#73: Recorded Future CMO Tom Wentworth - Growing Past $250M ARR in Cybersecurity, Hiring Journalists, No Agencies, & Why You Need Middle Management To Scale

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Tom Wentworth is here. A friend of mine, mentor of mine, Tom. I got to know Tom because I was working at Drift and Tom was friends with somebody who worked at Drift at the time and he was a big shot CMO at Acquia and he was an early Drift customer. He's an early adopter in tech. And so Tom was like one of the first, you know, when you get that one, that first big customer case study or that first like good ICP fit customer that's willing to like say good things about your product, you use them in all your marketing, you give them advisory shares and, and they help shape the roadmap of the company. Well, that's how I got to know Tom. Tom was that guy for us at Drift. David and Elias, the founders there, smartly brokered a deal with, with Tom Wentworth and we've stayed in touch over the years. He's one of my two dark ops back channel black hole texts. You know, we don't text that often but when he said, you know, like we don' text but when it's like it's the value exchange is very, very, very high. So Tom, it's good to see you my friend.

Good to see you as well. And I, I definitely send you a few hot takes. I mean it's more frequent than I think you're giving it credit for.

Okay, yeah, it's, it's frequent, it's frequent. And just so you know, if you're out there, if you're a recruiter, listening this call if you've ever reached out to myself or Tom Wentworth, we are screenshotting those emails and we're sending them to each other. And if we're doing that, if we're doing that, everybody else is doing that. You shall will be like, man, you see this company, I thought they have a cmo.

They do, if you're honest. What we used to really do was see if which one of us got recruited for it and we would flex on each other if, like, you didn't get or I didn't get it. So that's the honest truth.

No, the. But the worst feeling would be like screenshotting one to you, thinking, I'm flexing and you're like, oh, dude, I got that one two months ago.

There you go. I mean, I don't want to bring it up. I'll let you. You fall.

Okay. It was the CMO of Salesforce and I turned it down. Just joking. Joking. That would not be the job for me, even though I'm. I hope you're listening. And it wouldn't be the job for me because I'm just not good at working with that many people. I change my mind a lot and I like to make decisions quickly and I think that is why I'm not cut out to be a big company cmo. But anyway, so today you're the CMO at Recorded Future. We did a podcast three years ago when I had this other podcast, B2B Marketing Leaders. I've since now pivot Vivited 16 times. I'm all in on Exit 5. You're back. This podcast, I don't know if you know it, it's huge and I would love to do an update with you. People want to know structure of your team, all that type of stuff. And so if you're down to give me some of that information, I'd love to go through that today. But can you give us some background on what is Recorded Future? Give me size, scope, revenue, and then give me what you do there.

Yeah. So Recorded Future is a cybersecurity company. Most cybersecurity companies take sort of an inside out look at the world. They're about trying to protect firewalls and networks and devices. We take an outside in look at the world, looking at what threat actors in China and North Korea and Russia are up to, what types of vulnerabilities they're exploiting, what malware are they deploying, and then connecting the dots so that you can be a more effective cheap information security officer. We are now on record at 250 million which we announced six months ago or so. So you can do the math that we're probably a little bigger than that. A little bit over a thousand people. Marketing team is a little bit over 45 which I think is actually a little bit small for companies of our size and in good growth. Right. Where we're still considered a high growth company even at the size right now, which is a pretty hard thing to do as you can scale.

Yeah, especially right now. So 250 million six months ago, I mean it's got to be at least 275. What's that guy Nathan Laca who's like two doing all the math and he's trying to get you on your gotchas. That's not me. Thousand people. 45 person, 45 people on the marketing team.

Yeah.

I feel like it's always no CMO is ever going to say, myself included is going to say yeah, we have too many people on the team. It's always like. But the CEO is always asking like do we need 45?

No, I had too many people at Acquia so you mentioned Acquia earlier. I was at 45 people at Acquia when we were at 140 million at ARR and looking back at it, it was too many people. We, you know, was the classic trap of we raised a bunch of money in a series F. What are you going to do with that money? We're going to scale, go to market. What's the best way to scale? Go to market? It's hire more people. We got way ahead of headcount hiring and there. So there is a number where it is too much.

What's the biggest difference from you have a team that's I'm going to round up and call it 50 people. What's the biggest difference between a team of a marketing team of five and a team of 50 now that you've kind of seen all the stages.

Yeah.

Do you need the skill set? Like can you manage a team of 50 if you've only managed a team of 5? Are there similarities? Is it completely different? I'm just want to hear your perspective on that.

It becomes much more. Hiring becomes much more important obviously because you know you have now have 55 people in your organization that weren't there a year ago, you know, whatever a couple years ago. I think it's the middle management level that's the most important. As you scale, how do you make sure that whatever worked in the early stage, whatever DNA and culture that you've Built doesn't go away. And it's super easy to go away if you bring on somebody. You know, if you're $100 million company, you bring someone on from HubSpot, they're going to have a very specific view of the world based on their experience with HubSpot at serious scale. So I think it's important not to over hire both in numbers of people but also getting people that are stage appropriate for the company. And I think that's the hardest thing to do. We're now a big company at Recording Future. So my direct reports came from places like HubSpot and Okta and Bloomberg. Right. So we're at the stage now where those types of people can make an impact. But if I brought them on three years ago, we would not have been ready for them.

Say more about that, like why? What's a specific example? Because I agree with you, I just want to hear you articulate it.

If you come here, if you come to Recorded Future three years ago, when our processes aren't quite as mature as they are now, when our infrastructure isn't quite as mature as is now, when our product portfolio isn't quite as mature as is now, you bring people on who come expecting things to be a certain way and when they come and find that, hey, you're not really where I expected you to be from a maturity perspective, it can be really hard to be effective and I think vice versa is true. If you've got experience working at small startups, then you roll into HubSpot and you're expected to operate more as a part of the machine. That can be hard too. So my experience is that when you bring people on, you know, they should be ahead of where you are, but right ahead, like we're not as big as Okta Recorded Future but you know, we're aspiring to get there. So when I bring someone on to run product marketing from Okta, she is able to sort of paint a path to help get us from where we are to where we want to be. And it's a believable path at this point.

How do you get somebody from Okta? How are you recruiting? I've always found that's a delicate balance. Like you have to kind of sell up and you're going to take someone out of HubSpot or Okta, which is both are publicly traded companies. You know, I can clearly see how much money I'm going to make. It can be difficult. How, how the hell do you do that?

There's a certain type of person who doesn't want to be a part of operating the machine. Like when you get to a scale of a HubSpot or an Octa, there is very clear fit across every part of the organization. But people want to come to a place like Recorded Future where we're on a pretty great trajectory, but they can still make a noticeable impact where you'll look back in five years and say I did that thing. I think it's harder to do that when you get to massive scale. But you can come here and have a very noticeable impact very quickly. And I think there's a certain type of operator who loves that.

Speaking of HubSpot, you know, it's had an amazing run.

Is Kip incredible? Like, and it's so rare to do that.

It's incredible especially because of like how things went down and like Mike Volpe was a CMO there and he was a legend in his own right. And then Kip was like his kind of right hand person for a while and then like boom, he becomes cmo. And I actually just talked to him for the first time in a while on, on Monday or Tuesday I talked to him and I just, it just made me think of it. I haven't thought about him and HubSpot in a while, but it's been like he's been there for like eight years now and that's a long tenure at a company that continues to grow and has hundreds of. I was just trying, actually trying to Google. How many people, how many people do you think they have on the marketing team there?

I have some of my team who worked at HubSpot recently. It's like well into the hundreds. I forget it might even be take 200 plus.

Crazy. It's crazy. And so to keep growing and like to continue and I've been on such a smaller scale, you have this paranoia of like, oh my gosh, they're going to hire over me. Like they're going to, you know. But he's obviously been able to just keep growing as the company has grown. You know, typically like at that stage they always, then they go look for the, the CMO who's been at a gigantic company, you know, the CMO from Oracle or whatever. And they hire that person anyway.

Unfortunately, like HubSpot is the gigantic company at this point. Like there's what, five companies bigger? Where are you going to go? There's no one to pick from.

Yeah, it's crazy. So I asked about hiring and it's interesting because it feels like once you get to that, once you get over probably 10, 15, 20 people. It's not just like spitting out marketing ideas and moving fast and coming up with a new campaigns. Like you kind of have to shift. Like how do you describe your job with a team of 45 people? Like, you basically have to engineer this like marketing operating system that is like people budget, translate strategy from the CEO product and you're trying to like synthesize all of that and you have all these levers. Like, how do you see your job as cmo?

Yeah, I mean it's hard because I'm a geek. So one of the things I love doing the most is getting hands on with stuff. And it's why you and I got to know each other. At Drift. I was like, not just the cmo, I was the Drift user.

This is back to what we text each other about. Every now and then I'll get a text that's like a flex of like, look at how deep I am. And it's not even because you're flexing. It just, it's a good. Tom will send me a message, like to show me like he's. Even though he has a big team, he's like, I'm still in the game, I just did X. And he'll say some like super tactical thing. He'll be like, I set up social posts and buffer this, which is not the example, but he'll send me something like that. Like I was in Canva making my own images today. So he does still like to let me know that he's still got his hands on the controls.

But that's not the job. Yeah. So the thing that's actually moved the needle for me more than anything is hiring people smarter than me. Like that is the job. At the end of the day, when you get to almost any level of scale, the only way you're going to move the needle is just bring people on that are smarter than you. And I think there's a lot of CMOs who are afraid of bringing on people that are going to push them. But the end of the day, I get a lot more credit from my boss for hiring well than I do for being hands on in HubSpot or being early adopter ChatGPT or whatever it is. Like what's moving the needle at my company now is our ability to bring on people that we couldn't bring on three years ago. And that's my job. Like I've got to set strategy, I've got to communicate strategy, but then I've got to get out of the way and that's hard too, for me especially. But I'm at a point now where because of my direct reports at recorded future, I am clearly I've hired people smarter than me in every single area. And it's not that hard to do that by the way either. To be clear.

Ah, you're, you're pretty damn smart. But it helps when you have.

That was one of those self deprecating humor moments. Yeah, yeah.

It's all right. It's okay. Fell flat for me because you're fucking smart, but that's okay. I'm sure they're smarter than you in different. In various areas though I will say that you mentioned like we're talking a lot about hiring. How much of that is you doing the hiring? I'm guessing I'm going to lead you a little bit. I'm guessing that it's not just like you have a job wreck and you're like, hey, HR team, find me a badass person from HubSpot. Go like, I want to hear you talk about how much you're personally in the mix with recruiting and how you do that LinkedIn, you know, reading stuff. How do you keep your finger on the pulse?

Yeah. So I mean we talk about everybody who's at the higher the manager level and above has to think about recruiting as a part of their job. And it's not just like when you're ready to hire somebody. I think, you know, LinkedIn is a great place for this for me. I always know people that when a role opens, who I'm going to reach out to first, it doesn't mean I'm going to get them. And you know, my head of demand gen is somebody I've known, I wanted to work for, sorry, work with for a long time. So when I finally had the role open, he was the first person I reached out to and we brought him on board. So I think everybody needs to think about recruiting.

Is that Mr. Patrick Shea?

It is, yeah. So I look at it as everybody's responsibility, not the HR team's responsibility to be recruiting. My role generally in the hiring process for people that don't work for me is by the time they get to me, my job is to close them. So I'm pretty good at closing somebody. On coming to work for recorded future. So I sometimes talk a little bit past the sale, I'm told. But generally speaking, even at the manager level. Right. I'm brought in to talk to people, to help because it's competitive out there too. And I think people do appreciate getting to Talk to the CMO and ask questions. I think it's a cool part of the interview process.

Well, yeah, I remember Mike Volpe at HubSpot. When I worked at HubSpot, the team was maybe there was probably, it was close to this stage, probably 50, 75 people on the marketing team. And I was surprised at how involved he was in the hiring process. I had, I had coffee with him, I had my first meeting with him and then we kind of went to the do the HR thing and then he comes back in at the end in some way and I'm like, you really meet with everybody. And it's like, he's like, dude, this is the job. Like it is people like, how could I not like interviewing and building the team? Like is the thing that allows all the other things to happen. And I was like, oh yeah, that makes sense.

It isn't always that way though. It's hard because a lot of it, we want to do the work right. And at some point doing the work means getting people who are better at you at doing the work. And that's been a breakthrough for me at recorded future is we started to bring people on who are experts in specific types of marketing functions. And that's maybe another question is generalist versus specialist. You do hit a point where you want somebody who's best in class at specific marketing channels because they're going to help you really bring things to the next level.

How do you run this team of 45 people? Take us into some of your rhythms and routines and operating systems. Because let me tell you, if you had me managing 45 people, there would be a lot of, a lot of back and forth and changing of priorities. How do you do it?

And I'm not sure I'm world class at this yet. I think the way that I've gotten better at this is by bringing people on who have some of these systems and processes. So I have four direct reports. I have a head of demand gen we just talked about. I have a head of product marketing. I have a head of communications and PR and I have a head of brand. I also have somebody who runs our news organization. It's sort of not a part of the marketing team but it rolls into marketing. So I have four heads. I think that's a pretty common structure. Product marketing, demand gen, comms and brand. So each of those four leaders run different size teams and each of them have specific sets of OKRs that we use the OKR framework. So our head of demand gen, their OKRs around qualified pipeline creation and then all of the things that build into qualified pipeline creation. Our head of comms has okrs around things like share of voice and making sure that we're in the conversation. Our head of brand is out there worried about making sure that when people are thinking about intelligence, they're thinking about recorded future. And there are OKRs that we have around that. So at the high level, we use okrs as an alignment vehicle. And then at the next level, we really try to create and organize around what we call plays. So a play could also be called the campaign. We have quarterly and annual plays. Those plays can be about doing brand things like helping build the market. Those plays can be specific, tactical things like how do we sell more of a specific product to existing customers. So the thing that we've not been as good at, that we're finally good at now, is really having a solid strategy. Because in your LinkedIn post the other day, you said if you don't have a plan, you'll be given one. I learned that lesson the hard way. That was not something that came out of thin air. And I don't want to ever put my team in that position again. So we have a plan and our real focus is on making sure that we go execute that plan.

Okay, we're going to come back to that. If you don't have a plan, you're going to be given one. Which is your line.

I love that. That's a Pat Shea quote to give attribution. That came verbatim from him.

All right, Patrick, we'll get there. We'll go back to the team structure first. I think it's great because it's simple and you push to make it simple. I think I talk to a lot of marketing teams that get up over 20, 30, 40, and it's like you live with all these legacy. Well, I got a demand gen team, but I got this person who she reports to me because we used to do this and you have this crazy. And I'm like, how are you effective? CMO? And you have 12 direct reports right there. And so the fact that you have four more is a game changer.

And I have one on ones every Monday with each of my direct reports. Where.

Because you can.

Because I can. Yeah. No. And you couldn't do that otherwise. And we try to go through. I am not at all interested in what did you do last week? And any of the sort of tactical. Did you get that email out? How much pipeline did we create? Like, I have other ways of getting that information. It's more about strategy roadblocks. What are some things we could be doing six months from now that we're not doing? So I try to really keep those conversations focused on strategic conversations. And one of the things I think we're really good at at recorded future is giving access to data so that we don't have to have tactical conversations as a part of these one on ones like I don't need to see how much pipeline we created last week because that's sitting in front of me.

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Got it. I'm assuming, like if something was not working you to a talk either in the one on one or set up separate time, it's not going to be like, that's the only time you're going to talk about it.

No, the one on ones are purposely for strategic conversations. If something is broken and that happens quite frequently, as you can imagine, even at, even at recorded future scale, we're addressing the broken thing in a minute. If the CRO comes over and says we want to go do something that's not in our plan, we're not going to wait to the one on one. We're going to go jump in a conference room and walk through it.

How do you balance as a human, how do you balance the personal side of one on ones? I think one thing that used to stress me out and I don't know if I've ever said this publicly on a podcast, but I think it's helpful for people. It's like when you know you got to have a hard conversation with somebody, the next day you take that with you home and you're like stressed out. At least I stressed out at home. And the night before, you have a shitty night's sleep. And granted, obviously the person doesn't know, but I, I used to like, it's so hard to not internalize those things. Have you, is that the case for you? Have you found a way to separate it and treat it as business or it still is what it is?

No, it's brutal. It never gets easier. And it's hardest when the person you're talking to doesn't know. Like, there are some conversations where the tough conversation I'm having, the person knows it knows the issue we're talking about, it's not a surprise to them. But if I walk in a conference room, sit someone down, have a conversation about something that they thought they were doing really well, and I don't think they are, those are the most awkward ones and those are the ones that keep you up at Night and it's brutal.

Are there ways you can combat that? Like being more proactive with feedback or like sometimes it just is the nature of the job is just going to happen?

No, I think it's so, I think you can, I think it's like you've got to be good at giving feedback in real time. If you give feedback in real time in little bites, I think it feels a lot more palatable then when you surprise someone and say at the end of the quarter, hey, that thing you worked on was an abject failure. Like what were you doing? We're not putting you on a performance plan that should never happen. And I think that as leaders we've got to be better and more comfortable just giving real time feedback because in small doses like, hey, you know that thing we did and it didn't work, can we try it again? Is much better than me pulling you into an hour long meeting and just going through data and reviewing why you failed at something miserably. Right.

Well then you can be like, hey Dave, let's chat. Hey, so like as we've been talking about over the last three weeks, this is not working right. And it's not like what, you know, you're not at least, at least blindsided by that.

If someone's blindsided about performance feedback, it's your fault, not the person's fault. Like that's your job as a leader, to make sure where they stand is well understood on both sides.

I agree. There are also some. I can say this because I don't have a team of people now. There are also some people who are so shockingly unaware that you do have people that you will manage in your career who have a shockingly low amount of self awareness sometimes. And so there is, there is the outlier that you're like, yeah, you can't.

Solve for that, but you can sleep better at night. You can sleep better at night. Back from the sleeping problem. You can sleep better at night if you feel like you gave them that feedback and they couldn't internalize it for whatever reason. I'll sleep well at night for that person.

True.

I won't sleep well at night for the person that is not expecting what I'm about to talk about.

Yeah, that's fair. You got demand gen, product marketing, comms and PR brand and then your news org, which we're also going to talk about brand. So was interesting to me because you said brand and then you said they're responsible for how people are thinking about recorded future. Where does like creative sit in that mix, because they don't really influence that. They just make the things look nice for everybody else.

Yeah, it's. They sit in the brand organization and I don't want to. I think one of the most important changes in recorded futures history has been how we evolved our visual identity. You know, we're in a pretty serious space. So what we do is, is we're in the middle of some of the most mission critical things in the world. We help protect Ukraine against the Russian war. Like, we're doing serious stuff. Yet our brand used to be this fun, you know, fluffy, approachable, like very bright colors. And we pivoted that a couple of years ago to like very serious, dark, militaristic imagery that reflects the seriousness of the situation we put ourselves in. And I think it's helped people really identify us with solving serious problems. So no one is a bigger fan of visual design than me, but I charter the brand team as a whole to be the team that thinks about. And I don't call it category creation because I sort of hate category creation. Sorry.

Ooh, no, no, hold on. This is why I take notes. This is why I take notes. We'll get back to it. Keep going, keep going. There you go.

Sorry, category creation, but I need the world to understand there's a different approach to security. And that's what we do. And that's a big reason why we have a news organization too. But my brand, my head of Brand's job is to put recorded future in a position where we are educating the market on intelligence as much as we're educating the market on recorded future. We call it market. The market. It's a big part of what we do.

Your brand is sweet, it's clean, it's very, very official.

But there are certain things that we do. We do a lot of research reports on very serious topics. And we come up with this incredible imagery for these. We do every year a coffee table book. Like, we're so proud of these reports. We take them all together, we package them, we go spend a lot of money on putting together, like, a real book that you'd feel proud having on your coffee table. And they're incredible. And it's all because we have this, like, we put so much emphasis into designing these reports. And maybe I'll get you one at some point so you can see how awesome they are. It's a really incredible asset.

Sweet. I love taking the. I love having the physical leave behind.

Yeah.

Do you guys deal with, like, some real shit? Like, is your seat. Does Your CEO need to be like, does your company need to have, like, extra security? Like, I don't even know what I'm trying to say. But you're involved.

Yeah, it's kind of what we do. So we've got an intelligence cloud that has lots of different flavors of intelligence. And one of those flavors happens to be about physical security and even executive protection. So we can. If an executive's traveling somewhere, we can put some intelligence in place that helps understand any potential risks that might exist. We can look at things like executive impersonation. So if somebody's out there trying to impersonate our CEO on LinkedIn, we can flag it pretty much immediately. So it happens to be the business that we're in. But, yeah, we worry a lot. You know, our news organization, you know, we have reporters and reporters. It's well known that reporters get threatened all the time. Not at recorded future, but like, if you're a reporter and you write something about somebody who doesn't like you, you're. You're going to have potential security threats associated. So it is a very real thing we worry about, for sure.

Wait, so you're. The product can like, find that information on the Internet or like, you actually have a physical security product can find.

The information on the Internet that would indicate there is a threat to a physical location or person.

Interesting.

It's in, like, you know, facilities. I mean, think about, like, not so much like your office or my house, but more like you have an electrical grid somewhere or you've got a manufacturing plant somewhere. You want to know what the risk is to these physical facilities? A lot of what happens is planned on the Internet. Right? All those things are being planned on Internet. And if you know where to look, like we do, you can often find all the things that you need to help better protect.

So a company would buy recorded future to do that to help with the safety of their.

One of the things. Yeah, one of the things. One of the. One of the things.

Okay. I don't know how we got. Well, I do know how we got there. That could be a whole separate podcast. There's some crazy stuff going on. Okay. That makes more sense about brand comps and pr. Share voice.

Wait, wait, hold on. Before you go for comms and pr, I'm gonna give you a hot take.

You.

You're gonna skip past that one too fast.

Wait, wait, hold on. I wish I had my hot take noise. Go ahead.

Hot take alert. So we don't spend a dollar with agencies. Oh, and I believe we have one of the best performing PR functions in all of SaaS. And I'll tell you why, and I'll tell you the cheat code. But we do not spend a dollar with agencies. We've on and off tried agencies over the years. We've never had any luck. We do have PR people on staff, but not a huge team. It's a team of a couple of people and they're both world class. So the reason PR works at Recorded Future is because we actually have things to say that people care about. And it turns out when you do that, you don't need to spend $30,000 a month to get some agency to pitch you to some trade publication no one's ever heard of.

Or the other side of that is like. Or this is the other thing that I see CEOs do is like. Or try to pitch this company's story to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and the Tier one. It's like, they are not going to pay attention to you. They do not care.

No.

So why are you wasting time? It's just a waste of time. Have your CEO write witty LinkedIn posts and I promise you that will do more for you than an agency would in that situation.

100%.

Now, if you're at Recorded Future and you have good ingredients and you have a real story in an industry that is so much. You know, there's a lot of Tier one chatter about cybersecurity and Ukraine and Russia and all these things. Okay, that seems like the right ingredients to like, employ a, or deploy a tier one PR strategy 100%.

But what companies try to do is they try to deploy a Tier 1 PR strategy when they have nothing to say and they Wonder why the $30,000 a month retainer didn't have the results you thought they were going to have.

Or like, it used to be like, well, no, but we need to be in this. Like, we're, we're raising, this is our $20 million Series B. Like, somebody should write about us. And like the reporter, I actually remember this. I was pitching drifts. It was like, drift series B, which, 60 million, which is a pretty high Series B at that point. But the fundraising was so crazy at this point that I had one reporter from one of those top Tier one publications and she basically said to me, like, I'm sorry, sorry, sweetheart, we don't talk to companies that are raising like under $200 million. It's not even on our radar. And it used to be a guarantee, like, oh, you want some press? Raise funding. But even that changed years ago. And so it's just like all those things, like, nobody cares about that stuff anymore.

I have nothing against the PR industry. They're incredibly effective if you have something interesting to say. Right. But most SaaS companies don't. So that line item for the budget, the PR retainer, is the first thing I would cut. If I were to go be a CMO of some other company, some PR.

Agencies or even marketing people would be like, that's not true. You know, Ogilvy said there's no dull products, only dull writers. And it's like, well, you know, in this industry, in tech now, there's. The whole founder story has been so played out. And so it's like, it's not that interesting that, like, you used to be number three in the world in racquetball and like you donate to this charity, like, that's not going to get you featured in one of these stories anymore.

But I think most companies, and not all companies, but a lot of companies do have interesting stories to tell. They're just trying to tell the wrong story and they get in trouble by making it about the product or the company when maybe it's about the data they have that no one else has. Like, those are where you get lots of interest. No one cares about your product launch unless there's something fundamentally different underneath the hood.

Is it you don't have any agencies currently or you've never, like, you just. You don't want them.

We've had a couple. We've piloted a couple of agencies over the years just to remind ourselves that we don't think agencies work in our model. So, you know, we'll do month to month for a couple. We've tried it a couple times, but it's. I think we're pretty convinced at this point the best way for our model to work is to keep doing it in house, not just pr, but that's.

Agencies, like for anything, really.

Yeah, we have limited agencies. Like we use an agency to help design HubSpot landing pages. Like that makes sense for us. But we try to minimize the amount of external agencies we use because at some point that just doesn't scale as well as having people who know how to do it on staff full time.

Yeah, that's like a contractor to. But yeah, you don't have like a SEO strategy agency. Just could just give you a spreadsheet of things you need. That's a separate rant anyway. You have a news Org. Why do you have a news Org? What do they do? How do you measure that and tie it back to the business.

Yeah. So our inspiration is Bloomberg. So we call ourselves the Bloomberg of cybersecurity. And Bloomberg, if you don't know, make money by selling terminals to super fancy traders like hedge funds and Goldman Sachs and whoever. Right. So if you're a trader and you're, you're doing serious trades in the market and you're doing it with the Bloomberg terminal. But Bloomberg is most well known for news. And it turns out there's actually a very hard connection between reporting on financial news and using and operating a Bloomberg terminal. Right. So if you're a Bloomberg client, you get the news faster and you get it in a way that helps you do your job faster. So Bloomberg is sort of a model for us. We feel like if we are the best cybersecurity reporting news organization in the world, our clients are going to trust us in a way that they wouldn't trust us otherwise. And we happen to have a product that helps them look at a piece of news and then make security decisions as a result of it. So if we write a story about a specific vulnerability or a specific new ransomware actor, our clients can. So not only can you read the story, anyone can read the story, but our clients can read that story inside of our intelligence cloud and start to like pivot into the specific vulnerability they should patch or the specific IP addresses they should be looking for. So the way we kind of think of it is, is we want to make the news available for everybody because it's what a great brand building tool news is. But it also creates a relationship with our clients, much like Bloomberg does with Bloomberg News in a way where recorded future clients get actionable news. It's really cool. So the way that we measure news is entirely on audience development. Like I don't generate leads. There's no HubSpot. That's not true. There is a pop up, but I'll get to that in a second. But it is not something where we're saying how many leads did the News. Org generate? In fact, the news. Org doesn't even think of themselves in marketing.

It's not even on your website, is it? I can't find it.

There's your pay. There's. You go under company. There should be something called Recorded Future News. Okay, you should see it there.

I went to Google and I typed the Record. Recorded Future News.

Yeah, Recorded Future News. There's a page on our site that describes the news organization. And you know, they are editorially independent. They can and often will write about Our clients. And sometimes that creates a little bit of interesting conversation around. But you know, just like Bloomberg, Bloomberg reporters can write about Bloomberg clients and we take a very similar editorial independent approach. These are all ex reporters from big organizations like Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg and Protocol and others. And they're out there reporting five or six times a day on the stories that matter in cybersecurity. And they're building a massive audience. Like our news site gets way more traffic than our corporate site does.

Like how much? Roughly give people a sense.

I don't know if we've announced traffic, but yolo, you know, we did a couple million in page views last year, something like that. Three million.

That's what I mean. The exact number isn't specific, but I didn't want you, I didn't want people to be like, oh, this guy's talking about you're reaching millions of people.

It's not like, oh, we have a.

Blog and 10,000 unique visitors. Read our blog this month.

No, this is millions of visitors and growing. The way that we make a connection point between the Record and our Recorded Future is through a newsletter we call Cyber Daily. And this Cyber Daily newsletter, which was launched before my time, is effectively the daily newsletter for Recorded Future news. It summarizes all the stories we publish. Now that is a lead gen activity for us. In fact, it is our single biggest channel at Recorded Future. So email and one newsletter in particular is our largest new logo pipeline creation channel. And this is a newsletter that is out there sending news from recorded feature news every day. So the way we monetize it in some ways is through our newsletter.

Well, probably, I mean, because you've done such a good job with the legitimacy of this news organization, it really works to build the credibility of Recorded Future. Because if you're like, oh, what the record is this trusted source of news put on by Recorded Future? You're like, oh, Recorded Future must know their shit.

And we the same to the other product from Recorded Future News, our podcast. And as a podcaster you can appreciate this. Every tech company has a podcast. 95% of them are awful. It's like some marketer with a microphone kind of like you. No offense, but it's like they're sitting at home with their mic on and like that's their podcast. And we wanted to have a podcast that would rival Bloomberg Wall Street Journal or like a little Top podcast. So we went out and hired a podcaster from NPR named Dina Temple Rastin who like, was a well known podcaster on one of their Most popular podcasts. We hired her a production team. So you do your own production or, you know, you have a team that has production for you. We went out and did the same thing. We hired a production team. We hired writers to help write episodes. Like, it is a legit enterprise working on this podcast. And our podcast is the number one cybersecurity podcast on the planet and is very frequently the number one or two tech news podcasts in all of Apple podcasts. So, like, we are. We're up there with big boys. Like, our competitors are Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg.

Amazing. Yeah, it's not like, good content for like a wink wink marketing arm of a. Of a software company. It's actually its own thing.

I didn't know you had to, like, write scripts for podcasts. Like, they go write a script and they edit the script and they have fact checkers. Like, we have our podcast as a fact checker. Who will be fact checking this podcast, Dave? Like, is that going to be you and I fact checking our own facts?

No, I'm actually working with somebody, a friend of mine who came on the podcast and where they work is like a huge legal team, and it's a nightmare to like, go through this different sections and figure out what you can say and can't say. So, yeah, this is. Everybody does have a podcast. I would say that this podcast for me is a guy with a microphone, but I would say, and I don't mean this in a arrogant way, not everybody hosting the podcast is me. And I think it's that. That is like, this is what people miss out with. A podcast is like, choose your format, but, like, play to your strengths. And, like, don't hand the mic to your CEO who's never done a podcast and spoken anything publicly before and then wonder why it's boring instead. Like, what you did is like, oh, we're not just going to do the. We want to do a podcast, but we don't want to do them because everyone else has one. We want to do it because we think that we can create a top cyber security podcast as compared by these.

Major top news podcasts. Like, we want to be up there news. We want to be news. Like, we want to be up there with Bloomberg. Like, our big competitor right now is Bloomberg's foundering podcast, which is, you know, pretty high up the list. Like, we are neck and neck with them every week.

Yeah, you're going down Bloomberg someday. So how do you like all the people on this team? They have to go to meetings and stuff or they Just fully. We pay you like you're on the payroll, but you're.

Yeah, they're off the slack. They're not in the marketing team. Slack channel the head of the recorded future news reports into me and we have one on ones every week and he's been incredible. But they run and I give them budget. So we've done some things to try to expand the reach of what we do in recorded feature news. So they have budget that I help them. So we help them when they need help, but we give them complete editorial control to go do what they need to go do to grow the.

Okay, this is unfortunate that we're running out of time because I have a hundred things that I want to continue to ask you, but we got to go back to these notes. Give me some short answers on these and I'll do my best to shut up. If you don't have a plan, you're going to be given a plan. What does that mean? Are you getting kicked out?

I'm getting kicked out. I was kicked out by our CEO, so I feel like that was an acceptable kick out.

So you're not watching this on video because we don't do this on video. But Tom is doing a walk, which I have. It's a walk that I haven't done in a long time, which is. It's the walk of. When you're in a conference room, you probably didn't book it. The person wants the conference room, they knock. And Tom is now walking down the hall the offices of recorded future and to find a new conference room where you can finish this podcast.

Well, that's almost 90% accurate. The only thing you got wrong was I booked the room for an hour. But since you and I chat so much, you know, we went over time. So it's my fault.

What are you talking about?

This is from.

It's 2:58. Maybe you got secret clocks.

We took 20 minutes talking. There was the pre show that wasn't recorded where you and I talked about all these more interesting topics.

Yeah, you're right. More interesting topics. We talked about AMT tax, Bernadoodles and. And drugs. Okay, so if you don't have a plan, you're going to be given a plan.

I've learned this the hard way. So I. I've learned as you get. I mean I now believe this with my whole heart that if you don't have a commit a plan that's agreed upon by the powers that be an organization, you're going to get the random act of marketing. Ask from the CRO who wants the webinar, the CPO who wants the webinar, the regional sales VP who wants a webinar, you're going to be webinar to death. And if you come with a plan and say, here's a message, here's why we think this is the right message for the right time, here's the different channels we're going to use to activate this message. Here's how this is going to impact our quota carriers. Here's how it's going to impact our channel partners. Here's how our BDRs are going to use this to go out and generate interest. And here's how these plays lay out over a year. If you do that and hold to it, you can control your destiny. It's not perfect. We try to aim for 80% of what we do in a quarter year, be something that we've predefined as part of this play. But if I didn't do that and I didn't, to be clear for a while, how can you say no when somebody says, oh, can we do a webinar or this thing over here, I don't have anything to show you that says that this is a better option. So the plan will be given to you. If you don't get the plan and get the plan approved, and more importantly, hold to that plan in the spite of these random apps that often come.

To CMOs, also just makes your life easier. I saw a comment on this post that we had on LinkedIn from Alina, who's one of the founders and CMO at Chili Piper now. And she basically said, we want to know what the team is working on and have faith that like, or we want to know that the, the team is in good hands. Or like that they're thinking about stuff. And I also feel like when you own the plan, when you go to the CEO or whoever and you're like, we got the plan, it also checks Xbox of like, ha, all right, I don't need to be in Tom's shit as much because like I. He's got a plan and I know that he's on top of it. Okay, you mentioned you hate category creation.

For 90% of companies, it's the wrong goal. Like, everyone points to the. When I, when I say category of creation, who's the first company that comes to mind if I were to ask you?

For me, it's Drift. Because we did it while we were there. While I was there.

Fair enough. Okay, so Drift. But like the main one that Everyone.

Talks about, I don't know, Apple, who, who Gainsight.

So Gainsight is sort of stood up as like they created the customer success management category. So Gainsight effectively created a category. I could argue Drift created a category, but these are two world class companies that had founders who understood how difficult that was and had the commitment level to make it happen. So category creation by itself is not necessarily the evil thing. It's every company thinking that their special little product has earned deserves its own category. And it gets to the point where no one cares. Like, and I think it creates all sorts of artificial like we have to now talk to analysts about our invented category and we've got to put all this effort into getting others to talk about our inflated category. For most people, stay in the category you're in and just do a really great job of articulating your unique position in that category. Like MongoDB didn't have to tell the world that they're creating this special type of database. They just had to say, hey, we're a database, we're just better than Oracle.

Most people would be better off simplifying to like, I do believe that it is, it is important but like, I like to simplify it for founders. Like, what do you want to be known for? Yeah, and then you're not worried about like, because I've done it, I've worked with companies and it's like they obsess over. Well, like, okay, now that we're creating a category, like how do we let Gartner know about this? And it's like, who cares? Like in the Drift example, we didn't start creating Category until basically the market had already told us. Like people like you, early adopters, like, hey, we're kind of like doing conversational marketing because we're using Drift. And we were like, oh yeah, that is. But the, from the beginning the founders set out to create this big vision and were like, hey, we're not here to build some small little SaaS app. We had this big vision of creating a massive category.

It's good to have a big vision. It's bad to assume that there are lots of database companies who have a huge vision, but the end of the day, they're still database companies. They still are in the same category as Oracle was in 50 years ago. They are just coming to market with a different approach. In the Drift case, you were doing something different than classic website chat. That made sense and Gainsight did do something pretty interesting. But I think category creation as the like de facto playbook is where it falls down for me. I am not a category creator. At Recorded Future, there is a category that we're in. We are just advocating for our unique approach to the category that we exist in.

Yes. And seems to be going pretty well. 250 million in revenue. All right, we gotta go. Well, I don't have to go, but you gotta go. I gotta go because I gotta. The Masters is on, and it's a absolutely fire leaderboard right now, but Tom Wentworth, I love you, man. This is a great conversation. People are going to love it. I haven't done one of these in a little bit. And thank you for doing it. Do me a favor. Go to Tom's LinkedIn. I'll put in the show notes. Go to LinkedIn. Tom Wentworth. Send him connection requests, comment on his stuff and tell him that you heard him on this episode. It's my favorite thing. Like, you messaged me about the Hillary episode. Abm.

Oh, my God, that was incredible.

She runs abm. It's Snowflake. She messaged me. It was my favorite thing. I don't care about downloads. I don't care about anything. My favorite thing is now when a guest comes on and then like, two days later, they email me and they're like, oh, you do have an audience. Like, I got a bunch of messages from this show is my favorite feeling. So I hope you.

I would be worried as heck if I were Hillary's boss at Snowflake, because she is now. Like, she is showing up on everybody's hiring radar, thanks to you.

You. You.

This is you. You did this for her.

No, not true. I've seen her stuff. I'm drafting off of Saster. She gave a presentation at Saster that I saw.

Ah, fair enough.

So shout out to Jason Lemkin. All right, Tom, I'll see you, man. Thank you. I'll see you in my text messages. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit 5 podcast. If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over@exit5.com. We've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates. Plus we have a community. A community of over 4000 B2B marketing pros. Whether you're deep in your career and want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see what people are talking about, get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company. Go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the email list there. You can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out. Exit5.com and I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friends at Hatch. That's Hatch fm. They produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do. And they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast editing and on demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you got to do is just upload, upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's Hatch fm.

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