A friend who’s been an F500 CISO for fifteen years told me this last month, and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head:
“Startups all want to show me their solutions. What I have are problems. What I need are solutions to my problems.”
Sit with that for a second. The entire cybersecurity vendor ecosystem runs in one direction. Every BDR sequence, every booth at RSA, every “got 10 minutes to chat?” LinkedIn DM, every conference dinner, every analyst category. The vendor leads with what they sell. The CISO is supposed to figure out whether it fits.
It’s backwards.
Why it stays this way
The conventional wisdom is that the CISO market is crowded, and the answer to crowding is more efficient discovery: better landing pages, better SEO, better outbound, better RFP responses. Every analyst firm and growth-marketing playbook is built on this assumption.
But “crowded” is a vendor’s word. From the buyer’s seat, the problem isn’t volume. It’s direction. A senior security leader walks into any given week with three to five problems they’re actively trying to solve. They don’t have a solution shortage. They have a matching shortage. And matching is hard because the market is structurally pointed the wrong way: ten thousand vendors are pitching toward the buyer instead of being pulled toward the buyer’s actual problem.
The reframe
The fix is small in word count and enormous in posture. Vendors should open every meeting by naming the problem they think they solve. Then confirm with the buyer whether that problem matches one the buyer is actually working on. Then, and only then, show the solution.
The solution can include cool tech. Most of the work being done in cybersecurity right now is genuinely impressive: agentic remediation, exploit-validated AppSec, AI-native detection, identity verification that holds up to deepfakes. Show all of it. Just show it as the answer to a problem the buyer agreed they have, not as the thing the founder wanted to talk about.
The product doesn’t have to change. The order does.
What good actually looks like
A vendor doing this well opens with something like:
“Most ASPM tools generate three thousand findings and route them all into Jira. The triage problem becomes the security team’s problem. We chain repo signals to runtime behavior, so the queue you actually get is the ten findings that can be exploited in your production. Here’s the workflow.”
A vendor doing it badly opens with:
“We’re an AI-native ASPM platform with unified policy, agentic remediation, and a single pane of glass across SAST, SCA, IaC, secrets, and container scanning.”
The first one names a problem the CISO has been losing sleep over. The second names a category the CISO has been hearing about for two years. Same product, possibly. Different meeting entirely.
What the buyer’s seat looks like
This isn’t only on vendors. Buyers can train the market with a single sentence at the top of every meeting: “Open with the problem you think you solve. If it’s mine, we keep going.”
It costs the CISO nothing. It costs the vendor a few seconds of recalibration. And it inverts who’s leading the conversation without anyone having to be confrontational about it.
The vendors who can pivot to a real problem in those few seconds are usually the ones worth thirty minutes. The ones who can’t were going to waste your thirty minutes anyway.
Back to the question
Cool tech isn’t the problem. There’s a lot of cool tech in cybersecurity right now, and the field genuinely needs it. The order is the problem. Solution first, problem second, is the wrong way around.
Flip it. Lead every vendor conversation with the buyer’s problem, and most of the rest sorts itself out: pipeline quality, peer signal, even the analyst category. None of that gets fixed by buying a different list of CISOs to email.
If you’re trying to do this inside your program or your GTM, connect@passarel.com is the right door.