CMO at a cybersecurity vendor, a lecturer on cybersecurity, advisor to startups, advisory board member at Startups and a main board member as well, the whole lot. Find out more by going to Salesbluebird.com Research. That's salesbluebird.com research. Now back to the episode. When I look at your LinkedIn resume, Colin, I see someone who has got a background in engineering, and specifically mechanical engineering. You spent some time at two or three companies for quite a time. The company before Fend, you were there for over five years, almost six years. It looks like you took on many different roles, management roles, project management roles, but again, in the infrastructure side and then fast forwarding to August 2017. It looks like that's when you founded Fend Incorporated. I'm going to go out of limb here a little bit and see if I can explain Fend to the audience and have you critique me afterwards whether I've got it even close to on track for what you guys do. So let me see if I can try and piece this together for the audience. So when you think about critical infrastructure, operational technology, one of the things that I think is broadly true is that you're in environments which shouldn't or don't change very much over time. They're not like a laptop or a server where you're constantly changing configurations and setups and trying to fix things all the time. There are technologies which are reasonably well set in stone, but still you need to be able to communicate with them to understand what's going on and what's not going on. And when you got the communications allowed between someone or something and that device, that's a potential vector of attack for an outsider to come in. And I think reading between the lines of what Fenn does, it says, look, we recognize that you need to have the communication, but we've got some hardware and software that combined actually only allows one way communication. So what you can do is configure the device, but then only have the alerts coming from the device back to wherever you want it to go. So you can monitor, do all the things you have to do, monitor it, but without ever someone coming from the outside being able to get in and therefore attack or alter or take down that device. Is that even close to the truth?

00:05:47 - Colin Dunn That's pretty good. When it comes to critical infrastructure, a lot of this has been here since before we were born, and we'll be here till we retire and just sort of acknowledging that if this pumping station has been pumping stuff since 1992 and it's still working, then you don't need to do anything about it. But the is it still working is the key question. And there's a couple of things there. One, this is older equipment that you want to bring it online, but it may not be designed in the first place to be brought online at all. And certainly it's not going to defend itself against cyberattack and you're not going to be running software on these programmable logic controllers and older tech. And at the same time too, this stuff isn't getting any younger and it's going to break down more often over time. And we have the complexity of that along with it's just been tough for a long time, even pre pandemic to hire enough maintenance people. So what do you do with stuff that's getting older with a shrinking workforce and the impact of this stuff failing is greater and greater as populations rise, as stuff gets more expensive, what can we do to bring that equipment online in a safe way? And that's what we're all about. And that background you mentioned with Mechanical Engineering, what we've created is more like a one way check valve for data than a piece of software. Some of that background of appreciating that we need to meet this equipment where it is, we need to also meet the teams where they are. Knowing I've worked with building managers who've worked in the same building for 30 years, you can't expect some of these teams to completely abandon the way they've done things. We make it easier for them to touch the cloud in a safe way when they wouldn't necessarily touch it with a ten foot pole.

00:07:25 - Andrew Monaghan So it is an environment which is reasonably static, not just in terms of technology, but it sounds like also the people that are running it have been doing it for a while. They're not job hoppers like people in Silicon Valley software companies are, it sounds like. Yeah.

00:07:38 - Colin Dunn And these are facility managers who, if and when they retire, they're taking the knowledge with them. There are times where just nobody knows how these systems work. And you find that as well with a lot of customers in utility side and the government side. They don't have any institutional knowledge about some of their questions, some of their systems, and they question how it even works. They're beholden to their support contractors and when things get really tough, what can they do? And we want to make sure that they have access to the information, they have the visibility, and be able to if you have 30 factories, for example, and fewer and fewer people who know what it's doing be able to share that information among those sites so that you can make good use of limited expertise.

00:08:21 - Andrew Monaghan Let's go right back then. According to LinkedIn, August 2017 was the time when you officially started fan. I'm sure there was things that happened before then. It's back to that moment where you were sitting somewhere talking to someone and you thought your phraseology, I'm going to create a one way check valve to solve this problem for cybersecurity, not just for flows. And suddenly it all kind of came together and made sense and you thought, you know what, I'm going to start a company.

00:08:51 - Colin Dunn I'd say the two parts of that there's the technical approach had to come up with that. And you know what? I'm going to start a company that goes back even further. And I'd say, even before I was an engineer, want to be inventor, filed provisional patents as a teenager on stuff that didn't necessarily have a market need. And that's where later on when I went to get my MBA said, oh, we need to not only solve problems, we need to solve problems that a lot of people are willing to spend money on that solution. So sort of taking that desire to create the novel and the new as well as the business education to say, and there has to be a sustainable business model for that. Those things came together a few years after business school and I started seeing these pain points from customers that either had their own internal processes, they're like, I can't get around my own paperwork, I can't bring this equipment online, but it's also failing. And I saw that there was this need to get data, but also this need to not touch those old systems and change how they operated and sort of tinkered with ideas, with ideas of mirrors and lasers and things. And I had hoped I'd come up an entirely new technology category. And it turns out that the category of data diodes have been around for 20 years and I just didn't even know what I was searching for. They've been in the intelligence community, they've been in the nuclear power space. And I was disappointed. I said, I'm not the first one to ever think of this concept. And I went back and thought, well, Apple wasn't the first to create a music player, but what are the barriers for this to go really big? Well, the previous technology was too expensive, it was too complex. You couldn't work on it yourself. You needed additional servers or software and there were licenses and it was hard for folks to buy. And there are just so many things on the business side, on the product packaging side of what are we offering that could be made so much better for the customers that we were targeting. And so put on that MBA hat and said, hey, this is a business problem that we can solve, while at the same time being really creative with the technology. And from why did I started then? There were just lots of things happening at the same time. Had my first child and the office where I used to jog to work had moved 12 miles further away and I'm not going to jog 17 miles to work. It just wasn't happening. So there's just changes in lifestyle. I've just sort of like, this is time for a change. You got to try something new. And it just became the right time for this.

00:11:23 - Andrew Monaghan And did you go into your workshop or garage and just start tinkering at that point? Or what were the next few steps you went through?

00:11:31 - Colin Dunn There was some tinkering and certainly I had to continue to get traction from my main investor and supporter from my wife. This isn't going to be some startup lifestyle. I had to show that we were making progress. And so there was tinkering. I was using some Arduinos and lasers and just built a prototype that could send like one character per second, just super slow speed. And I said, if I can do that, I can find the people that know how to do this better. And managed to join a startup accelerator, managed to get some federal funding, let me hire a full time engineer, get some office space and say, okay, I'm not doing the electronics design anymore. I'll focus on making sure that we've got the partnerships, find the customers, listen to what they need, and built that team. But thankfully we had some of those relationships and federal funding that allowed us to get going. But there was some early Tinkering just to show, hey, this can be done, but boy, if I find the right people, we can do it really well.

00:12:30 - Andrew Monaghan What was the big value of going through that startup accelerator?

00:12:33 - Colin Dunn You said probably a lot of it was challenging assumptions and assuming that, hey, we have this Widget, we're going to save the world with it. Now a lot of those assumptions were on how customers buy and how investors look at companies and it really made us think, what can we do more than just be a hardware company? It really helped us launch the concept of Fendcloud, which was bringing data from legacy industrial controls equipment through our one way diode hardware off to the cloud and then bringing in the best of analytics for those customers who might not otherwise be allowed to get data on their phone. They might have to live with a spreadsheet they get every six months and some customers picking up hard drives from around the world. Can they get that data safely and can we, as a business, turn what would be a one time hardware sale into an ongoing relationship with the customer? But that was some of the value of the startup accelerators, thinking bigger about what the business model could be.

00:13:33 - Andrew Monaghan And when you're thinking about funding, did you find it a challenge to get past any misconceptions or preconceptions about, well, we only invest in software and trying to find people who are okay and actually supportive of hardware based startups as well?

00:13:50 - Colin Dunn Well, that's definitely a recurring theme, is that I think most investors who are in some kind of tech or cyber tech are staying away from hardware, but not all. So it was less a matter of, well, let's completely get away from hardware. There was going to be a piece of hardware. The hardware is part of a solution that is a really hard problem to solve and that's probably why the problem was still available to solve. But that one way data flow allowing the confidence that nothing's going to get back into those legacy systems was a key part of it. But finding where those hardware and combination hardware, software investors reside was a big exercise. And we did a lot of pitching to a lot of folks that at times it was even in the first two minutes, which was almost a bit refreshing. You have hardware, we don't actually want this, we'll give you the next 28 minutes back. But that's also part of why we went with some federal funding at the very beginning with our SBIR Award, with Department of Defense contract, because they know they have some problems that aren't going to be solved by some software company that's outsourcing their development to another country. At the same time, we learned that because we were making our hardware here in the US. And we were the low cost provider in a category, there was a little bit less worry about. The other worry that you see on the hardware side is, oh, someone in China is going to make it for cheaper. Our customers are not buying critical infrastructure cybersecurity technology from China. And so I've got that going for me. In fact, there's so much Chinese made tech at military installations, at utilities, and there's not a real knowledge of what lingering threat is there that we can actually provide a barrier that prevents something from being activated on those systems that are in place. So we're actually in a really good spot with the hardware approach we've got, and we make great margins on the hardware. But really that combined offering with Fendcloud allows us to make money in a bunch of different ways. But yeah, I'd say hardware, there are many allergies to hardware in the investment community.

00:15:59 - Andrew Monaghan I like that word allergies to hardware. Yeah. I think in general it's more difficult is what people say, right, that scaling involves more working capital and things like that to really get it going. But let me go back to something you said before, which caught my attention, was throughout our critical infrastructure, there's hardware, there's components from who knows where, right? Maybe it's China, maybe it's other places that we were not quite so sure about it as well. So going to replace those or fix those will be a gargantuan task. But what you're saying is you're able to go in with the message of let's mitigate that risk, let's leave it where it is. But let me give you something that's going to take away a lot of the concern you're going to have about.

00:16:40 - Colin Dunn That stuff still sitting there in some ways. There are some places where we serve the role of the big magnet in Tony Stark. And you're not pulling from Iron Man, you're not pulling the shreds of shrapnel out of him, but you can make sure that those shreds don't get any closer. And not having seen every Avengers movie, maybe this all sorts itself out later. But in the early ones, at least, serving that role, making sure that this doesn't get worse and in fact, being able to operate with that body you've got, with that infrastructure you've got, make the most of it, that's a role that we can serve without having to tear a whole bunch of stuff out or doing some really painful surgery. That's a role we're happy to play because that's part of how I got into this in the first place, was about reducing costs and improving resilience. And if we can help improve resilience without spending a bunch of money tearing out these controllers that have been there and made abroad, we can really do some better things with that money.

00:17:44 - Andrew Monaghan I love that whole idea of tackling it from a different way, right. The brute force, the obvious way is let's just replace all that. But what if there was other compensating controls or something else that we could use to mitigate that risk? I love that whole concept for those of us that are watching on video right now. Colin, do you want to just quickly show us what this piece of hardware looks like?

00:18:09 - Colin Dunn Sure. So I've got some of our current generation hardware. It's a box which is black and has our logo on it. So it's not the most exciting looking piece of hardware, but it's got inputs and outputs. We've got Ethernet and serial, we've got a separately grounded power so we can keep folks out who might hack in through the power lines. And fundamentally what it does is it takes data from a source, turns it into light, shines it in one direction, and gets it off to where it needs to go with no physical way to get back in. And we've had that tested by the Department of Defense and others, and it's truly a one way broadcast of information. So where you have that need to keep an eye on industrial equipment or critical networks, you can get the data out, nobody's getting back in.

00:18:53 - Andrew Monaghan And for those listening, it looked like almost like a home router, right? That's our size. The important question, does it have flashing lights though? Because you can't have a box without flashing lights.

00:19:03 - Colin Dunn Calm we do have flashing lights. We have some ten different lights. If you need different flashing patterns here.

00:19:12 - Andrew Monaghan I just remember in the days, going into server rooms or data centers, all you see is things flashing around. You think, oh, it must all be good because it's all got flashing lights in it. Let's go back to one of the things you said before, which was the buying side of this. So who do you go and engage with? At what sort of level are they? Are they specialist people on the OT side, or are they just general security folks?

00:19:38 - Colin Dunn So we have an interesting mix of customers. Some of them know exactly what they want. They come to us through the website, they order the product, they get their products, they order more of it. They're doing it in house, and they know that they have these networks that they need to segment and they need to get data from the operational side of the house, the OT side, into the It side. And those folks often have roles like plant manager. There's an increasing number of people that do OT cybersecurity, but it still tends to be more people who process engineers who've had to learn cyber and sometimes It's cybersecurity professionals who've decided to get into the operational side. It might be somebody from the It department and a manufacturer. This is a great way for folks to get in and say, hey, our factories need better security. You here in the It department, go learn what it takes on the OT side. But it tends to be folks on whether It's folks have come to us or folks that we have approached at utilities, whether they're water utilities or electric cooperatives, where they have a need to get data at times because they need to reduce truck rolls or they need to know which substation has gone out this time. Did a squirrel true through a wire? Did a tree come down? Sometimes they're living in the dark as their customers are in the dark, and they just need better information so that they can solve these problems faster. They're not otherwise bringing this stuff online because they want more data. They need to improve speed to fixing a problem. They need to do more with fewer people due to retirements or other reasons. On the It side of the house, this is a different audience, and we haven't really cracked that nut yet because they're used to just a different set of things intrusion detection systems, firewalls and backups so they can go restore the state of that network. But in an industrial setting, if somebody blows something up in your substation, you're not restoring the state of that. It might be two years before you can get the parts. So we're dealing with a different audience today, but I think that there are more and more people in the boardroom and on the It side that understand the OT risks. And so we're having a bit more pulled into that direction.

00:21:45 - Andrew Monaghan It seems like it's getting more education, right? People are more aware both from a standpoint of knowing what it's all about, but secondly, knowing that there's actually experts who know a lot more than they do about that whole side, right, and therefore being comfortable bringing them in to talk about what needs to be done.

00:22:02 - Colin Dunn And there's a lot of different pressures now that there weren't even a few years ago. You see a cyber insurance as a market starting to fall apart and being able to either self insure and when you have to do that, you say, wait a minute, what are my actual risks here? I need to understand, what could somebody do to our organization on the industrial side that might lead to supply disruption, might lead to stock prices reducing. And just the understanding that there's this cyber physical element to not only the bonuses of executives, but at times we see with Pacific Gas and Electric talk of executives going to jail over fires. If you're going to put that kind of responsibility and accountability at the board level, you start getting attention and that has really been some of the drivers. It comes to liability, shareholder value. And bringing this to a place where needing to disclose those cyber risks as part of your investor reporting, I think is where we're headed.

00:23:05 - Andrew Monaghan Yeah, I think you're right. It's amazing how that whole site has changed in the last few years from the big rise of cyber insurance. And now people are in a question a little bit about how well protected are we really by an insurance policy with a lot of clauses in it? Colin, before we get to the sales end of this, let's get to know a bit more about you. I've got a list of questions right here. If you give me three numbers between one and 35, I'll list out the questions they correspond to.

00:23:37 - Colin Dunn Sounds good. How about the 33, 34 and 35?

00:23:42 - Andrew Monaghan Love it. Okay, 33. Dive bar or cocktail bar?

00:23:47 - Colin Dunn Probably dive bar.

00:23:49 - Andrew Monaghan Any particular one in mind when you say that?

00:23:52 - Colin Dunn Oh gosh, it's been so long since I've done anything interesting between the startup and family and stuff. So just looking back in time, the places that I used to go have closed. And there was a place called actually they may have reopened at this point called Froggy Bottom, which is Washington DC. Real dive bar actually was kind of the first place I really learned to love chicken wings, but that's more my style. I don't really know what to do with a $30 cocktail.

00:24:25 - Andrew Monaghan Yeah, any drink that's $30, I'd be nervous about drinking. I think 34 is what annoys you most.

00:24:37 - Colin Dunn Probably things about myself I see in others. So just sort of if there are expectations of an outcome, probably taking a step back from there. I know that when I was growing up, or even early in my career, like, I was probably better as an individual performer and like really, you know, if if you gave me something, I could do it. But it was harder to be a team player and the further along you get in your career, the more you need those team players. And then if you see people early in their career and they're more like the individual contributor, they're not ready to jump in. I find that annoying, but I find it annoying because that was me not that long ago. So that's probably what's the most annoying.

00:25:24 - Andrew Monaghan Very self aware answer, I think, to that question. I like that a lot. And then last one is what's one song you could listen to for the rest of your life?

00:25:37 - Colin Dunn Let's see. I've always been a fan of Groove Line by Heat Wave.

00:25:44 - Andrew Monaghan I will have to go and find that and listen to it. Will it be one that I recognize without realizing that's what it was, or do you think it'll be new to me?

00:25:53 - Colin Dunn You may have heard it in the past. You'd be digging out from the archives.

00:25:59 - Andrew Monaghan Okay, well, nothing wrong with going back to the archives. Speaking of archives, let's transition over. So one of the important days at a startup is the day you actually decide to form the company. Another important day, Colin, is when you get your first real, live, paying, hard cash customer who's saying, yes, we're going to give you a PO for a bit of money here. Take me back to that day and what it was like.

00:26:29 - Colin Dunn Yeah, that was back somewhere around the very end of 2019 or so, and we had a water utility here in the DC area who we were talking to and said, hey, I need this. I'm otherwise burning DVDs, taking it from the treatment plant over to the It side of the house. I don't trust the It side of the house, let alone the bad guys over there. They don't understand my treatment plants. I don't want them touching it. So they were using an air gap and saying, here's your Daily disk, and they found this is not only an annoyance and the expense of the disc, but there was real labor cost. Having somebody sit there and burn a disc for ten minutes and walk it over there. I mean, it comes out to a few thousand dollars a year just in labor costs that we're saving that customer. But it felt good to have that first Real paying customer. They became a repeat customer. We're looking to make additional sales to them, but it opened up other markets. Like, we weren't even looking at water utilities before that, and now we're in several different water utilities. So it was exciting for us. I mean, it was sort of that moment where you can look back at that point, you can look back and say, I made a thing here in America and I sold it, and is serving a community with millions of customers that are relying on us to keep their water safe. It was a proud moment.

00:27:45 - Andrew Monaghan Proud moment. And you kind of feel the responsibility a little bit as well. I talked to a finder last week. He said, at that moment, we moved from being a development shop to being a real company with customers who expect things from us. And it definitely kind of brought home what they were trying to do. Now, as you think about the sales side, Colin, you're probably doing a lot of founder led selling at the time. At what point did you think, we need to do just more than just me and start thinking about building a team? When do you know it was the right time to do.

00:28:20 - Colin Dunn That fairly early on. It may be through some, well, certainly help from the startup accelerator Smart City Works. Let us know that you're going to need that team, but also that there's different options for bringing people on board who can go out there and network and educate. Because a lot of our challenge, which has gotten easier over time, is that we're bringing a category of technology to markets that have never heard of it and they have a need, but they didn't really know there was a solution to avoid truck rolls, to avoid living with higher risk. And so we early onboarded some sales agents that got a very high commission, but I wasn't paying them an hourly rate. And at some point, even though they occasionally made a sale, this wasn't the only thing they were doing. They were all fractional, didn't have their full attention. And it was hard to find ones that were putting in the effort to understand the technology enough to sell it to people who are like, well, how do I make this work at my water treatment plant? How does this hook into my control panel at my factory? And it was hard to find those folks on a fractional basis. But we had some that did put in the work. Some of them are now full time employees. We wound up getting a resale partner who said, hey, I am having trouble selling my analytics service without a cybersecurity solution. And that was sort of when some of this clicked and said, oh, there are folks out there that the end user is different from the customer we're actually selling to this service provider who can't otherwise sell their service without a cybersecurity solution. So that opened up the door to us going down that path. And since then, we've picked up additional resellers folks that say, hey, I could do more engineering services if I could sell this on top of it. So growing that network out there, we're still onboarding the new partners, but we've acknowledging as well that this is a mark. It where a lot of times the customer is like, oh, I totally need this. Next time I do a factory equipment tear down or next time I do some sort of maintenance on the substation, I'm going to put you guys in and we say, when is that going to be? Two or two and a half years from now? And then just knowing that we need to cast a wider net. And so having those partners that have salespeople all over the world helps bring that funnel back to us. If this is at times long lead time, other times people buy them with call us up, give us a credit card number, and they bought it that day. But just being able to cast that wider net is where those resellers help.

00:31:00 - Andrew Monaghan And have you hired people who weren't first agents. You got people cold, as it were, into the company and how did you pick those people?

00:31:09 - Colin Dunn We have hired sales folks who weren't agents. Some of that was through headhunters. Some of it was through online websites. We put up the description. Sometimes it was for sales engineer was the title. Just trying to make sure that the person knew they're going to need to know enough about the product to make these customers who otherwise their backup plan is, I'm going to disconnect this stuff from the Internet and I'm going to go back to driving a truck. You have to make them comfortable. They're sales engineers positions we hired there that those candidates didn't work out.

00:31:43 - Andrew Monaghan Why was that, you think?

00:31:44 - Colin Dunn Some of it just seemed like, well, it was also we were hiring during the pandemic and there were folks that maybe they came in on the first day to get their computer and then we didn't see them in person again. And then you don't want to micromanage folks, but it was also perhaps tough to onboard people to the level of training that they needed. So it was a mix of different things. But in the end we found that when we get these folks who are really behind the mission, like, oh yeah, we're saving the world from cyberattack, we're protecting America's critical infrastructure from cyber threats, or we're helping defend electric utilities around the world and making sure that nobody gets to take away this stuff from their citizens. If we start with people that are really into the mission, those folks have been able to perform better on the sales side because they can communicate that enthusiasm and they put in the work to learn how it all functions.

00:32:47 - Andrew Monaghan It is so true, just that whole emotional side to why people join companies and why they're motivated and things like that. It's also true when you're selling to people as well. I often use the analogy, I'd rather sell Coke to people like Coke rather than sell Coke to people like Pepsi. Right. Maybe one in 100 might switch, but I'd rather be the one that says, yeah, I've got that stuff you love already. And if you're hiring people like that, they're already clued in on, this is actually going to be very important and we're doing a good service here. I'd rather have those people say, yeah, and what's the job about? As opposed to the way around. And it must be nice to be in a position where you have that big mission because I don't think every company I think a lot of companies don't even try to attach to a big mission and then sometimes when they do try it's, let's say tenuous about what the big mission might be. So it must be good to be able to sit there in front of someone and say, look, this is the big task that we're taking on here.

00:33:45 - Colin Dunn But certainly helps when times are tough, when sales cycles can be long, when even during the depths of the pandemic and telling the team we need to work harder to get parts. I will just say we learned a lot about supply chain management and we never had to cancel an order because we couldn't get the parts. But boy, was it tough and expensive at times. And just if you don't have the mission behind you, you'd say, I give up. But with that, there saying, we're going to get through the tough times because the world's counting on us, it matters a lot.

00:34:24 - Andrew Monaghan Yeah, I can see that for sure. One of the things you said was the onboarding perhaps during the pandemic was tough. I'm wondering as you're where you are right now and bringing new people into the company on the go to market side, what have you learned about how to get them up to speed quickly so they can go out and make an impact?

00:34:45 - Colin Dunn Part of it is you got to budget for the time, whether it's yourself or we picked up a chief growth officer, we picked up a new VP of sales. Just make sure you spend a lot of time with them. And one of the other great things is just making yourself available to answer their questions, but pushing them out there and making them sell it. We've had more than one occasion where on the first week on the job, that new person is pitching our product at an event or representing us at a trade show booth or giving a webinar on it. Unless you have a strong desire to embarrass yourself, you're going to put in the work very quickly to understand, what am I supposed to say here? What can I say? And listen to the questions those customers give and say, I don't know the answer to that now. I'm going to go back and make sure I have the answer next time. But giving those sort of live fire exercises to the new hires, but being there to make sure they've got the training has been useful. And thankfully there's more and more of those opportunities to get out there with customers now that the world's opened back up a bit.

00:35:50 - Andrew Monaghan I really like that concept. I'm trying to think when I've done it before, but I have done it where my first or second week in a job, you're somewhere where you're very uncomfortable, right? But you got to figure it out. You can't say nothing, so at least put the work in to figure out, well, what do I want to say? What questions do I want to ask? If I get these types of questions, let me go and figure out what the answers are. So you're somewhat prepared. But I think the nice thing about it is the right person will still be in learning mode, so you don't feel like they've got to answer every question they get. It's perfectly okay to say, I don't know yet. I wouldn't be in here six days but let me find out for you. And that kind of gets that mindset of always be learning, which I think is so important in those early days.

00:36:32 - Colin Dunn I'm looking back now in the previous role, I had to fend my first week, I was at a trade show. I said, here's the literature, man the booth, this person's over here, if you need to pull them in and I'd pull them in early, but pull them in less and less as the week went by. And it was a good tool. And try to use that today.

00:36:52 - Andrew Monaghan Yeah, I'm sure as you look at what the sales team is doing right now, Colin, and you can wave a magic wand and solve one big problem for them right now, what would be that problem that you would solve for them?

00:37:06 - Colin Dunn I'd say, well, the big magic wand one would be helping that team know when is the right time to approach the customer, when there is often a very well documented process for that customer. Like, we're we're at a big Fortune 100 manufacturer, and early on, we just didn't have maybe we didn't even have the courage to ask, hey, when are you doing these projects? And they say, oh, we're doing these three this quarter and these six next quarter. But acknowledging that those customers, some of them are looking years out and being able to know in advance, make it easier to do projections and things like that. Otherwise the understanding of how these customers buy is a big deal. And we've learned just to ask. But earlier on, it was we figured we're going to sell direct to all these folks, say, no, we buy through this reseller, or we always work with this system integrator. We say, Great, so you got to do the detective work. You get cozy with the system integrator, but when are you going to buy? And acknowledging that leave these folks alone until exactly the right moment would help focus a lot of folks time.

00:38:28 - Andrew Monaghan Like what you said about maybe a lack of confidence. Certainly that's one of those questions where you're not sure if you want to hear the answer. I don't want to hear nine months or 18 months or three years out. I want to hear the next couple of months. And sometimes you're afraid to ask the question in case that's the answer you get back. Whereas I think maybe the right person with the right mindset would recognize that I've got to ask more of those questions to know when I could stack up all these people so that I know this quarter, I've got these five and that quarter I got these ten, and start building the pipeline like that.

00:39:02 - Colin Dunn And then you got to get really organized with managing that data and knowing when you got to re approach these folks. And you start building that in the CRM. You start having those alerts for you, and you start taking what seemed like a really long sales cycle and a possible challenge and just saying, no, we know we have this schedule, we know when to reach out, and we've got this pipeline, and we know where to send which resellers and when that's the case. And it takes a lot of discipline. It's certainly not something you start out with.

00:39:34 - Andrew Monaghan Yeah, for sure. Well, let's flip this around. I'm wondering, as you think about the go to market side and the sales side, if there's a question for me that we could address right now.

00:39:45 - Colin Dunn Yeah, so we have seen that resellers can be really effective, especially on the system integration side. When you're talking about folks serving investor owned utilities, they've got their go to set. But it'd be useful to me to learn even more about how you can get those integrators really interested in the absence. But at times, in the absence of having a purchase order in hand and saying, hey, I did all the selling and all the work. I want you to go do this. But it seems like that's what you got to do sometimes, and other times, the way to sign up some of those big players and how you can make good use of those relationships internationally, because we're based here in the US. And we've gotten inquiries from all around the world, and there are times where we don't have a way to serve these people. If something ever went wrong with the hardware, our best case for certain parts of the world is just ship them a new one overnight at great expense and hope you get the one back. And this is not a customer experience. We want we want to have a better reseller relationship to serve those folks before we even get into those markets.

00:41:00 - Andrew Monaghan Yeah, let me see if I can draw from my It side of the highest experience with resellers and see if that applies on your site as well. I think it's one of these things that there's a way to get into it, and then there's the way to actually maximize it or get a lot out of it, as opposed to a little out of it. One of the things that always springs to mind whenever we talk about partners is there's a big difference between signing a partner and having their employees, their reps, actually motivated going out there and working on your behalf. What I've often seen is they're not loose cannons, they're not contractors, but those reps often act like that. They say, okay, I work for this company, but really the people I work for are these five other my customers. My five customers who I've built relationships with for 1520 years. That's who really I'm serving and I work for. And they don't want to do anything that jeopardizes those relationships. They don't want to do anything that conflicts with what they're doing already with those people. So anytime you were thinking about selling through third parties always think about, well, who actually has that relationship and what state are they in? I think it's good to understand if the reseller rep that you want to work with at X Company, you want to know whether they've been there six months or 20 years. You want to know quite what their relationship is. Are they a proactive seller into that account, or are they reactive? You often get people who will be often. But sometimes the Dunnger is you have a reseller rep whose job they think is to go to the purchasing people and say, okay, what are the projects this year? Okay, let me go and find people to fit into the projects. Really, when you're trying to make a market, you want to find that rep is the one that goes, I want to take cool new stuff that solves problems in different ways. To innovators inside that company and knowing who those reps are and who they're not, I think is a way to avoid a lot of frustration and heartache when you're wondering why we sign them, but we're not seeing much from them and understanding who the right people are. So in many ways, it's a hand to hand combat thing with resellers when you go and sell jointly with them at the rep level, where the real difference is made. Kind of like you were saying, actually, with the sales agents beforehand, right, is that they've got lots of things they could be selling and they're thinking about, well, what's the right thing for me and what's the right thing for my customer? And then third behind that is often what's the right thing for the company I work for, the reseller that I work for. So recognizing that and building that into your engagement model with the resellers say, we're going to go one by one and we're going to partner up and go work with these reps. And it's one of the first things to ask them. And what I find is the more senior ones actually appreciate that, right. When you go in and say, listen, let me first of all understand how you think about your market and your customers and how I can fit into that as opposed to what some people do is come in all guns blazing and saying, I've got the most amazing thing that your customers are going to love. And they've heard that from 300 vendors already, so it's not going to be new news for them. So I think that is one level. I think the other one other level is for each integrator or reseller is understanding actually how they make money is important because some might be making a lot of money on straight resell, some might view the resell as really just nothing. And the way they make money is actually on services, and they're not going to be so enamored about your stuff with five points of margin or even 25 points of margin unless it drives a whole bunch of services revenue. And going back to what you said before, I noted that Dunn, you said the analytics company, right, is really what they were looking for was a way to sell more of their stuff. I think that's a great observation about how different partners work in different ways. And I think the big mistake we often make is to assume that A, they'll be enamored by our ten or 15 points of margin and B, they all work the same way and that's definitely not the case. So I think that's our thing to think about. And the last thing, I hate to even say this because I don't know, it's embarrassing or what, but just acting with complete transparency and ethics when working with these partners is what goes a long way. What tends to have happened is they've been burnt many times by different vendors coming in, promising various things and then suddenly the goalposts shift and the model shifts and they're working a deal and suddenly it's not quite so much of this and less of that, and they feel like they've been burnt. And whether reality of that is true or not often doesn't matter. It's a perception which is key. So I think approaching each and everyone with very clear guidelines about how we work together and how we don't work together, even simple things such as swim lanes about, well, we're going to sell direct over here and this rest apart, the market is open for people like you to sell over here, just so you know. Every order that comes from this company will take Direct, though, so please don't waste your time and money trying to get that. Things like that, they'll probably be a little bit annoyed that they can't go there, but they'll be much, much more annoyed if they go there, work it and then you take it direct, right? So think about swim lanes and setting up very clear guidelines about how they get paid and don't get paid will actually stand you in pretty good stead over time. And one of the things that's true is it just takes one rep and one company to get burnt and suddenly that spreads all around the office very quickly and you could have ruined the whole relationship. So, I don't know, there was three things there. I don't know if they're different to what you're thinking about right now, or in addition, but if I was being in your shoes, that's probably the things I would be thinking about.

00:47:05 - Colin Dunn Well, thank you, that's helpful. Very good.

00:47:08 - Andrew Monaghan Well, Colin, listen, I really enjoyed the conversation today. If someone wants to keep on the conversation with you and get in touch, what's the best way to do that?

00:47:17 - Colin Dunn Sure. You can grab our contact info on our website, which is Fend Tech, F-E-N-D-T-E-C-H. Or you can send me a note directly at cdun at fend Tech.

00:47:29 - Andrew Monaghan That's great. And will you be at RSA this year?

00:47:33 - Colin Dunn We'll be at RSA this year.

00:47:35 - Andrew Monaghan Very cool. We're recording this early March, so that's only six weeks away, I guess. So I look forward to seeing you there and I wish you and the team every success for this year and next year.

00:47:45 - Colin Dunn Well, thanks Andrew, and thanks for the opportunity to speak with you and share a little bit more about ourselves now.

00:47:52 - Andrew Monaghan I appreciate all the learning I got from this. This is great. Learn a few things along the way, which is one of the great pluses about doing a podcast like this. Well, that was a conversation that was really interesting for me. Colin clearly spent talking, spent time talking about Fan for quite a while and therefore he's a very compelling person as he's explaining how it works and the challenge they solve or the impact they can have. I just find a really interesting conversation from that standpoint in terms of takeaways three ones for me. First one was when he said how he got going with the product. Right. He went into either his lab or his garage and started playing around and he said, if I could get just one character per second to go through a device like this with the technology that he was using, that could prove it was possible. And then he would then find the people who could scale that up to much faster speeds. But he started with something so small, right? And I don't mean small in terms of the effort to do it, I just mean if we could just get this one character to go through, we've proven that we can do that and therefore we can then find someone who scale up from that. Just love that approach to let's prove this out in a very simple or very simplistic way to start. That was one. The second one was it was interesting to hear how he got all the no's from the investors, right? And I think one of the things that he said was some of them were really good because they heard in the first two minutes it was no and give you the 28 minutes back of the half hour call and they'll say, oh, you're hardware, we don't do hardware. And then that was it. Right. And sometimes I wish we could get to that point quicker with prospects, when we're talking to prospects, figuring out what's the early no that we can align towards to figure out whether it's even worth spending more time with them. And the third thing was the importance of mission to Fan. When Colin talks about the big impact they can have on the country, the critical infrastructure, operational technology as a whole, protecting our whole country, I could see how people would just gravitate towards that and say, this box that Fenn has built has far reaching implications and positive outcomes for the country. Never mind whether we can sell it to a company at a certain price. Right. Attaching to that larger mission, I think, is something that is so important when we're thinking about what we do, where we choose to spend our time as human beings. I always feel it's better to have a big mission like that as opposed to a smaller one or one that's just not quite so compelling as well. And I think a lesson there is for all startups to think about, what is that big mission that we can help employees or future employees or future partners attached to to have a big impact? So I really did enjoy that conversation, and I wish Colin and the TS band all the best for RSA coming up for 2023. And of course, in the 2024.