One of my favorite business management books is Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't. It’s by Jim Collins, and it explores the characteristics that separate companies that just chug along from those that grow quickly and sustainably. The book is going on 20 years old now, but it’s got some exceptionally valuable lessons for businesses today.
The most important lesson I’ve taken from that book is “first who, then what”. The idea is that with the right team in place, you can figure out the problem. But even if you have a great strategy, a mediocre team won’t get you where you want to go.
While I was talking with colleagues past and present about White Ops, the humility of the team here was one of their biggest talking points. And it’s one of two key reasons I decided to join White Ops. People here know the gravity of the mission before them, they know the complexity of the adversary, and they take nothing for granted. Victories and accomplishments are celebrated, but they never gloat, they never shame, and they never assume the war is won.
The other major differentiator is the technology. No one can touch the sophistication of what they do to mitigate bot fraud throughout the internet. White Ops has made an indelible mark in the cybersecurity world as the leader in fighting sophisticated bot fraud. When you’re a key player in the takedowns of Methbot and 3ve, two massive botnet operations, in a span of only a few years, you’ve proven you’ve got the chops in bot mitigation.
And now, they’re moving into places that are near and dear to my career: Marketing Integrity, the newest offering, protects brands from sophisticated bot activity on their websites. As a sales leader, protecting my website, my turf, from sophisticated bots that distract and take resources from my team...that’s a big goal. During a pilot run of Marketing Integrity with several top brands, White Ops found the percent of sophisticated bot activity on form collection pages got as high as 40.8%.
White Ops created a technology to stop that kind of wasted time and money, and they somehow stay humble about it. I was struck by the people here: they believed wholeheartedly in the mission of White Ops. There is a world in which the economics of cybercrime can be reversed, where it is too expensive for fraudsters to commit these acts. This isn’t marketing fluff, this is real.
This passion makes me even more excited to bring what I’ve learned over my 12+ years at Google here. There is a bright future in store for White Ops. I saw it while I was looking from afar and I now get to see it everyday within their four robot-lined walls.
