189: Unlocking Data Protection with Paul Lewis, CEO of Calamu

Andrew Monaghan 00:00:00

If you've listened to the podcast for a while, you'll get this sense that I have a soft spot for data protection companies. So I love it when I get to chat to a founder who's working on actually protecting data and not just all things round about it. Andrew Monaghan is the founder and CEO of Calamu and they're going to be at the Early Stage Expo at RSA at the end of April. And Calamu is approaching protecting the data in a novel way. A stay tuned to the episode to find out what that is. Find out how he came to realizing this was something worth working on and how he has started his selling activities. Welcome to the Sales Bluebird podcast, where we help cybersecurity companies grow sales faster. Whether you're a seller, marketer leader or founder, we give you tips, tricks, experiences, examples, ideas and inspiration from people who know a thing or ten about building great cybersecurity companies. I am your host, Andrew Monaghan. Our guest today is Andrew Monaghan, founder and CEO at Calamu. Welcome to Sales Bluebird.

Paul Lewis 00:01:11

Thanks, Andrew. Great to be here.

Andrew Monaghan 00:01:13

I'm looking forward to our discussion, Paul, because you've got a rich history of being an entrepreneur, being a founder, leading companies and now you're in a segment of the market is very interesting to me and the things you got going on there. So I'm looking forward to understanding how you approach this as one of the many companies that you started over the years and what you've learned about how to do it effectively so we can inspire other potential funders or other funders going through the process right now to really grow and go about changing the world, as we're all trying to do. But Paul, before we get to the business side of this, let's get to know you a little bit. I've got a list of 35 questions here. Can you pick three random numbers between one and 35? And I'll read out the question.

Paul Lewis 00:01:55

So my lucky number is two. So let's do 212 and 22.

Andrew Monaghan 00:01:58

There you go. I love that. So, number two, favorite action movie of all time.

Paul Lewis 00:02:02

Oh, gosh. Favorite action movie? I'm going to have to go with Last of the Mohicans. Maybe not everybody considers that to be an action movie, but I think there was a lot of action that was in that movie and a lot of lesson in that movie as well. So I'm going to go with that. Maybe Courtney answer, but that's my answer.

Andrew Monaghan 00:02:21

I remember the movie. I don't remember the details. It's quite a few years since I've seen it. But I do remember there's a lot of action and some of it's a little bit gory as well, if I recall.

Paul Lewis 00:02:29

Correct. Yeah. So I think some hard life lessons, but if you haven't seen the movie, go check it out.

Andrew Monaghan 00:02:36

Yeah, absolutely. All right. Number twelve is early bird or night owl?

Paul Lewis 00:02:41

A little bit of both. So when I'm a night owl, I'm not going to be an early bird the next day, but I don't really follow a format. Sometimes I work way into the wee hours of the morning, and other times I'll get up at 04:00 A.m. And just kind of pick up and go, very good.

Andrew Monaghan 00:02:56

All right. And 22 is what's the most used app on your phone?

Paul Lewis 00:03:03

Gosh. I'm going to say imessages. I'm going to have to say with Imessages or find my iPhone because I have four kids and I'm kind of always tracking them down and watching where they are. So I think between the two of.

Andrew Monaghan 00:03:18

Those finding their iPhones, where are they, where in the neighborhood are they? We find that a lot like, which house are they at right now? Yeah, I get both of those, actually. That's same for me, probably. Paul, going back to early days, how did you first make money as a kid?

Paul Lewis 00:03:35

I was kind of that kid that always wanted to have the lemonade stand or was always offering myself out for services, cleaning garage, garages, shoveling driveways, snow off driveways, just anything that I could do. I just had this entrepreneurial bug to try to see if I could work hard and convert that into cash. It was just fun money for me.

Andrew Monaghan 00:03:58

Fun money. Very good. And then what was your first real job when you went into the big bad world?

Paul Lewis 00:04:04

My first real job was an intern, actually an internship that I had when I was in college. And it was with at and T. At and T is a great company, but I noticed right away so this summer that I was working at at and T, you walk in the door at 830 and then you take a coffee break at 1015 and then you have lunch at twelve. And then 415, you start winding down for the day and then everybody kind of walks out together. And I said, if I've got to do this for the rest of my life, I am not going to make it. I can't do this. I can't be this regular creature of habit. Didn't know it then, but that was, I guess, the first indications that I was really an entrepreneur.

Andrew Monaghan 00:04:44

And what did you do in college? What was your major?

Paul Lewis 00:04:46

My major in college was computer science and actually launched my first business while I was in college.

Andrew Monaghan 00:04:53

That's interesting. So you got the technical background, but you've been a business founder, entrepreneur for many years after that.

Paul Lewis 00:04:59

Yes. So formal education in the technology and then school of hard knocks for the.

Andrew Monaghan 00:05:05

Business side, the real education out there in the world.

Paul Lewis 00:05:08

Yeah.

Andrew Monaghan 00:05:08

Well, let's talk about that then. So you founded six companies, you sold two, and a few years back you founded Calamu. Take us back to that moment, that point in history. Where were you? What was the thing that said we should probably do something about this what was that moment for you?

Paul Lewis 00:05:29

I've been in security my entire career, and back when I had this moment, I was on the services side. So I was doing data forensics and incident response for global corporations and companies that were breached and no shortage of companies that were being breached. This is ten years ago, and we still have the problem. It's magnified even today. But back around ten years ago, it really bothered me that we've got all of these great technology companies and all of these layers of defense, but somehow the bad guys are still winning. And I really spent a lot of time thinking about how do we turn the tables on the bad guys? And the moment of inspiration really came to me is one night I'm sitting on my front porch, as I did often after dinner and got the kids down and my wife would be inside doing something, and I would just sit out there and kind of think about and brainstorm, how do we solve this problem? When my dog, who was sitting at my side, got up and literally picked up his bone and trot it across the street and dug a hole in the neighbor's yard and put his bone in the neighbor's yard and came back, and I could swear he was smiling at me in the moonlight. But it dawned on me, I said, we've got to figure out how we could put our data in the public domain. He just put his most prized possession in the public domain, and he's fine with the security. And that was really the inspiration of the shift in mindset that I needed to figure out, how do we look at things differently. Incidentally, my dog, who's up in doggy heaven now, his name was Calamuchi, and in his honor, I named the company Calamu, which was his nickname.

Andrew Monaghan 00:07:04

I love that. But you were in an instant response world, it sounded like, in your job at the time. Right. So you were just seeing these issues again and again and again, and you kind of sit there, I imagine, saying, there must be a better way.

Paul Lewis 00:07:19

So it was all about with incident responses. How quickly do you understand that you have a problem and how quickly can you recover from that problem? So it's T plus something, and I was trying to figure out, how do we make it T minus something? So instead of putting the loaded bank money in the bank bag for the thief and waiting for them to steal it and then opening it and getting sprayed with ink, how do we prevent the thief from getting it in the first place? And that's what Calamu is about. So instead of trying to help companies after they got attacked, I wanted to try to help companies before they got attacked or during the attack and have them just brush it off.

Andrew Monaghan 00:07:58

So one of the things I'm interested in, Paul, is you get that moment that says, okay, I've got a thing, I need to probably do some research and get into it. But how do you actually start, though? What's the first thing? Do you go and hire a couple of developers? Do you have a buddy that you know that would work with you? What's the next couple of steps you go through?

Paul Lewis 00:08:17

Well, the first thing I did is I was actually leading the cyber group at consulting company in New York City. And the first thing I did is I went to the CEO and I said, hey, I have this really great idea. I don't really think it aligns with this company, but I want to disclose it. So I wanted to make sure that I didn't want to do anything secretive. I wanted everything to be above board. So I got the whole thing carved out of my employment agreement with HR, which I think is a really important first step if you're working somewhere else. And I also had his endorsement, the CEO's endorsement. He was actually my first investor in the company. First thing I did was a lot more research and I searched for intellectual property and patents and was surprised that I couldn't find anything. But I'm just an amateur doing this research. And I filed a patent and I filed a patent on the initial concept and the initial technology and didn't really think much of it. I was excited about it, but I kind of thought that the patent office was going to come back and say, nice try, but there's 1000 other patents similar to this. And by the way, this is invented 80 years ago. And I was kind of expecting that kind of response. But the patent was issued, and in the meantime, I had filed a second patent. And when the second patent was issued and I got the notification, I went back to my CEO and I said, I got to jump. This is, this is my sign. And I got to kind of go all in on this. And I told you have have four kids at the time. I had three kids in college. So, you know, difficult financial decision when you've got a lot of expenses. But I kind of know me and I know that if I don't go all in, then I'm not going to do a good job. So you got to jump off the cliff with both feet.

Andrew Monaghan 00:09:59

And then did you hire some developers to start working or did you know enough to code yourself so I know.

Paul Lewis 00:10:06

I know enough to code a little bit myself. I used to be a lot better in the good old days, like the Turbo Pascal days. But what I did was I first for proof of concept, I hired an offshore development team with my own money just to make sure that this whole thing could actually work and function. And when that came back positive, I said, okay, I'm going to fund this a little bit further and hire some domestic contractors to start from scratch because I just felt uncomfortable with the security product that I offshored just to somebody I found on the internet. And they didn't really know what the big grand scheme was. So there was enough of a secret there. But I wanted to kind of start all over with coding, which I did built out kind of a proof of concept or basic MVP. And then at that point I started talking to potential customers, but it was still really early on and also started talking to angel investors about funding, providing additional funding.

Andrew Monaghan 00:11:11

So at that point there you're guiding the contractors, but you've got two prongs I need to get my first customers and I need to get some money from investment as well. Was it tough to juggle all that at the same time or did it come pretty naturally?

Paul Lewis 00:11:25

No, it's tough to juggle, right. I mean, there's a lot of stress with this whole thing. This was very early in 2019 and now I'm all in and I have no income and I'm spending my own money and I've got kids that I'm paying their tuition for. And when I finally got it to a point where I said, okay, now this all makes sense, let me really lean in and go to the investment community. That was the beginning of 2020. So now we all know what happened in March of 2020, which was bad timing for me, but I had to persevere, I had to go on, I had to had to move forward and did.

Andrew Monaghan 00:12:05

And then as you were doing all that, was there a moment in, in the progress where you thought, ah, I don't know if it's going to work out, you got some barriers in your way or something came up. Was there that moment in the process?

Paul Lewis 00:12:22

I have a lot of scars, so I know it's never easy and it's a lot of hard work. It's a lot more work than most people think. But I always believed in the mission. I always believed in the outcome. I'm 100% committed to solving this problem and trying to make the cyber world a safer place which is desperately needed. So this was not about necessarily building a successful business and making a lot of money, but it was more about trying to solve this problem. And I'm very focused on that.

Andrew Monaghan 00:12:53

We'll come back to that in just 1 second. Final question about the starting up process. You mentioned there people might not realize how tough it is. What's the big misconception people have about starting a cybersecurity company?

Paul Lewis 00:13:06

Well, starting any company takes fundamentals, right? And at the end of the day, it comes down to you got to be cash flow positive. Like you got to figure out how this thing is going to make money. So I think what I've seen is if people go into the process trying if their goal is to try to make money, you probably shouldn't do that at all. Right. And I advise people that have a great idea and they want to make a gazillion dollars like, well, don't try to start a business then, because I don't think it's going to be that can't be your goal. You have to really be going after solving a problem. So I think the biggest misconception or the biggest mistake is people don't go into it trying to solve a problem, and then if they're not trying to solve a problem, they're not going to stay in it and persevere and go through the ups and downs.

Andrew Monaghan 00:13:52

Okay, yeah, I love that, actually. That's a good point. So let's talk about Calamu then. If I was a CISO Adam, let's say this is weird, but I'm only twelve years old, how would you answer my question, what does Calamu do?

Paul Lewis 00:14:06

Calamu protects your data in a way that cannot be. No other product can protect it. Today, there's a lot of companies that keep the bad actor out of your data by protecting the systems that house your data. So the whole world is kind of, we've kind of built this security mentality that we're trying to protect the systems rather than protecting the data, which is really what's of value and really what the bad guy wants. So Calamu kind of shifts that. And instead of protecting the systems, we start with the premise that the bad actor has reached the data and we protect the data itself. All other systems have been bypassed at that point.

Andrew Monaghan 00:14:45

So in all contexts of the data, where it's a mobile or a database or the cloud, or do you have certain aspects you focus on?

Paul Lewis 00:14:54

Well, one day we're going to be all data, and that's our mission, that's our goal. But today we work very well on unstructured data and data at rest, and data in motion in a static format. So not transactional data, not database, although that is on our roadmap. But today we work very well with unstructured data.

Andrew Monaghan 00:15:14

And to get technical, just for a second, when you say protect, that you encrypting it or are you somehow controlling access to it?

Paul Lewis 00:15:20

So we've been called encryption on steroids. And what we're doing is we transform the data using multilayers of encryption and fragmentation and some other things. We transform and geo disperse the data so that if a system is compromised and data is removed, the attacker only gets valueless. Digital sludge, they don't get anything of value. They don't get any real data. They only get a subset of the data. So they only get kind of encrypted fragments of encrypted data. They don't even know that they don't have all the pieces necessary to put it together. So it's geo dispersed, kind of combining physical security and cybersecurity to really confuse the bad guy.

Andrew Monaghan 00:16:03

That sounds interesting. I've heard of this concept before. I'll tell you every time I've heard of it. My thought is you got to have some really smart engineers to figure out how to do that really well. Because the demands of people getting the data again, it's going to get back to where someone needs to consume it pretty quickly in a state where someone could use it. Right.

Paul Lewis 00:16:25

It's got to be near real time. Right. And as we work towards fully transactional data, we're talking about microsecond access to the data. So we spent a lot of time and energy not only on the security, but on the efficiency and how do we do this in a very expedient manner and using cloud storage. Right. So we've got bandwidth is always a constraint as well, but we have some really smart engineers that are very much up to the challenge and have accomplished some incredible hurdles and we're moving forward.

Andrew Monaghan 00:16:57

That's awesome. What sort of companies and what sort of people does this resonate with the most?

Paul Lewis 00:17:04

When you say companies and people like, is there something similar or what do.

Andrew Monaghan 00:17:07

You no, I mean prospects. What type of prospects? As long as they go yeah, I get it.

Paul Lewis 00:17:12

One of our biggest challenges is you can't boil the ocean, right? So you have to start somewhere. This problem, though, is the ubiquitous problem. Every company has the problem of data exfiltration or ransomware attacks or data manipulation. Every company has that problem. So where we're focusing our attention is where we're going to get, where we're getting the quickest early traction, and that is around sensitive data, right? So the most sensitive data, so think financial services or think health records, things along those lines. So information that if it is leaked to the public would have a devastating effect not only on the owner of the data, but who the data is also about.

Andrew Monaghan 00:17:57

Yeah, I get that. When a prospect first sees the product, what's the thing that makes them go, wow, that is cool. That's going to be impactful for me.

Paul Lewis 00:18:09

I'm really proud to say that that happens all the time, right? So it doesn't happen half the time, it doesn't happen a third of the time. It actually happens all the time. And when we get to the point where we show our process and kind of show our secret sauce on how we're geo distributing the data in a redundant manner, first off, we usually get, wow, why didn't I think of that? Or wow, that's so eloquent that it's simple. Or wow, how come the whole world isn't already doing this? So we do get a lot of wow factor with the process, but I.

Andrew Monaghan 00:18:40

Bet you get pretty quickly thereafter the questions how and they're thinking their minds how this is not going to work for them sometimes, right? What about this and what about that? What's my questions usually get?

Paul Lewis 00:18:51

Yeah, I mean, they try to poke holes in what if your credentials are stolen and someone logs in through the Calamu portal. And I'm like, well, if it's not you, if they're using your credentials. If someone walked up to me right now and hit me in the back of the head with the bat, they have access to my computer, right. So whatever is open, they have access to. Now we have some cool things that we're working on that actually will prevent even that, so stop that from happening. But they're not ready for prime time today. But yes, companies try to poke holes. We used to use the term, we have a breach proof solution, and that would get us a lot of meetings and it would get a lot of debate right off the bat. How can you say breach proof immediately putting us on the defensive. So we've softened our marketing messaging a little bit, but we still get a lot of disbelief as we're talking about the benefit. And then when we show the process, they're like, wow, yeah, you're right. This does work.

Andrew Monaghan 00:19:53

I love that. Tell me about the day that you won your first real live paying customer at Calamut.

Paul Lewis 00:20:03

Like a lot of startup companies, software companies, you have a product that you're dying to have somebody prove that there's value to it by paying you money for it. Right. And you install it, and you kind of have your fingers crossed that it's even going to get through the installation process. And you know that there are bugs that you haven't identified yet. And you never know, really, where that tipping point is, where you go from just doing demos until you get to someone that's, okay, I'll pay you money for it. And we got to that point about a year ago. We closed our first sale a little over a year ago, and it just felt great that we kind of celebrated that. We now have somebody that believes enough in us to open up their pocketbook and pay us money for something that we created out of nothing. So very gratifying.

Andrew Monaghan 00:20:51

And was the whole company waiting for the PO to come in? Were they expecting it and ready to celebrate?

Paul Lewis 00:20:55

Yeah, and then we did celebrate. We actually celebrated more when the money hit the account because we said, hey, this is the first time we ever had money come into our account.

Andrew Monaghan 00:21:07

I love that. I remember years ago, when I was in sales, used to think that the moment of money coming in or getting POS was a big thing for sales. But then I hung up with some developers one time, and they said, no, it's really important for them as well, because it shows I'm working on stuff that's so valuable that big companies will actually pay money for this, and that's a gratifying thing for them, and it's something I never thought of back in the day. Let's move on to the sales team. Paul, tell us about your sales team right now and how they're structured.

Paul Lewis 00:21:37

We're kind of multifaceted, right? So we have a combination of a direct sales effort. We're also marketing and selling to the channel and then we're also looking at strategic partnerships as well. So we're still figuring that part out. Right. So I'm not sure if we're going to be a direct sales. It will ultimately be a direct sales model. So we're kind of trying a few different things and we have folks that are covering each of those things and small teams on each of those things and we're going to see which one is going to make the most sense for us to scale.

Andrew Monaghan 00:22:08

Okay, so you're trying different channels and seeing which one's going to get the most traction quickest, right?

Paul Lewis 00:22:14

Our biggest problem is it's a ubiquitous problem, right? So the total addressable market is gigantic. And I know that's no excuse, everybody thinks the total addressable market is gigantic, but in this case it really is everybody. So we're trying to figure out what is going to be the how do we most effectively conquer this problem in the best possible way. So we're actually talking to super large enterprise and we're having very engaging discussions with very large global enterprise all the way down to SMB. And there's no shortage of attention across the whole spectrum. In fact, I don't want to be a consumer play, but we've also been questioned, hey, this would be a great consumer play where you can actually protect enduser, end user data. Endpoint data, which is true, but we've got it. We have to focus. So we're trying our experiments on the direct sales side from SMB to mid tier to enterprise, we're getting the most attention really on both sides of the bell curve. So on the SMB side and on the large enterprise side, not so much in the mid tier, they're either moving slowly or they think they've got it kind of covered a different way. But one of the things that we solve for is ransomware and an SMB. A lot of companies are terrified of ransomware, don't even know really how to approach it or what they need to do with it. On the large enterprise, they're concerned with ransomware, but they're really more concerned about the data exfiltration or the double extortion part of ransomware. So two different value props. And then my guess is mid tier kind of thinks they've got everything covered or they don't have budget or they don't want to go for a different change in strategy, or they already have sunk cost and what they've deployed and have to hope and keep their fingers crossed that that doesn't get breached. But kind of interesting, what we're learning on the channel side, we're seeing a lot of activity because the channel sees this as a definite add on, right, and a definite value add for them servicing their clients. And then on the partner side, which is really most appealing to me, we have large companies that could have a very strategic play by implementing the Calamu process into something that they've got already deployed.

Andrew Monaghan 00:24:28

And when you say the channel, is that the traditional security channel you're talking about or are you a different channel?

Paul Lewis 00:24:33

Yeah, MSP. MSP. So the folks that take care of your network and that sort of thing, all the security around it.

Andrew Monaghan 00:24:43

So, Paul, if you could wave your magic wand and fix one thing for your sales team right now, what would that be?

Paul Lewis 00:24:51

I think it's awareness of a different way to approach the problem. The whole world kind of has been programmed. You go to RSA and Blackhead and all the security conferences where we got I like to say we have 3000 companies selling the same ten things and with no discredit, we need those ten things they're desperately needed, but they're all about really layered security. And how do we detect a problem quickly and how do we react to a problem quickly instead of really going to the heart of the problem, which is let's protect the data and make the data useless and valueless if something happens, if the data leaves your system. So, by the way of a magic wand, I would have the whole world have that little tiny nugget of education that let's not build another moat, let's protect the crown jewels, to use an old analogy.

Andrew Monaghan 00:25:42

Yeah, I would imagine there's people out there who are probably already thinking about things like that, maybe not specifically how you're doing it, but their philosophy is data and their philosophy is there must be a way to do this differently than before. Have you found people that are already thinking like that or is it all just education?

Paul Lewis 00:26:00

No, the whole world is thinking about it, but the whole world is kind of a step behind, I think, in my opinion. So we're looking at things like Immutable storage, which solves part of the problem. We're looking at Air Gapping, your data, which kind of solves part of the problem as well. But Immutable and air gapped doesn't really allow the data to be interacted with very easily. Air gapped and putting your data in the side of a mountain, how do you use it? How do you have a database working with something that's air gapped? And then Immutable is just storing a lot of information, right, and just writing it and never allowing it to be rewritten or changed, which isn't really practical.

Andrew Monaghan 00:26:40

So you mentioned the idea of the education would be good. Getting attention is hard as well. What things are you doing right now to get attention for what you're doing?

Paul Lewis 00:26:50

Well, there's a lot of noise, so we have a good solution for ransomware and so does every other company that you ask. Right. Everybody has a solution to ransomware, even though maybe it's not really a solution to ransomware. So cutting through the noise is really important. And we're challenged with that because there's. A lot of buzzwords. There's a lot of new technology. There's a lot of flashing lights. And we're trying to just kind of come into the root cause and say, this is what we do. We're trying to whittle our message down to the one thing and really simplify our messaging around the one thing. We think we have so many benefits that we bring that we're struggling to get that down into just the one statement or the one thing. But the team is working really hard on doing that now.

Andrew Monaghan 00:27:37

Yeah, I feel sometimes that you've got to take the 15 things and say, well, what's the level up or the level up from that? That would be a good way to summarize most of these things. And that's not easy to do right, because you want the input from the team. But everyone's got different opinions, and trying to get them all together could be tough at times.

Paul Lewis 00:27:55

Yeah, it's a challenge, but it's a necessary thing to kind of work through. And I have a great team, and we all see the top of Mount Everest, and we're all trying to figure out the best route to get up there. We all know that we have to be on the same route. So, you know, we're looking at the goal. We're looking at the end goal, and we're trying to figure out how to make that happen.

Andrew Monaghan 00:28:14

That's awesome. We'll talk let's talk about that then. What is the big vision for Calibre over the next next two or three years?

Paul Lewis 00:28:20

So, look, I mean, we have a big goal probably well beyond two or three years, but we have a big goal to protecting all data, right? So whether it's Calamu or a solution like Calamoo, we think that this new concept of geodispersed, kind of the process that we're using, should be the de facto standard for primary storage. So that's really our big vision, is how do we have the supply to all data types today? Unstructured data very well, but we know we need to move into highly transactional databases and very fast moving data, and that's our big goal. Now, if we look at two to three years out, we want to kind of chip away at some of the major primary storage, not providers or solutions, but the way that they're architected, and we want to embed, and we want to complement, and we want to bring additional benefit to some of those solutions. So that's kind of what we're focused on with some of our partnerships for the next maybe two to three years.

Andrew Monaghan 00:29:17

I love that big vision. You and I are aligned on the importance of doing it actually, the data level. And the idea is that in trying to protect data, it seems like the industry has done everything except for protected data. It's like, how close can we get to without actually touching it? Because I'm a little bit scared of doing it right. But having the awareness and also the chopstick. Pull this off is going to be huge. Paul, I really enjoyed the conversation today. If someone wants to continue talking to you or they want to hit you up for potential jobs and things like that, what's the best way for them to reach out?

Paul Lewis 00:29:52

Most certainly they can visit our website, which is www.callamu.com. It's C-A-L-A-M-U. Or they can email me if they'd like to email me directly at Pelowis@Calamu.com as well. I know you've got a giant listenership, so I probably shouldn't have just given out that email address, but I try to respond to all of them. I'll try to respond to all of them.

Andrew Monaghan 00:30:14

Yeah, that's great. I appreciate you doing that. Yeah, I truly enjoyed the conversation. You're in a great area. It's really, really compelling for a lot of people when they really think about alternatives, the way to be doing it for a while. And I wish you every success for 2023 and also for the early stage expo at RSA.

Paul Lewis 00:30:32

Great. Thanks so much Andrew. Pleasure being here, really enjoyed it.

Andrew Monaghan 00:30:35

Well, that was a lot of fun. Paul is obviously a very compelling person, an engaging interviewee for these podcasts. He knows the world he's operating in very well and has been doing this for long enough to learn a lot along the way. So I did really enjoyed that conversation with him. Three takeaways for me. One is that novel approaches to solving these types of problems are definitely needed. But it's interesting when you have to do the required education of the market, but also in selling situations, you have to do education as well. How do you get that balance between wanting to get some business, but also understanding that you got to educate people on the way? That's something that they've been tackling and thinking about. Second thing was Paul is experimenting a little bit with different sales channels. He talked about those on the interview. And what's interesting is you don't know what's going to really hit home until you actually go and have conversations with people. I think too often when we're doing customer development things at an early stage, we focus on just the end user buyers and they're important. But essentially as you get to the stage of trying to think about, well, how do we go and reach these people? That you don't ignore having the customer development conversations with the different channels as well. I think that's an important part of the process that Paul talked about. And thirdly, those wild moments that he said, he said that they're lucky in that the way they demo, the way they do those first meetings, almost everyone or every single meeting has that moment where the prospect sits there and goes, wow, that's different. Wow, that's cool. And I think not everyone has the luxury, I think, of having every single meeting end up like that. But it is something to be intentional about right. I don't think you leave the chance to say that you'll get to the point or gets the moment a demo or the deck, or it might be where that why won't happen. Because you have to engineer these calls to make sure that your highest chance of someone sitting there going, whoa, wait a minute. I've not seen that before. How do you do that? What's the impact of that? You know, stop right there. Go back again. That's those wild moments you want to engineer those first conversations for. So, as I said, you know, those are my three takeaways. I'm sure you had Euros as well. I really enjoyed that conversation with Andrew Monaghan, CEO, Kellerman. And we're all the best for the rest of the year.