Tales from the Valley: no such thing as BizDev role at a startup

Before starting my startup career, I grew up working at Microsoft in the Valley where in my final years, I drove BizDev deals with companies like ServiceNow, Asana and Druva. I got to work with the most successful BizDev folks in the industry, who’ve been hand-picked by their CEOs to work with the big fella, Microsoft. All these companies had mature products with tons of customers and at least a couple hundred employees in the engine room. The definition of the BizDev role at these companies was:

an experienced sales guy, tasked to find a win/win partnership between the companies, PR it out so that both businesses gain customers through press.

Then I decided to jump off the big fella and try what it’s like in real life: I joined the startup Tresorit where the founders hired me for my Microsoft BizDev achievements. Tresorit at the time had an End-to-End Encrypted Dropbox-competitor product and they decided to launch a product for developers in the enterprise to End-to-End Encrypt their databases. Go, BizDev that!

BizDev requires a Biz first!

If you join a startup at this stage in a product or business role, you soon realize that what they call “biz” is thin ice: perhaps a couple of customers signed a piece of paper (i.e. letter of intent) or a project in the works that the founders are aspired to launch as a product at the end.

Now I can tell: if you want to hire a BizDev, you need a Biz first. So, I took off my red ribboned BizDev cylinder and put on my product & UX paper hats, rolled up my sleeves and 2 months prototyping & development later, I dragged my Europe-based team to NYC and Boston to a few randomly organized meetups and developer workshops, so that we meet those who believe will be our customers. It’s when the rubber meets the road — as we kept joking with my CEO and lead dev.

Image: The epic moment of meeting the first commercial-to-be customer. It didn’t happen. But gave us lots of learnings.

The birth of a product

6 months, 1 pivot, about 35 customer interviews and 20,000 lines of code later when we witnessed our first customers going live with their MVPs using our platform, we suddenly felt that we’re ready to call our project a “product”. It had a value prop, a landing page, a signup experience and what’s even more important: customers, who promised to pay us real money in a couple of months’ time. So, it was time to turn on the time machine and travel ahead in time to see who will need this tech in 6 months from now.

The first BizDev deal

A developer who we’ve met in one of our randomly organized “rubber hits the road” events in NYC traveled in SF and while hanging out at Workshop Cafe, he mentioned that Apple recently launched their healthcare app developer framework, CareKit: it’d be awesome if it worked with ZeroKit. He didn’t have the connections, just an idea…

Image: unrelated... a mobile barber shop in Apple’s Cupertino campus, cutting busy employees during their lunchbreak

A week later, I’m sitting in a Cupertino meeting room, meeting a secretive Apple team who can’t tell me much about who they are and what they’re working on, but they liked what I was InMail’ing them about. Apple’s products are built with security in the core, but all their iOS CareKit developers will end up connecting their patients’ devices to some sort of a non-Apple cloud, and for that, they didn’t have a solution yet: it was set up for a HIPAA’ster. End-to-End Encryption to the rescue!

In January 2017, we launched ZeroKit by announcing the collaboration with Apple. Our Mashable interview named ZeroKit as the tech that enables Apple’s CareKit developers to keep patient data secure in hospitals and health apps in the cloud and across devices. My CEO was happy: “that’s the BizDev deal that we’ve hired you for a year ago. Good job!”

BizDev a startup

By now, I can define the Startup BizDev job description:

A Product role that focuses on building growth into a product in a form of a joint business model with a larger company that’s missing something critical in their product to succeed.

When I’m meeting friends who talk about their recent BizDev hires who had one sales job before, I feel sorry for the guys and for their recruiters. So, I decided to share my story to help you get your very first BizDev rock star hire right. Go, Apple it — as we used to say at Tresorit.