This being Valentine’s Day, and having just completed my third year at Wickr, forgive me for getting a little sentimental. You see, just when employment data indicates that most people in a sales capacity get the “What’s next?” itch, I couldn’t be more excited about Wickr’s “What’s next?”.
What’s so great about Wickr? Well, I run global sales and am thus probably one of the least objective people to answer that question. But let me share the four primary drivers behind my joining as they’re even more relevant today:
Consumer to Enterprise
In early ’17, we were just beginning the transition from a freemium-consumer-only product to a full-featured product for the enterprise. Exciting but daunting. For anyone who’s tried to do it, you know it’s no small feat. Today, we’ve a full collaboration suite of voice, video, messaging, screensharing, and file sharing…on a zero trust network with industry-leading encryption…delivered on a walk-up kiosk-friendly app deployed at massive scale either onprem or in the cloud. In software, the product work is never done. But, 224% YoY growth from ’18 to ’19 (with big expectations in ’20) and some of the most respected global organizations in the private and public sectors standardized on Wickr? Not bad for a company with a freemium-only-consumer product just a little while ago.
Team Sport
Building an enterprise-caliber company is a team sport and Wickr is fortunate enough to work with some of the brightest and most successful board members and advisors in the business. Being able to bounce GTM and product ideas off the likes of Gilman Louie, Jim Breyer, Sam Palmisano, David Phelps and others seems almost disproportionately unfair for a company of our size. Trees through the forest, forest through the trees…they’ve seen it all. And as for Wickr employees….
What We Do Matters
Our work is purposeful and important…humanitarian and altruistic…and – thanks to the last 3 years – commercially viable. I was on a candidate call earlier today. I spent 10 or so minutes giving a Wickr overview, then the candidate said (paraphrasing), “That’s great, I want to be where the work is with purpose and intent.” One of our federal government customers, at the conclusion of a meeting, leaned in and said quietly (again paraphrasing), “Please tell all of your employees that your product is being used all over the world and is helping save lives, literally” (insert goosebumps). And, in the private sector, it can sometimes figuratively feel that way, where we’re protecting M&A, incident response, IP, exec comms, etc. Everyone at Wickr believes in our cause and feels a sense of collective responsibility. Truly, all our paddles are rowing hard and in sync.
What We Do Is Imminent
And this market is maturing right before our eyes. Stop me if you’ve heard this before: There’s new evidence – seemingly every day – that adversaries are increasing in capability and attack vectors are widening in impact. Prevalent collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams and Slack were built with ease of use in mind…not security (and I don’t blame them, they’re in the business of allowing access to customer data and generating revenue from that data). With limited to no administrative and compliance controls, shadow IT consumer-encrypted products (like WhatsApp) aren’t purpose built for enterprises, resulting in huge amounts of data and IP leaking outside organizations. Enter AWS Wickr/Enterprise – smart, responsible, compliant and up to speed with IT-vetted encrypted communications. I don’t know if it’ll happen tomorrow, or next year, or five years from now, but at some point it’s reasonable to think that all communications will have a default expectation of privacy and security. It is imminent. And I’m here to ensure that Wickr participates aggressively.
As I said to that same candidate, we’re in the first couple of pitches in the first inning. Want to grab a bat and join us?
