How much prior domain expertise is required to be a successful enterprise entrepreneur?

Evan is the CEO and co-founder of Abnormal Security. In this class, Evan breaks down what a functional and effective culture of leadership means at enterprise startups, and the best ways to foster that culture. Prior to Abnormal, Evan most recently led product and machine learning teams at Twitter after co-founding successful companies including Bloomspot, acquired by JPMorgan Chase, and AdStack, acquired by TellApart.

Evan: So I don't think, I don't think you need to be, I don't think you need a lot of domain expertise to be successful. Abnormal Security is a good example, right? I'd never worked in cybersecurity that did my co-founder Sanjay, but we were still able to build a market leading cybersecurity product.

So I think in terms of like actual, like technical domain expertise, you don't need a lot. However, I do think what you need is,some combination of humility, curiosity, and drive to really work with customers, to understand their PR, to deeply understand their problems, in order for you to really innovate and build a great solution.

So I [00:02:00] think that you can get away with a lack of domain expertise. If you are very willing to go engage with the market and customers to really understand the problems and their mind, and that will help you build a great solid. Ultimately to be successful as a enterprise software entrepreneur, you have to build a substantially better solution for a pro a problem that customers care a lot about.

And if you're not a domain expert, you probably won't have a good sense about what really matters. And that's why all these other things are very important for success.

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