by Oren Klaff
Boom. That’s only 138 words. About one minute of speaking at normal speed—thirty seconds when done at double the normal pace, as I instructed Heather to do.
Even though I wrote Heather’s Flash Roll, I didn’t fully understand it. Most people would not. Arguably, the experienced sawmill executives—the very people who are supposed to understand this stuff—might not get it 100 percent. The goal, of course, is not to deliver this kind of information for understanding and comprehension, but to demonstrate your technical mastery in such a way that you create certainty about your authority and expertise.
Your customers don’t actually want to know the details that are in your head. If you gave them the full benefit of your industry knowledge, it would be overwhelming and time consuming, moving further from a sale rather than closer. So you create a mini-performance that you own, by delivering the Flash Roll with focus and impact. Of course, most of us aren’t professional performers (this is why you keep a short time limit). But for this brief display of mastery of the details, we can all learn our Flash Roll script. It’s critical to do this correctly because the buyer wants the comfort and confidence that you are an absolute expert, that you can get down in the weeds if needed, and the Flash Roll shows them that you can do it, without question.
In Geneva, Billy was going to deliver a Flash Roll we’d spent weeks crafting. But first, he had to lay the foundation.
WARMING UP
“Gentlemen,” Billy began, “the top ten highest-paying jobs in data security today are . . .”
[long pause for dramatic effect]
“. . . are all completely bootleg, criminal, and illegal. Let me quickly tell you about the top three moneymakers in the data industry:
Stealing data and reselling it on the dark web
Encrypting data and ransoming companies to decrypt it
Hacking bank accounts and making fraudulent transfers
“And the good ol’ days of the amateur account hacking ransomer are gone,” Billy continued. “We now have well-funded nation-states like North Korea, and traffickers like the Sinaloa Cartel who are playing the bank fraud game.
“When you hear the word hacker, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? A twentysomething alone in a basement, wearing a black hoodie, staring at a laptop. In the old days, sure, you wouldn’t be far off the mark. Now we’re defending banks from professional criminals: the Russian Business Network, the Carbanak group, Cosa Nostra, Yakuza, and the Sinaloa drug cartel. These groups are stealing data and hacking accounts at two petabytes a day, worth $10 million each, with almost zero cost. This criminal activity is invisible to most corporations, until it’s way too late, so hardly anyone will pay the high cost of installing better safety systems.”
Billy was starting the pitch by providing context for what was happening in the industry—the specific undercover forces that most people didn’t know much about—further cementing his status as a cybersecurity guru.
“Today,” he continued, “the hackers are well-funded, difficult to identify, and very industrious because the black market for stolen data pays so well. Incredibly well, in fact. It’s a world of high revenue and high profit. A criminal data operation can go all the way from idea in the morning to operations in the afternoon and then to a million in profits by the end of the day.”
I had written this section of the presentation around the Pre-Wired Idea “Winter Is Coming” (more on this in the next chapter), painting a picture for the bankers of just how bad things were getting. We needed to show them that the world they lived in was becoming unacceptably dangerous.
“Hackers will try all day every day to access your customers’ accounts and their money,” Billy said, staying on script. “That’s why you ask each customer so many questions when they call, right? But the customer is annoyed by so many questions—birth date, PIN, last transaction, et cetera—and the process takes an average of five minutes and seventeen seconds to ask them all the identifying questions. You and your customers currently accept this inconvenience as a necessary evil to keep the transaction ‘secure.’ But customers sure don’t like it.”
Some of the bankers were nodding their heads. This was definitely hitting home.
“What if it wasn’t necessary at all?” Billy continued. “Our system identifies the caller using their voice in less than five seconds. We’re never wrong. We do this using our own unique voice identification algorithm and by comparing what they are saying to every known piece of information about them on the internet. If there is any question they are not the person they say they are, we flag it immediately. It’s an unbeatable system.”
Because this topic was so relevant to the bankers’ world, they became visibly emotional as Billy spoke, shifting in their seats.
Their body language revealed that Billy’s words were hitting a nerve. But I knew we were still a distance from the finish line. We still had to convince them that Billy was capable of spearheading this company—and was worthy of the $10 million we were asking for.
As if on cue, Philippe spoke up. “Tell us, Billy, if we provide you ten million dollars, how will you spend it?”
Now, Billy was tech smart. He was food smart. He knew literature, seventeenth-century architecture, college football rankings, and, of course, cybersecurity. But he wasn’t the greatest at international diplomacy. He jumped in without giving a thought to where we were (Geneva), whom we were asking for money (Swiss citizens), and where we were going to haul their money off to (Akron, Ohio).
He rushed to explain. “First, we’re going to build a new data center in Akron. Then, we’re going to hire six or seven engineers from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. And we’re going to partner with NASDAQ. And our first big customer is going to be Bank of America. We might park a couple employees at their headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina . . . just for a while to monitor implementation.”
In other words, all that money would leave Switzerland, be spent in the United States, and only benefit Americans. He might as well have said we were going to spend it all on new outfits for the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. This was not what they wanted to hear.
“Why should we give this American company our investment when there is no benefit to the Swiss?” Philippe asked, starting to frown. “The board of directors would never approve it.”
There was a long silence as the body language in the room cooled off. Pens were put down, chairs were pushed back, coffee cups clanged back in their saucers. It was like one of those scenes in the movies when a character does something embarrassing and the music comes to a screeching halt.
We were in trouble. I jumped in.
“Guys, let me interrupt here for a moment because the best part of our plan is next—we’re going to open an office in Zurich.” Their heads nodded approvingly. Whew. “And we’re going to hire five Swiss engineers and open an internship at Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology.” More vigorous nodding. “And, of course, we would expect to hold the annual board meeting right here in this office—if you would agree, of course.” A murmur of approval.
This explanation diplomatically solved the geopolitical turf war Billy had started. But now we had a new problem: Billy’s slip-up had broken the spell we’d cast over the Swiss investors. I could see them sliding back into their natural state of skepticism. They started firing questions at us.
“What do the projections look like?”
“Do you have a CFO?”
“How many additional rounds of finance will be required? Who will buy us when we want to sell the company off?”
Rapid-fire, penetrating questions like this are always bad news. With his statement, Billy had unintentionally triggered the buyers’ brains to become aware of the risks we were offering. Now these bankers were trying to gather more information to close their Certainty Gap. The problem is, we didn’t want to answer, because answering tech
nical questions is an inefficient way to close the Certainty Gap and rarely works with sophisticated buyers.
We needed to figure out a way to flip the script. To do so, Billy had been practicing an incredible Flash Roll, and this was the right moment to launch it.
I took a gamble and interrupted the interrogation. “Gentlemen,” I said, and pointed to one of the men at the table, “one question at a time, please. Professor Schumacher, what were you asking?”
“You obviously know data security,” said Schumacher, “but our banking industry has special requirements; these may be difficult for you to learn in such a short amount of time.”
I breathed a silent sigh of relief. It was the perfect question to set Billy loose with the Flash Roll. Billy rushed in to answer again, but now he was in the right domain—cybersecurity, not international diplomacy; this was an area where he was an expert. And this time he was about to deliver a well-rehearsed masterpiece of a speech, not just something he was making up off the cuff.
These guys were about to see a very different side of Billy Cambell.
Billy grabbed a fat strawberry from the platter in the center of the table and dipped it into the bowl of sugar by the teapot, and the whole thing disappeared into his mouth. He was fueling up for his Flash Roll, or as I sometimes call it, a drum solo. He knew this was his chance to make the deal happen.
A $10 MILLION FLASH ROLL
“Unlike retail or manufacturing,” Billy said, swallowing the strawberry in a single bite but not slurring a word, “banking IT security controls are required by the EURO2 to be multilayered and to meet Unified Threat Management on the server side, which requires firewalling, intrusion detection, and anti-malware. We use Palo Alto Networks’ PA-5000 to cover these gaps. But that leaves software-based security holes on user-side devices, so all banking exchanges will audit your end point protection to go beyond the host-based network side and do an AJAX pass root on the user’s device in external environments that do not provide network-based security controls like Level 3 Boundary Protection. Of course, we still need data encryption rest cycles at two hundred milliseconds, which goes way beyond end point encryption to wide net cloud storage. That’s why the ten largest banks are using multifactor cryptographic tokens and biometrics at the current ISO2026 standards, a system that we designed and sold them.”
Whoa. What just happened?
This went way beyond Status Alignment and hit every credibility button a banker has.
Although Billy was speaking in a very matter-of-fact tone, he was also speaking at twice his normal pace, so this was an impressive amount of technical detail in a short period of time. It was a drum solo of sorts, a wonderfully produced Flash Roll, for bankers only, and when he wrapped up, there was no question that Billy was a technical master in the domain of banking security—precisely the kind this bank needed to solve their problems. He didn’t tell them how he “knew” the industry or list his extensive credentials. He showed them. It was an easy script for him, scrolling through technical details, software vendors, the tech stack, and security implementation. After this speech, there was little question in anyone’s mind that Billy was the only man for the job. They thought to themselves, “He is the one to protect us all.”
“Well, thank you, gentlemen,” said Lustenberger a few minutes later, after we’d finished the rest of our pitch and turned over full autonomy to the bankers (a technique I reveal in chapter six). “We’ll talk it over and get back to you in a couple of days. Are you in Geneva long?”
“We’re leaving on Friday and need to know by then,” I said matter-of-factly.
The very next morning we got the call from Philippe. The bank came in with the $10 million investment we’d wanted. Project Windbreak was a success. Billy’s Flash Roll had turned the tides at a critical moment and left the questioning bankers with a sense of complete certainty about our experience, depth, and know-how.
We went out in search of a restaurant to celebrate and ordered three of everything, which was just about the right amount.
CHAPTER 4
Using Pre-Wired Ideas
Since my first book came out, we’ve had to keep the office doors locked to prevent the large number of visitors, walk-ins, and occasional crazies. Accordingly, I was surprised to see an elderly rabbi shuffle into my personal office at ten o’clock on a Monday morning. His venerable beard framed two rosy cheeks, his eyes looked like windows to a different century. He was sporting a black suit and the kind of large leather briefcase my grandfather probably carried back in Lithuania.
I stared at the rabbi and he stared back at me in an awkward silence. Then his face erupted into a huge smile as he pulled a carefully folded piece of paper out of his breast pocket and held it out to me. I did not take it.
“You see?” he asked, as if I was supposed to know. It was a newspaper clipping announcing the launch of a biotech fund by a major venture capital firm. They had $200 million to spend and the rabbi wanted some of it.
“I need to meet with New Icon Capital right away,” he said, “and get twenty-two million.” He sat down across from me, opened his briefcase, and started pulling out papers slowly and methodically, stacking them on my desk.
Oh man. Some days all the stuff that comes my way is overwhelming. Today, this guy needs $22 million, tomorrow that guy needs $30 million, and then some other guy needs $50 million . . . there’s no end to it.
I excused myself from the room to ask my assistant, Amy, what the rabbi was doing in my office, why he was unpacking his briefcase, and bluntly, how we were going to get him out of there as quickly as possible.
Amy had been through all of this before. Nobody was supposed to get through without an appointment. “He’s on your calendar,” she told me with a shrug. “You accepted the invite.”
Now, I’m not the kind of person who checks my calendar multiple times a day, but I’m sure I would have noticed “Old Guy wants $22 million” was scheduled first thing on a Monday. I checked my phone calendar and, oops, there it was: 10 a.m., Silicon Valley Mentor Program.
Amy rolled her eyes. “You’re his mentor,” she said.
I glanced back through the open door of my office at the seventy-year-old man who was still carefully withdrawing papers from his bottomless briefcase and organizing them on my desk, seemingly in his own little world. I was his mentor? No, I don’t think so.
But Amy was right. A few weeks earlier, I had volunteered for an entrepreneurial mentorship organization. It’s an obligatory Silicon Valley tradition in which successful executives get paired up with a mentee who is just starting out in the business world. There are a couple of reasons why it’s nearly impossible to get out of being a mentor. Not only is it the decent thing to do (and it really doesn’t take much time), but more so, a cabal of lawyers, banks, and accounting firms basically require you to do it. The unwritten rule is, “If you want to get access to our money, you help our people out.”
Here’s how these mentorship deals are supposed to work:
You get paired up with a twentysomething wunderkind who is creating some kind of change-the-world technology.
You meet the kid for coffee, and listen intently while he shows you a demo.
Most of the time the demo stalls out, or shuts down, and a colorful little circle starts spinning.
You listen to a heartfelt speech about changing the world.
Next, you dutifully make some calls to get them a few investor meetings.
And of course, once they meet a partner or investor, you never hear from them again. Favor done. Case closed.
The entire process is supposed to take no more than a few hours, cumulatively. These mentees are supposed to be young, tech savvy, self-motivated, and . . . completely broke. You buy them a cortado and an almond croissant, listen carefully and try to help, and eventually they will go away. I was prepared for all tha
t. But I had not signed up for this guy.
“Look, sir,” I said, grabbing a few of his papers and stacking them back up, “I’m really not an expert in biotech. I think Simon at Biocom would be a much better fit.” The rabbi pushed one of the documents he’d laid out on my desk an inch closer to me. It was a signed contract with Humana, a $300 billion company. That got my attention. I flipped to the next document in the stack. Another signed contract with Pfizer. The next document—another contract, this one with Merck. And there was yet another one with Johnson & Johnson.
“These are sort of interesting,” I said, quickly adding up some of the numbers in my head, while trying to remain impassive. “You have over nine hundred million dollars’ worth of contracts here.”
“One point seven billion, actually,” said the old man, blinking repeatedly. I glanced at the name on the bottom of every contract. His name was B. Rosenberg, the most rabbinical-sounding name in the world. Only this was no rabbi. Within a few seconds I had pulled up his Wikipedia page. Professor emeritus in biochemistry. Runner-up for national laureate in recombinant human genetics. Recently awarded an international fellowship in molecular medicine. An international ranking in developmental biology. And twenty other similar awards and honors, each one better than the next. It appeared that he had bounced around the early stage biotech startup world for a while, until a friend of mine, Bob Morgan at a Silicon Valley bank, decided he needed a real adviser and then referred him to me.