It’s not every day that the co-founder of a cybersecurity company compares building a startup to defending chickens. Then again, Eldon Sprickerhoff isn’t your typical founder. At Communitech’s latest Breakfast Series, the co-founder of eSentire shared survival strategies from his journey to building a billion-dollar company – and his fair share of experience fending off predators, both in the coop and the corporate world.
“I live in the country, and my wife has a few dozen chickens. There’s a certain amount of time I spend any week defending the chickens,” he said. “Everything loves to eat chickens—coyotes, weasels, skunks—and chickens like to eat chickens as well. Everybody is out to get you.”
The analogy highlights one of the themes from Sprickerhoff’s recently released book Committed: Startup Survival Tips and Uncommon Sense for First-Time Tech Founders – a survival mindset is critical when facing the chaos and competition that come along in a founder’s journey.
In a fireside chat with Ellen Johnson, Senior Founder Success Manager at Communitech, Sprickerhoff shared advice from his two decades in the cybersecurity industry. eSentire, the company he co-founded in 2001, grew from a small startup in Waterloo Region into a global leader in Managed Detection and Response (MDR) services that protects over 2,000 organizations around the world.
“You can’t be blissful and think this is my baby, I love it, and everyone will feel the same way about it,” said Sprickerhoff. “No, you need to hunker down and consider it war. Every day, you need to fight and survive against everybody else, whether it’s big competitors or small ones. Everything is out to stop your success.”
Sprickerhoff said every founder needs to embrace the role of “Chief Survival Officer”.
“It’s not enough to have the vision. You need to be actively fighting every day to survive,” he said. “You need to survive long enough to get lucky.”
An important part of surviving as a founder is achieving product-market fit, he said, and getting there is about listening and getting feedback from what he calls “true believers”.
“You need to be out in front of as many people as possible,” he said. “Get them to prove you wrong. You need to keep asking people consistently [does my idea] scratch the itch you have?”
For eSentire, Sprickerhoff said finding product-market fit came down to listening to the growing demand for proactive cybersecurity solutions. He said his strategy for success involved always looking ahead and figuring out what would “kill” the company in three years, and then working backward to make sure those things wouldn’t happen.
“The odds of any startup surviving 10 years is worse than inverse Russian roulette,” he said. “If you went into starting a company thinking it’s going to be a cakewalk, you’re sadly mistaken.”
In the tech ecosystem, competing against larger companies can feel like taking on an entire pack of predators. Sprickerhoff said it’s more important than ever for founders to know and amplify their differentiators while also calling out the weaknesses in their competitors’ offerings.
“Amplify your differentiators in such a way that they can’t respond at all,” he said. “I love an unfair advantage, especially when it’s in my favour.”
He said a founder’s authenticity and story can be what sets them apart from the competition. While he admits he hated doing sales, he quickly learned that it’s critical because, as a founder, you have something no one else does: your authentic vision.
“Founder authenticity beats almost everything in sales, because you put everything into it and you’re still here, you didn’t abdicate sales to anyone else,” he said. “It’s the one superpower that every founder has.”
For founders who feel uncomfortable with sales, Sprickerhoff shared his go-to line: “Could I have 45 seconds of your time and talk about the company I started?”
“It’s a pretty hard-hearted person who’d say no,” he said.
Another part of startup survival is fundraising, and Sprickerhoff had a word of caution for founders: don’t rush into it.
“When you raise a round, expect that’s the last money you’ll ever get,” he said. “It’s been very difficult over the last couple of years to raise money. One of the opposing views I have is why do you want to give away so much of your company so early?”
Sprickerhoff also weighed in on the future. With artificial intelligence (AI) already embedded in so many tech solutions, he predicts it’s only going to grow, especially in cybersecurity.
“Your differentiators are now more important than ever,” he said. “You’re competing on a global basis. That’s a lot.”
It’s a fight, and Sprickerhoff’s success story proves he was more than ready to come out swinging.
“Just go for it,” he said. “Don’t be passive. Go for it.”
