#REAPER UNFOLDER HOW TO#

The current personnel will have more added to their plates on a day-to-day basis, as the company needs the remaining personnel to do more with less. The personnel let go might be redundant in the eyes of company leaders, but they may have played a vital role in a process or function that you depend on from that vendor. Seeing friends and colleagues depart for reasons entirely out of their control makes everyone nervous. Expect your vendor relationship to worsen.Make it clear that the path for advancement is with your organization. Take the time to reinforce your commitment to your employees by increasing flexibility (if you haven’t already), delivering market adjustments to salaries, promoting skip-level meetings and job rotations, and funding and providing time for training and upskilling within normal working hours. Shiny, new security tech vendors offering elevated titles, anywhere-work models, and stock options were appealing destinations for those engineers and security analysts looking to make a change during the “great resignation.” But recent announcements will give your team members pause. Protect your people…by retaining them.Think about how product marketers, marketers, and account team members could join to drive security awareness and training initiatives and help with a security brand internally. Consider how sales engineers could make excellent security architects - especially in customer-facing roles such as product security for revenue-generating products and services. Look for skill sets that you may have previously ignored.Use this to your advantage by hiring this talent and learning from experiences that come from other regions, verticals, and people. The talent that vendors will let go as they trim costs will come with diverse backgrounds and experiences from working with dozens to hundreds of other organizations.

Do not ignore vendor talent because they haven’t worked on a corporate cybersecurity team before. Vendors often hire cybersecurity practitioners from nonvendor organizations, but practitioners do so less often. Recruit from vendors the way they recruit from customers.The staffing and skills shortage still very much exists, and security leaders’ next great hire might come from those let go by a security vendor “optimizing its business.” As you watch the next several quarters unfold and more announcements fill your LinkedIn and Twitter feeds, take the following actions: Cybersecurity vendors, however, are not so lucky as the investor ecosystem that subsidized their mega-growth initiatives goes to ground. Security leaders can rely on externalities to help preserve their budget. As The Gilded Age Of Cybersecurity Unicorns Ends, An Era Of Opportunity Begins For CISOs

#REAPER UNFOLDER HOW TO#

This blog covers what security leaders and practitioners should know about these conditions and how to endure trying times … as we enter an entirely different set of trying times.

Headcount reductions are an easy way to cut costs, and remaining employees are asked to do more with less.Īs sales cycles start to lengthen and attach rates diminish, expect more announcements … and more personnel to become available.

Investors prefer companies with product market fit, not subsidizing those still searching for it.

Everything regresses to the mean: Hypergrowth takes a back seat to profitability in turbulent times.

Cheap, available capital disappeared faster than cybersecurity startups expected.

The cuts are happening for a few reasons: With turbulent times ahead, the tech world signaled that cuts were coming, and cybersecurity vendors followed. It turns out that when the spigot of easy investor capital shut off, some vendor leaders discovered that they were “not optimized as a business,” as Cybereason CEO Lior Div commented. The economic downturn is in its early stages, but it certainly appears as if the hypergrowth phase of the cybersecurity vendor party has come to an end - abruptly. Lacework, Cybereason, OneTrust - three vendors, over $3 billon dollars in funding, and over a thousand out of work. But in June 2022, Lacework cut 20% of its workforce, Cybereason cut 10% of its workforce, and OneTrust cut 25% days after RSAC 2022. Cybereason raised $275 million in July 2021 and $750.6 million total, and OneTrust raised $926.4 million in total. In November of 2021, Lacework raised $1.3 billion on a valuation of $8.3 billion, bringing it to $1.9 billion raised in total. Just 12 months ago, the cybersecurity startup ecosystem seemed fine, with more funding coming in and valuations continuing to skyrocket. It looks like cybersecurity vendor unicorns will follow tech companies as they begin to prepare for macroeconomic headwinds and a much more conservative investor environment.

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