Cymulate

A few years back I had the opportunity to join Rapid7 in a newly-created role to help define and build out their threat intelligence business after they acquired IntSights. It was a great role, and I was part of an amazing team. All good things come to an end, though, and after a couple of years there was a bit of a business shuffle and my role no longer existed. They had a new position for me, but it wasn’t something I was super excited about.

At about this time, a friend from my time at Blue Coat called me. He’d just left his current job, and was joining Cymulate to run sales for Australia and New Zealand, and needed a technical sidekick. As the business grew in the region there would be the opportunity to build out the team. Another friend from my time at Websense was also joining, looking after channels for the region.

What perfect timing!

A few interviews later - including a very strange one with the CTO and co-founder - I was offered the role. It was a very difficult decision to leave Rapid7, but this appeared to be a great opportunity. Interesting tech that appeared to both work and add some value to the end user. More importantly, while I was leaving one team of great people, I was going to be rejoining some old friends.

Unfortunately, things don’t always work out as we’d like.

It quickly became clear that the company leadership really had no idea what they were doing. Perhaps that’s why they are an 8+ year old company clinging to the “we’re a startup” mantra: the entire operation is insanely immature. Decisions are made on an emotional basis, without bothering to look at facts or data. Internal systems and processes that you would expect to be in place at this stage are either inadequate (best case) or simply don’t exist.

The exec team also had little interest in actually helping the field teams. Early on we were working to get an order out of a bank in Australia. The deal was basically done. All that was remaining was to complete the “new vendor” survey. The account rep and I worked through it, getting about 85% of the responses completed. The remaining handful were outside our ability to respond to (for example, “Provide evidence of 2FA being mandatory for all staff”), so I reached out to the CISO. There was maybe ten minutes worth of effort for him. He refused to assist. I was stunned, I’ve never been with a vendor where the entire C-suite won’t jump in where they need to. Usually the challenge is getting them to leave you alone!

Anyway, almost immediately after I joined, the only other sales engineer in the region (based in Singapore) was let go. According to people in the know he’d been feeding commercial info to his ex-colleagues who had all left and joined a competitor. No idea if that’s true or not. What I do know is that left me as the sole technical resource for the entire APJ region. Forget about growing the team, that role was never backfilled.

To exacerbate that, one of the sales people I now had to support in Singapore was one of the most self centred and immature reps I’ve ever had to deal with. Threw hissy fits if I declined a meeting for 8pm with only a few hours notice. Told me I had to lie on RFP documents and say that we complied with all requirements, even if we didn’t. Had no idea how to actually uncover end user requirements. Took everything as a person attack, rather than recognising that I was actually trying to help her not dig herself into a hole.

But at least I still had my friends in Australia, and still got to work with cool people.

Oh, no, wait a moment: they all got let go, during their probation periods (one on the very last day) on made up “poor performance” grounds, even though they’d actually both been laying the groundwork for a successful business. It’s always a telling sign when the first you hear about your “poor performance” is in the call telling you that things aren’t working out. So now it was me in Australia and two sales reps in Singapore.

Then one on the reps - the one worth talking to - resigned, leaving just me and the useless one. Awesome.

Getting summoned to a “consulation meeting” with HR a week late, and being told that the company was looking at changing focus and withdrawing from Australia came as something of a relief. My only regret from being made redundant is that I would have preferred to leave on my terms with another job to go to, rather than be kicked out.