Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…That it was, and we are your hosts. We're going to go right here into the onstage introduction of Jim and the Brooks story. I don't want to give too much exposition here, except to say that if you've been sort of thinking of Brooks as this shoe brand and what can tech people possibly learn from a 100-year-old shoe company, prepare to have your mind blown. Jim is one of the most dynamic guests that we've ever had on Acquired and I just got so many comments leaving the arena, just absolutely floored with all the great takeaways, lessons, and quotes that people wrote down from Jim, so make sure you enjoy that. Now before we dive into that, we have a fun little Q&A with our presenting sponsor, Vanta, the leader in automated security and compliance. As you know from hearing from Matt Spitz live in the Arena, the Head of Engineering at Vanta, we are huge fans of Vanta and their approach to the whole security and compliance process, SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, and more. Today, we've got CEO and co-founder Christina Cacioppo back with us to chat about Vanta. Christina, we've been talking about your product all season. What else is unique about Vanta the company? Do you personally have any strong beliefs about how to run a company culture? How to be successful in this ecosystem? One strong belief I've developed about the two parts of a company that go-to-market and end product design is that I think a lot of folks somewhat naturally run the engineering side, in particular, as if it were industrial engineering. I actually think that side is much more like art than science. What is product development? Again, there are metrics you can put around it, especially at the early stages. It's a lot of when you see it, you can go through processes, but you can't really prescribe outcomes. I think in contrast, the go-to-market side like marketing sales and customer success, especially for SMB businesses or mid-market business should be run industrial engineering-wise. You just have processes, you have inputs, you have transformations, you have conversions, and you have outputs. The spreadsheet map there is actually really helpful and that it can be a lot more predictable. Whereas again, I think especially on the new product development side, that if you try to go full industrial engineering on it, you will just not do anything interesting. I think part of the magic at Vanta is we've been able to bring those two sides together and cross-pollinate across teams. Give folks on the engineering team opportunities to see how we sell and vice-versa. That's one of the things that I'm most proud of over the last few years at Vanta and I think has contributed to some of the early success we've had. Our thanks to Vanta, the leader in automated security and compliance software. If you are looking to join Vanta's 2000-plus customers to get compliance-certified in weeks instead of months, you can click the link in the show notes or go to vanta.com/acquired for a 10% discount.…

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