Rolling Up E-mail Security SaaS: Gary Steele, CEO Of Proofpoint (Part 2)

SM: How did Eric find you and convince you to join Proofpoint?

GS: He had a search partner who helped him identify people, and they made the connection. It was a classic Valley network deal. We got to know each other and we liked each other. We thought we were a good fit. Joining as a nonfounder in a five-person company is an odd role. In some respects you are the admin guy, the insignificant adult admin role.

SM: What position did they give you?

GS: I came on as the CEO. There was a concept but no product. Somebody else was designing the product. In reality the opportunity, and what I enjoyed about the first year, was the critical opportunity to get the product right. We are in a market that is moving fast, and people are willing to spend money. We had to hit the ground running with a product that met customers’ requirements.

I spent my time with customers. It is the biggest, most important learning experience I had from this endeavor. Every day I would call people up and introduce us and explain the area that we were building our product in. We would then ask them for 15 minutes of their time to get advice, and we did not try to sell them anything.

SM: Who were you targeting? CIOs?

GS: No, the people who owned e-mail. It was typically somebody a level down in the enterprise. We looked for the individual who ran the e-mail operations. Through this process we got really smart about how people were thinking about the problem and what they thought they were going to buy. During that period we met our first group of customers. We got people to fall in love with us.

I probably did 25 calls with very large companies, and out of that we had three major deployments. One of the first deployments covered 175,000 people. We were working with them before we had written even a single line of code. Customers are not going to solve the problem for you, but they can certainly tell you what their major issues are.

When I had those meetings, I always came out with great data. One particular Fortune 100 customer on the East Coast allowed us to do multiple visits. They could not understand why we kept coming out there to visit, and the reality is that I wanted to keep them from buying anything. I wanted to understand their buying process so we could be prepared when we had a product. That time frame gave us time to build personal relationships, and our future customers started realizing they had input into the key development of a new product.

In most enterprise-oriented companies you never get it quite right because you are not close enough to the customer. The engineers are always smarter than everyone else. We would get to know key individuals in a corporation so that when they decided to go through the formal acquisition process, and issued an RFI and RFP, that we knew the process and could earn the right to progress from one step to another.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Rolling Up E-mail Security SaaS: Gary Steele, CEO Of Proofpoint
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