Building Enterprise Mindshare: Lessons from Island's Meteoric Growth - Eric Appel CRO Island

Are you struggling to sell the “unsellable” in cybersecurity? Wondering how to create or lead a brand-new product category? Curious about how to maintain a winning sales culture and scale your team when you’re growing fast? This episode offers actionable insights for sales and marketing leaders looking to accelerate growth and navigate the changing cybersecurity landscape.

In this conversation we discuss:
👉 Building market category leadership: how Island tackled the challenge of selling a paid enterprise browser against established free products
👉 Evolving sales hiring strategies to fit different growth phases, including missionary selling and scaling to larger deals
👉 Establishing strong company culture and early investments to drive sustained success even during rapid expansion

About our guest:
Eric Appel is the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) at Island, the enterprise browser company. With 25 years of cybersecurity sales and leadership experience, Eric has overseen Island’s growth from stealth mode to 900+ customers in just a few years. He previously held leadership roles at companies like Yahoo and McAfee.

Summary:
Tune in as Eric Appel shares lessons in creating category-defining success, hiring for high-growth sales teams, and ensuring an unbeatable company culture. This episode is packed with real-world examples and strategies to inspire your next go-to-market move. Don’t miss this milestone conversation—listen now!

Connect with Eric Appel on LinkedIn, explore Island at island.io, and book a 30-minute meeting with Andrew Monaghan.

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Transcript

Andrew Monaghan:
Here's a pitch that probably no one wants to hear just a few years ago. I know you already have a browser deployed across your enterprise. I know it's free in terms of licenses you already have. I know it actually works really well. You know, no one's really complaining about it, but I want you to set that aside and I want you to pay for ours. And I promise you it's going to get better and be better in the future. That was essentially Island's challenge 3.5, 4 years ago. And looking in from the outside, honestly, It sounded really interesting, exciting, but also incredibly difficult to get into that market.

Andrew Monaghan:
So welcome to episode 300 of the Cyber Go-To-Market Talk podcast. For this milestone episode, I've brought back someone whose journey is really interesting, who's someone I respect and admire and really enjoy following along in the industry to see what he achieves. And that is Eric Appel, the CRO of Island. Eric actually joined me back on the podcast in 2022, and I highly encourage you to go back to listen to that episode. At that point, Island was just 6 months out of stealth and trying to convince enterprises to replace something that wasn't broken. They were finding their feet. They got their first batch of customers. And then fast forward to today, they're at 900 deployed customers and they're growing at a heck of a rate as well.

Andrew Monaghan:
So how do you actually sell the unsellable? How do you create a category that didn't exist as a sales team? How do you go and engage with people so that you stand out and people want to do business with you? And also, what does Eric still get nervous about after 25 years in this business? Let's find out. Well, Eric, welcome back to the Cyber Go-to-Market Talk podcast. I think actually when you were on, we were called something different back in the day. And your episode was aired, I think it's September 2022, believe it or not, 3 and a half years ago.

Eric Appel:
Indeed. And as you and I were talking earlier, nothing's changed at all. No, it's the exact same as it was 3 and a half years ago. Yeah.

Andrew Monaghan:
There's really— we had to struggle for things to talk about on this episode. Well, this is episode 300, Eric. So, you know, milestone for the podcast. And it was important to me that we got someone who in prior episodes people loved, loved to hear about, loved the way they talked about their business and what was going on. So this was a natural one for me to ask you to come on again.

Eric Appel:
I love that. Andrew, you're one of my favorites in the industry. Always have been. I think it's really cool that I have the opportunity to be on your 300. I remember when we were talking about your 200, it seemed like about a couple of months ago. So congrats on your success, man.

Andrew Monaghan:
Thank you. Thank you. So let's talk about what's changed. You know, If we go back to when we recorded the last one, I think you were basically about 6 months or so out of stealth, and you were coming into an interesting situation, right? You came to market, and essentially people could have viewed what you were doing and said, look, you know, you're basically saying to people, look, I know you already have a browser. Let's face it, they all work, right? It's not like they're failing and crashing and not rendering web pages very well, right? And by the way, it's free. We know that what you've got is free and we want you to now pay for it. So I'm kind of interested, like going back to 3.5 years ago and how you think about that journey from talking to people who are saying, yeah, I get this thing over here that's free to then suddenly people getting the idea about actually this could be something that is very different.

Eric Appel:
I just, as you were asking that question, I started to think about that 3.5 years ago and in a way it feels like forever ago and in a way it feels like 5 minutes ago. You know, it, it's interesting because when I think about 3.5 years ago, you're right. And a lot of startups that are creating a new category or a new space or trying to transform something from old to, to modern, they can appreciate there's so much education involved. There was so much education for us at a, at so many levels. There was educating the Fortune 500 market. And so we were at that time, we were wanting to be the keynote of every Avanta event possible to get that message out. We were sponsoring big channel partner SKOs so we could, you know, be on stage and educate. There was just so much that was educated.

Eric Appel:
And then when after we would educate, we would then do the pitch of the demo and we'd try to latch on to a use case. And back then we didn't have a lot of proven ROI to speak to or proven value to speak to. So we were just looking for small use cases. And then when we would find that small use case, we had a vision that if we could find a small use case, as the platform expanded, we could expand. And so if you recall, we talked about one of the unique things I think we did, and actually we still do it, is it was a sales engineering-led deployment to make sure that we had a lot of success with that initial use case. And so back then we, we were doing these use cases, then we would find these customers that would embrace it. Our SEs would stay very involved. Our engineers would stay very involved.

Eric Appel:
R&D would stay very— it was all about making those use cases successful. And fortunately we did. And so it was all about landing with a, with a specific use case. Now, if you fast forward, you know, several years, as you would hope, we have case studies and we have real references to show how, as we deployed those use cases and grew, you know, 3, 1 of 3 things happened in an account and sometimes all 3. We drove a, a great ROI because as you deploy a browser, now it's become more of a platform. There could be great ROI from tech stack reduction, from cost avoidance, productivity improvements, those types of things. User experience is really interesting. And I've, Andrew, I've worked with you a long time and then I've been in cyber now for gosh, almost 25 years.

Eric Appel:
And we rarely have the opportunity to talk about user experience. As I think about right now, we're at around 900 or so deployed customers. Almost every single one of them would tell you that user experience is improved. Whether it's, hey, I'm a, I work at a bank and I no longer have to carry two phones because Island is the way now that I can access those applications. It's, hey, I'm traveling. I don't have to take my laptop. As long as I have Island, I can access an application anywhere I want. Hey, I have Island.

Eric Appel:
I no longer get ads. I no longer have to use a VPN, a VDI. So user experience is big. And then the third thing that we're able to now educate, because we've seen the improvements, is just a better cybersecurity posture. And so it kind of moved from land with a use case, let's lean in like hell to make them successful, try to have the opportunity to expand, to now fast forward 4 years ago, we've got so much goodness that we've collected I'd be lying if I still said, you know, it's easy, but it definitely is benefiting us to have, you know, a lot of those good stories behind us.

Andrew Monaghan:
So that's interesting about user experience because I would imagine 3, 4 years ago, going to an IT organization and saying, you know that thing that no one ever complains about? We want to give you something different. And they'd be like, whoa, hold on, don't touch. Don't touch anything. It's all working really well right now, right? But if you look at the totality of the user experience, I guess there's much more to it than just, you know, you're changing the browser.

Eric Appel:
It's a great callout. And the br— it's, it's not actually the browser. It's the outcome of an enterprise browser. And what do I mean by that? Well, if you don't have an enterprise browser, you still have, you have to find a means to secure the engagement between users and applications. And so therefore you have a prevalence of VDI for any third party. So you think about the rise that Citrix and VMware, and then, you know, more modern solutions like Microsoft ADD, AWS WorkSpaces, all of that, because you still have to secure that. So you may still be using Chrome or Edge within that VDI session, but nobody wakes up and says, ah, I love to use VDI today. Or nobody wakes up and says, I can't wait to turn on my Cisco AnyConnect.

Eric Appel:
Or, you know, my Palo VPN. But with an enterprise browser approach that has become such a much larger platform, those things start to go away. You don't have VDI, you don't have VPN, you're not served up ads, so you don't have the callbacks to Google. You can now enable AI securely. So user experience does start, it's a great byproduct of working with us.

Andrew Monaghan:
I remember when we talked 3.5 years ago, one of the things that stood out and I've had people kind of comment to me about was, your first batch of sellers that you hired were obviously people that you guys all knew, right? There's a lot of trust there. It's a natural thing to do and you're able to attract great talent, right? I'm just wondering how your profile has changed as you've gone from, well, maybe more missionary, educational into actually we're now at a spot where we really can pull down bigger deals and more wide-scale deals, things like that.

Eric Appel:
I had a theory and like most of my theories, they were wrong. I theorized several years ago that great sellers were great sellers were great sellers and who we hired and the type of person that we would've hired 4 years ago, hey, they were great at what they did. They had a great network. They could educate, they could do a sophisticated sales cycle. That same seller would be the type of seller or that same first line leader, second line leader would be the exact same. Like my wife would tell you, I was wrong. People, I would hear people talk about in startups that, you know, the group that got you maybe somewhere isn't going to be this, won't be the same group. And I was like, ah, horseshit.

Eric Appel:
But there is some truth into it, unfortunately. And so we have had to evolve just like any organization, just like any person in order to grow, you have to evolve. And we've definitely had to evolve. If you think about that first group of sellers, we were a little bit different. We didn't just go hire traditional startup sellers as you and I talked about. We hired experienced sellers that we could trust, that had a network that we could trust, that if something wasn't working right in the sales process, it wasn't a sales issue. It was probably a product issue. So we could isolate that.

Eric Appel:
If you now fast forward to where we are, I still, don't get me wrong, I still love a salesperson with a network, but now that Island isn't just this net new toy, It's actually in some ways being chased by others. Speed becomes so important. Those that have this, this maniacal desire just to prospect while understanding complex sales. And then finally, the thing that's also changed for us is that Island is not just a cybersecurity sale. And so you have to find people that are comfortable selling to end-user computing, selling to cloud, selling to the AI czar that, that goes across the organization, and then build the folks that, that like to build more than one champion. It's because it's not a narrow sale. Back 4 years ago, we were typically convincing the CISO, and that has changed, you know, fairly significantly for us.

Andrew Monaghan:
How do you know you have someone who has that maniacal desire?

Eric Appel:
That's a great question. One of the ways that that you can do this is you can look outside of their professional experience. One of the favorite things I do in an interview, and I'm not God's gift to interviewing by any means, I'll tell you that, is at the onset, tell me about yourself when you're not grinding and making a ton of money as a salesperson. What do you do? Tell me about your background. You can tell about someone and not that, because people will say, I love hiring athletes. Athletes are great, but there are people that have demonstrated continual growth and building things outside of athletics. And so I love hearing what people do outside of work to understand how are they pushing themselves, how are they pushing their family, how are they involved in nonprofit? They're pushing those things because you can start to get a feel for the whole person. I think getting a feel for the whole person is important.

Eric Appel:
And then, you know, just from a professional perspective, when you're asking the question in the interview and you think back to your experiences, hey, when you got to Zscaler, when you got to Palo Alto Networks, what does your territory look like? And what does it look like now? If it's, hey, when I, you know, I was given 10 accounts. Oh, great. How many of those were customers? 7.

Andrew Monaghan:
Okay.

Eric Appel:
Tell me about the other 3. And so you, you start to mix the personal with the professional., and then I can get a pretty good idea of, of what we're working with there.

Andrew Monaghan:
And it sounds like your profile has expanded, not just a traditional cyber seller, but someone who has the infrastructure experience or the wider buying groups experience as well. Absolutely.

Eric Appel:
And that's been, that's been a little harder for us because, you know, some of us, some of us just grew up in cybersecurity, but there's so much goodness when you can start to expand because they bring different ideas on, hey, if you're targeting, you know, senior vice president of end-user computing value proposition, how you gain their attention in a prospecting LinkedIn message or, you know, with some other event or something like that is going to be different. And so it's really helped us to expand our reach, you know, kind of outside of cyber for sure.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah. Yeah. Now I know you as someone who is authentically, genuinely big on culture, right? You— it's important to you, the people that you bring in, that, uh, it's truly a, a knitted well-together team as opposed to a bunch of individuals all doing their own thing, right? But, you know, when you scale in the team as fast as you've done, um, I wonder how you've been able to retain the culture you want to instill as, as all these new people come in with their fresh ideas and fresh ways of working.

Eric Appel:
It's a, uh, it's funny you asked that question because I have thought a ton about that just this week. We are going to our sales kickoff next week. We finished our fiscal year last Friday. Our sales kickoff is Monday. And Island, one of the things that we do, we, one of the things about our culture is speed. And the reason I'm bringing up that is because when I think about sales kickoff, I think about, and I'm pleased and appreciative of the success that we've had over the last, you know, 4 and a half, 5 years., but I'm also appreciative of how we did it. And so as I'm thinking about, I get the opportunity, I get that first session where you gotta get everybody fired up and, and culture is gonna be at the heart of my first session because I want the person that's in their first day in the chair to understand and appreciate not just that Island succeeded, but how we succeeded. Realizing that how we succeeded is going to evolve, but I don't want to lose the core values that allowed us to be successful.

Eric Appel:
The core values that have kept our attrition rates under 7% when the industry average is over 30%. And so that's super, super important to me. And Andrew, it's a great question because it's so hard to maintain. You know, as you get in the sales organization, first line leaders, second line leaders, third line leaders, there's so many different routes to market. It's really, really hard to maintain. And so you have to be unbelievably intentional about it. You have to talk about it. You have to be it.

Eric Appel:
You have to represent it. And then you have to make sure that your leaders are doing the same. So I think about it all the time.

Andrew Monaghan:
What's an example of something where you have been intentional and you think it's really actually, you know what, that's really paid off. It's something that people seem to really rally around.

Eric Appel:
There's a couple of things. You You know, one, I'll give you a simple and kind of funny one. As you can kind of see me on a video, I'm wearing my Island logo. If you would've asked me back in 2022, when we did that first podcast, would everybody in your company still wear Island gear every day? I would say probably not. At some point that's going to not be cool anymore and it will kind of peel away. Here we are in February of 2026. Island has now almost 800 employees. Venture to say that every single person still wears Island every single day.

Eric Appel:
I don't know of another company that's done that, that would want to do it. I don't know if I ever work at another company, I'll want to do it, but there's something about wearing it every day that I don't know if it makes you work differently, if it makes you appreciate what you're doing, if it's attractive to somebody on the other screen, or they're like, oh my God, they're all wearing Island again. But there's something to it. I really do believe I've never really experienced a place where I feel that people really want to do good for the customers for sure, but there's this greater calling to succeed for the company. And so that is something culturally, it's a small thing, but I'm really amazed by it. In fact, now it's got, it's, we have our, we have a swag store that people can actually go to that Don't work at Island. And it looks like you've gone to Nordstrom.com and I was not asked to be a model on it, but you got models with the Island clothing and it's wild that it's just kept up and it's something that people have held onto. So that's just a small example, but I think it speaks to the attachment between people in the organization.

Andrew Monaghan:
Eric, I'm shocked you weren't asked to be a model. I don't know what they were thinking.

Eric Appel:
I know my hair's receding and You know, but yeah, I was shocked.

Andrew Monaghan:
Well, I think it helps that your, your, your brand name, the name of the company, doesn't sound like some sort of pharmaceutical, for one. And, uh, it's actually something that's warm and inviting, as opposed to some of the ones we have out there in our industry. You know, when you have 3,900 vendors, it's, uh, you get all sorts of different kinds of brand or, or swag out there. So that's really interesting. So people generally feel that connection is, is a a big deal, I would imagine. Let's rewind a little bit. Felix Noll, who's the CRO and CEO at Cranium, I'm going to take a question he suggested. I'm going to turn it around a little bit.

Andrew Monaghan:
So let's go back November '23. You're moving along nicely, right? You're 18, almost 18 months or so out of stealth. You're ramping up. I'm just going to put some words out there, uh, you are way outpacing your biggest rival at the time, which was Talon. You know, I've heard along the grapevine from various different people that revenue was, I don't know, let's say it was closer to $1 million than, than $10 million. And then Palo acquires Talon in November '23. How did you guys talk about that internally, and how do you talk about with your, your, your customers and partners and what that really means? Because that could be potentially, you know, a really big impact to the business.

Eric Appel:
That's a great question. Thank you for asking it. And as I, as you were saying November '23, I'm like, what happened in November '23? What happened? And yes, that is exactly what happened. You know, there's the thing that you say to yourself that makes you feel good right after that. Well, hey, that validates the market. That's great. You know, the market's validated Palo Alto Networks, Gordon's company and dedicated cybersecurity company buys a competitor of Island. Validates the market.

Eric Appel:
But then you gotta ask, you gotta go deeper than that. You can't just say it validates the market. And so interestingly enough, and we, we still do this today, we didn't go dissect and analyze what the combined group of talent within Palo and this whole Prisma Access thing that they were going to say. They immediately changed the name from Talon to Prisma Access Browser. Interestingly enough, we didn't spend a lot of time studying it. We didn't spend a lot of time looking at what would make that unique, where would be the gaps. We just put the throttle down even more on our side. You know, it's like when the US Treasury, when they study fraud, they don't look at counterfeit dollars.

Eric Appel:
They look at their, the real dollar. And that way they always know that this is the real dollar. And if they see something else, then they'll know. They don't spend time studying something else. And interestingly for us, we just focused and put the throttle down on just continuing to differentiate, continuing to build and outpace because we knew that the number of engineers, the number of customers that were we were building and focusing far outweighed what they were going to have for that specific product within this massive portfolio. And so we didn't really spend time looking at it. And then as other competitors came on, you know, there's probably 10 to 12 companies that are trying to basically do, and then you've also got the established players that are pivoting, you know, you know, organ— great organizations like Zscaler, great organizations like Netskope, We've just intentionally, and if you look at our sales kickoff conference, we don't have one session on competitiveness. We're focusing on what we can do, what our customers need, and how do we build to our customers as opposed to how am I, how is this feature compared on a checkmark card to talent? We just don't really focus there.

Andrew Monaghan:
Do you believe to some extent you have mindshare that when someone says, secure browser, enterprise browser, they think Island?

Eric Appel:
I would hope so. I would hope so. I think, I believe that we are known as sort of the premium player in the space. That can be good and bad. It can be, hey, I just have this small use case, so maybe I don't need the premium player. And premium doesn't necessarily mean dollars and cents either. Premium may result in that, but premium can just be, Hey, this is a platform that contains a lot and it has evolved into so many things. Maybe premium is too much.

Eric Appel:
Maybe I don't need the best. So I would hope, you know, occasionally, you know, I'll get evidence of that, but not sitting on the other side. I guess I won't pretend to always know, but that was my hope.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah. It just came to mind when you were saying, you know, we don't spend, you know, hours and hours of sales training, whatever. How do you compete against, you know, different companies where, I think maybe if you've not got the mindshare, you might be more like that as a company, right? So you've got to try and carve out your bit of the space.

Eric Appel:
You know, maybe, but here's the thing. If I ever, if my wife ever lets me do this again, you know, in 15 years, the thing with chasing, if, because I spent time at some big, big companies in the past and they were great companies and I wouldn't ever change anything, but we would acquire a company. And after we would acquire a company, we would realize that, hey, maybe that company wasn't first in the space. And so we'd immediately analyze what's the delta between second and first or third and first. And you try to go shorten that gap just so you can maybe be on par with that first. Meanwhile, you gotta feel like that first player, if they're continuing their job, they're just out here. And it's that balance. It's almost hard to catch.

Eric Appel:
And so, you know, it's that The company that I would worry about is the company that's thinking about something completely, that's thinking about it completely differently. That's just going to show up one day as opposed to the one that's, how do we shore up the gap to Island? They come up with something that is just completely different that we haven't thought about.

Andrew Monaghan:
Let's talk about international. It looked like going through hiring, you added into international very quickly. I think I'm right in saying February 2022 is when your sales leader and, and, and EMEA, uh, came on board, right? That was basically, I think, as you were kind of coming outta stealth. Um, so Jay Wallace, who's the VP of sales at Valnchek, he was asking about, you know, your decision-making around that. Why so early, right? And then how did you get going? What was the land and expand, uh, version of, uh, of EMEA that, uh, that, that either worked for you or you got ideas about how to improve?

Eric Appel:
So he's definitely right. We were early, but we were early with a lot of our investments and we were intentionally okay with being early. We were early with verticalizing in healthcare. We were perhaps early with a focus in mid-market. But back to your question on international, I have so much respect for Ash Brinsford and the team over there because we were early. And traditionally they're going to be laggards. And we didn't give Amiga and the UK specifically the air cover and the infrastructure that we had in the US. They didn't get the marketing spend.

Eric Appel:
They didn't get all the events that we were doing. They didn't get the executive intimacy. Like in the early days, I was involved in every deal. Mike Fay was touching every deal. Dan Amiga was touching every deal. They were sort of on their own. And it was harder, no doubt. And they initially struggled, but man, here we are 4.5 years later, and I'm happy to report that they are crushing it.

Eric Appel:
And I have so much respect for them because their road was harder. They, in so many ways, but if we hadn't gone early, they wouldn't be such a huge contributor to our growth because going into it, and I've realized this going into any new market, whether it's a new segment, a new vertical, a new theater, it's a, you know, it's more than likely a 24-month type investment before you get contribution. And so now they're providing in a very, very meaningful way. And I think a lot of it's because of the early investment and now, you know, they're rapidly scaling, you know, almost 30 sellers, you know, one. And it's very, very thankful for them.

Andrew Monaghan:
For sure. And did Ash just get dropped in and say, there you go, here's a couple of people, or did you have a much more of a wider plan involved? I don't know, PR or channel development or other things from day one, or that come later on?

Eric Appel:
I wish I could tell you that it wasn't just Ash, hire 2 people and go get them. And there was a lot of that, and that's why it was harder. Now, yeah, did we, did we go recruit some channel partners to help us Yes. But I look at some of the sales cycles that go, those guys endured because there just wasn't critical mass that was happening. And, but what's awesome to see with that group are the seeds that they laid 3 years ago, 3 and a half years ago. Now, if you look at the types of organizations that we now work with over there and that are our customers and that have rolled it out front to back, it's some of the same folks that, that Ash and James Savory and Lorenzo and these other guys were calling on so many years ago, and now they're coming back and they're engaging and they're winning and they're expanding. And so, and yes, as you know, it was a little bit of a momentum ride in that as we started to get customers, we started to invest more and the marketing started to come and the flywheel really started to go and the flywheel has caught now and it's exciting to see.

Andrew Monaghan:
How many sellers did you have in the company in February 2025, if you were to guess?

Eric Appel:
2025, which is basically a year ago. One year ago, we were around 80 sellers.

Andrew Monaghan:
Okay. So in all the areas where you invested early, looking from the outside, it looked like one area was not enablement and effectiveness and things like that. I think you, you hired your first leader in February 2025, which is what I was asking. I wouldn't say it's common for a sales organization to wait till at 80 people before they say, look, we should probably get some programs in place. What was the thinking around that?

Eric Appel:
It's a really good question. Could there have been an opportunity to initiate that investment sooner? Yes. I view enablement as in terms of sales effectiveness, there's so many different things we're doing with the product and that kind of thing. I view enablement as one of our biggest opportunities for growth this year. And I mentioned that 80, well now basically multiply that times 2 now, and that's about where we are. And if I look at the biggest opportunity, it is in the onboarding and the investment in our folks that are within, you know, 12 months. There's such an opportunity for them to grow. And, but But also we're getting realizing that, hey, can't just focus on the first year guys and girls.

Eric Appel:
We need to build an everboarding plan and a training plan for everybody. This is the first year where we've really built meaningful productivity enhancements into our capacity plan because it's the first year we've really been able to look ourselves in the mirror and say we feel comfortable doing that. So You know, if I'm talking to other leaders out there, is this something that I wish we would've done a little sooner? Yeah, it is. Now that we're in the throes of it, I think we're doing it in a very intentional way. The team that we have is now growing. I think it's really starting to work, but there's a huge opportunity to uplevel that could help us, you know, even improve upon the productivity enhancement that we've got built into the yield.

Andrew Monaghan:
Okay. Old friend Steve Pepe, VP of Field Engineering at Sublime. He was going to ask you a question around where does SEs report into an island? Where's the best place for them to report into? How do you balance investments in SEs versus AEs, things like that?

Eric Appel:
For whatever reason, when you say Steve Pepe, I just immediately think of a shit-eating grin. You know, like every time I see Steve Pepe, he's got this shit-eating grin that he knows something that I should know., but he is not going to tell me I should know. I think he's great. Thanks for asking the question, Steve. So our SEs, while I feel responsible for them in a way that I want to make sure they're successful, they feel pulled into our culture and they know how important they are. Our SEs report up through Braden Rogers, who's my peer. Braden is responsible for everything customer-facing. He, so he owns customer success.

Eric Appel:
He owns product marketing for our customers. He owns pre-sales engineering. But Brady and I work incredibly closely together. I still do a go-to-market call every 2 weeks where all the sales engineers and all the salespeople are together. Almost every all-hands call that's go-to-market facing is sales and SE. You know, I don't think many CROs would be silly enough to come on here and say that the SEs don't matter as much or more than the salespeople. SEs play a massive role at Island. And so it's super, super important to have that integration.

Eric Appel:
I do think there's goodness though in having somebody that is specifically looking out for that. And Braden and WeWin and others do a great job of making sure that The SEs are taken care of and that they feel fulfilled and that that's a separate line from me. And so while I feel responsible for them, I think there's some goodness and a little bit of separation there.

Andrew Monaghan:
Okay. Yeah, not many, well, not many, but certainly some would probably say no, they've got to be inside the CRO organization, right, to get that alignment. But it feels like maybe there isn't the disconnect that might happen if they're not inside the same org.

Eric Appel:
Well, part of that's because, you know, Brad and I are so such in lockstep. He is my true partner in the business in so many different facets. And because he and I are so connected, therefore down the organization's connected.

Andrew Monaghan:
Okay. Question from Marty Overman, head of sales, North America sales at Darktrace. Let's put this in the context of, you know, in early, early doors, you wanted to get the right people, right salespeople. You know, high quality, high trust, things like that. And now you've scaled up a long way. So right now, would you rather have 5 expensive reps who know their way around, or would you rather have 15 more junior ones, but they need some guidance and coaching and things like that? They're much more, uh, they need more care and feeding than the expensive ones.

Eric Appel:
There's a— I'm gonna give you the easy answer and you're gonna be like, oh, Eric, that was a cop-out. I think it's a blend. I think it's It's both. I think there's room for, I actually call that diversity. Diversity in experience, diversity in what your need is. The other thing is it's a great question, but you also have to apply it to what your specific needs are. For instance, we have a financial vertical. The person that I would hire in the financial vertical to go cover 4 accounts is going to be different than the person that I give Wisconsin and Michigan to.

Eric Appel:
And so I think you really have to understand what that territory needs, what your goal is for that territory, short-term and long-term. You know, there are, you know, some hires where we just gotta get in and we gotta get POVs going. I need somebody that's gonna just freaking come in and bust their ass to get as many POVs going as possible because we know that's a leading indicator of success. Then there are others where, hey, I've got Wells Fargo. I just need to go learn as much as I can, build relationships high, wide, low, and the leading indicator of success can look very different there. So I think it's situational and it's both, but we've evolved. Like if you'd asked me that again 5 years ago, I was probably, you know, give me the expensive guys that have a network.

Andrew Monaghan:
And now we've evolved. All I heard there, Eric, was you said that Wisconsin and Michigan don't need high multi-reps, but I don't know if that was exactly the point you were trying to make.

Eric Appel:
Oh no, no, no, no. I love the auto industry and cheese, so I love all the guys up there.

Andrew Monaghan:
Here's a question from, uh, I'll make the person anonymous, but clearly they're a partner of yours at Island, and his question was, why doesn't Eric pay us more money?

Eric Appel:
This is from a partner?

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah.

Eric Appel:
Damn it. Uh, that's not fair. Um, You know, I actually, I do think we, that's actually a funny question. Now I'm thinking, who asked that? You know, the channel program for us has been interesting. 5 years ago, we were coming forward, you know, 4 and a half years ago, we were really spending a lot of time as we were kind of in stealth coming out with the channel and we were getting pretty good feedback. Oh, that's really interesting. Yeah, I'd love to work with you. But the reality is the channel had a business to run.

Eric Appel:
We were cute. They had to go hit big numbers. They had to go displace products with other products. And so while we were putting intention and emphasis in the channel, we actually realized that the channel was not a great way to build a new category. It's not their channel isn't set up to go create and build a new category.

Andrew Monaghan:
They're not market makers, right?

Eric Appel:
They're, they're not a market maker. Yeah. But they are a business scaler. For sure. So we have now, we now appreciate what the channel can be for us, what we can also be for the channel. So that's a two-way street. It's not just, hey, we need you to bring us leads. No, we gotta figure out how do we, how do we help them in their journey? How do we help their reps? How do we help them with enablement? How do we help them with introductions into accounts? And hey, at the end of the day, back to the anonymous question, we do try to lean in as best we can.

Eric Appel:
From a margin perspective. And we do things internally to also make it attractive to our salespeople to where they don't feel like, hey, I'm giving up this much margin, therefore I'm getting hosed. We do some really creative things to where both sides feel good.

Andrew Monaghan:
Good. I love our partners out there. Question from, from Mike Baker, current CRO at Reach, formerly at AIM, no name, Arbus, Silence, McAfee. The legendary Mike Baker, who's on his 5th out of 100 startups he wants to do before he's done in this world. And his question, I didn't understand it. He just said, ask Eric who trained him at his first conference at McAfee when he was a seller.

Eric Appel:
So first of all, Mike Baker has endless energy. He is such a, he's got so much more energy than me. When I think about the companies that he has led and the next thing you know, he's doing the same. I compliment him and appreciate him for what the energy that he's brought to our industry. He is one of one, Mike Baker. Yeah, so back to the comment. So when I was hired, I was hired outside of cybersecurity. I worked at Yahoo.

Eric Appel:
This was 2004. And after I met Rob Emescua, it was the first person I met in the industry. I mean, he made fun of me because I just brought in the Bought a new bag. The next week I was told to go to this conference in Colorado Springs and follow around a guy named Mike Baker. Rudy Schnitt had told me to go do this. And so I showed up in Colorado Springs and I went to the booth at McAfee and I said, I'm looking for Mike Baker. And he was like, he's over there. So I went and tapped, like, hey Mike, I'm Eric Apple.

Eric Appel:
And I was told that I was going to come and just listen to you at this trade show for 3 days. And he looks at me like, you gotta be effing kidding me. You are going to be my shadow for 3 days. And I'm like, yeah, let's go. And so I proceeded to just stand next to him and listen to him talk to people. I don't remember one thing about it in terms of like what I learned, but I did learn that that guy was a damn good seller. I remember that. So that was, it's a fun memory.

Eric Appel:
I hadn't thought much about that event in Colorado Springs that you brought that up.

Andrew Monaghan:
That's great. Tell me about you, Eric. What's something that people probably think that you do effortlessly, but in reality, you're pedaling away like crazy under the water just to try and keep up and figure out what's going on?

Eric Appel:
I feel like I paddle as quickly as possible on a lot of things, Andrew. There is very little that I feel like just comes completely naturally. I'll give you an example of something though that hopefully this gives people some hope out there, public speaking. So next week I'll have the opportunity to address 500, 600 people in a room and I'll get up on stage and I hope that I give this appearance of somebody that's very confident, that believes in what we're doing, believes in our mission, and it feels good about what we're doing. I will tell you the amount of prep though that I put myself through to get up there is what builds the confidence. If I stepped on stage without a significant amount of preparation, I think my heart rate would be even higher than it is. Same thing with a sales call. I still kid you not, if I'm getting on and, you know, with a, a, a CIO or a CISO at this point in my career, hell, I'm older than most of them.

Eric Appel:
You'd think I've probably talked to 7,000 CISOs in my life. I still get nervous, which, but I use that, those nerves to prepare. I will go, and now with AI, there's so many things that you can do to prepare and learn about their business, learn about the person, start thinking about our value proposition and how that pertains and aligns to what they're doing. Well, all of a sudden, you, your confidence goes up and your nerves go down just a little bit because you're prepared. And then it moves from, I'm nervous to I'm prepared to let's go. I'm ready. And that's something that I had to learn and it's helped me so much. And I don't think that necessarily people are, if they are a bad public speaker or something like that, they're doomed forever.

Eric Appel:
I think there's obviously, there's tactics that people can tell you about, you know, look at the audience, imagine them naked, all that stuff. But I think there's more to it about just preparing yourself. And once you prepare yourself, you become confident. And then once you're confident, you're ready to go.

Andrew Monaghan:
I love that. That's a great story. I remember actually, for those that are listening, go back and listen to the first episode that we did 3+ years ago. There's a story that we kicked it off with that was aligned to that whole idea. Do you have time for one more question, Eric? We got it. Carefully worded question. Why hasn't Island been even more successful?

Eric Appel:
It's a great question. And if I internalize it and I also think about it externally, and this is going to come from, you know, Mike Fay, our CEO, he would tell you the same thing. I'm not, well, I shouldn't say it. I'm never going to use words exactly like Mike does. He's Mike. Mike's also one of one. We're always going to, we just have this kind of DNA in us. I don't know that we're ever going to feel like we're successful enough.

Eric Appel:
In a way, that's an amazing thing. In a way, it can create maybe undue stress. It definitely fuels us. But let me give you something, maybe even, you know, something more. While I think about what we've done in 4 years of selling, it's exceeded my wildest dreams, expectations. I feel fortunate that I'm still the CRO after this amount of time, and hopefully I'm the CRO for another 5 years. I really am fueled by this place. I'm fueled by others around us.

Eric Appel:
What we took on though was really unique. We didn't build a better, more effective, more less expensive mousetrap. We came up with an idea that, hey, what if this could become the future of work? And when you start with something that broad, it takes time to lay the foundation. And I think we've done an amazing job of laying the foundation. If we were more tactical in nature, more surgical, I think we would've grown even faster than we have. But we have chosen to build a foundation that one day perhaps will lets us not grow 100% plus year over year. Maybe we have that year we grow 200% and maybe our customers start to expand us even more. But I think that's the rationale that I would give you is it's been more foundational in nature preparing us for even more after.

Andrew Monaghan:
It's a great question. No, that's a good observation and a great way to wrap up. So Eric, you are one of one in terms of what you're achieving there, how you're organization. You know, I'm sure there's a lot of pride in what's been going on for the last 4 or 5 years. So congrats on all that, and we wish you a whole bunch more success for this year and next.

Eric Appel:
Andrew, it's all— thank you. It really genuinely is a pleasure to, uh, to be on with you. You are one of the best in the industry. I've learned a lot from you. I love that you continue to drive so much value into our industry, and I feel, uh, blessed to get to a cat who's a friend.

Andrew Monaghan:
So thank you. Thank you.