Jeremiah Smith And Ed Carroll With Edison Marks

Intro: [00:00:06] Welcome back to the Startup Showdown podcast, where we discuss pitching, funding and scaling startups. Join us as we interview winners, mentors and judges of the monthly 120,000 pitch competition powered by Panoramic Ventures. We also discuss the latest updates in software Web3, Healthcare, Tech, FinTech, and more. Now sit tight as we interview this week’s guest and their journey through entrepreneurship.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:41] Lee Kantor here another episode of Startup Showdown podcast, and this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor Panoramic Ventures. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Startup Showdown, we have Jeremiah Smith and Ed Carroll with Edison Marks. Welcome, gentlemen.

Jeremiah Smith: [00:01:02] Appreciate you having us today. Lee, looking forward to talking with you.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:06] Well, before we get too far into things, tell us about Edison Marks. How are you serving folks?

Jeremiah Smith: [00:01:11] Edison Marks is a platform that’s built on the premise that that a small and medium business operator should be able to manage their cybersecurity risk as easily as the average consumer manages their credit score. That’s just not the way the world works today. So Ed and Nick and myself set out to to change that, to help them reduce their overall vulnerability as an operator and put them in a better position.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:40] Now, if they don’t work with you, what are they doing or are they doing anything in this regard?

Jeremiah Smith: [00:01:46] The overwhelming majority of small and medium enterprises are ignoring the problem. About 42% of all cyberattacks are focused on the small and medium business, but about 14% are prepared, which means the overwhelming majority, again, are just not doing anything. It’s mostly because the problem is hard to understand. The solutions are mostly built for the enterprise, which means they’re pretty complex or pretty pricey for a small or medium business operator. So it just makes it easier to just sort of put your head in the sand and pretend it won’t happen to you.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:18] And then what are some of the cybersecurity issues that a small to midsize business would be dealing with now?

Jeremiah Smith: [00:02:25] You’ll see things from we actually still see quite a bit of phishing attempts. So most of the breaches are still coming through email. They’re looking for credentials, your username and password, that type of information. And once they get those types of things, they’re looking to do malware or things to to inflict viruses on systems and looking for ransom in a lot of cases. So different hackers, different cybercriminals are going to are going to attempt different types of things. But for small businesses, we’re going to see mostly things that result in them looking for ransom or looking for money to encrypt their systems. Which sucks.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:01] Yeah, I can ruin your day. It can ruin your business. You could be out of business if you don’t take this seriously. Are you seeing are you are you selling the service as kind of software as a service where this is a subscription? I pay a fee and then I get kind of access to this on an ongoing basis. It’s working in the background.

Jeremiah Smith: [00:03:21] Well, currently we’re working through what we would best describe as trusted business partners or providers for small and medium businesses today. These are the folks that have already been working with small and medium businesses, so they’re trusted partners to them. They have the ear of the owner or operator, which allows us the opportunity to do what we do best, but through that partner. So today the platform is going through managed services providers manage security services, providers, white labeled for them. They pay a subscription fee to us and then provide it to their client base as a supporting tool in their toolbox to their range of solutions that they’re providing already today.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:09] So then you’re going through this intermediary that already has access to the client base.

Jeremiah Smith: [00:04:14] Right? I mean, going door to door with and selling small or medium business operator is both slow and hard. Right. And and so we thought this is the best way to find traction. And scalability is again, work through these partners who have who have already established themselves in that arena. And that intermediary is proven pretty successful for us thus far.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:36] And then what kind of services are these intermediaries providing to the small and midsize business owner? Again.

Jeremiah Smith: [00:04:43] Most of them today, those who are going through to start with are think of them as sort of an outsourced i.t provider. So lots of small and medium business operators supplement their i.t department or have the entirety of their IT department outsourced to what we call a managed services provider or managed security services provider. And that’s the group we’re going with. So we’re going through these sort of outsourced I.T providers and, and working our way into the trusted conversation with the owner.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:16] And those folks don’t have a cybersecurity solution right now or there’s isn’t as good as yours.

Jeremiah Smith: [00:05:22] Now, funny story is that they have solutions. Their problem is selling those solutions and our solution supports them in that. For the managed services provider, this is a great utility for them to highlight. In a really simplistic and easy to understand manner the concerns that they are trying to sell additional services to support. But today they have. That’s their number one problem is customer acquisition. And so for us, we support that customer acquisition effort without them having to change their operation or their process. And and so they get that value added benefit, but then they get to have this really simple, straightforward conversation with a small and medium business owner that they can then upsell. Right? They can then provide their additional services that we are not by design providing to close the gap with that customer.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:15] So what was the kind of genesis of the idea? How’d you get involved in this line of work?

Jeremiah Smith: [00:06:24] Yeah. I’d say both of us have been in and around cybersecurity for the last 15, 20 years, and we were starting to realize a lot of the times we were focused on enterprise and we’ve got friends, we’ve got family. We both remind myself have fathers that were small business owners, and we started to see these trends starting to happen. So we had a passion about trying to find solutions and being in the enterprise space and talking bits and bytes. We’ve realized that when we talk to our friends that are small business owners, that they would just retreat if we started talking about cybersecurity. To them it was, you know, they they, they’d crawl into their shell and say, I’m not interested in hearing any of this. And so we had some experience in the past working for a company that leveraged behavioral science helps to help folks reduce their energy spend. And we thought, hmm, why don’t we look to apply something similar to this problem that we’re both passionate about, that we both want to help these small businesses with? And so in your mind, and I’ve known each other for over 30 years, we grew up playing baseball on the fields of East Asheville and always spitballing ideas with each other. And so it just organically came out on like a Thursday afternoon. I still remember the day.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:37] Now, was this the first time that you worked together on a project like this?

Jeremiah Smith: [00:07:43] Yeah. You know, interestingly enough, having done all of having spent all of that time together as we grew up, went through high school, went to college, both Ed and I, having spent time in startups since I was like you mentioned, this is the first project we’ve really been able to dig into together, and that’s been an interesting sort of wrinkle in our relationship for sure.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:07] Now you also have a third co-founder that is not in Asheville, that’s another country. How did that come about?

Jeremiah Smith: [00:08:18] Nick Kristof is our CTO and and I met him through editor. Ed, why don’t you talk about Nick? Yeah. So I’ve known Nick for a number of years. We both worked at an email security company a number of years ago, and he ran product for us. And interestingly, like he was right under our nose this whole time, as Jeremy and I were coming together on this, we looked at, Hey, how do we get our VP out? How do we get this minimum viable product out? Do we go low-code no code? Do we try this approach to go test the waters on some of these things? And in Nick’s been a buddy that we’ve worked with in the past and and it kind of dawned on us one day because we’ve talked about doing this type of stuff with Nick before and, and, and we brought it up and he’s like, Oh, I’m in, I’m in because he, he gets it. He also has a passion for what we’re doing here, too. And it was just one of these weird things where it was like, keep your eyes open. You just don’t know where that next co-founder or next strategic relationship is going to be. Keep keep your seats warm with folks.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:21] Now, a lot of folks, you know, start a company with two co-founders and that has its own challenges. But to have three and have this kind of triangulated possibility happening, how are you guys managing that?

Jeremiah Smith: [00:09:38] I’d say I’d say pretty easily. I mean, I think we’ve. What’s the old adage on you need the the hipster the I’m not going to remember maybe Jeremiah will remember that. But I think we all have our roles. Jeremiah has been fantastic as our CEO to make sure I’m a maverick. If you look at my personality test, I’m a maverick. I need to be reined in. I’ll go off and try to pursue interesting strategic things. And Jeremiah is a perfect person to rein me in. And Nick from a from a from a CTO perspective and a tech perspective, he’s the perfect guy we know and trust him. We’ve known him for years and so it’s been a little easier than one would think. You know, we’ve got three strong personalities, but I think we all know our roles and where our strengths and weaknesses. Knowing Jeremiah for the last 30 years, he he knows my weaknesses. He knows my strengths. And he makes sure he puts me in a position to to take advantage of my strengths.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:29] And then you don’t have any of those, you know, kind of flashbacks to when you were ten. And then the, you know, the that history, those relationship history, little pokes that can come about when you were dealing with an old friend.

Jeremiah Smith: [00:10:46] I think that that’s actually played to our advantage. I mean, we still have arguments about whether or not Dale Murphy is the greatest baseball player of all time, but he’s not the but the the ability to be able to sort of break a tense, business oriented conversation with with a flashback to the the beatings that he used to get on the baseball field. Our team versus his are actually nice break points from from what would just be otherwise a business relationship. I think that’s created this situation where we’re able to work together and understand when it’s time to relax and how to communicate in both those situations pretty effectively.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:30] And then you were able to kind of convey this mission and the values with Nick as well, which I mean that you have to think the little bit that that’s a tough needle to thread to get three people all aligned with this kind of this is our true north, these are our values. This is the mission. This is the hell we’re trying to climb.

Jeremiah Smith: [00:11:55] Yeah, I think for me, the. You’re absolutely right. Right. I don’t think that’s something that that every team thinks is ideal. Come together. Let’s put three heads on the founding team and just assume we can make it all go successfully. I’ve had some experience across 15 years. Teams like Planned Grid, that was four co founders right out of the gate as they graduated Y Combinator in in being an active participant in a very, very early days with teams like that and how they worked and operated and and communicated internally to the success of their near-term and long term goals, I think really, really helped us in this situation. I think we’re we’re all pretty sensitive to to each other’s unique needs. And we we’ve been around the block enough to know that to take care of them as they arise. And so I think experience has helped us in that respect. Now speaking well, maybe I’d lead that also. I mean, look at the missions altruistic in its nature. And I think when you look at cybersecurity and you can come from that background, too, it’s it’s easy to get aligned when you’re doing good, important things. You know, now we get lost maybe sometimes in making some of these businesses, but the overall mission is so altruistic that we’re able to quickly align on that.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:17] Now when you are attacking kind of something like this, I would think that it’s kind of easy to get behind because the mission is so kind of pure in the sense of you’re trying to help small and mid-sized businesses deal with something that’s that they’re kind of in denial about. So I get that completely. But do you think that you guys are kind of uniquely qualified because you have kind of been around the block a bit and you have a bunch of failures that are part of everybody. I mean, not just your resume, but everybody’s resume. And you’ve kind of lived through that. And I think that when you’ve gone through some of that and you have that skinny, it’s easier kind of to attack things and easier to kind of bring people together that have all shared those experiences 100%.

Jeremiah Smith: [00:14:05] And well said, the skin the knee analogy is perfect. It gives us the opportunity to not get too caught up in whatever it is in the moment. Right. We can all stay focused, whether it’s good news or bad news or otherwise. That experience has put us in a unique position to take on what is a challenge that, candidly, most cybersecurity startups flat out will not go after because it is such a challenge. So yeah, I think you’re right. Well said. It puts us in a unique position and we’re taking advantage of that.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:41] Now when you are I mean, I think this is one of the advantages of having people have gone through the process several times where, you know, that one big issue isn’t necessarily a death blow. You know, you’re like, look, we’ve been through worse than this. This looks hard and it’s a setback. But I mean, we’re going to we can figure this out like you have the confidence and because of the experience. And I think that that probably helps you kind of reach ultimately reach your goals.

Jeremiah Smith: [00:15:13] Yeah. Like it’s the old like. I mean, you can make sort of analogies on this all day long, but for us it’s, it’s we just want to get 1% better every day. And we know that’s going to come with some some setbacks. But the experience, again, of of having been through start ups from 0 to 100 million, $150 million flame outs and sort of everything in between has definitely put us in this position where where we we neither get too excited or too high or too low, right. I think actually that may have created a weakness that we kind of laugh about. We don’t celebrate enough. Right. You know, because we’re like, let’s keep trucking. We’ve got work to do, but we don’t celebrate enough in that respect is probably the weakness of that. All that experience and all that, all those skinned knees have created.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:01] Right. It’s funny you bring that up in my business. My wife was worked in corporate for a long time and now she’s part of my small business. And we ring a bell when something good happens and she’s so ready to ring the bell. And I’m like, Look, not yet. We’re not ready yet. You know, like and it’s important to ring the bell, you know, you got to the the the mouse has to get the cheese because that helps everybody kind of, you know, stay motivated and feel like you are making that 1% progress each day.

Jeremiah Smith: [00:16:31] Well said.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:32] Now. So what is next for you all? What do you need more of? How can we help?

Jeremiah Smith: [00:16:38] Yeah, I think what’s been interesting in Lee, you probably hearing this from other other founders and folks that are on is is what we’re staring at is this economic downturn that we should probably expect the next 12 to 24 months. And so we we know with that experience we have to be nimble and adjust and adapt. And so we’ve started looking at a few different things. We’ve recently were accepted into a highly competitive, competitive accelerator with a cybersecurity focus. Very interesting thing that we’ll be doing. It’s international based and we have very specific reasons for wanting to do that. And some of the relationships that we’ll have and we’re kind of shifting a little bit from we were pursuing a lot of institutional funding and we’re saying, hey, let’s we were thinking about it now we’re going to we’re going to pull back and really fine tune our program. And in our platform these next six months, we’ve got a transformative type of opportunity since the startup showdown that we’re working on right now. So we’ll spend some time really doing that well so that we can replicate and reproduce it. And then we’ll probably look at a different type of fundraise. We might look more towards angels for a period of time and then going into 2023, really throwing gas on it. So I think that’s an important thing for us to be thinking about, right, is what we’re seeing from an economic downturn, being able to be nimble and adjust.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:57] So how did you hear about startup shutdown in Panoramic Ventures?

Jeremiah Smith: [00:18:02] Look, if you look into we’re very specific about who we wanted to talk to really early. And if you look into the world of institutional funding, particularly in the Southeast, and then you sort of cross that with, again, cybersecurity players, people, judges name rises right to the top. And so really early before we were. Ready in any way, shape or form to begin really talking to institutional investors like panoramic. We knew we wanted to talk to Paul. We knew we wanted to talk to Biraj and get feedback because I think feedback is something we’ve learned really, really early on in our startup careers is, is what’s going to propel you further, faster? So being specific in who we wanted to talk to and knowing that at the intersection, cybersecurity, Paul George is somebody who’s well respected. Panoramic is extremely busy in terms of their volume. It was an easy one for us to find and surface as a as a sort of must have conversation really early on. Startup Showdown came as a result of us chasing Biraj down in bucket and getting a 15 minute meeting with him over coffee. He presented Startup Showdown as an opportunity for us to to go test our value proposition in front of a really good group of judges. And we were just absolutely going to jump on that for the experience, if nothing else.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:30] So what had you benefit from going through the process?

Jeremiah Smith: [00:19:35] Yeah, I’d say that there’s a number of things that we took from it. It’s the amazing mentors that they put in place that were super helpful with feedback on on, on our pitch that and along with working with Dustin the team at Panoramic like they really helped us fine tune and customize our pitch a little bit more. So those things were super helpful for us. It’s it’s always good to be doing these pitches in a vacuum with each other. But to get that type of feedback from the type of people that panoramic puts in place is priceless.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:08] So now, having gone through the process and having kind of made some adjustments and which is just part of the part of the experience as you move forward, is there any advice for other founders when you’re and let’s talk about advice because I love to ask the advice question, but in your case, I think I’d like to be specific in terms of giving advice to folks that are that their ideal prospect is not necessarily the end user, but is an intermediary. So how would you recommend founders who are, you know, taking on the same strategy, the go to market strategy as you are, go about finding those first partners and and kind of customizing the offering so it helps them sell to the end user.

Jeremiah Smith: [00:21:01] I’ll jump on that by just simply saying, in my personal opinion and it may have something to add here. In my personal opinion, my advice would be to get out early and often. We’ve benefited from having done so, get out talking about what we’re doing really early and often. I mean, it wasn’t forget about it being baked, right? The oven wasn’t even really warm yet. And we were out just conversing because we we felt like we were really on to something. And so getting out early and often gave us an opportunity to both spread the word in terms of who we are getting introduced to, people who seemed like they might be a proxy value add to what we’re presenting and then continue to tweak our focus and orientation in our go to market strategy. It gave us an opportunity to do all of those things getting out early. Right. It’s it’s really helped us hone in on the crowd that that understands what we’re doing. But we wouldn’t have had the opportunity to even get there in such a short period of time if we hadn’t started before we were ever ready. So I’d say, don’t be shy, get out there.

Lee Kantor: [00:22:02] And just start kind of learning and having conversations with people that are in the space just to see what their needs are and how you can fit your solution in there.

Jeremiah Smith: [00:22:12] Right? If you if you’re really going out and having these conversations from the perspective of curiosity and adding value, not selling or trying to assume that that everybody’s a buyer. Right. Don’t present yourself in that conversation that way, but really get out, get curious, have a conversation, build a relationship and understand that it may not go anywhere, but it also may if you really doing that and you’re really being honest with yourself about about how you’re approaching that, then getting out early and often, you’ll find people will reciprocate, right? They’ll respond in kind and it’ll lead you down a path you didn’t even know was in existence.

Lee Kantor: [00:22:53] Right. Which sounds a little counterintuitive to maybe a new startup person, because it requires you to be humble and vulnerable and curious and ask a lot more questions than kind of showing how smart you are as well.

Jeremiah Smith: [00:23:09] Said well said. We were we were all of those things in many conversations. Right, humbled, left, vulnerable, questioning ourselves in a lot of really early conversations. But again, it’s such a priceless conversation to have had and has really taken us leaps and bounds beyond where we would have gotten without it.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:29] Well, congratulations on all the success thus far in the momentum. If somebody wants to learn more and have more substantive conversation with you or anybody on the team, what’s the website? What’s the best way to connect websites?

Jeremiah Smith: [00:23:44] Edison Marks and we’re happy to connect. You can chat with us there. You can send us an email in our emails. We’re we’re an open book, whether it’s just to talk about starting a venture early and the things that we’ve learned or if it’s about managing your cybersecurity vulnerabilities, pointing you in the right direction, we’re happy to have any and all those conversations. And you can get us at edX, at Edison Carroll, at Edison Marks and Jeremiah at Edison Mark’s dot com. And we’d love to talk.

Lee Kantor: [00:24:12] Well, thank you both for sharing your story. You’re doing important work, and we appreciate you.

Jeremiah Smith: [00:24:18] Thanks for having us, Lee. Really appreciate it.

Lee Kantor: [00:24:20] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you next time on Startup Showdown.

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