THE RACE TO BE SEEN BEFORE THE ATTACK HITS

What a Formula 3 driver turned cybersecurity CEO taught me about marketing, trust, and why the best brands are already protecting people before anything goes wrong.

By Alano Vasquez (Profile: Alano Vasquez), CEO at Whyze Labs (whyzelabs.com)

I want to tell you about a guy who raced formula cars across Spa-Francorchamps and Silverstone, then walked away from a long career at Dell Quest to chase something bigger - and ended up building one of the more fascinating go-to-market stories I've come across in cybersecurity.

His name is Luigi Lenguito (Profile: Luigi LENGUITO). CEO and founder of BforeAI (Company: BforeAI | The PreCrime™ Company), a company that trademarked the phrase "Pre-Crime" - yes, like Minority Report - before anyone else thought to. After our conversation, I walked away thinking about marketing, trust, and the gap between reactive firefighting and genuine leadership differently than I did when I sat down.

Let me tell you what I mean.

THE SETUP: Most companies are playing defense. Luigi built an offense.

When Luigi left corporate life, he spent two years doing what he loved - driving. Spa-Francorchamps. Silverstone. Catalunya. The full circuit. But somewhere between laps, the entrepreneur in him couldn't sit still. He looked at the cybersecurity market and saw something that most people weren't talking about: the entire industry was moving toward reactive posture. Detect and respond. Assume breach. Show up after the damage was done.

He bet that in four or five years, the market would be desperate for something different. Something predictive. So when serendipity connected him with two researchers who'd been quietly building predictive behavioral AI for a decade - calling it "pre-policy" - Luigi saw exactly what it was. Pre-Crime. He trademarked it. He launched the company. And then Covid grounded every racetrack in Europe, which meant he had nothing to do but build.

Six months later, BforeAI had its first customer.

That mindset - focus on your own lap, not the car behind you - is something I've been thinking about ever since he said it. Because it applies just as much to how you build a brand as it does to how you build a product.

"Don't spend too much time on the competitors. We're already leading the pack. It's their problem to catch us. We just have to go faster."  -  Luigi Lenguito, CEO BforeAI

THE MARKETING LESSON: Saturated markets don't reward louder. They reward different.

Here's the thing about cybersecurity as a space: it is flooded with money. Big, established players can write checks for sponsorships, booths, billboards, whatever. They can out-spend you on day one. So if you're a startup trying to earn share of mind, you cannot win on just volume.

Luigi gets this. He's running something he calls the Prediction Tour - 80 dinner events across the United States, 25 to 30 CISOs per table, facilitated conversations about AI and cybersecurity, no sponsor stage, no pitch deck, just real dialogue. He's in competition with Taylor Swift for booking dates. (His words, not mine - and I'm here for it.)

Think about what that actually is from a marketing standpoint. It's intimacy at scale. It's trust-building that no banner ad can buy. And it generates something even more valuable than leads: it generates intel. Every city throws up a different set of topics, a different set of worries. Luigi is essentially getting paid in market research for showing up and listening.

The only problem? Almost none of it is being captured on video. And this is where I put on my agency hat for a second, because I see this constantly - great founders doing great things in rooms full of the right people, and walking out with nothing portable, nothing amplifiable, nothing that can reach the person who couldn't be in that room.

Here's a number that should stop you cold: for two dollars, you can get a C-suite executive to sit down and watch a complete three-minute video about your product. Two dollars. If you have a message worth saying, there has never been a cheaper path to the right eyeballs.

The organic reach is great - Luigi's built 30,000 followers without spending a dollar on follower campaigns. But organic builds slowly. Paid compression collapses that timeline significantly. You're not choosing between authentic and promoted. You're choosing between reaching your audience this year or next.

THE TRUST ARCHITECTURE: The smartest thing on their website isn't a product page. It's a customer.

One of the things Luigi mentioned that I genuinely had not seen before: BforeAI trained a large language model on one of their first customers - with full consent and collaboration - and put it on the front page of their website. Not a chatbot. Not a product assistant. A customer AI, available to answer your questions at any hour, from the perspective of someone who has actually used the product.

When I talk to prospects about conversion, the thing that kills most websites is the same problem: every piece of content sounds like it was written by the company, for the company. Social proof is hard because real customers are busy people who don't want their time monopolized by reference calls. But an AI-trained customer persona? That's scalable. That's always on. And it's coming from a voice that isn't trying to close you.

The trust signal is the whole game. People don't buy software. People don't buy platforms. People buy confidence that the decision they're making won't blow up in their face. And when buyers that Luigi's team has worked with got promoted within six months of implementing the product - that's not a coincidence, that's a case study waiting to be told on every channel they own.

"Nobody was ever fired for buying IBM. I hate that phrase. Our customers get promoted."  -  Luigi Lenguito

THE THREAT LANDSCAPE: AI didn't just change marketing. It changed crime.

We're a marketing firm at heart, but you can't sit across from the CEO of a pre-crime company and not walk out with a few things that change how you think about the internet you're operating on.

Luigi walked me through what's happening with hyper-personalized fraud right now, and it stopped me cold. After the tariff announcements, criminals launched a wave of customs fee scams - but this time, each fraudulent invoice was uniquely generated for its target. If you were a photo equipment company, the fake invoice listed camera lenses. If you were in manufacturing, it listed aluminum bars. The address on the invoice was yours. The AI is doing the customization at 200,000-message scale.

He also mentioned something I hadn't considered: AI search poisoning. While doing research for BlackHat, he saw a fake website surface inside AI-generated results - a fraudulent storefront mixed in among legitimate sources. The criminals aren't just targeting your inbox anymore. They're targeting the tools you use to do research.

The reason this matters for every brand builder reading this newsletter is simple: your brand is now a target surface. Impersonation attacks - fake versions of your domain, your invoices, your customer-facing communications - cost ten times more than ransomware in aggregate. The reputational exposure alone should scare every CMO more than it currently does.

THE TAKEAWAY: Speed is not optional. It's the whole strategy.

There's a reason Luigi keeps coming back to racing as a metaphor - it's precision. In motorsport, you don't wait for something to go wrong before you respond. The data is live, the adjustments are constant, and the teams that win are the ones who have already anticipated the conditions before the car gets there.

That is exactly the posture the best brands are starting to take. Not reactive - predictive. Not louder - more trusted. Not spending more - spending smarter, in the channels where trust actually transfers.

The security industry is finally learning something marketers have known for years: you can't buy your way to credibility. You earn it in rooms. You earn it in honest conversations. You earn it by showing up consistently in the right places with the right voice, before the person you're trying to reach even knows they have a problem.

Luigi's building that at a company level. The question I'll leave you with is: are you building it at yours?

Formula 3 to Pre-Crime: Racing Mindset in Predictive Cyber - w/ Luigi Lenguito (CEO at BforeAI) -- Watch the full episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ORzn_ifkUI

P.S. We're booking a limited number of strategy sessions for brands in cybersecurity and technology who want to understand how expert-led video and targeted LinkedIn distribution can compress your time-to-trust. Reach out directly on LinkedIn or find us at https://whyzelabs.com