#234 - Dmitri Sirota, CEO BigID - on embracing scientific hypotheses to build a successful startup

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that enables organizations to know their enterprise data and take action for privacy, protection, and perspective. My guest is Dimitri Sirota, CEO, and Co-founder of BigID Dimitri has over a decade of experience as a privacy expert and identity veteran and is an established serial entrepreneur, investor, mentor, and strategist. He is also recognized as one of the leading authorities in startups and company team building, receiving numerous recognitions, including being named an Entrepreneur of the Year finalist by Ernst & Young in 2021 (New York) and 2022 (Florida). Dimitri holds an M.Sc. in Engineering Physics from The University of British Columbia and a B.Sc. Honors in Physics from McGill University. Today he's the CEO and co-founder of BigID, a modern data intelligence platform that helps customers solve data protection, privacy, and governance challenges. Their thinking: Data drives business. Data is a critical factor for all businesses – not just to persevere, but to continue to innovate. As such, BigID is on a mission to help every type of organization know their data, take action on their data, and unleash their data's value to do that. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Dmitri to my podcast. We explore the challenges companies face in rethinking their approach to data where they essentially have become the custodian, as opposed to the owner. Dmitri explains the novel approach they've taken to solve this. He shares his route towards product-market fit and carving out a business model that could fuel exponential growth. He tells about their approach to creating defensible differentiation, and an ability to expand their story ahead of the competition catching up. Last but not least, he shares his advice on creating a business software business that creates products that customers fall in love with. Here's one of his quotes So early on, once we did our straw man strategy, we doubled down on one particular area. Once we found kind of a pressure point, we said, Okay, let's just focus on this and do a good job here. And so that's what got us through the first two years, I sometimes described that as a swim lane. We needed a clear definable swim lane that we could own, that was differentiated from other technology players. And we went down that path and invested in it, and it actually worked out for us. We were able to do the classic 5x revenue in year one. 3x revenue in year two. During this interview, you will learn four things:

How to create your own blue ocean within a large red ocean

The single most important answer to look for when defining product strategy

When's the right moment to move on and expand your story

The things you should avoid doing as an early stage B2B SaaS founder

For more information about the guest from this week:

Dimitri Sirota

Website BigID

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