RICHARD STIENNON

What is your name?

Richard Stiennon

What company do you work for?

IT-Harvest

What is your position in the company?

Founder, Chief Research Analyst

How long have you worked in the industry? 

29 years

What do you do and in what circumstances would I come to you for something?

 I am an industry analyst focused on cybersecurity. You would come to me if you were looking for guidance on which segment or particular vendor to invest in.

How do you start and finish your work-day? 

I start at 6 AM with several cups of coffee, upbeat music, and a quick check of email, Linkedin, Slack, and my Substack stats. The work day ends when I shut my laptop at 10 PM, unless I have call with Australia.

What do you do at work on a daily basis?

I find new cybersecurity vendors and discover what they do. I categorize them into one of seventeen categories and 660 subcategories. I enter them in our internal workflow for my team to put into the IT-Harvest Dashboard, a database of 3,339 vendors. While doing that I am also writing something every day. A post to Substack, a book manuscript, or a research report for a client. I have at least two demos of the platform every day to prospects.  Later in the day I converse with my developer in California on new features and data sources for the Dashboard. Somewhere in their I try to practice piano.

What’s the biggest misconception people have about your position? 

People think they can pay an industry analyst to promote their products. This is a misconception created by the few bad actors that are pay to play.

What is the best thing about your job?

Learning new things every day and the freedom to dive deep down rabbit holes.

What hard skills should someone in your field have?

I wrote a book about this! (Curmudgeon: How to Succeed as an Industry Analyst) You have to learn how to write and how to speak in public. Luckily those are both learnable by doing. The hard trait is having an inquisitive mind that leads you to never tire of learning new things.

What soft skills should someone in your field have?

The ability to ask questions to dig into what a company’s products actually do and compare them to similar technologies.Keep asking until you “get it.” It does not hurt to have an excellent memory.

What’s one professional skill you’re currently working on?

Sales. I launched a SaaS platform a year ago and, because we are still “founder led,” I do all the sales. I found that sales is a lot easier when you believe in your own product.

What’s a mistake you made early on in your career, and what did you learn from it?

I learned the worst thing I could do is shift gears. I was changing industries too often. It takes years to understand a new industry. Luckily the last shift was to IT security and I have stuck with that.

What was the worst moment in your career?

When I was in my late twenties I joined forces with a partner to acquire ADM Technologies, a manufacturer of audio mixing boards, the giant consoles you see in music studios. It turned out that the investor who promised to put up the working capital for the company was a crook and was in the deal to steal our paid-in capital. After two weeks we had to shut down the company and lay off 50 employees. It set my career back five years.

What is the best job decision you’ve ever made?

Becoming an author. It helped my analyst business and led indirectly to putting my financial worries behind me.

What is the worst job decision you’ve ever made?

All the worst decision were leaving a company too soon. I get impatient.

What has been your biggest career disappointment?

Getting laid off at Blancco because they could no longer afford me. I loved the team and the company.

If you could edit your career, what would you change?

I would have recognized that computer science was a thing in high school. My first computer was a Linc8, the predecessor to the DEC PDP11 family. I wasted five years becoming an aerospace engineer who used computers but my later entrepreneurial career would have benefited from being directly involved in computers.

What concerns you about the future of Cyber?

I am an optimist. I see cyber security getting better every year. The industry will continue to grow because the attackers will always find victims.

Describe yourself in three words? 

Good natured thinker.

What did you want to be when you were growing up?

I wanted to colonize the Moon.

What behaviour or personality trait do you most attribute your success to, and why?

My imagination. I give credit to my father who did not allow TV in our house. I read all the time.

What are your best and worst personality traits?

Best:  Calm under fire.  I am very hard to phase.

Worst: Impatience. I have zero tolerance for bureaucracy. I hate meetings were everyone talks about how to solve a problem when the problem would go away if someone just stood up and did the work.

What do you consider your greatest personal achievement?

Getting my Masters from King’s College when I was 55. It was the hardest thing I ever tackled.

What is the most important lesson that life has taught you?

Pick your spouse wisely. Or, in my case, get lucky.

Is there a quote that motivates you?

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

– Winston Churchill

Which living person do you most admire, and why?

John Lewis Gaddis, now a professor at Yale. He wrote the history of the Cold War used by every student of international relations.

Which words or phrases do you most overuse?

Lately, thanks to the emergence of ChatGPT, it’s “mind blown.”