Fireside Chat w/Dr. Yuval Bustan, Director, Global Infrastructure @ IFF

Welcome to our Fireside Chat. This is our monthly conversation. Thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule to join us. I'm just going to go quickly around the room. And before we do that, just some quick ground rules. If this is the first time you're joining us, we welcome you to our Fireside Chat community. And thank you for being a part of this community and for joining us and hearing conversations that we're going to hold this evening. If you're a vendor in the audience, we appreciate you. We are happy that you're here but please note that this is not the time, not a place to try to sell us on your greatest, latest and greatest product or solution. Please use this as an opportunity to learn about our guests this evening, who is Yuval. We'll get into Yuval's background in a bit of in a few minutes. Do want to also say it's the middle of the week. It's Wednesday. Let's have a great time. Let's really try to enjoy ourselves as we get. Throughout our time this evening so I'm just going to go quickly around the room. You all, we'll leave you for last. I'm Tomas Maldonado. I'm the CISO at the NFL. Russell, over to you. Thanks so much. It's amazing to be back here again on our monthly fireside chat. You've all look forward to getting to meet you. Hey, Russell, you banks been running my company the last four years security ever after we helped companies who lost their CISO speaking of CISO, Katie. Over to you. Thank you, Russell. Hi, I'm Katie Hanahan. I'm the Deputy CISO at Ingredion a manufacturing company headquartered in Chicago that manufactures things that you might not even think about. I actually recently visited a plant. I was very excited to share this little tidbit. We actually can extract 26 different ingredients from one kernel of corn. Thought that would be a riveting little tidbit for our audience tonight. Over to you, Daniel. Nice tidbit, Katie. Good evening, everyone, and good morning to you all. Appreciate the time carving it out so early this morning. This is Anil Hargis. I am a Senior Operating Advisor with Francisco Partners. Back at you, Tomás. Thank you, team. And look, I'm really happy one, to have this conversation with you all. I've had the pleasure of knowing you all for, wow, several years now. I want to say at very least maybe six years or so and I'm prioritized. I had the opportunity to work with Yuval for a few years in my prior opportunity. So really interesting to, to learn more about Yuval and his his journey. Who's actually, I should say, Dr. Yuval Boustan, who who just recently obtained, if I'm not mistaken his doctorate degree, which I know he was working on for quite some time. So that's going to probably be an interesting segment of learning about you and your journey, Yuval. I do want to say one. Just quick soundbite, our comments and opinions are our own and do not represent our current or prior or future employer for that matter. So with that, and without further ado, Yvonne, why don't you take a few moments and feel free to take as long or as short as you like. Why don't you tell us about you? And tell us about your origin story. Sure. Thanks so much. Thanks everybody. And thanks for having me. I'm from Tel Aviv, Israel, born and raised. And I won't tell you how old I am just yet, but I will say that my first encounter with coding was with basic over Commodore 64 in the 80s. So that's a bit of history, moved on to Pascal in high school. And then, as you mentioned, I'm from Israel. So we get drafted to the army. I served as a gunner in a tanks unit 94 to 97. And then immediately after that, I went into school, took a few classes in coding. So the C, C Visual Basics, SQL Server, a bunch of InfoSec courses. Then I got my first real job in 99. So if we do the math, I've been doing it for 25 years, and I typically, when I look at my career, I split it into four parts. So my first part was a part of a consulting company. It was implementing ERP systems, mostly Oracle applications back in the day. And if you think back, I joined as a low level programmer, and then. quickly became an Oracle DBA. And when you think back to those years, a lot of the companies who implemented ERP, that was probably the first big IT project in those companies. And so you got to do a lot more than just ERP. So I did system architecture and I built the InfoSec offering for that company. And eventually after a few years made it all the way up to be the CTO of that company. I was there for six years and after touching probably 30, 40 customers I had got the itch to build something for myself. And therefore I wanted to go in house. So in December, 2005, I started the second chapter of my career and I joined a company called Futon. Futon was an Israeli managed global company in the flavors and fragrances industry. So for those of you not familiar with the industry, it's mostly B2B. Everything we have in the fridge is processed food these days, almost everything, right? So even if you go to the store and you see a bottle that says 100 percent freshly squeezed orange juice, that still doesn't mean somebody picked an orange from the tree and squeezed it directly into your bottle, right? There's a lot of work going on there around stabilizing scent and taste. And color to make it appear the same way all year round. So there's also a lot of technology behind it as it turns out. And this industry turned out to be quite exciting, actually. So there are as with any industry, there are those big global players, but also hundreds and hundreds of local companies. These are typically local companies, family owned they ran for years, they've got a solid customer base, they buy at four, they sell at five, everybody's happy until the generation change and then they're looking to sell. So Pluton was one of the companies coming in and acquiring a lot of companies. I was there for 11 years, and in those 11 years, we currently bought 55 such companies. So a company could have been 10 people across the river in Jersey working on a special type of enzyme, and it could have been 700 people in eight countries in Europe, dominating the the meat spices sector in that, in those countries. And then anything in between. So I joined is the global director for it in charge of infrastructure and infosec basically got to build the it environment for that company from the ground up. And also, as you can imagine, 55 companies, that means a lot of my day to day. Was about M& A's from due diligence to, post deal integration even some divestitures that we got to do. So yeah, it was quite a rollercoaster and a unique experience, I have to say. After 11 years of doing that I, I started, wanted to get off for a bit and in the summer of 2016, I started my third year, third part of my career. And actually, as Thomas alluded earlier, started enrolling to do a PhD. So that was just in line for my 40th birthday. And that was, a good opportunity to pursue a dream that I had. As a side note, I was lucky, fairly early in my career to advance rather quickly and move up, so I didn't really need, unlike in the U. S., a college degree to move ahead. That, that gave me the luxury, to learn things that I was interested in and not this thing that I necessarily needed for work. So a passion of mine has always been geopolitics and international relations. I started the first online magazine in Hebrew exclusively dedicated for international relations along with a friend of mine. We ran that for 15 years. And in the last few years, I'm a regular columnist at Forbes magazine in the Israeli edition. So we print in Hebrew, but we also publish online in English. And maybe I'll post a few interesting links later on to this conversation. And yeah, so my bachelor's and master's and then PhD are all in international relations. And two worlds living in parallel in my life. Now, my dissertation touched on the impact of. technological innovation on military conflicts. So being from Israel obviously we kept a lot of those, unfortunately. And I was always, there's a huge body of literature around what's called asymmetrical warfare. If you're so strong, why don't you always win all the time? And obviously technology is a big part of that. We are engulfed in what's called the information revolution in military affairs, where IT basically is everywhere now. Not only in Israel, obviously, in the American military as well. And so I presented a lot of questions around technology. And questions, actually, that I think we ask ourselves every day in our career as well. So how do you introduce new technology? How do you know it's the right fit for what you need? How do you handle unintended consequences when you deploy one thing and it creates a problem somewhere else? How do you manage expectations with yourself, with your team, with the public? How do you keep it secure, of course? I ask these type of questions around, again, Israel's military conflict since the turn of the century. I also looked into the U. S. experience in Iraq some Insights there. And yeah, so I started in the summer of 2016 and after about two years, I was ready to move to stage two, which in it lingo basically means I finished the LLD and was ready to actually write. And that was when I was actually ready to to go back to business and work as I was focusing almost exclusively on, on school until the so late 2018, I got a call from the CIO of Futurum and then from the CEO of Futurum. And I knew Furtron was acquired by IFF a few months back and basically they told me, it's a whole new ball game and you've got this unique opportunity now to do everything you wanted to do all those years and and take it to the next level. And so I did. I came back first as a consultant and then con converted to an FTEA year later. That's where I got to meet Tomas, as you mentioned, in in IFF. And that had turned out to be even more exciting, the ome, his IFF was embarked on its own journey. IFF was acquired Terron, and then a couple of years later merged with the natural bioscience from DuPont. Thought Berger created a company that was about 25, 000 employees strong and about three, 400 locations with technology. And so I was part of a great team in charge of devising the strategy. How do you handle all of that? And how do you integrate FruitROM within itself and then into IFF and then NNB as well. And as we were busy doing that, the business obviously handling this big state that they had now have made some decisions on optimizing their portfolio. And then we got to do a lot of divestitures as well. And, it's all public, so I'm not disclosing anything, of course. Yeah, a lot of exciting things there. I know there was a lot in there. So just to summarize, I've been doing it for 25 years, about 20 years or so around MNAs, and managed to squeeze in a PhD somewhere there in the middle. So yeah, that's me. I'm happy to take your questions. That is a very interesting journey that you took us on. So I'm going to pass it over to you, Russ, to keep the conversation going. Hey, thanks so much. You've all, and again, thanks for being up so early in the morning. Not a typical time, but Hey, so glad that you spent some time with us and I love what you shared. There's so many things that you, I'll tell you, you brought back some memories, Commodore 64, Pascal, Visual Basic. I'm like yeah. We are, we've got a lot in common there. And I'll say you're not the first. Tanker to be on either. We had Lance Spitzer in the past and he's been a guest with us before. He served in the U. S. Army and then worked with tanks at the time. So you mentioned that too. So some common connections there, the Yeah, I've always been impressed with companies that came from individuals who worked with the Israeli Defense Force. You can think of, Checkpoint, Imperva, Apollo Exonius, and so many others, even some that you've listed. Why do you think it is? Help us see the connection of why so much cyber innovations come from that part of the world, from folks that have a similar experience as what you've had. Can you help us understand that better? Help me understand that better. Yeah, sure. So I would say it's not only in cyber that we see Israelis with experience. It is our reality that forces us to find solutions, right? And technology very early on in Israel DNA, I would say since 1948. It's always been the key differential for we are much fewer than our enemies and therefore we need to find force multipliers, as we call them, and technology is obviously just being the most important one. And so you imagine when you guys go to college at 18, we go to the army and a lot of the folks, start doing real world work. Life saving work, even as early as 18 or 19. And so you have to find solutions and those solutions at the end. And again, you can think about anything from cyber in Iran or anything within defensive cyber, or even just it in general is something that certainly. Comes into play very present in the day to day life. So the startup scene is certainly booming in Israel in the last few years. So just one example, there was a startup, not from cyber actually, but it was a startup called chameleon that was sold to Walmart, I think. And those guys and gal actually came up from the air force where they used 3d model to analyze the topography of the land. And then they use the same model. As they left the army to do a 3d model to simulate, how do you look when you put your clothes on online? So you go, you shop online, you take a picture of yourself, and then it actually simulates how the clothes would look on you based on this, on a similar 3d. Model, right? So this is just a one application of how you do something in the military and then completely out of left field. You can do it in the civilian market later on and in InfoSec. Yeah, again, as you can imagine, every type of obligation you can imagine, and those even that you can't comes into play a lot of folks the 8200 unit is probably the biggest thing, the military. That might change after the current war but a lot of talented people working here and that's what you get when they go outside. Wow. What a great comment. I actually wrote that down. Reality forces us to find solutions. I appreciate that and appreciate you giving me some insights into there and helping me appreciate the fact that it's not just in cyber where it's innovations and again, reality forces us to find solutions. I love that so much. I appreciate that. Katie, over to you. Thank you, Russell. And thank you so much for joining us. You've all you said something really interesting. I also appreciate the study of, asymmetric warfare and that background we touched a little bit on Israeli companies and their approach to solving for very complicated problems. You have a really unique background in MNA. And I think that there is a correlation potentially between your background in asymmetric warfare and MNA experiences. And I would love to hear your thoughts on how to, achieve sometimes a very complicated merger as part of an acquisition. Just your thoughts on how to do that in large companies like you've been in. That's actually a very interesting question. Thanks for that. I think the number one thing I took from Proveraum, and as I said, 11 years of doing a lot of M& A's there, and a lot of the companies we took over were family owned they were fit for purpose for sure, but as you can imagine, taking over a family business that's been running 30, 40 years is a one man show often way behind on any modern technology stack you can think of, and what I come to learn there is that, anybody or a lot of people can look at a company and just wash it completely and say, let's, implement everything that we've got. But sometimes you don't have the time for that or a bandwidth for that, or you're not funded for that. And so this is where you have to make difficult choices and you have to look at everything and you say, okay, a lot of things are, forgive my French, a shit show, but they can remain a shit show for a few more years. We have it. We have important things to take care of first on the other side of the business. So it's about prioritizing and it's about analyzing the landscape and determining, what really would make an impact and don't, refresh it systems or do everything back to back just for the sake of doing it. You have to always assess what the impact is going to be there. So going back to asymmetric warfare, I would say a lot of what we're seeing in the current war as well. And obviously I won't get into the politics, but a lot of the questions that. We're asking ourselves, we'll ask ourselves, what makes an impact. Do you just blow things up, or do you need to do something that would actually make an impact, on the field and then beyond? Yeah, I think that's the key question. We shouldn't do things just for doing them, but we should do things that actually have an impact. Yeah, I appreciate that. Maybe a follow on question would be, yeah what were some of those examples for you where you can you made some very strategic decisions that made a a quicker impact and In a merger and acquisition scenario, right? So a lot of it again, certainly when it starts with governance and identity, and those are given. But beyond that, it's really about what do you want? As I said, what do you want to touch 1st? And was a company with almost 40 different systems across 120 locations. And then IFF, obviously, it were complicated. So I would say early on, the decision was, how do you structure? Let's see your infrastructure in a way that is scalable on one hand, but also flexible as the business strategy keeps evolving through the years. When I joined, it was about 1000 employees on 10 locations. When I left, it was 7, 120 locations. And he didn't have an appetite to have all of them fully aligned and fully integrated. So how do you support that? So part of the decisions was always to use, you mentioned you visited a factory, right? So we use data centers within factories, regional data centers and then, MPLS were just coming out. So global networks were not. So for defined as they are today, so there was any decision you had to make, you had to use very long lead times to get new networks and new hardware on one end, but then the business was moving so fast. And so you had to be flexible enough and build it in a way, as I said, to be, will be, that will be scalable. So one of the decisions early on again was to build those data centers that would, that will be able to support. Anything that came their way almost at a moment's notice. I appreciate that added that added an insight. I think that, all of us are in positions where we're constantly having to make those kind of complicated decisions and it's so helpful to. to have your insight tonight. I have a few more questions when we get back to your, I would like to get back more into the origin story piece. But before we do that, we have a smaller group tonight anyway. So I'm going to pass the mic over to Anil. So I don't dominate the conversation right now, but I do have a few more follow ups for later on. Anil, over to you. Great. Thanks, Katie. You've all you highlighted definitely a very, Eclectic background experiences and having worn so many different hats, whether programming, CTO to CISO. But one of the key things that you mentioned in your origin story that caught my interest I want to check with you on is about your contributions to Forbes as a, as an author. If I'm not mistaken you may have been, you may have read an article I read years ago. Regarding Brexit and want to understand not specifically about that topic, but how that mindset about writing, communicating, engaging folks in that medium helped you throughout your roles, in your current role. Speak to that in the context of, how that's allowed you to engage varying audiences. Sure, that's actually an interesting topic to cover. So thanks for that. I started with a friend of mine, Alon Levine the online magazine, as I referred to earlier, in 2005. Just as I joined Futurum, actually, the same month. I'm doing a lot of writing. You mentioned Brexit and yeah, and a lot of different articles that we covered. And I guess what I've come to learn is it's all about storytelling, right? We are, we're all selling something even to the business, to whoever approves our budgets to our teams. Again, going back to what's the meaning of what you do. You have to frame the story, whether it's a system, whether it's the actual story. And. Even when you do an analysis of geopolitics and let's say, Russia goes to Ukraine. What's the politics behind that? What's the next step and stuff like that? It has to start with the story and I've always enjoyed writing I was always enjoyed geopolitics as I've said, which is why I went and went to school for that and Yeah, to me, it all comes back to that. Even when I do a presentation at work, it all comes back to the storytelling. What do you actually want to say? What do you want people to walk away with? What's the purpose of every slide you put on the screen? And it all comes back to storytelling. And if it was up to me, it would be a prerequisite for any hiring. People need to be able to tell stories. And at least to themselves, right? Try to explain to yourself. Why are you doing the things you do? What's the impact of what you do? And then I find things are just, simpler. Oh, that's great. Thanks for highlighting that. I think the key component you talked about is storytelling. We talk about it, creating that narrative, but it's again, I have a copy of that saved article because what you succinctly captured was all angles of the storyline. In depicting how people arrived to that to that conclusion or where we ended up in that state, specifically on the topic of Rexent. Definitely appreciate that. An additional follow up regarding your, a couple of your prior roles was, how did CTO help, shape how you engage security once you moved into a security function at CISO? What I would say is, And again, as I moved rather quickly, rather up and the company did a lot of changes back then, but the number one thing that stuck was, as I said, those were the years that you've got to do everything right. We, a lot of the companies we visited and helped that was the first major it projects. You've got to touch, you've got to touch a lot of things and security has certainly been top of mind for everybody. So I got to do a lot of experimentation and again, took a lot of classes back then. And yeah, you recognize early on the importance of security and you think back to SOX, I think that was the early 2000s as well. That became top of mind for everybody. And when I learned that and got a lot of experience in that, when I moved into built from the ground up. It was up to me to design the strategy for for this new IT organization we were building and that was present from really right from the get go. So got you appreciate that. And that's great to provide that insight because again, helps set the table for how you engaged and how you're able to develop, the programs around that context. I'll get it back over to Katie. I know she had some follow up questions when I re engage her. Oh yeah, thank you. Yeah, I was going back, there are a lot of us in this profession that, a lot of us trip into it. Often we have people who come from the IDF through, through the 8200 unit or, other areas. I do find it more, interesting that you came from, being a gunner in a tank unit. However you're, I think you're always still exposed to that kind of extensive infrastructure. From, the IDF in that background. But prior to that, so this is where I'm interested in growing up, you said you're born and raised in, in Tel Aviv. Growing up, what were your hopes and dreams for your life? Did you think to yourself, I'm going to end up in this tech world, or is that something that, that, came out of that experience? That you had more in your early adulthood. I'm just curious, what the evolution was because there's also, I think, a lot in our industry that I find compelling too. And, there's definitely a mission oriented nature to most of us that have chosen this profession. So just wondering where kind of those fundamentals came from for you as an individual, as a human. Yeah. I would say for whatever reason, computers always came. So that's why I mentioned Commodore 64, right? And I'm thinking of all the great games we played on it. From really, right from day one. And then XT, and then the 386 came, and a bunch of other stuff. So to me, really right from the first moment, it felt natural. And if anything, the three years in the time queue, it was a distraction from that. And that's why Typically, when you go to the army, you get, when you get discharged, you get some money that you can start your own business or enroll in school. So I use that to enroll to the classes I mentioned to do some software development track and then InfoSec. Yeah, in that regard, the tax unit was. Enjoyed my time there, but was quite a distraction from a track. I knew I was going to go to because I knew all along that I wanted to work in computers. Didn't know exactly what. So that was some evolution there from software development to DBA, which also felt natural. The days of Oracle, SQL server, Informix even a little bit. So yeah, evolved. And as I said, From an Oracle DBA, that was maybe the first, or the most significant jump. Being a DBA to doing system architecture and then a CTO, that was, again, lucky because those were the years that you came in to a customer to implement ERP and they had no one else. So they turned to you and you got to do all this great stuff. Some things that in today's terminology would call an enterprise architect, right? You get to do everything because there's nobody else. And so I capitalized on that and Yeah, I picked up on that rather quickly. So to me, it was very early on a natural evolution into into consulting and then doing IT implementations in FruitROM and then beyond taking it to the next level now with with IHF. And I want to go back to the aspect of storytelling. You're very good at it. So I'd like to, I'd like to know, as you have people coming into your organization and you're mentoring people in, in how to be a better storyteller in this industry, do you have a process with which you work with your mentees? Or how do you help people tell better stories? First of all, yes, I'm trying always to, to push people to, for themselves, right? When you, and you see it all the time, you have, you can face people, whether it's, in house or vendors that have great decks and great presentations, but. They sometimes just track of the story, right? So you have all these stats and all these numbers and nice graphs, but what are you trying to say here? And do you really need to go through 20 slides to say it? So I saw an online training video like 20 years back, which was, stuck with me that basically said the same thing, take a story, go through all your slides and then challenge yourself. Do you really need that slide? Do you really need every bullet on that slide? Maybe you can just take that. Take just a few. Do you really need every word in the sentence, right? You don't want the audience reading off the slide. You're there telling a story. So the presentation or the slides there, try to think why is it even there? What's the purpose of it? So once you. And it's not easy, right? A lot of people are trying to think, don't always take for granted, or it's not instinctively that you know what's the meaning of what you do, even on small projects. So this, I think, forces a lot of people. On the one hand, we don't want to want them to waste time on just, building PowerPoint slides. But on the other hand, if it gets them. To understand their own story and what they do, there's a lot of benefit there. So to me, it always comes down to this. I can see it on a very long meetings, but at the end, you can sometimes summarize it with 1 sentence or 2 sentences. Or even a minute, but you always have to focus, what is it that you're trying to accomplish for yourself and then for everybody else. Yeah, I appreciate that. And that insight, I think that it's at the end of the day, yeah we always want to ensure that our audience is really. Receiving information that they're there to hear, but I bet that everybody's wondering with that Commodore 64, what was the very first thing you did? Was it a game? Was it where you program? What were you doing with this Commodore 64? Because I remember mine, for example, and it was Tetris for me. So I'm just curious what your gateway was. With that particular, it was mostly, yeah. So I remember two things. First of all, a lot of great games. And I still remember the audio and probably what a bit. So whatever it was there. So a lot of cool games that I sometimes encounter emulators online, which I, throw me back. But also there was a little bit there about basic, so I didn't do too much advanced coding that came later, but, play with it a little bit, even, you start with a little world and you pick it up from there. I think, again, did you, do you understand the language because the end programming languages, at least at the core. Back then was about, just different syntax, but do you even get it that you write a piece of code and then something happens? What should be today? We don't need to bother with GPT and friends, right? But Back then I think to me that's what stuck the most that it's not obviously I didn't plan to make a career out of playing games, though that could have been fun. But yeah, it was about coding early on. I think that's interesting too, just as we think about getting more people into our profession. And actually, yeah, my first thing that I wrote was I'm a history major and I wrote a history trivia game. And I, that was my thing that I created. So yeah, I know I appreciate that. And I just like to think about how do we translate into that? How do we get, the next generation into into what we're doing here. But with that, I know Russell had a few more questions as well. So I'll turn it over to Russell. Thanks again, Yuval. Awesome. Thanks, Katie. Thanks everybody for being here. Just a quick, super quick reset. We're glad that everyone's here. About 40 minutes into our conversation. Folks in the audience, feel free to hear just a moment. Click on the raise hand if you'd like to come up and ask questions of you've all would love to have you up on the stage With us so you can ask your questions And be a part of our now monthly for over three years. We've been doing this fireside chat So so so grateful that we're all here are all assembled And it just it's a highlight for me when I look on the calendar and I see Wednesday at 8 p. m Eastern I know it's gonna be a great week and this week is absolutely no exception So with that you've all I got a question for you. Looking at the notes I wrote down for when you were introducing yourself, telling us about your origin story, and there was one item that stood out. You said you built IT from the ground up. One of your things that you mentioned earlier, and I thought, wait a minute. On one hand, mega impressive. On the other hand, it seems like it would be like extraordinarily overwhelming. Like, where do you work on? What do you say no to? What do you say yes to? How do you be mindful of the things that you do while you're literally building it from the ground up? How did you kind of balance between the being overwhelmed with? All the years worth of work necessary to do that versus the tactical being able to get stuff done. What kind of balance do you have there? And the reason I ask is I imagine all of us are confronted with whether we're building IT or deciding what to work on for tomorrow might be even decision making process that you went through. I'd love to hear something about that. That's a great question. Thanks for that. I think it comes down to having a management that challenges you. And this goes back to maybe everything we spoke about until now, again, storytelling and understanding the meaning of what you do. The CFO back then used to joke that when he joined the company and he wanted a mailbox, somebody told him just open something with one of the free online services. So there wasn't even a mail service. And I remember going into the warehouse and there was still Windows 3. 11, right? In 2005. There was a lot of catching up to do there and. The number one thing that stuck again is, what am I going to do with it? Don't impress me with the latest and greatest and don't tell again, going back to vendors with respect to everybody. Of course, it doesn't matter if it's a new version or whatever. What can I do with it for my, what would my users do with it? What will the business do with it? So as you lay the groundwork, so obviously I, then you start with identity and then on top of that. The different directories. And again, we had every directory. You can think of not only Microsoft. And we started consolidating into a central location, as I've mentioned. You really, when you think about it, you think about the fundamentals, right? You can take always some, 1 of the big 4 to do a template for standard template for how a global company should look like, and that's going to involve a lot of components. But when you really, distill what you really need. It comes to identity and then, even something basic as emails and office communicator, whatever it was back in the day. You really had to challenge yourself on every single component. And even virtualization was only starting. So you had to, commit to a certain type of hardware beforehand. So there was the fundamentals there again, around basic collaboration. Primitive collaboration in today's standards on one end and then a central ERP and the ERP, certainly manufacturing companies is the sun and everything orbits around the ERP. So we started off that and then slowly expanded into other systems, into other sites, other regions, and so on. So again, you have to be focused on, what when a user comes to the office in the morning or connects in remote, What's the first thing that they need? What can't they do without? That's what you start with. So it's always, if you think about the supply and demand. So we took an approach that, demand drove everything. What do you need? And then build around that. So I love that. Love that approach and appreciate that. Let me ask a clarifying question, as you're thinking about, what does the business need? What's the demand, what's the. And maybe this is tying into the earlier storytelling that you mentioned, you started off with, what's the story you tell to people that get told no, for whatever reason, yes you might need this, but the demand is somewhere else. Is there any examples of how you dealt with or communicated to colleagues that didn't get the things that they may be demanding, but perhaps the business was not in a position to to deliver any any examples or ways to deal with that? Yeah, so there are two types of people there, right? One are your colleagues that you work with and they want to implement 10 systems and they only get to work on a couple. And the other side of the coin are the users who are looking for something maybe they saw in previous life and they want to get it in this company as well. So about the users, again, it goes back to what do you do with it? And people have always been open for ideas, of course. But. It always comes down to, showing the value of what you do. And again, you think you're a very primitive companies when we started. So even something as trivial for us as keep us in Excel and then upload that via some interface into the ERP or into something else. You have to show value how something that you took, you did manual for three hours and now it's automatic for five minutes and in five minutes you complete it, right? So stuff like that, how do you get, you need to provide a benefit at the end of the day and a value for the users as for the I. T. colleagues, I think one of the key benefits and the takeaways I took from Proof of Work and now from IFF is that there's so much to do so much to do and all the time and. The benefit there is that even if you don't get funded or you don't get approved for something you wanted to do, you probably have five other things to do on the shelf waiting. So there's always stuff to do. And even if you don't agree with the priorities, if if you do the different pieces, and they end up assembling into something greater down the road. So maybe it will be a bit slower than you thought. Maybe you're taking a detour. You didn't want to take. But again, if you're focused, if you know where you want to get, go to, then eventually you'll get there. And I think that's the most important thing. And going back to why are we doing the things that we do, those are the questions you have to ask yourself. If I don't get to do one thing, will this impact my journey or is this just something, going about it a different way, being a bit flexible and maybe open minded maybe I would have, given the opportunity. Choose something, some different path, but that doesn't mean it's the only path. So that was my approach for it at least. I love that. I'm so glad I followed up on that. And your explanation, I was like clicking the little emojis. and others were as well with your response. And I just have to say that you used the word colleague and I love. When folks use the word colleague versus use the word user is a common word. We use it in technology. It's just a common language. However, I like when you say colleague, my coworker, someone who's expert in something that may not be technology, may not be cyber, but they're just as much a right to be there is what we are with their respective disciplines. I love that a whole bunch. With that, let me hand over to Anil. Back to you. Thanks, Russell. Yuval, as you talked about your origin story, you definitely highlighted the fact that education was of importance to you. But you also talked about the fact that you had an informal education versus formal, and then you conveyed that you were pursuing your Ph. D. Tell us about that journey. Where does that passion come from, number one, and what was the drive to go after that? And then secondly, how do you find balance? That is a huge undertaking while taking on a full time role, family, and life outside of that. But speak to us about that journey with the PhD, but also, how do you find balance? With all that you're doing. Thanks for that. So first of all the informal part, or maybe we'll call it short term engagements like we do today. We do online learning right back in the day. It was, a week worth of courses that you could take within five days train on something almost on the job. So that's that part of the benefits. I think our industry brought. To the market that you can again, thinking back to what do you actually do with it that matters so you don't need to go to school for four years and I'm not taking anything away from that, of course, but you can spend a week or maybe a month or something very specific that will be of value to your work and build your way up, right? So if you choose wisely the courses and the training that you want to take on your job or off it that's a great way to, build your career. So anything from programming to infosec to. Database administration, as I said, infrastructures, mission specific stuff specific applications, everything is out there, right? You just have to choose. So I think that's a big, one of the big changes from from a few decades ago. So that's on the informal part. As for the PhD yeah, quite a journey and couldn't have done it without, my wife covering for a couple of years but I would say again, this is, this goes back to the passion of geopolitics and it's when I started early on. Actually, I started with computer sciences in 2000 and then quickly as we went into math and algorithms. Okay, that's not it. And as I said, I was already working at the time. So it wasn't about, securing a living. It was more about doing things that I was interested in. And then when I started that online magazine with friend, as I said, things click and it became a quite, I would say, thought provoking and really fun to, to work on that. We developed a lot of interesting ideas, as I said, made it eventually into Forbes and. Yeah so it was just a natural choice then to go into, to international relations for the bachelor's and master's and then the PhD in the master's, actually, I research about China and international institutions and stuff like that, which was interesting, I thought, but then when I went into the PhD and I debated quite a bit, which topic to choose, technology in military conflict is something very present in our lives. Obviously, again, not going into the politics, but Iron Dome in the sky, as we mentioned, the 8200 unit we see a lot of stuff that we hope only Israel can do. So that's very present in our lives. And you get case studies every other year, unfortunately. So yeah. That was right there and and I chose to pursue it. And the actual PhD, you start with a blank page, right? If you think about it, so a master's dissertation would be probably a chapter in a book, and a PhD dissertation is a book. But you start with a blank page. There are no courses. There's no nothing. It's up to you. That was quite challenging. That was actually the reason I left back in the day was because that was when I felt I couldn't do the two things at the same time. It's just it's not about going to a class and answering a few questions and doing some home assignments. It was about, being, having enough bandwidth to, to concentrate on something for a substantial period of time. And so that's why it took me almost two years. And I remember two years just to go through the, what we call the first stage when you do of sort the LMD, right? Trying to break down right to the chapters. What, how are you going, how are you going to do it? What are the questions you're asking? And how do you, are you going to answer them and so on? So that took about two years. And actually the turning point for me was COVID. In during the lockdown, obviously everybody in it, was working 24 seven to keep the lights on across the business. But for me, as I wasn't working from the office and I was like, everybody locked at home, that's when, I really got my. My mojo bag and I wrote, I think 100 pages in a month with everything else that was going on there. So yeah, it was just, 100 percent CPU all day long. And that's when I kick things up and eventually finished. I think a year later or something like that. So we only took me 5 years. Yeah. So to me, it was all about the passion. Why do you do it? Some people do PhD for. Yeah. Career in Academy, which is fine for me was always about writing right and telling the story. So probably, when I get the chance, I'll do a book off it. Yeah, so that was a passion. It came from there. That's awesome. I definitely appreciate sharing that insight, especially it's timely as I've actually considered. Approaching pursuing the PhD, but as I mullet over and over again, that lifts that investment that you talk to is weighing on me, but it's great to hear your insights and, pursuing that passion, but that's great to hear. Thank you for sharing that. I'll get it back over to Katie. Yeah, thank you. So you said a lot about, technology and military conflicts. So now I'm really thinking about what this next question should be. First, I guess my question would be, if you're looking at the last 10 to 20 years with what you can share and based on your research, what would you say? say is the most impactful moment in military history that I'm imagining was part of your PhD dissertation. And then my follow up question would be, and if you can answer, what do you think we are potentially unprepared for as we look forward, based on that research? What are the things that we should be thinking about and perhaps are not sure? So I would say I wouldn't say it's a moment. I would say like in technology. It's an evolution, right? So when we say the information revolution in military affairs, we are referring essentially let's say from the Gulf War onwards and today everything Is it what we mean by that? And actually, I posted my latest article on that on linkedin just the other day. So I'll put it in the comments as well. There are 2 concepts that are into play and you see it in Gaza as well. 1 is called network centric warfare. So by network centric, we mean. And this is an American concept. We mean all the units in the field are connected. It could be Wi Fi, cellular, satellite, but some form of communication, encrypted, obviously. But everybody sees everybody else, right? So the one of the challenges initially was the fog of war. Where are my forces? Where is the enemy? How can I get the latest intel and so on? So network centric warfare basically means everybody feeds off each other. everything feeds into a central command and control system. And then central command, but also the tactical forces can collaborate and make decisions. The other side, the other concept is called jointness, which is what we see in Gaza every day. Jointness means basically All the different branches of the army of the military in the U. S. case or all the different units in the IDF are joining together in the same in the same operation around the clock. So you've got tanks, you've got artillery, you've got the air force, you've got the navy, you've got intelligence on the ground, you've got special forces, everybody communicating through the same system through the same the same set of commands. to achieve a common goal. So when you think about it, if there's a target somewhere or if there's a tunnel, how do you get, your best force, the most equipped force and the most suitable weapon to to face the specific enemy that you're facing every point on the battlefield, right? So that takes a lot of planning, a lot of training, also a lot of controls. You've got, again, sophisticated command and control systems. A lot of them are AI driven. You can't If, if everybody's a sensor and you've got thousands, if not tens of thousands of feeds, how do you make sure that you've got what it takes almost in real time to make the right decision? So I think that was the big change. The idea started out about 20 years ago when the U. S. started in Iraq as well. Essentially. If simplify things. Imagine you go to the field and you've got an iPad, right? And in the iPad you see the map. And the map shows you, where's the, in real time, where's the in ways or Google maps, where are you going to, where's the enemy where are all your forces? You get push notifications with in military intelligence and you can communicate again, with the drone hovering above or with with a chopper or whatever it is. So all of that comes into play. As part of the modern battlefield and that evolved through time. So we saw that when the IDFs case, it started in 2001, probably spent five, 6 billion to date. And it started with the most senior officers getting the iPads and access to that systems. And in, in Gaza, it's already down to the platoon commander and obviously way more sophisticated systems. And AI comes into play when, again, you get so many feeds. How can I get. Only the relevant information to every force on the battlefield so they can again, collaborate and be even more effective in terms of challenges that we should consider or not considering today, maybe a couple of things. Number 1 again, if you think about such a sophisticated system, what happens with a system like that gets hacked. Think about it again, simplistic terms, a client server topology. The server is the central command. And then every tank and every vehicle on the field has at least one screen, if not more. So what happens when somebody takes over that vehicle? And on October 7th, when Hamas swarmed in, they also grabbed a couple of vehicles. So then nobody discussed it publicly. It stands to reason that they have a few of those screens. I would imagine whoever is in charge of that there, of security, knows how to block those screens or those clients out of the system. But that's one end. So if, again, imagine if you've got somebody tapping into your system, they can see what and they can see everything. But that's, that may be the good scenario. The worst scenario is what happens when they can manipulate the data in the system, right? And again, one of the reports from October 7th, and there was a story in the New York Times in October, is there was an attempt actually by one of the forces of Hamas to swarm into one of the secret bases, not far from Gaza, about 20 miles, where servers of some classified IT systems were. According to the story that attempt was foiled. But imagine if somebody gets a hold of your server and then manipulates the data in it without you even knowing. In other words, When you get, you get all these great capabilities from it, but it also creates dependency on it. So how do you make sure that, to collaborate? And you can fight exclusive effectively together. But without being over reliant on IT, because, if that's compromised, you need to go back to the basics and see how you fight together. So this is, a challenge we never thought of before, and certainly people need to think of now. So on one end, you get all those great systems, but you have to, number one, keep them secure, for sure. But number two, you need to know how to be as effective, even. Without them and maybe just to follow up on that, right? There's a, there are international treaties today about AI, for example, in the battlefield to not let any. Robot of sort to, to autonomously decide about firing, right? So you have, there has to be a human somewhere in the loop that makes a decision to fire or not on whatever the target is. And this is admirable, but what happens when your enemy breaks that treaty? What happens when your enemy decides to let its AI take aim and fire on you, on your advanced forces? It will be obviously much faster, much more efficient than you, which will, could force you as well to break that treaty to remain competitive. And so I think a challenge that we'll see in the coming years with AI. In many aspects is that the market of sort and the challenges could drive us to places we can't even think of yet. And that's something that could be quite challenging, I think, in years to come. Yeah, thank you for that. And those are some of the things that I was thinking about and really appreciate your your insight. I know that Russell had a couple of questions as a follow up as well. Over to you, Russell. Thanks so much. And wow, what an amazing answer. I was just thinking, it's fascinating to consider the things you were talking about, the scenarios for the things you shared and assuming breach and then in light of that, how do you still operate that just amazing, but my goal is to ask a good double question like what Katie did when one day I will grow up, be more like Katie, that's my my goal. So the questions for you then would be one, what are you reading right now and what are the top two candidate titles for your upcoming book that you briefly mentioned a little while ago? Ooh, now you put me on the spot. So reading, unfortunately, the news, on a day to day stuff we track it all the time. I don't even have time to read a book currently, actually, on my on my bedside before October 7th was a book about 50 years of the Yom Kippur War, which was, a country defining war that we had 50 years ago to today. Oh, plus one day to October 7th. And so now I was thinking, and it's been 50 years and every year still you get so many books out on that war. And I was just thinking, with this new war, certainly it's going to, 50 more years of books we'll have coming out, maybe I'll. Contribute something to that as well. Yeah, unfortunately, I don't have time to pick books right now. I do read, flight books when I fly to projects. So those are typically, action books I don't know, project X and stuff like that which keeps me awake at flights. But other than that, Yeah, it's been a while since I had time to properly read a book. I did read quite a lot when I worked on the dissertation. Obviously, I threw away a lot of the papers I was reading and yeah, you literally have to go through, I'd say thousands of articles when you're working on a research for this kind of project. Yeah, I did enough reading, I would say in those five years for quite a few more years to come. As for the titles, What I the title, I think, is. I'm debating about is high resolution warfare by high resolution. It sounds maybe a bit confusing, but you think about high level, right? But high resolution warfare means or high definition warfare again, when you do warfare, you have this DNA, especially the type of warfare. Israel is in it. You have to be. As good as, hitting a window from 50 miles out. That's the challenge. You think about Russia and Ukraine, right? And you sometimes see they hit a missile and they miss by 20 miles. Israel misses a window and people lose their mind, right? Or their lives. So it's a much, much more challenging warfare where you have to really be super accurate in what you do. And again, how do you get your best capabilities there going back to setting expectations? If you have the expectation somewhere to be very accurate and precise in what you do, that doesn't mean every single bullet you fire is 100 percent accurate, right? And I'm just, this is a general comment, not only for the IDF, but this goes back to expectations. People expect you to be as good as. Your best unit, this is one thing of of high resolution work we always think about is you have to be super accurate in what you do and everything that you miss costs you dearly in the battlefield and the way things are perceived to be, the difference between success and failure. Sometimes you miss. just by an inch, and that's enough to completely change the story. Wow that's just fascinating. It so resonates. You mentioned high resolution warfare, high definition warfare, and then the stakes and the expectations. Just fascinating for me to consider there. Bob, Nate, so glad you're here. Bob, we'll go to you first, and then to Nate. Always great to see and hear you here in just a second. What questions do you have for Yuval, Bob? Yeah, thank you. Yuval, I was reading your article published a few days ago in Forbes about some of the things you were talking about today. What was fascinating to me is how Israel over the years had to change their security doctrine because of societal and some complexity issues and the new doctrine now. Israel has adopted. When you look at cyber security threats and issues in companies in the U. S., there really isn't a per se security doctrine, but we are in a war, and I think most people will agree. Is there any way, what are your thoughts about being able to translate that mindset? That from the idea of it is do it has into companies adopting a similar mindset so they can understand there is a war. And maybe the current security doctrine per se isn't working. And it's not working because companies are constantly being breached and violated every day. So I'm curious about how do we get companies to change their mindset when it comes to security here in the U. S.? And if you can leverage everything, anything from what the IDF has done in terms of them changing their security doctrine. I'm curious if you see any parallels there. That's my question. Yeah, thanks for that. So I think the most persuasive thing that can happen is when it costs them money, right? When there's a breach to the company or to a, let's say, a competing company from the same sector, that's when you get their attention. And similarly in the battlefield when it costs you. Life, unfortunately, or when you feel it, then when you then is when you know that you need to be better and more vigilant and invest more in security. For Israel, as an example, 1 of the problems is 1 of the problems in modern warfare with cyber again, when you think about the battlefields, you got forces in 2 sides of the border, they're changing blows. As big as they are, whatever it is, but with cyber, I can be, in a beach on the beach in Brazil and still fight this war and try to hack your systems and do whatever it is. So there's no limit to the number of enemy knocking on your doorstep, literally and trying to hack your systems. So you have to be. Extremely efficient and capable in defending your key systems. If you want to survive, and obviously in this type of war, Israel is engaged now. When there are a lot of actors around the world is looking to join the fight. And if you want to be. Super successful in your defense strategies, then you simply won't be. And so again, this forces you to excel at what you do or face the consequences for companies. Obviously, companies are going under threat quite frequently these days. What I find is the most effective way is to follow the news, right? Because a lot of the incidents we hear about chances are you won't be targeted specifically on this. Again, there's a specific sector, but it'll be more of an exploitive nature. So all the, the things we heard about in the past, like TV or open on not patching systems, stuff like that. So you have to get your attention. He always come down to management. I find two, three basic questions. What are the chances that he's going to happen to me tomorrow morning? If it does happen. What will be the potential business impact and what can I do as management that I'm not doing today to improve the, my posture for the first two questions? What are the chances it's going to happen tomorrow morning? What will be the potential business impact? If you scare them enough on both questions, then you'll get your attention. And obviously you don't, the good thing is in our industry, you don't have to make things up. It is scary. So certainly I would say these two points are the ones to, every director. That will get you will get his attention. Great. Thank you for that. Thank you, Bob, for joining us. And and we have Nate as well. Nate is a frequent, to the program. Nate, what's your question for you all? Yeah, thanks, Katie. Yuval, thanks so much for spending the time sharing your expertise and insights in such a candid fashion. As a fellow veteran, I've absolutely loved hearing all the points about your military perspective and experience, and how warfighting has really influenced your approach in security. What I'm dying to ask, though, is to double back into your Emmett. M& A experience, and I know you've touched on a number of facets of it between assessing, programmatic, how to integrate things, capabilities, technology, tooling and the likes. The angle I was hoping you might be able to touch on a little bit more is the integration of culture. And how do you integrate and influence integration of security culture and security teams from two disparate organizations? That's a good question. Thanks for that. So in terms of culture again, speaking from my experience, I think the key differential there is, what's the impact to the business? How do you regard the impact to a business that is compromised? In some companies, it's the world and everybody should stop and do everything possible to get them back online as soon as possible. And in others it could be that, it's, it is certainly serious, but it's not the most important thing. And this goes back to management priorities. And in some operations, even in IT, not only in InfoSec, those would be SLA driven operations and some would be best effort. I would say that the most important thing is to find out, get the best of both worlds. And again, being practical about do we want to now spend all our efforts and our own money and just aligning all pieces of the company into a single standard or again, what would be the most effective way? To support the business strategy and come up with a, with the culture, as you said that actually celebrates the best of both companies or as many companies as you're integrating. So I think that's what stuck with me the most is to be when you get it right in terms of what's the most important and impactful thing you could do to the business. This drives everything. And once you get that everything else falls behind, I would say. Yeah, it always started with that. From all the companies, it's always great to learn from new companies and, pick up new ideas and certainly if I look at the companies I've worked for. You always get new ideas from places you couldn't even think of. So you have to be open for new ideas, but what has to win, of course, is what gets you the best value to the business. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I really appreciate that and definitely, really appreciate the business centric view in that, that it can't be one culture is the way and the only way that it's really going to be centered on the impact of the business and the important and the values that you're trying to preserve. And. No, you're just thank you for that. And thank you for your question Nate and we have a couple of other people who've joined us as well. Fletus over to you. I think you were next on the stage. I hope I said your name correctly. I'm sorry. You did. I appreciate it. And I apologize. My internet breaks out, just let me know. I've been listening for a little while, and with tech innovations, military, etc. So my question more to you is, how do we get past the groupthink, and this is how we've always done it, when it comes to getting our boards, our leadership, and our peers, a. k. a. individual contributors, to align on, this is more human centric than it is administrative. And or technical. Yeah, again, a great question. That's, up to anyone who's trying to push a new idea, right? It's I think you have to be open for new ideas as a person and adapt to changes rather easily. I think that's going to be one of the most popular traits, human traits. Going forward in any industry, because everything is changing so fast, right? And now AI is only stretching the surface, right? You have to be ready to accept new ideas. That's what will win doing things in a traditional way and sticking to what we did all those years ago would only take you so far. And so flexibility and being open to new ideas, willing to experiment, willing even to pay the price. If you fail, I think that's. That's going to be probably one of the most top three important things going forward to anybody devising a strategy. If you stick to what you know and own what you know, then yeah, it won't get you so far. So it will be the right finding the right balance, actually, between sticking what worked, but also opening the door to new ideas. Yeah, thank you. That's something that I've been in circles. And had many conversations and you can just see the individuals gloss over when you ask them to think outside what they are used to, what they've previously done and what they think they should be doing versus actually what the environment is telling them to do and not to do. Thanks for joining us on stage. It's really nice to meet you. I think I've seen you in the room before. So thanks again for joining us and jumping up on stage. Another frequent guest, Jeffrey Gray. Nice to see you. What's your question for you all this evening? Thank you. You've all, this has been a great session tonight. So thank you for taking the time to, to spend some time with us. First off, I want to say I can relate to the PhD journey. I'm on year two and a half of probably got a five year journey relative to pursuing a PhD. So I appreciate your. Your narrative and your and your outlook as far as your journey there. But I have a specific question that kind of piggybacks on what Nate had described. And I'm just curious what sort of metrics do you consider, around this kind of business centric approach that you've been talking about as far as the business impact or business value in particular, through an M& A or divestiture, what are some of the. metrics that are top of mind for you when you're in the throes, if you will. Two things, three things come to mind. Number one, time to market, right? When the business is moving so fast, you have to deliver, and management would have only so much patience to hear great stories about, this long term plan that you have for the next five years, but they need something in a few months or a few weeks sometimes, right? Time to market. It's always key and you have to design your systems and your team to be agile enough to deliver quickly. So that's number one. The second thing is obviously keeping the lights on, right? Again, with all the changes and as challenging as it can be, and it is, you have to keep your system available. You have to keep this system, with adequate performance and fit for purpose. So you have to build them in a way. Not only scalable enough, but also again, flexible enough and being able to support a fast changing business. And then the third matrix I always looked at is funding, right? If you do your job well, then you get funding and you get more credit to do the things you do and deploy new systems and new tools across the environment. So if you get. If you do your job well, and obviously if the business is doing well enough, then you get enough funding and if you need to start cutting you and cutting corners maybe in some places, then that's, that's a warning sign to, to see that you need maybe to rethink your strategy. So time to market, lights, keeping the lights on and funding. Thank you for that. Can I just ask one other follow up quick question. And it's unrelated to this, but you seem like a super driven individual and I'm just curious. What's the day in the life look like for you from waking up in the start of your day to the end of your day, it just seems like you're pretty driven and it seems like you motor. So I'm just curious what a typical day for you Val looks like. So yeah, wake up 6 37. My kids are fairly grown up. So the youngest one is going on 16. So he maybe needs a little help to kick him out the door, but he's going to school. And then yeah, the fact that I'm working remote almost exclusively. So that means. Office, the office is in the next room and I probably come online 8, 8, 30 AM and start either working on or reading some stuff for articles I'm working on since I'm working for an American company and most of my peers are Offshore and to the east and to the west, I would say, then the day usually picks up around midday for me and until the evening, right? Let's say morning hours are more about working with the Israeli team or doing some other stuff or, working quietly without meetings. And then most of the day picks up around 1 2 PM my time until, let's say, 9 or 7 or. Or 8 p. m. And then, spend time with my family somewhere in between and after. And finally, we close the day with Netflix, like everybody else. Awesome. Thank you for that, Yuval. I appreciate your responses. Yeah, I love that. And I appreciate that. See, that's international. Everybody closes their day with Netflix. with Netflix. And as we close this discussion there's one question that I think you just, you led us into in a most beautiful way, talking about your family life and then the fact you have a son who can listen to your conversations that you're having. One of the questions that Tomas Maldonado always asks, at the end of this. Unfortunately, he's in a a room where it's a little bit loud. So he's asked me to ask this on his behalf. But what is the advice that you would give to your younger self? That's a very good question. Be ready to accept failure because things always happen the way you expect, right? So yeah, so failures will happen, big ones or small ones throughout the road, but they shouldn't distract you from what you are aiming for. So be ready to accept failure because things will happen. And yeah, you have to celebrate your successes for sure, but you don't need to, go crazy when you face some failures. I think that's the most important point for me. And listen, it's timely for all of us. I think that every one of us at this stage in our career has certainly at least experienced it at once substantially, if not currently, right? And what an example then for if we had learned that as as younger folks maybe we would have Yeah, it's something I think that I should probably call my kids right now at college and give them that information. And thank you for that reminder. You've all and, and frankly, this has been just an extraordinary conversation this evening and want to thank you again for taking so much of your time to share your experience, your background, your story. I'm extremely moved and inspired going into the rest of my week here. Before we close, I just want to make sure I know that, Tomas was working on a work issue. I don't know if he's back online but want to make sure the other moderators had a moment if they could to say a final word and then we'll close out for the evening. Yeah. Happy to do that. And Katie, I appreciate that. You've all. Such amazing bookmarks, or bookends to the conversation. You started off early saying, reality forces us to find solutions. And then you leave us with this, again, my page, I just got all kinds of notes from the things that you shared. You said, be ready to accept failure. Both of those are things that I'm going to dwell on got right in front of me and I know they serve me. I know they serve all of us here in a fireside chat and for everyone here, if you're not already doing so, please follow us on our page and LinkedIn for a fireside chat. So you can be sure to know about our future conversations. But again, you've all, you've been the star. We appreciate you and thank you so much, especially for your time of the day to your time of the morning spending the last hour and a half with us. We definitely appreciate you. Thanks. And I think everyone else is offline. I see a heart from Tomas. So thank you again, Yuval. And with that thank you everyone again for joining us. And we'll look forward to seeing you in another month here on the fireside chat. Thank you. Thanks all.