New Dazz Advisor Nick Warner on the “3 T’s” of company potential, the path to customer delight, and flying high in security remediation

Imagine you’re in the cockpit of a Cirrus plane. All the controls, gears, and notifications are there to keep you safe, but the data overload is overwhelming—and you’re just trying to safely fly and land the plane.

For Nicholas Warner, a 20-year cybersecurity veteran, former president at SentinelOne, and neophyte pilot, data overload is a real thing—and he often ruminates on it from a security leader’s perspective while he’s in the air.

Nick is joining Dazz as our newest strategic advisor, and Dazz CRO Jared Phipps caught up with him to get details on his journey in cybersecurity, how to turn customers into devoted champions, and how security teams can experience clearer skies when it comes to remediation.

Jared: Thanks for joining us Nick; I’m so excited to have you joining the Dazz Advisory Board. Can you give folks a quick recap of your background, and a few things that have stood out to you?

Nick: Thanks for having me! I’ve spent 20 years in cybersecurity, and most recently at two back-to-back, hyper-growth startups. I spent a few years at a company called Cylance and grew them from pre-product, pre-revenue up and through more than 20 million dollars in sales, then went on to SentinelOne and served in a variety of roles. I left SentinelOne, as president,growing the business from about a million dollars through 500 million.

Along the way, what’s become really interesting to me is the protection of customers against bad actors and advanced threats. I’ve been very preoccupied with that in the last decade, seeking to understand the advanced tradecraft, advanced malware, and how companies can better defend themselves in an operationally adoptable way.

Jared: I know since we’ve had a chance to work together you’ve always had the ability to look at a company or a market and see the potential. How are you evaluating that with Dazz?

Nick: I can best summarize it in 3 ways: Team, Technology, and TAM. For the team, you’ve got to start with the right founders; Merav, Tomer, and Yuval are terrific talents, and they’ve hired and assembled a really great team. The technology is amazing and fits a big need in the market. As far as the TAM, the addressable market is enormous. It’s really rare when you find that combination of all “3 T’s”—that’s what I look for in companies.

Jared: I know there’s another thing you’re really passionate about. You used the phrase “delighted customers” so many times when we worked together at SentinelOne. How does a company create delighted customers that become champions in the market for them?

Nick: You have to have the discipline to stay with customers throughout their journey. Most companies have the right intention to put customers first, but lack the discipline to see it through. The CEO should be out seeing customers. The CTO should be out seeing customers. Everybody in the company needs to understand that they’re in sales and customer success.

Having that attitude does a couple things. One, it points everyone in the right direction and builds a great culture and two, there’s groundswell; word of that fanatical attention to customer success and delighting the customer spreads and becomes one of your best weapons. A prospect may approach you and say, “Hey—I don’t know much about your technology, but what we do know is that your folks are amazing to work with.

At the end of the day, customers are your reason for being. They’re your source of revenue valuation. They’re the reason you're building and servicing the product. It’s always curious to me that so many companies lose that along the way.

Jared: Moving a bit to current market conditions, what do you think is the impact that a company like Dazz can bring to the market now?

‍Nick: The noise for security operators becomes overwhelming. Companies of all shapes and sizes are wrestling with what a real security problem is, how to prioritize those problems, and how to fix them fast. That’s what’s so interesting to me about Dazz’s approach—it’s all about remediation, which is the outcome-based approach organizations are looking for.

I think one of the silver linings around the increasing visibility and severity of threats is that it very much has become a board-level conversation and there is vastly better understanding — that’s really different than it was 10 years ago, when it was just a corner of the company that had to worry about security and it wasn’t really a business conversation. Those days have changed forever.

‍Jared: Last question, and it’s kind of a fun one: What’s something about yourself that we wouldn’t find on LinkedIn?

‍Nick: I’ve spent the last year and a half working on obtaining my pilot’s license, and it’s been really humbling. I’ve been learning and training on a plane called the Cirrus which is a very modern glass cockpit. The avionics in it are as advanced as advanced or more advanced as a 787. Initially I thought it would make me safer. But I’ve come to find it’s data overload in a glass cockpit. It makes me think what life must be like in a security operation center where you’re just bombarded with information and have to hone in on the data that really matters.