I’m continuing to record audio versions of pwn the future, and once I am caught up, will combine them into a single post. This is just a recorded version of my third post, published on June 2nd. In case you missed it, here’s the text:
Tough love from a close friend
“You need to start at the beginning.”
A consummate scheduler, Sam had portioned out 30 minutes for the conversation. I paced back and forth in front of a Virginia movie theater. It was 8pm on a misty Monday night.
A year’s worth of thinking prior to my departure from the National Security Council staff had convinced me that the way to solve some of the most intractable problems in industrial control systems cybersecurity was to start an insurance company. And while I might have been right at the time (spoiler alert: I wasn’t), Sam explained that, good idea or not, it was more important to go through an organized process.
So what did that process look like?
Start with a problem, not a solution.
Talk to as many people who are thinking about that problem as possible. Potential customers, potential investors, and potential collaborators.
Take exhaustive notes. Always follow-up. Always have asks.
The plan
On top of this high-level advice, we sketched out a plan: First, start talking to potential customers (with a discussion script built on this book) to better understand how they were thinking about risk management around industrial control systems cybersecurity. Second, start talking to investors: see what types of deals they were seeing, where they thought the market was going, and what they thought was “investible.” Both would be something of a flywheel if I kept to my script, which ended with, “who else should I talk to?” Third, start articulating in writing specific potential solutions at the center of the now-obvious Venn diagram:
With some recommended tools, I was off. Except for one last thing.
“Want to talk to some Angel investors? You might be surprised how much you can learn from them.”
“I don’t even have a company yet.”
“It’s never too early,” he said.
“Okay.”
Three days later the avalanche started.
*audio version* - the tao of sam