Our Founder & CEO, José Seara, sat down with Joshua Feinberg on the Data Center Go-to-Market Podcast (DCSMI) for an unusually candid conversation — not about the technology, but about the hard work of bringing a brand-new category to market.
Watch the full conversation below.
Building DeNexus meant building demand for something most buyers didn't yet have a budget line for. Here's some of what José shared about that journey:
The budget you enter through isn't the budget you should be paid from. DeNexus usually enters an industrial organization through the cyber security team — which wrongly positions it as a cyber security tool, competing for cyber security dollars that are already under pressure. But it's a risk management solution, and the risk management budget is typically far larger. Moving the conversation from one to the other is its own journey.
Identify who can kill the deal — early. In complex enterprise procurement, it's comfortable to spend your time with the champion who already loves the solution. The harder, more valuable work is mapping the full ecosystem of personas and finding the one stakeholder whose single "no" ends the deal — then either winning them over or disqualifying fast.
POCs are an investment, not a default. Jumping into an expensive, time-consuming proof of concept too early is a classic small-startup mistake — you convince yourself you're ready when you're not, and risk doing free R&D for a prospect who never buys.
Less technical content, not more. Explaining how beautifully complex your product is doesn't help you sell. Stay on the basics. Talk about the customer's problems — sometimes opening their eyes to problems they don't yet realize they have — not the elegance of your architecture.
Marketing and pre-sales aren't commodities. The functions José assumed he could outsource — top of funnel, marketing, pre-sales — turned out to be core. Learning that was an expensive mistake.
The most dangerous moment is right after the Series A. Money in the bank tempts you to do things the company isn't ready for yet. Building something meaningful in a complex environment is a marathon — and you can't run it before you've run the half.
The thread tying it all together: in a market this early, education is the gateway to trust. Watch the full conversation below.
DeNexus quantifies OT and industrial cyber risk in financial terms, so risk owners, CFOs, and boards can make decisions in dollars — not just CVEs. See how DeRISK works