Fireside Chat w/Evan Reiser, CEO @ Abnormal Security

[00:00:00] hey Tomas hey can you hear me okay it's my first time ever talking on Clubhouse I can how you doing [00:00:18] doing good good to see you man I guess here you good to hear you yeah absolutely absolutely good [00:00:25] to hear from you man and thanks for thanks for taking the time out of your day to work to attend [00:00:31] this it's gonna be fun can you hear me yeah just let let me know if you can't hear me and I'll get [00:00:39] my headset no you're coming in you're coming in good we'll get started we'll get started in about [00:00:46] five minutes or so yeah set up so I'll make you a moderator and we'll let we'll let folks [00:00:55] sort of join in they should be coming in soon I've got a few mods that may or may not make it [00:01:03] tonight so we'll see I know it's you know it's a busy work week for a lot of people so we'll see [00:01:10] we'll see how it pans out today awesome well appreciate you uh inviting me and um yeah always [00:01:17] happy to make time you've made a lot of time for me in the past no look I think it's gonna be a good [00:01:22] conversation I'm sure a lot of people want to hear about you know not only your your journey and your [00:01:27] story but you know what it's like to to start a business you know last week we had uh another CEO [00:01:35] for a startup at a healthcare's cyber security company called SILERA uh I don't know if you know [00:01:43] Timmer um but he was on last week and you know this week we have you uh focused on a secure email [00:01:50] gateway if you will right and I know we're not here to really talk about uh abnormal but you know [00:01:56] just everything around what you're doing and how you've gotten to where you are it's going to be [00:02:01] really interesting for folks I'm sure uh definitely for me as well so let me just set up the room real [00:02:07] quick and then we'll kind of jump right in uh so we'll talk about some entrepreneurship this evening [00:02:13] we'll do some networking of course [00:02:16] what else should we talk about I'm trying to get the topics uh it's usually like three topics that [00:02:25] that clubhouse lets you add to the room [00:02:28] let's see [00:02:33] let's do those can't think about term right now [00:02:45] all right so we pinned you at the top so everybody could click on you click on you you probably get a [00:02:55] few linkedin requests which is good um but hopefully people uh people connect with you [00:03:01] uh there's a few regulars in the room and that I that we that are here usually every week so I'm sure [00:03:07] they'll pop up at some point once we open up for questions and they'll jump up on stage to ask some [00:03:12] questions well how are you doing you're you're out west right are you are you traveling yeah [00:03:16] uh in the bay area okay and Tomas um forgive me for um you know uh for not knowing this but [00:03:24] is kind of the the normal topics you talk about is entrepreneurship or like any kind of themes you'd [00:03:30] recommend I focus on no it's it's usually so it's usually really free form and more centered around [00:03:41] the journey your journey so depend upon what you share and and what people are sort of uh what they [00:03:49] gravitate towards in terms of your your journey that you know questions will will start to uh follow that [00:03:56] path um sometimes we'll get different questions that that might pop up that are more specific to [00:04:02] either security depending on so you're sorry so in the cyber security realm so there might be some [00:04:07] questions that like that um but it's a it could like when I tell you it could really go anywhere it [00:04:13] could really go anywhere in conversation oh that's what I like about it like it's yeah you know I didn't [00:04:18] send you any questions beforehand there's no this is a very candid conversation which is what I like [00:04:23] um and most of the people that I guess keep coming back because they like that as well [00:04:28] but you'll see you'll see as we do that makes sense well as you know Tomas like I'm I've always [00:04:33] been a super direct you know open honest person and I didn't even tell our PR team about this so you [00:04:39] know we should be totally unfiltered well that's that's that's good if you need me to delete it [00:04:45] afterwards you let me know no you you you let me know because uh no I'm sure it'll be a really fun [00:04:53] conversation we'll be we'll be completely completely fine so people people starting to file in it's [00:05:00] kind of like you know uh like if we were at a conference right where people start to file in [00:05:05] and then we'll sound we'll sound the alarm in a second and kind of get started um but it's good to [00:05:12] it's good to see familiar names and faces at least their images uh in the audience um so I'm sure we'll [00:05:21] get uh we'll get some good questions from the folks uh let's see so look let's just do some [00:05:29] quick I'll do some quick uh house rules uh the other moderators as I said there's a there's there's a [00:05:35] good amount of moderators that we usually have uh some folks that send me on the back channel that [00:05:39] they are still either stuck at work stuck in meetings um it is Ramadan so some might be trying to uh get in [00:05:47] some last bits of food uh before we kind of jump right in so I could completely understand that um [00:05:54] and and I completely appreciate that so just some quick ground rules and Evan I'll go I'll go through [00:06:00] this um uh for the most of the most of the folks in the room already notice uh but let's get we're [00:06:06] gonna have a good time this evening we'll have fun it's a bit of the week we usually use this as that [00:06:11] sort of session to decompress a little bit um because sometimes it's been a rough week right we've [00:06:18] been dealing with the rough cyber issues this week I think it's been a little bit easier I think there's [00:06:23] been maybe some some google vulnerabilities and things like that that popped up and uh so you know from [00:06:29] from typical CISOs and other cyber professionals I'll say it's it hasn't been too bad and I don't [00:06:36] want to jinx it because the week is it's it's still Wednesday and it's uh we've still got a few more [00:06:41] days to go but we're gonna have fun uh we're gonna have an open dialogue conversation really get to [00:06:47] know you and and your sort of journey and and your your background um I usually go through the spirit of [00:06:54] our comments and opinions are our own and not representative of our prior or current employer uh that [00:07:01] goes specifically for me uh you're the ceo ever so uh you I'm sure you've got your own level of [00:07:08] disclaimer um that said um there are folks in the room there's a few folks in the room that I don't [00:07:16] recognize seeing so if you're new to our clubhouse we do this every Wednesday we run from about 8 pm [00:07:21] eastern time to about 9 30 pm eastern time or so uh we'll ask our guests uh in this case evan riser [00:07:28] the questions for about 30 to 45 minutes or so and then we'll open it up for the audience to ask [00:07:33] questions uh depending upon how many moderators join us I might ask for some audience participation [00:07:38] the audience help maybe a little bit sooner just to keep the conversation going um so if you are new [00:07:44] to our clubhouse uh there's a little greenhouse on the top left of your screen right next to where [00:07:48] it says fireside chat you can click that you can join the club if you're not already a member uh as [00:07:52] I mentioned we do this every single Wednesday uh for about an hour and a half or so but if you join our [00:07:57] club you can see all of our upcoming guests and we have a good amount of people joining and you can [00:08:01] hear the replays for uh the prior sessions so you can go back and play that back so without further [00:08:08] ado uh why don't we sort of kick into the conversation what we usually do is we we go around the room and [00:08:14] introduce ourselves it is just you and I uh so I'm going to introduce myself and then I'll pass it over [00:08:19] to you Evan and you can introduce yourself so I'm Tomas Maldonado I'm the CISO at the NFL [00:08:24] so Evan I'll pass it over to you why don't you take a moment introduce yourself and then we'll [00:08:27] kind of jump right into the Q&A sounds good uh my name is Evan Reiser as you have you as you've shown [00:08:33] this link here I'm the CEO of abnormal security um which is a cyber security company I started about [00:08:38] four years ago I've been an entrepreneur for about 15 years or so my background's in uh software [00:08:44] engineering and product management awesome Evan I usually like to open up the session with asking [00:08:51] uh our guests about their origin story and the reason why I do that is one yes I'm really interested [00:08:58] in what you do today but I'm almost more interested in how you got to where you are today and everything [00:09:06] in between so you know we're superheroes to a certain extent right we're here fighting crime and you know [00:09:13] trying to keep companies afloat you know trying to uh uh keep people from losing uh you know their [00:09:19] livelihood if you will so there is some level of superhero-ness to this origin story which is where [00:09:25] I kind of get this from like the Marlboro and and all those DC uh movies so why don't you take a moment [00:09:32] and tell us about your origin story and uh and share obviously you can share as much or as little as you [00:09:38] want but you know give it give us some insight into you that sounds great and and Tomas give me some [00:09:45] guidance do you want the one minute version the five minute version I don't want to ramble on about [00:09:50] uh I don't want to ramble too long I usually like the 10 minute version so if you have [00:09:55] a if you have a five to ten minute version go for it yeah um I do and and I think it's a great topic [00:10:02] I mean a lot I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs uh and just for context you know Admiral's [00:10:06] Cruz the email security company's about four years old um it's it's I think the second fastest [00:10:11] growing cyber security company of all time and so I talk to a lot of people and they're you know [00:10:16] they're impressed what we do today but some of what you mentioned Tomas they they kind of forget [00:10:21] that like you know all these overnight successes are like multiple decades in the making right so [00:10:26] I think it's good to kind of go go back through that and I talked to a lot of entrepreneurs and say [00:10:30] hey I want to like I want to I want to have a career just like yours I'm like no don't have it like [00:10:34] mine like I wasted 15 years of my career doing like silly things like you should you should do the way [00:10:40] faster version learn from that so I'm happy to share kind of the the origin story and um I'll [00:10:45] probably focus more on like all the mistakes I made along the way and some of the lessons I learned [00:10:49] rather than you know um you know the least initial success we're having today so just you know please [00:10:55] interrupt and give me guidance if I start you know that's perfect no that's perfect and and Evan if you [00:11:00] can go even as back as to like you know what you studied and and how you yeah where you grew up and [00:11:06] things like that that's I think that's great yeah I'll talk about it because you know it does influence [00:11:12] kind of you know uh how how I started entrepreneurship so I I grew up in uh California in the Bay Area um [00:11:19] you know grew up in kind of like a very classic kind of you know middle class you know suburbia family uh [00:11:27] my my my family on both sides are kind of immigrants and so we grew up in a house that was you know [00:11:31] very frugal right although you know um you know we weren't poor very luckily um but part of that was um [00:11:39] you know my parents were very frugal and I was you know as a young kid I got you know really into [00:11:44] computers and video games right but of course in uh you know in a very frugal household I had to you [00:11:48] know buy my own toys to all my own toys right so when I wanted to get a computer I wanted to buy a video [00:11:54] game I had to go and uh you know figure how to pay for that so I got into entrepreneurship really early [00:12:00] you know did everything from your classic lemonade stand to you know tutoring people on computers [00:12:06] eventually started you know building computers um to kind of feed my video game you know passions and um [00:12:13] you know was not a super great student in high school was was smart enough to like you know do okay but it [00:12:20] was it was not through great kind of great studying it was really just from uh you know being kind of smart [00:12:26] and um you know probably spent a little bit too much time on the computer right in high school [00:12:29] and then when I decided to uh go to college um I had no idea what I wanted to do and there's really [00:12:35] no one gave me any guidance and so I was like I want to like build computers for a living right [00:12:40] because I want to you know continue to feed my video game hobby and so I went to school for computer [00:12:46] engineering and I thought at the time that that was you know building computers it turned out to be [00:12:51] electrical engineering and a lot of you know math and calculus which I you know um didn't expect [00:12:57] um I wasn't very thoughtful and where I went to school I went to the school called uh Rensselaer [00:13:02] Polytechnic which is in upstate New York and I had no idea like I just picked I opened up some book and I [00:13:09] saw that was a computer I just going to apply to it and that was pretty much all the thought that went to [00:13:13] it um and I didn't quite realize how uh cold it would be in upstate New York relative to uh you know the [00:13:19] Bay Area so when I got to school um it's a you know took the classic kind of software engineering [00:13:26] electrical engineering type classes um I did really badly because you know in high school I was smart [00:13:31] enough to pass but never really built you know good study habits so I actually failed out of college [00:13:36] my first year um I got three F's in my second semester which is which is an automatic expulsion right so [00:13:43] I flew back home to the Bay Area and uh my uh I'll ask my parents like hey what do I do now they're [00:13:50] like go get a job and so I uh you know that summer I uh got a job at uh local TCBY which is like a [00:13:57] frozen yogurt place I made I think 6.25 an hour plus tips and I did that for like two you know probably [00:14:04] six weeks and I got my first paycheck and I was like 200 bucks I'm like this sucks like I worked my ass [00:14:10] off and you know I don't want to do this the rest of my life and so I figured out a way I basically [00:14:14] you know reapplied to the school and I think I told some sort of sob story ended up getting back into [00:14:20] the to the school right the next semester and um you know I just lived in the library and I I was [00:14:26] you know I learned to like actually build up some you know good study habits and ended up [00:14:31] you know doing quite well in school and then after school I had no idea what I want to do with life [00:14:35] and so I um but I knew I wanted to like um so I applied to a bunch of jobs and I ultimately accepted [00:14:42] a job in um at a Wall Street firm to kind of doing doing software although I didn't go to school for [00:14:47] software went to school for electrical engineering and so I didn't really know what I was doing but [00:14:51] I knew I wanted to live in Manhattan because it sounded really cool as a you know 22 year old so I moved uh [00:14:57] moved to New York City uh got a job on Wall Street learned kind of on the job how to do you know [00:15:03] what at the time was very you know probably basic software engineering um and was very fortunate [00:15:08] I had a lot of great mentors and and you know many friends I have today actually some of you know a [00:15:12] couple of which actually work at Admiral security so I did that for about 18 months and um you know [00:15:18] at some point I went to uh you know went out to one of the Wall Street bars and I talked to some [00:15:22] guy and he said um you know I said oh like you know what do you do he's like oh I'm just gonna keep [00:15:27] working on Wall Street for one more year and then like I'm finally gonna go live my life and I'm like oh my [00:15:32] god is this the just the path of mine am I gonna be this guy in like 20 years and so I think I quit [00:15:36] my job in a couple weeks and I was like I'm gonna go start my own business and I didn't really know [00:15:41] what I was doing or how to do it and um I'll maybe save the details of that initial business um for some [00:15:48] other time but you know started a um you know a consumer internet company great product we had lots [00:15:54] of users on our website um you know it was actually quite successful kept paying more and more server [00:16:00] bills but didn't make any money and so I ended up like everything I'd saved up my first job I basically [00:16:05] ended up uh kind of losing to this business it was a great product we built this great community but [00:16:09] just you know we were just the server bills cost more than you know uh that we could we could afford [00:16:15] so I ended up shutting it down um I ended up playing uh professional poker or you know which is not very [00:16:22] glorious but you know nights and week or nights and or Fridays and weekends uh in Atlantic City just to [00:16:28] pay my rent which is not a very glorious profession even though it sounds kind of sexy um and then I [00:16:34] kind of realized that point like I didn't I really wanted to start balloon I kind of proved myself that [00:16:38] I could go do it but I had no idea what to do so I I've uh moved back to California ended up meeting up with [00:16:44] some um executives from Yahoo um and we started this uh daily deal company it's kind of like luxury [00:16:50] Groupon we uh that was kind of my first experience with venture capital I knew nothing about how that [00:16:56] worked um we ended up raising a bunch of money and built this uh you know a pretty big company about 250 [00:17:02] people we raised about 50 million dollars in venture capital and um it turned out it was not a very good [00:17:08] business right so I learned a little bit about that but um you know I ended up leaving the company [00:17:13] and we sold the company to the JP Morgan for you know pennies on the dollar like it didn't make any [00:17:18] money you know personally from that and I was like okay now I know a little bit more of business you [00:17:23] know I know this is a bad business model but I understand at least the importance of like making [00:17:26] money in the business so I had to go start my third company which was a um advertising technology [00:17:31] company and um you know it was really kind of you know really just want to prove the world that I could [00:17:37] you know build a business that was successful and that the last two ones were flukes and so I spent a [00:17:42] couple years doing that um and it was like a moderately successful business you know we maybe [00:17:46] made a million dollars a year we had 10 employees but it kind of like you know kind of like going [00:17:51] where it was kind of like this zombie type company that wasn't dying or wasn't kind of growing um and [00:17:57] very fortunately um we actually got acquired by this kind of uh uh machine learning kind of behavioral ad [00:18:03] targeting company called telepart which is a really small company at the time it's about 30 people and [00:18:08] we had i think seven people we kind of joined together and i became the first product manager [00:18:12] at this company and um you know i kind of got in and um you know i was i really wanted to prove to [00:18:19] the ceo that it was a good acquisition and i kept trying to put you know push why our product would be a [00:18:24] great integration of their product at some point like the head of venturing came to me and said evan like [00:18:29] what are you doing like telepart's got a great business your product sucks it makes no money why are you [00:18:34] trying to drag all of our energy into your stupid product when like this other part of the business [00:18:38] doing great and i was like very defensive and i you know kind of like argued with him about why i [00:18:44] thought it was great and at some point he just said um evan like i think you just have a big ego and like [00:18:51] you just care about showing why your startup was a good acquisition rather than actually trying to help [00:18:55] the team go win and i was like screw you man right i kind of went home that night i was like pissed [00:19:00] off and then whatever and and you know basically what he told me is like hey and i feel like you're [00:19:04] just trying to like prove to the world that you're capable of doing something rather than actually [00:19:09] trying to like help the team or help the customers go win and there's something like i you know this [00:19:14] guy's name is way he's a mentor of mine today something about what he said really clicked to me [00:19:18] and i realized that i really spent kind of the first decade of my career just kind of trying to [00:19:22] like prove to myself that i could do it right without really thinking about the why behind it i had a bit [00:19:27] of a chip on my shoulder and for whatever reason this guy got through to me and i spent you know [00:19:32] the next you know you know six months of this company telepart really listening and learning [00:19:38] and trying to like try to figure out all the people that you know didn't have my experience what [00:19:42] experience did they have and what could i learn from them i really feel like i learned more in like [00:19:47] my 12 months this company telepart than probably the 12 years of my career right and i i spent a lot of [00:19:52] kind of my my life just trying to teach myself things right and trying to figure it out myself [00:19:57] and there's kind of a point in my career where i think things really change where i kind of realized [00:20:01] that the best way to learn things is not just to like figure it out yourself and try to be a hero but [00:20:06] find other really great people and try to learn as much of them from as possible and so you know [00:20:12] we ended up shutting down kind of my product i i ended up leading the product for kind of the main [00:20:16] part of the business the business was very successful we went from we went to we went from like zero to [00:20:22] about 100 million dollars of revenue in about five years right with only 100 and 100 people at the [00:20:27] company this is very successful we ended up selling the company to twitter um in 2015 um for for about [00:20:36] 500 million dollars and it was it was successful i ended up leading the kind of machine learning team [00:20:41] at twitter kind of doing all of the ads so any annoying ads you guys see on twitter that's my fault i [00:20:45] apologize um and you know you know twitter it was kind of a bit of a culture culture clash i never [00:20:52] worked at like kind of that big of a tech company and um you know i i learned a lot i you know just [00:20:58] kept trying to like learn about how to do things at a big company but ultimately realized kind of [00:21:02] it wasn't wasn't right for me so uh left twitter um you know in 2018 to go start abnormal security and [00:21:11] it's as tomas knows i talked to him back in those days i was you know a total amateur i had never [00:21:17] did anything in cyber security but both me and kind of the team i built had became really good at this [00:21:23] kind of machine learning and um behavioral kind of understanding of users um so we we said you know [00:21:29] in the kind of inspiration there was we saw the world moving to the cloud we knew that people were [00:21:34] going to start using new types of technology to go do their jobs that would really have an impact on [00:21:37] cyber security and we felt that if we could take some of the technology we built in ads and go talk to [00:21:43] you know smart customers um about what some of the problems were and kind of why the existing [00:21:48] solutions weren't working we could kind of figure out how to go build you know um new tech new [00:21:53] technology and um you know solve those problems so when we started the company we didn't really know [00:21:58] exactly what we wanted to do and we talked to probably about 100 people tomas you included [00:22:03] and we just asked them hey what is the you know biggest problem you see in cyber security and it [00:22:08] and we made a giant spreadsheet of what people said and the most common thing was you know social [00:22:12] engineering fraud and phishing so we really try to kind of focus on those use cases um and uh you know [00:22:19] that was about four years ago we've we've grown the company to about um you know almost 400 people today [00:22:24] and today we protect about five percent of the fortune 1000 so um and i'm still trying to uh [00:22:30] learn and grow and just surround myself with people that are a lot smarter than me so i can [00:22:34] continue to up my game as you know i grow and our company grows so happy to go into all the other [00:22:40] ways i kind of screwed up in my career that i didn't mention but those are probably some of the [00:22:43] the big milestones and highlights for me man i'm i'm sitting here smiling laughing cracking up [00:22:51] because not because of your story uh uh uh you're calling your your learning opportunities but it's [00:23:00] just everything like everything that you just kind of went through which is it's just amazing it's [00:23:06] amazing and the funny thing is you know how how well not you know how but i remember when i met you [00:23:13] back in i guess 2018 damn it's been that long that that is uh that's awesome um i was just thinking to [00:23:22] myself if i would have known all of those all of those mishaps or different opportunities and that [00:23:28] journey would i had still had confidence in you and to talk about what was what you were doing but no look [00:23:36] i i i remember i remember when we met you know and i won't go into too much of that detail but [00:23:42] you know i remember our mutual sort of vc put us in touch with put me in touch with you and it was [00:23:49] like hey we've got this we've got this startup got a great idea why don't you chat with them and and [00:23:54] you know get give me your thoughts and and it just i immediately clicked with you specifically around [00:24:01] not only the the the problem that you were trying to solve which was very timely at that point in time [00:24:06] if you think about 2018 not a lot of people were focused on business email compromise right i don't [00:24:12] even think it was called that back then i think was you know maybe i don't know if there was a [00:24:16] specific label on it maybe it was from the fbi but anyways the point is you were you were trying to solve [00:24:23] a problem and i can tell from your journey of different opportunities that yeah it clicked for you [00:24:29] where you were trying to add value back into the community back into the business and that's what [00:24:34] is sort of uh able to drive a lot of success from uh for you for you early on and as well as you know [00:24:42] where you are today i i think um i don't know if you would agree with that but i i it does seem that [00:24:47] way right it does seem that way because you've taken more of a i don't say a customer-centric view but [00:24:52] more of a more of some of a customer-centric view and more of a a value proposition back to the companies [00:24:59] that you interface and interact with you and and and i think that's that's great i think that's great [00:25:04] and that's that's what we should should all try to do right how do we add value to the people we're [00:25:09] interacting with uh and the companies that we work for but man that such a funny story i mean such a [00:25:17] funny story so far um i do want to give hussein a minute to introduce himself and then uh we'll probably [00:25:24] i i want to know about that first failure but uh let me see if hussein has any any questions before we [00:25:29] we kind of pivot too far away from what you were covering so who's saying why don't you take a [00:25:33] moment a minute to introduce yourself i gave all the disclaimers we do have some people in the room [00:25:38] uh i see the little red balloon i think that's anniversary happy anniversary encrypted and we've got [00:25:43] some party hats so welcome to clubhouse that usually indicates you just joined clubhouse within the past [00:25:48] week or so so welcome to clubhouse uh but hussein over to you hey good evening and nice to meet you [00:25:53] having as well uh fascinating story my name is hussein i'm the seesaw here at robert with johnson in new [00:26:00] jersey i'm quite impressed by your perseverance i'll own up you know i tried to start a couple of [00:26:06] things in my in the late 90s early 2000s and when they didn't pan out i kind of give up i can went back [00:26:13] to working but quite impressed by your perseverance and going at it and you know winning it congratulations to [00:26:21] that uh back to you tomas thanks for saying so rpi you you you you you dropped you flunked out i guess [00:26:31] or whatever but you went back you started you said you started your first the first company that and you [00:26:37] failed and i just want to hear about that one all right just a little bit more on that one i know you [00:26:43] said you you you failed at your first company but can you can you just dig in there a little bit more [00:26:49] yeah absolutely and hussein great great great to meet you um yeah and like calling it a company [00:26:56] is maybe a bit of a stretch right which speaks to maybe the quality of that business um but basically [00:27:03] um you know honestly the time i was i was in my kind of you know mid-20s and had no idea like you know i [00:27:10] knew i wanted to do a startup but i was just very naive about you know i didn't even i didn't even think [00:27:14] of a startup as a business i was just like hey we're gonna go create this like awesome you know product [00:27:19] and people are going to use it and then we'll figure it out and so um you know like i mentioned [00:27:24] earlier like you know one of my kind of personal hobbies right and kind of passions growing up was [00:27:28] video games and so at the time right this was kind of before facebook took off but um we basically [00:27:33] created kind of like a facebook for people play video games and um it was actually extremely popular [00:27:38] right grew very quickly we had probably a hundred thousand users in the first six months and um and [00:27:45] just we never like we just did something we thought was you know because all the advice i think or a [00:27:50] lot of the advice i think entrepreneurs get is hey do something you're passionate about do something [00:27:54] that like you know people will be interested in and we kind of like we did that we're like hey this [00:27:59] is something we're passionate about um we had lots of people use it we got lots of feedback you know [00:28:04] you look at our graph of users graph of page which is up and to the right and we're like we're doing all [00:28:09] the things you're supposed to do um but we never really thought about um it is a business right we [00:28:14] never thought about how are we going to make money we never paid it you know literally didn't even you [00:28:18] know never paid ourselves right um we just you know we paid our server bills and we tried to kept [00:28:24] building stuff to listen to the kind of that community and um it was kind of it was a it was a [00:28:30] bit eye-opening right because it's one of these things where hey we're doing we're doing all the [00:28:34] things you're supposed to be doing right we got a great product right this is the the time it was like [00:28:38] this is the myspace story right get everyone using it and then we'll figure it out we never really [00:28:42] thought through like okay how does how do we turn this like idea into a business and i think um you [00:28:48] know it was kind of it was like it was almost a bit of a a collapse of my mental model we had to like [00:28:53] shut it down it's like we were shutting down this thing because we can't pay for the server but it's [00:28:58] so popular like what do i not understand and you know frankly it didn't click with me at the time but [00:29:04] um i think i think one of my big lessons from that was you know really thinking you know if you want [00:29:10] to start a business right to think about what is the business right what's the value you're creating and [00:29:14] who are your um you know who are your customers and so both kind of like being a you know a publisher on [00:29:20] that side then all my other kind of startups and jobs is basically again in advertising that's kind of [00:29:25] one of the things that i think is really challenging about some of these ads businesses you know i used to [00:29:31] run the ads team at twitter and there's this really um and so i'm going to go off off top a little bit [00:29:36] to last but i want to kind of go back to something you said about you know ultimately kind of being [00:29:40] clear about who your customers are and trying to contribute to your customers like at twitter there's [00:29:44] a really there's a challenge that i always had my job was to like help twitter make money and there [00:29:50] would always be this question that i would kind of bring to you know jack and the cfo and the executive [00:29:55] team how many ads do you want to show on twitter if we show fewer ads that's actually really [00:30:00] good for all of our users because they'll spend more time learning about the world and communicating [00:30:05] and we're going to make less money it's bad for advertisers we show more ads we make more money [00:30:09] and our advertisers are more successful but users get annoyed and that's a you know that part of that [00:30:14] business that um it's really challenging is like there's not an obvious answer right you're actually [00:30:18] trading off between different types of stakeholders and customers and one of the things i really love about [00:30:24] you know working in cyber security now and part of the reasons that you know we are very you know [00:30:28] customer centering customer obsessed company it's literally one of our core values is because it's [00:30:33] a business where you're totally aligned with your customers you're working together with your direct [00:30:38] customer maybe the different channel partners and you're all fighting the same fight we're trying to [00:30:42] go stop crime together if we do that you know we win our customers win right when they give us feedback [00:30:48] about how we can better support them we go do that like that's good for them it's good for us it's good [00:30:52] for the whole community so that's kind of one of the things that um i just really appreciate about [00:30:57] you know the the world that you know both of us work in today actually all three of us working today [00:31:01] um that we're really you know we're on kind of we're on different you know we're playing different [00:31:06] roles we're all kind of you know fighting on the same team against crime [00:31:11] no that's that's that's great that's great um i'm going to ask you there's a question in the in [00:31:17] the chat that i want to ask you and it was around you know you were talking around about your [00:31:22] mentor and how he's still your mentor today uh that uh was it wiz you mentioned um i can't remember [00:31:29] the name his name is uh wade wade chambers wade wade yeah so you mentioned that wade gave you this [00:31:34] this piece of advice and that he's a mentor of yours so you know the question in the chat is how was your [00:31:39] mentor able to get through to you to get you to seek guidance and learn from others doing so can feel [00:31:45] vulnerable at times especially if you're not especially if it's not your prior approach yeah [00:31:52] i mean um i mean i was you know younger evan was probably like pretty off the charts on an ego [00:32:00] perspective and hopefully i've fully rotated the other direction but i was probably a hard person to [00:32:04] break through right so some of this is you know a lot of this comes down to i think his just skill as a [00:32:09] leader and a mentor um but i think that the thing i think the reason why he you know he's still a [00:32:15] phenomenal mentor to me today and i i've seen touch with him really closely ever since um but i think [00:32:21] that the thing for him is like uh and he's he's a um he's a technology executive you know he's worked at [00:32:26] um you know he's just been in the valley for a long time he was ben horowitz's vp of engineering [00:32:31] opswear so he's he's an experienced manager and executive and i think his like his like superpower [00:32:38] is that he actually cares about his team and the people around him and you know he's also someone [00:32:43] that is not a um you know he's not a bullshitter right he'll tell you exactly what he thinks and he's [00:32:50] very thoughtful um and i think the reason he's able to really um break through to people especially you [00:32:56] know egotistical young entrepreneurs like i used to be is that behind what he's saying is he'll he'll say [00:33:03] the hard truths right and he'll kind of call it like he sees it but you know where it's it's [00:33:07] coming from a place of love right where he he actually cares about you know you as an individual [00:33:12] being successful um and when you have someone give you some like hard truths or kind of like show [00:33:19] you you know give you critical feedback if you if you have the underlying trust you know like hey [00:33:24] this person is doing this because they're trying to actually help me versus push their agenda [00:33:28] if i give us that underlying layer of trust it makes it really easier for those messages to get [00:33:33] through for people to feel you know for people to kind of really hear you right they're not looking [00:33:37] you know with way i never i i never felt like he was trying to push an agenda or he cared about anything [00:33:43] else another trying to help me be successful and so i just knew when he kind of said that to me at the [00:33:47] time right and to be fair like it took like you know a couple days to actually process right before you [00:33:52] know um but i just knew that it was coming from a place of um you know good intentions where he's [00:33:58] really trying to be helpful and he's just a wise guy so i think that underlying layer of kind of trust [00:34:02] that you know this is someone that is you know cares about you as a person that is um i think that's [00:34:08] what all great coaches do to order to like create this space to give you the hard feedback sometimes [00:34:18] like get out of get out of your own way you know don't let your ego sort of uh [00:34:24] uh drive you and and get out of your own way and and take a moment to reflect on on yourself and [00:34:31] i guess it's really hard to do right when you're when you're young you're motivated and you you you're [00:34:37] out there wanting to conquer the world right we tell we tell the youth you know the world is your oyster [00:34:45] mindset and you know it is it is it does take a bit to for you to you know take a step back and [00:34:51] really reflect on on some of that feedback so uh that's i agree i think also when you have like [00:34:58] small amounts of success it's very easy to let let your ego kind of sneak up on you right and so [00:35:05] you know you graduate college you get a good job you teach things yourself you can kind of slowly you [00:35:11] can slowly start thinking like you know you you know a lot more than other people right and um that [00:35:16] was definitely one of the i feel like one of my biggest mistakes of my youth right my career [00:35:21] i spent 10 years thinking i kind of knew how to do things right rather than and when you do when [00:35:25] you have that mindset right it really prevents you from seeking out mentorship and learning it can [00:35:31] really you know flatline you right in your in your career so i mean if you i think the book the evan [00:35:37] you know the evan riser pre-wade was a you know if you look at my learning trajectory it was pretty flat [00:35:43] and i think you know after him and um you know after i saw some of the you know just initial personal [00:35:48] growth from trying to listen and learn just you know really be humble and open-minded right i've [00:35:54] really tried to you know overcompensate for that and uh hopefully if if you ask people my team they [00:36:01] would they would describe me as a you know um you know humble and like a student i'm always trying to [00:36:07] learn and always trying to up my game that's great uh katie thanks for joining us katie i know you're [00:36:15] just settling into the conversation but why don't you introduce yourself and then uh i'll go to hussein [00:36:20] and then come back to you okay oh well thank you and i apologize for being late i was actually really [00:36:26] looking forward to this one i'm a little bit of an email security nerd i was one of the really early on [00:36:32] employees at agari so it was you know when d mark was coming into the market was you know and then [00:36:38] really learned um the significance of you know email security and and how it impacts business so i was [00:36:44] like oh i have normal security some of my favorite people work there i'm so excited to meet you so i'm [00:36:49] so sorry i'm late i had a work obligation but um yeah so i'm a vp of cyber security strategy for a [00:36:56] um small um well small ish i guess um si out of chicago um but we partner with a number of [00:37:07] you know companies like yours and i really have always admired what you guys are doing um just even [00:37:12] from the uh i i might have missed i did miss your backstory so i'm sorry and actually got a note from [00:37:19] somebody that said i was missing a really good one so just so you know um but yeah i just i think that [00:37:24] you know email is all about communication and the way that um you know not only do people do business [00:37:30] but even in our personal lives so i really appreciate what you're doing i you know take that uh message [00:37:36] to market every day so i just you know again just thank you for taking time with us today and again so [00:37:41] sorry that i'm late well thank you so much for uh hosting me and i feel really privileged to get [00:37:47] jump to you yes all right so we'll come back to you katie i know it would let you get settled uh [00:37:52] hussein uh over to you my friend thank you mr tomas uh so evan a quick question around uh your leadership [00:38:01] it in your current role so the way you know abnormal i've looked at quite a bit you know your [00:38:07] model and how it integrates into messaging and protects the uh from social engineering how do you [00:38:13] foster innovation and keep the drive and momentum in your team going seems like you guys are innovating [00:38:20] at a very faster pace and are growing and you know are conquering so what is the mojo there can you talk [00:38:27] about it so the people who are listening can kind of take some lesson from that thank you um i could share [00:38:34] i share what works for us but uh you know your your mileage may vary um so i think like you know in [00:38:42] investors never believe me when i say this but like i think really our our secret sauce as a company is [00:38:47] our culture and when i when i say culture i really mean you know what are the behaviors that we value [00:38:53] right how do we make decisions and i think that um what's been really effective for us is we try to [00:38:59] be really clear about what are those core values and what behaviors are aligned to that and then [00:39:04] specifically what are the things we do not value right and i think in every you know especially in a [00:39:09] really so we're a very high growth startup right we are our company has tripled in the last year [00:39:14] right and tripled the year before and so the challenge when you have a company like that is [00:39:17] i mean every any day right today two-thirds of our company wasn't here a year ago and so you have this [00:39:23] kind of like you're importing a lot of culture from different companies and the way people do things [00:39:29] right is way different in different organizations right and kind of what's considered valuable or not [00:39:33] valuable and this applies to you know every little task right you know one very common trade-off right [00:39:39] is speed versus quality right where should you be on that spectrum some companies right you want [00:39:44] to be super fast right if you're like a uh if you're creating a new social app you want to innovate [00:39:49] and go really quickly right just try lots of stuff bad doesn't matter if you screw up if you're working [00:39:54] in like brain surgery you don't want to do that at all you want to you want to never make a mistake so i think [00:39:58] everyone comes into an organization with different expectations so i think it's very valuable to be [00:40:04] really you know to get everyone on the same page and like hey here's how we want to make this decision [00:40:08] when it comes to this trade-off and you also want to kind of give people permission to like not worry [00:40:12] about things so um you know we we have kind of um you know so we really weave our kind of core values [00:40:18] into how we work i literally meet with every single person the first week to go through the why behind [00:40:23] these core values and they're very kind of customer and market driven so we pick core values not based on [00:40:28] what evan thinks is cool but what is actually valuable for our customers um and so we try to [00:40:33] explain the why behind that for us there's kind of five you know five of these core values and they're [00:40:38] all kind of trade-offs so the first one is um and maybe i won't go through all of them but the first [00:40:42] one that's relevant to i think your your comments about kind of like the speed of innovation um our first [00:40:47] core value is velocity and velocity is um is kind of like the opposite of perfection so we when we say we [00:40:54] value velocity what we really mean is we want to do the good thing now versus the perfect thing later [00:40:58] on that's really important in cyber security right it's important for our customers because [00:41:03] if you think about the decisions that you know a software engineer might make hey do i ship this [00:41:08] like pretty good feature out today that will help protect 95 of our customers against this new attack [00:41:13] or should we wait two weeks down the road where we can protect 100 of our customers [00:41:18] probably most of our customers say hey like get the thing out right maybe it maybe only 95 chance it [00:41:22] helps us but we have to kind of always be one step ahead of the attackers because the attackers are [00:41:26] getting smarter every single day so we we say that when it comes to these trade-offs right whether it's [00:41:31] in sales or marketing or software development we always want to try to like the the good thing now [00:41:36] versus the perfect thing later on better for us to like um and and that we want to be kind of really [00:41:41] clear about you know that being kind of what we want to optimize for and kind of where that applies [00:41:46] and where it doesn't right because it doesn't apply to everything like for data our own internal data [00:41:50] security and our customers data privacy like obviously like mistakes are not acceptable so you need to like [00:41:56] kind of clarify where this place applies and don't or where it doesn't i think the thing that we do [00:42:01] that i think maybe other companies don't do is we try to be really clear about here's what we do not [00:42:05] about here's here's what we do not value right so i tell people hey we're not a company that values not [00:42:11] making mistakes that's not something we we do why because it's it's kind of the opposite of a culture [00:42:16] of velocity we're trying to be a a high velocity you know high you know we want to like have high [00:42:21] velocity innovation high velocity kind of um you know development you you can't you can't tell [00:42:28] people don't make mistakes because that's kind of the opposite and so literally tell people like when [00:42:32] they come in hey like what you guys are going to see here is that we're going to make a lot more [00:42:35] mistakes we have a lot more bugs in our software right you're going to see like a lot of the work [00:42:40] we do will not always be representative of the finest work we're capable of doing because we're always [00:42:45] trying to kind of go for the good thing now and yes we'll optimize and improve over time but we're not going to [00:42:50] kind of wait long periods of time so how we talk about kind of the other core values if you're curious [00:42:54] but i think we try to be really clear about what are those trade-offs and get everyone aligned on [00:42:58] the same expectations and these things like these things seem very kind of silly but it really applies [00:43:05] in practical ways right i mean if you're if you're sort of you know if you're someone in a company right [00:43:10] and your boss sends you an email hey evan what's three things you learned today what are you how you [00:43:15] supposed to respond to that right do you send three bullet take three minutes and write the three bullet [00:43:19] points or do you take three days and write a three-page essay about your strategic assessment [00:43:24] how you're taking those lessons and applying them to your job like who knows so a lot of companies [00:43:28] spend a lot of time with these kind of like you know just they waste a lot of time these kind of [00:43:32] unclear expectations about how they want people to act and so we tell people like hey in a culture of [00:43:38] velocity no one's expecting anything more than the three bullet points if they want something more than [00:43:41] that they can go ask for that but otherwise we're always going to default to the same thing [00:43:45] and no one should have the assumption that you know no one here is the company will ever get yelled [00:43:49] out for making a mistake they may get yelled at for not fixing that mistake quickly right so i think [00:43:53] just clarifying like what is valuable to the company getting everyone on the same page and i think most [00:43:59] importantly explaining why is this value for the customer our customers and kind of why do we do this [00:44:04] and why is this important like for us as a team i think that helps just create a lot of clarity and [00:44:09] kind of how we work and um it it also it ultimately kind of drives you know things that are valuable [00:44:15] for customers if you pick the right core values oh great evan you made a lot of good points i mean [00:44:22] that's the only way to learn right to make mistakes and learn from them and improve on as opposed to [00:44:27] be fearful of not making a mistake great answer uh katie over to you yeah sorry just kidding real quick i was [00:44:36] just going to say it you know as one thing that i kind of take for granted because i've not worked at [00:44:40] a startup before and and i and i like that you that you do this is so reinforcing or re having those [00:44:49] conversations with your with your teams to be able to to instill you know the why get to the why and [00:44:55] we've talked about you know so sort of uh i forget the name of the book uh by simon seneca around the why [00:45:01] um but we've talked about that in prior sessions which is very important right and we've [00:45:06] talked about another book called uh extreme accountability and there's a whole component [00:45:10] in there around you know helping make sure people understand the why for the mission right so you [00:45:16] know i think it's great that you're doing that evan um and it's something that me since i've haven't [00:45:21] worked in a startup in startups you know i take that for granted right i've worked at other companies [00:45:25] where you kind of go into their culture and you try to adapt and yeah you might want to try to make [00:45:30] some strides to change certain aspects of the culture but you're constantly reiterating but [00:45:37] re-emphasizing your culture almost on an annual basis because you guys are growing so fast which [00:45:43] which is that's a lot of work ever that that's right and i think the important thing with culture [00:45:48] is like it all comes down to behavior right it doesn't matter what the ceo says on onboarding that's [00:45:52] not the culture the culture is how do people actually act and so um i think it's really important [00:45:57] for any leader just recognize like you know you know you can be a leader whether the ceo or you're [00:46:03] like any role of the company right you're influencing other people it's really important to recognize [00:46:07] like everything you do is like a role model for other people and humans are very good at observing [00:46:11] others and trying to like figure out what's the behavior what are they trying to optimize for and i'm [00:46:15] gonna go do more like that so one thing that you know i i do because i really take kind of culture [00:46:20] extremely seriously and this may sound crazy to some of you guys um i have a meeting every day with [00:46:25] my staff at the end of the day it's at 4 30 pacific and the whole purpose of this meeting is i go around [00:46:30] the room and i say hey guys tell me today what did you see on the team tell me some behaviors you saw [00:46:35] from people where you felt people were doing a good job being a role model for velocity or other four [00:46:41] core values and then we basically go around the room and i said i write it down in the email i share my [00:46:46] screen and i say hey i want to give a shout out today to nicole for doing you know for doing a great [00:46:50] job with velocity right instead of kind of like wait until next quarter to go ship this new product [00:46:54] feature we figure out a way to kind of go do this and that's going to allow us to get out to our [00:46:58] customers you know tomorrow or something right and like i'll never know these examples right but i [00:47:03] want to we collect them from the team so every day i kind of write this down in front of the entire [00:47:07] executive staff and i send out that email to the entire company with shout outs for people at the [00:47:12] company they've done a great job you know being role models um and i do that every single day i've [00:47:16] done it for three years um because i want because you know culture comes from people seeing these [00:47:21] examples of behavior and specifically calling out the trade-offs they're making right another one of [00:47:26] our core values intellectual honesty right when someone says hey i know this really uncomfortable [00:47:30] conversation but like you know i got to give you the direct feedback like you did this thing and it [00:47:34] was you know i know this is kind of awkward but like it really hurt us from doing this and like i want [00:47:39] to kind of share that with you right that's a really great thing we want everyone to know at the [00:47:43] company that we value intellectual honesty this company right if you have critical feedback don't you [00:47:48] know for the ceo don't be worried about that right we want to do that we want to learn that so i think [00:47:53] by by kind of very regularly kind of recognizing the behaviors that are kind of consistent with the [00:47:58] core value the core values that's a way to kind of you know for every leader in the organization right [00:48:02] at any level to really kind of reinforce what what matters and give people very tangible examples of [00:48:07] those trade-offs people are making right and that's a really powerful tool to kind of get everyone [00:48:11] aligned on you know the culture and the values that are important for you know the company and the customers [00:48:16] that's great um so we have lisa beth who just joined us lisa we'll let you get settled uh katie [00:48:24] i'm sorry i cut you off but over to you i don't know you didn't cut me off at all and sorry i was [00:48:30] i had just gotten into my car i was driving through the city and i live in the suburbs so i was a little [00:48:34] distracted earlier um that was for anyone who lives in the city to laugh at me um by the way you can laugh [00:48:42] out loud on mute if you want um but anyway uh evan honestly the the velocity piece for me is really [00:48:50] interesting um you know having come out of the startup culture myself um and then now on on this [00:48:56] side where i'm integrating and then also serving as a cso as a vc so for you know a few companies [00:49:02] i really love that you know in the partnerships that i find um in the industry right now it's it's so [00:49:07] difficult to find partners who are are interested in moving fast and in doing the best you know maybe [00:49:15] it's not perfect but that is something that i've definitely when i'm interacting with my partnerships [00:49:20] every day what i appreciate about what you just said is that you're willing to you know say hey this is [00:49:24] the best that we have right now and have design partners and i think that's what you're getting at [00:49:28] and i i really liked it because um that's the kind of you know uh practitioner i am and when i can [00:49:34] find partners that are leaning in and and looking for for people who are willing to accept something [00:49:39] that's not perfect but it's a a lot better than what we had um and and really innovate together [00:49:47] um for me that's really you know exceptional and so and i did miss your origin story and i'm sorry but [00:49:53] what i'd love to know is when you were founding um abnormal security and by the way i knew who you [00:49:58] were just because again i'm impressed with your company i've i've seen you and and the people that work [00:50:04] for you in the industry and i've been very impressed by um your your company and your your culture so [00:50:10] for me it's really interesting to to get to the kind of bottom of the list so when you were founding [00:50:15] this company um how did you do that did you actually write that down did that come out earlier i'm sorry [00:50:21] if it's redundant but i really appreciate how that's such a core value and how that's i've seen it [00:50:27] without having met you until today i have seen it in the industry so what was that like and how do you [00:50:32] do that because i would love to um see you know my other partners replicate that and maybe someday [00:50:37] if i have a great idea to do that myself and katie just to make sure i'm answering our question is the [00:50:44] quat it was your question more about how do we kind of how do we build the culture from the yeah [00:50:48] where did it come from yeah yeah that's that's really my point sorry i'm i'm not a good driver ever [00:50:54] so if i'm talking and driving it's really bad um but yeah so what i was saying is you know having [00:51:00] observed you from the outside and then um now meeting you today and hearing that you have this [00:51:08] real core values that i've seen in the industry which by the way never happens how often do you work [00:51:14] with a company and they say well these are our core values but you don't see that exhibited you know [00:51:18] throughout the organization and i think that's you know to your uh to you i was it's a i admire it [00:51:25] that's why i was super excited about this conversation tonight so that's what i'm asking is and i don't [00:51:30] know if i missed it but was there a moment when you were figuring out how you wanted your company [00:51:36] to grow and here you are you know you know three-fourths larger than you were a couple of years ago [00:51:42] what was that conversation i want to understand what did that look like was that something that you got [00:51:47] from mentors was that something that you got from your childhood i don't know like just let me know [00:51:52] like where did that come from because i think it's really really interesting and i i'd love to see that [00:51:57] in more of the partnerships that i have every day well uh i'm gonna answer this and probably too long of [00:52:04] a way but there's kind of two pieces one was like there was a light bulb moment where i realized kind [00:52:08] of how important culture was and then there was how do we decide what the right culture for abnormal [00:52:13] is so on the first one right i i i never really i always knew like a lot of companies talked about [00:52:19] culture and i kind of like laughed it off and i kind of rolled my eyes i'm like oh it just sounds [00:52:23] like a you know kind of like some hr thing that just is meaningless and the the and when i first you [00:52:29] know so when uh twitter bought um uh our last company um you know i came into twitter and i was like [00:52:36] who are all these product folks that you know why is this product culture all screwed up no one talks to [00:52:41] customers they don't move quickly they can't make decisions i'm like oh it must come from all these [00:52:46] people at twitter right all these people here are you know maybe bad in some way right in these [00:52:51] dimensions and then you know that was kind of day one at twitter fast forward three years later on the [00:52:56] day i left right i was the most senior product leader of twitter right at least on on the on the ad [00:53:01] side and all these new people and like nothing had changed right and all these new people um were [00:53:07] coming and like oh these old people like evan screwed up the twitter culture right and it really [00:53:12] kind of it really so i guess the eye-opening moment was that like kind of these you know you know [00:53:18] company culture and the culture of any community really persists and outlasts any of the individual [00:53:23] people right and that was kind of this moment where i realized kind of how powerful i think culture [00:53:27] was for for any organization and it you know at twitter right even their core they had these two core [00:53:32] i'll just give an example kind of like why and they just give some insight about why why twitter [00:53:37] has some of the challenges it has but you know one of the core values of twitter is ship it right [00:53:42] that's pretty clear right like hey we're going to get stuff out there and move quickly another core [00:53:46] value is take time to get it right that kind of makes sense by itself right here we're going to [00:53:50] really kind of go slow and make sure everything we do is correct so if you wonder like why does [00:53:55] twitter not maybe develop as fast as most people think is because it's not because one of those is [00:54:00] the right answer or wrong answer but like half the time people are debating right hey i thought we [00:54:04] should move quick i thought we should take time to get it right right so we have kind of conflict [00:54:08] right in those core values or those values aren't aligned with kind of what's important for your [00:54:12] customers right then you then you create a lot of unnecessary confusion ambiguity and ultimately lack [00:54:19] of productivity inside a company so i think it was really my experience at twitter that kind of [00:54:23] helped me realize how important the culture was and then when we started the company um and kind of [00:54:28] why we how we got into email security is a is a different story especially because i'd never [00:54:32] worked in cyber security i was a total amateur total noob um but when we started the company i knew [00:54:38] that like we had to we had to pick core values and we had to kind of like inspire behaviors inside the [00:54:44] company that were things that were good for our customers i think it's good to recognize that like [00:54:50] you know there is no kind of copy paste culture right you really think about like what is important [00:54:53] what are the behaviors you want to inspire and activate right in kind of your market so going [00:54:58] just on the theme of velocity it makes a lot of sense right in cyber security right the you know the [00:55:04] the challenges are again there's a new attack there's no email attack every single day right so of course [00:55:08] it can be valuable as a company right and what your customers want is for you to move quickly and [00:55:12] innovate quickly and learn quickly so you can kind of get ahead of the new thing before it becomes a bigger [00:55:16] problem there's some other company right it's the five os on stage or we want to go start a brain [00:55:21] surgery company we wouldn't want to have velocity as a core value we want to have take time to get [00:55:26] it right we're going to make sure every brain that comes through our surgery center is flawless right [00:55:30] we never make any mistakes right and you would yell at people if they made a mistake right where in a [00:55:35] high velocity culture right you can't right the minute you yell at people you're signaling to the [00:55:39] entire company we're not really about culture right or we're not really about velocity we say that but [00:55:44] we don't really mean that that's why we're getting that's why we want to you know that's why we're [00:55:46] kind of reacting this way so i think that when we we kind of built our our kind of you know our five [00:55:51] core values that had abnormal it was really all about you know what is going to be effective behavior [00:55:58] in the long run right that we want to kind of last for a decade that's going to be most valuable for [00:56:03] this type of company in this environment serving you know cyber security customers and for us that was [00:56:09] you know velocity we want to innovate quickly because the attacks are always changing we have a really high [00:56:13] kind of ownership even if that means more delegation inexperienced people making decisions because we [00:56:19] knew we're going to grow quickly we need to train the next generation of leaders our third one was [00:56:23] intellectual honesty because we knew that cyber security is kind of riddled with a lot of misleading [00:56:29] claims and a lot of you know a lot of kind of you know scammy stuff we knew that we were in a business [00:56:33] of relationships and trust so if we didn't have a culture you know built on being open-minded and direct [00:56:39] and humble right even if it meant we were being kind of awkward and kind of socially you know [00:56:44] breaking social cohesion right that would be a problem for us long term you know we we you know [00:56:48] our fourth value is customer obsession we always want to make sure that we're listening and learning [00:56:52] and kind of working backwards from our customer problems that was really important because you know [00:56:56] we're trying to build a new type of technology to solve customer problems in an area that like i [00:57:01] personally don't know you know didn't know anything about at the time right so we always make sure we're [00:57:05] working backwards from our customers problems versus forward from our ideas and then our final [00:57:10] one was um ambition ambition for excellence right we knew that you know we're in a market where the [00:57:16] problems are changing every single day the attackers are getting one percent smarter that means we have [00:57:20] to get one percent better in everything we do every single day right ourselves our systems our [00:57:25] process our technology even if that means right it's going to be overwhelming and discouraging to feel [00:57:30] like nothing's ever good enough that that's a trade-off we want to make as a company so we really kind of [00:57:34] work backwards from what we thought the customers the market needs to define the culture and then [00:57:38] the culture then defines like how do we make decisions how do we work how we behave and um you [00:57:43] know ultimately how we show up in the world love it that's why i show up to this fireside chat every [00:57:50] single wednesday yeah thank you for that and and by the way you said it was going to be a long answer [00:57:54] is exactly what i was asking so thank you for hearing me and answering my question and appreciate that so [00:57:59] much um lisa beth have have you settled in are you able to unmute and get oh i'm settled and i am [00:58:06] just sitting and reveling in this discussion the uh compliance and ethics and integrity part of me is [00:58:13] singing happy songs right now um so nice to meet you evan um my name is lisa beth lentini walker um quick [00:58:23] background i am a compliance ethics and corporate governance um consultant i have a firm called lumen [00:58:32] worldwide endeavors and everything that you're telling me um resonates and i especially liked i [00:58:39] wish more companies would sit down at the end of each day and think about who has lived out the values [00:58:47] of this organization and how are we going to recognize that so let me ask you um in terms of um recognition [00:58:58] how beyond you know calling things out in these daily meetings how are you building towards the future [00:59:07] in terms of sustaining culture particularly as you bring in more and more people [00:59:17] um how do you scale that um continually in your organization because you're doing some really cool [00:59:25] things and i'd love to hear more about your thought patterns behind um keeping people engaged in um [00:59:32] building the culture that you want to see by by being the person you you want to be [00:59:39] yeah at least it's great to meet you and that's a really thoughtful question hopefully i can i'll try [00:59:46] to give an equally thoughtful answer but forgive me if i if it's a little bit inarticulate um [00:59:51] and i think that the first thing is you just have to acknowledge as a company that like you have to [00:59:55] decide how much does culture really matter to us how much do these core values do and my kind of [00:59:59] personal belief founding the company was that this is why we're going to win in the long term and so we [01:00:05] said from the beginning that you know we are going to take these core values very seriously and we're [01:00:09] not going to compromise um those the kind of culture for any other business objective right and i was [01:00:15] super clear with our board of directors all the investors of that since day one and we basically [01:00:19] kind of built into our you know hiring process you know actually our hiring process our promotion process [01:00:26] and our performance management process slash firing process you know kind of um everything is kind of [01:00:31] built around the core values so we literally interview everyone right that applies to the [01:00:36] company across these core values and we're trying to answer the question are they not going to reduce [01:00:41] kind of the average in any of these core values and can they up our game in one right if that's not [01:00:46] true we don't hire someone even if they're really talented really capable because we really want to [01:00:50] you know we're not going to accept people that you know can't commit to those values doesn't mean they [01:00:54] have proven themselves but they have to be willing to kind of you know commit you know commit to that [01:00:58] um so i think one is just like you got to take it seriously right you have to be willing to fire [01:01:03] your number one salesperson right if they don't have behaviors that are in line with your culture [01:01:08] right and so and that's like a really hard decision right to make as a company right to [01:01:11] if you really want to commit to that so then in terms like the recognition right um i think you're [01:01:16] bringing up a good point it's really hard to scale right when we were 10 people that was very [01:01:20] effective for me to go talk to my staff was basically the entire company and then share that with [01:01:24] everyone but it's but you know now there's like lots of people the company i don't talk to most people [01:01:28] every day and so i think you have to kind of do it both in like a tops down way and a bottoms up way [01:01:33] i think the tops down is important because you need everyone to understand that it actually matters [01:01:38] and that's why you know i spend you know three hours every week 90 minutes for our kind of you know new [01:01:43] hires in the us and 90 minutes for our hires in um kind of the apac region and i go through here's why [01:01:49] these are the values and i do that personally i don't do a video recording so i really want people to [01:01:54] know that like i care about this that's why i'm blocking off my time to see you to like meet people [01:01:58] and tell them the why behind this um and then you know we do our kind of weekly town hall i usually have [01:02:04] three kind of guests you know people submit their kind of recommendations and i i give them kind of [01:02:09] one minute each to a pure shout out for someone they recognize across the company um as being um [01:02:15] you know kind of exemplifying our core values and then i give them basically a 25 gift card it's kind [01:02:19] of just a token thing we just want to say hey this stuff actually matters we want to put our money [01:02:23] money where our mouth is it's important for me to host that and to do that in town hall in front of [01:02:28] the entire company because i want to signal to the entire audience this stuff actually matters right [01:02:33] evan's spending half his time every week in front of the company talking about this because he really [01:02:37] cares about culture so that's good to establish the importance right but the challenge is i just don't [01:02:42] have visibility right i'm not going to recognize i'm not able to see all the good work and i can [01:02:47] inadvertently kind of encourage people to like you know show off and maybe political ways because they [01:02:52] want to get recognized right there's lots of amazing things that happen our company behind the [01:02:56] scenes right out of the spotlight they'll never know about so the second half of the recognition [01:03:00] right there's got there has to be a bottoms up piece and so um there's basically a um you know um [01:03:06] i won't say the product name but like there's a there's some software we use right that's basically [01:03:09] a recognition platform and the way we have it set up is anyone can go um it's kind of integrated [01:03:14] into slack and basically anyone can kind of go recognize one of their co-workers for kind of [01:03:20] exemplifying one of these core values um and when they do that right they basically kind of just you [01:03:24] know there's a pretty simple format what's the value what do they do why is this a great example [01:03:29] of our of our core value right and anyone across the company that does that right that will they basically [01:03:34] recognize someone it appears kind of in this like big global shout out slack channel the people get [01:03:39] pinged then um then we have it set up so that person then gets a um you know i think a 20 gift card [01:03:45] right which they can either donate to charity or they can use to buy company swag or they can um [01:03:51] you know take it as a gift card and so that allows kind of anyone at the company to kind of celebrate [01:03:56] and recognize you know people that are helping us you know go build our culture and kind of raise the [01:04:00] bar and we you know we we we you know it's not like a huge amount of money but we spend you know tens [01:04:06] of thousands of dollars on this right in gift cards because you know it's really important to the [01:04:10] company it's a good investment and so um not that people do this for the money or not they don't give [01:04:15] the shout outs for the money but um i think it's important for the company to just signal hey this [01:04:20] stuff matters it's not just like a fun thing we're doing but like it's actually valuable for us to um [01:04:25] it's valuable for the company it's valuable for our customers it's valuable for our mission to go fight [01:04:29] crime so i think that recognition has to come and kind of you know those two different angles and [01:04:34] there's there's probably new things that we got to be doing right as we go from you know 400 people to [01:04:38] a thousand people later this year thank you so much for sharing that and i love the tone at the [01:04:46] top that you're demonstrating um in the chat people are talking about how you know they worked for you [01:04:52] and you were one of the most influential leaders that they've ever had so um i love hearing what [01:04:57] you're doing i wish more organizations um uh led by example and and role modeled in this way so i'm i'm [01:05:05] going to uh just sit back in awe a little bit um and turn it back over to tomas um for the room reset [01:05:12] and um and in questions yeah no thanks thanks uh thanks lisa thanks for thanks for that that handoff [01:05:20] and uh and great question and evan you are getting you are getting uh pretty popular now i gotta go to an [01:05:26] admin if i want to get a hold of you you know i remember the days of just being able to like reach out [01:05:32] and and and call you uh but you know that's what happens when you're when your company grows so i i [01:05:38] appreciate that and it's great to see all the success that you guys are having at abnormal so [01:05:42] this is our weekly fires fireside chat we're going to go for about 30 more minutes or so because i want [01:05:47] to be respectful of evan's time and of everybody else's time if you do have a question and you want [01:05:52] to pop up on stage feel free to raise your hand and we will bring you up on stage um there are some [01:05:58] questions in the chat uh i i will say if you can just pop up on stage and ask your question we'll [01:06:04] we'll get we'll get to all of you uh hopefully we'll get to all of you and i do want to spend some [01:06:09] time talking about you know evan it'd be uh almost selfish of me or not selfish it would be [01:06:16] it would be uh bad of me not to maybe spend some time talking about you know what you guys are seeing [01:06:22] trends and things like that around uh business email compromise and and uh sort of just general [01:06:29] email account takeovers and the likes and and you know what your your viewpoints are for you know [01:06:35] where we're going with with regards to that space but also just thinking even more forward into like [01:06:42] the you know the concept of whatever the metaverse is and how the the abilities that hackers are having [01:06:50] now to uh enact phishing and other types of scams to other different types of channels which don't [01:06:57] necessarily originate an email and just really want to get your thoughts on that and and how you guys are [01:07:02] thinking about that so you can leave that for later let's get to maybe some of the uh folks that did pop [01:07:07] up on stage thanks mods for bringing them up so ryan i'll pass it over to you uh anything you want to [01:07:13] ask evan absolutely um hi evan i'm ryan risotto um nice to meet you i've been doing cyber security for [01:07:20] about 10 years and uh this is one of my highlights of my week is to be able to come on here and you [01:07:25] have definitely added and and provided a really interesting story so um one of the questions i'm [01:07:32] gonna do two for one super easy i think it is i'm just dying to know if you're still in the video games [01:07:37] and if so like you know xbox playstation what's your what's your thing you know you said that [01:07:43] basically your whole path right was you were this kid who wanted to play video games so you got into [01:07:49] entrepreneur uh entrepreneurial you know opportunities including a lemonade stand right for anyone who [01:07:55] missed it and and and everything was around that so i'm just curious right fun fun little fact [01:08:01] um there's no employees listening right no i do um i do i do play video games and i'm like an extremely [01:08:09] competitive person and so like i have to be a little bit careful because i get like you know i have to [01:08:13] win every i like i like to win everything i do um but my my favorite type of video i play games on a pc [01:08:19] and um i like this sounds really nerdy but like any game that requires like spreadsheets or like tools you [01:08:26] need to like optimize to like to like be really be really good at the game is my kind of thing so like [01:08:30] i like i like the uh i like the i'm an optimizer so i like any game that requires a lot of optimization [01:08:36] to to win interesting yeah i'm actually not into video games at all but i just thought that that was [01:08:41] such a pivotal piece of your story that i was like but does he still play video games so very cool glad [01:08:47] to see that all of your hard work and your career has paid off for kind of your childhood dream there um [01:08:53] but another question i really thought about when you were kind of answering katie and i think a few [01:08:57] questions here about culture and how you spend 90 minutes both with like you know you mentioned apap [01:09:02] region and the growth of abnormal i was just curious right and again two-part kind of like you [01:09:08] know it sounds like you had this amazing opportunity because it was a startup to really say foundationally [01:09:13] what do i want the culture to be what should it be for this type of company and then how did you [01:09:18] you know maintain that foundation but also allow it to grow either as you expanded obviously [01:09:23] geographically including like like you said apex and or with the size right because i think that a [01:09:28] lot of companies whether you know something happens like for example the pandemic i think shifted you [01:09:34] know how how did companies either shift or um you know kind of maintain a certain culture in a remote [01:09:42] environment if they didn't have it before and um you know with differences and whether like actual [01:09:48] technology or just you know people again and cultural differences which would love to hear since you seem [01:09:54] so obviously so like i don't want to say concerned i don't think that's the right word but obviously so [01:10:01] passionate about culture um how how do you maintain that well i'm still learning figuring out so if you [01:10:10] guys have tips here let me know and i'll try to go apply them absolutely yeah and not you know not to be [01:10:16] um you're not to be too redundant or not to be like i don't mean to repeat myself too much but like [01:10:21] i think it just comes down to like you have to have well i think it's good to separate out like [01:10:25] you know culture means a lot of things um really like i guess there's the the core values which are [01:10:30] kind of the valuable behaviors that are good for your customers and the company in the market those [01:10:34] things were like really inflexible on right we we don't want those to adapt to evolve right now of [01:10:40] course that's that's that's a that's maybe the center of the company culture but a lot of the kind of [01:10:45] company culture you know kind of outside of those dimensions right is organic right we have you know [01:10:50] we have people and i think you know 10 different countries right it's a very diverse company different [01:10:55] backgrounds right and experience and all sorts of things and everyone kind of brings in you know [01:11:01] everyone brings in their own expertise and kind of best practices and traditions and rituals and i think [01:11:06] those can be you know just more diversity and kind of like that culture importing is actually really [01:11:12] good because there's you know every company in the world right even if they're not successful does [01:11:16] have pieces in it that are valuable right there's good lessons to learn so i think you want to be [01:11:21] you know flexible and kind of allowing that to kind of organically evolve but you want to be like really [01:11:26] inflexible on your on your core values and those need to be you know more dogmatic in nature um and i [01:11:32] think the way you at least so far what's worked for us right i can't tell you we may not be successful [01:11:38] here in the future but at least what's worked well so far is just you know telling people that this is [01:11:42] stuff we take seriously you know every leader of the company they need to like be a role model there [01:11:48] if you start promoting someone that's not customer obsessed right that's one of your core values [01:11:52] what are you really saying to the company right so everyone has to be a role model [01:11:55] and you need to kind of constantly give people examples of like what those behaviors are and just [01:11:59] any big company or any company that's growing very quickly you're importing a lot more culture than you [01:12:04] export and so it's it's something you have to be really mindful of and it just these you know some [01:12:08] of the touch points i mentioned have been successful so far and i'm sure as we as we grow more over the [01:12:13] next year it's going to be increasingly challenged challenging we'll have to think about you know how [01:12:18] do we kind of keep optimizing but i think a lot of culture just comes down to like what are the behaviors [01:12:23] right of people in the organization and the beautiful part about culture is if you kind of set it up right [01:12:28] it becomes self-propagating right you know people come in they start doing things a certain way they start [01:12:34] being a little more customer focused a little more have higher standards higher ambitions other people [01:12:39] see that right then they start doing it more people see and they start doing it so the the challenge of [01:12:44] culture is it kind of it kind of ends up being what it ends up being right it's very hard to go change [01:12:48] that once it is so um i think on the core values you got to be really dogmatic and kind of continually [01:12:54] kind of reinforce that anytime me or any other leader any person is showing up in a meeting or a room or [01:13:01] they're sending an email those are opportunities for us to kind of reinforce those core values and [01:13:05] i think the best leaders of our company are i can really try to weave in these concepts into everything [01:13:09] we do so i don't know what kind of the next generation this looks like i'm still learning myself [01:13:16] but that's at least what's worked well for us so far i love that and i could totally go on i won't but [01:13:21] i will say um one of the moderators who's normally here isn't um but we him and i as well as someone else [01:13:27] have a uh it's russell eubanks he has another clubhouse and um love to invite you if you're [01:13:33] interested we've been talking a lot about culture and cyber security and um yeah that and i'd love [01:13:38] to connect me on linkedin i don't have your email don't know if anyone else has had that problem [01:13:42] not asking for it but just letting you know um and on that note thanks again really enjoyed the [01:13:47] conversation and i'll pass it on so thanks tomas and thanks thanks thanks ryan thanks for popping up on [01:13:54] stage and uh nothing like asking an email security guy what's your email uh that's probably a good one [01:14:02] but um no i'm sure if you uh connect with evan on linkedin he'll be happy to connect with you and you [01:14:06] guys can uh can carry on the conversation uh along those lines um jennifer thanks for popping up anything [01:14:13] you want to ask uh yeah thanks tomas hey hey evan nice to meet you the story's been amazing um where in [01:14:20] the bay area did you grow up that's just a teaser question but i'm asking i i grew up in the north [01:14:26] bay and marin and then i lived in new york for a decade and i lived in san francisco for a decade [01:14:30] and i now live in the east bay oh too funny okay i grew up in berkeley and i live in moran but um [01:14:36] and uh the examples you were giving on culture and why that matters it just was bringing the the [01:14:41] some examples to my mind and one was a sort of a startup but kind of a mid-sized company acting like a [01:14:46] startup and it was important that we were we had different goals necessarily i was in legal and i've [01:14:51] got to help you know commercial get their deals over the line and product team come to me when [01:14:56] they're having issues and not build a product that's going to have you know licensing restrictions [01:15:00] downstream or something so we the this whole culture aspect of of defining it so that we do know what [01:15:06] matters and we're you know we worked our asses off um but we because we were aligned in the culture [01:15:11] we had parameters of what we were doing where we were you know it really reduced the friction and [01:15:16] and going head to head and it's funny because i did just look you up on um linkedin and jay simon [01:15:21] simmons who you know was uh one of our head guys there so it was funny to have that connection but [01:15:27] um i wonder if you find out asking how you how you were able on this kind of tailors on ryan's last [01:15:32] comment so i apologize if you've already answered it but um how you were able to identify this sort of [01:15:37] culture and i think using the word culture is um i mean it's it is the descriptor for it but it also [01:15:43] can give it that sort of fluffy term that i like you said a lot of investors and others would tend to [01:15:47] off right but it it really is core to the um success of the organization because it gives those guardrails [01:15:54] of of understanding like if you want velocity but not sloppy like you've got to come from customer first [01:15:59] or as you're saying you give recognition but as you get bigger you can't see everyone and giving [01:16:04] um people the opportunity to recognize each other not only gives the the receiver of that [01:16:11] recognition but it gives the organization the understanding that you see you can't see everybody [01:16:16] and so it's not just something that's you know awarded from above it's it's that you really are a [01:16:20] a cohesive organization working together towards these things so these are just like different [01:16:25] examples you're giving of something that's really um important to a successful organization i was [01:16:30] wondering how you um sort of identified all of these different ways to implement this and stick to it [01:16:37] like that the actual day-to-day practices or week-to-week practices yeah i think like you know what those [01:16:44] kind of core values are what the trade-offs right like those are things we kind of identified really [01:16:48] early on by just learning about um you know our cyber security customers and there's many people i i [01:16:54] i literally asked like you know some of our early seats as we talked to like hey what do like what do [01:16:59] companies do that's like really dumb they shouldn't do right like what's some of the behaviors you see [01:17:03] that really drive you crazy um and you know a lot of i mean i'm sure some of the folks in here know [01:17:09] but like one thing that really drives cyber security customers crazy is like the lack of precision and [01:17:15] clarity and like what do you do and why is it really different right and they felt a lot of people [01:17:19] feel like there's a whole generation of you know mediocre cyber security companies that kind of like [01:17:24] you know misled or exaggerated or kind of you know made promises they couldn't really keep and [01:17:29] so we saw that as a way for us to actually stand out in the market and so you know if you're if you're [01:17:34] you know tomas you get a thousand emails a month from cyber security vendors like you know how do we [01:17:40] have to go stand out from the noise right especially as a company right that no one's ever heard of [01:17:45] with a ceo that's never worked on cyber security before it's really important for us to go kind of [01:17:48] stand out in the market and so we knew that you know we just looked at kind of what our customers [01:17:53] were looking for in like a world-class company we tried to kind of work backwards into that and i think [01:17:58] once you kind of like start identifying the themes then you can start doing the pattern recognition [01:18:01] on on some of the behaviors right and you know you know we have some you know giant wiki page where we [01:18:06] talk about hey here's what we value here's what we don't value and you kind of like extend those [01:18:11] things out extend those things out over time um and you kind of start recognizing some of the [01:18:15] downsides when you see those you want to be really clear that that's an acceptable downside right [01:18:20] for us we're a very customer obsessed company that means when we build our product roadmap [01:18:24] that's driven by customers it's not becoming from some my ideas on our product manager ideas we're [01:18:29] just the editors and when people see that right especially new people say hey this is really stupid [01:18:34] we have always great ideas right we should go you know we should you know we should go do our ideas [01:18:39] and then that that's an opportunity for for i think you know someone as a leader right or you [01:18:44] know me or someone else to say hey that is um you're right right that's one of the trade-offs [01:18:49] we're making right by us being very biased toward awaiting kind of our customers feedback we're [01:18:53] going to miss out on good ideas from inside the company we're also going to rotate too much on [01:18:58] what's important now versus what's important in the future and like those are things we're accepting [01:19:03] right as part of this culture of being customer obsessed and so i think that when you kind of [01:19:07] explicitly define here's the trade-offs and here's the downsides right here's the consequences of [01:19:13] the saying we value these things that gives people you know permission to you know not have to worry [01:19:18] about those things right and that's i think when you explicitly name those things you give people those [01:19:23] you know superpowers right um you know that's just kind of things i have to worry about and that that's [01:19:28] what helps make you some of the culture more empowering so sorry sorry if i you know if i missed [01:19:32] kind of part of the question you know please please let me know i'll help you share more you know i think [01:19:36] that's great and i think you're right it's just haven't been doing this stuff for a long time or [01:19:41] working with deal teams for a long time it's it's um a lot of people push what they their ideas [01:19:45] without listening to what customer feedback is right and so it kind of goes back to your first um company where you [01:19:51] uh you know ended up not having the revenue model to support the server stack which is that you guys [01:19:57] think it's a great idea but it's not what the customers are paying for at that point or pulling [01:20:01] a little bit but it's um a lot of companies do that they push their solution versus what the [01:20:05] customers need at that point and then clear and concise i'd say um very few companies have that [01:20:10] especially larger ones and both externally and internally so nice job impressive [01:20:15] thanks jennifer thanks for popping up on stage and asking your question david over to you hey [01:20:23] thanks tomas and good evening to all the mods and evan so happy to hear and see uh another ceo [01:20:31] for the startup company well you're not that startup anymore but uh having doing great i absolutely [01:20:37] think your statement about uh customer obsessed is correct i mean if you're not well it doesn't [01:20:44] make really a lot of sense that you'll be in business long because you're not focused on it my [01:20:49] question to you directly is that earlier on you spoke about the fact that your mentor you really spoke [01:20:55] glowingly about your mentor about how he sort of you know paraphrase sort of cloaked you in his [01:21:00] philosophical approach to how to become successful and then later on you mentioned that um the company [01:21:09] culture you know if the ceo is not doing it it doesn't matter it comes so two-part question here is [01:21:16] that did your mentors uh engagement with you permeate you in such a way that you took that and you now [01:21:26] mentor to your staff and coach your staff and do you mentor a coach period and two is not the [01:21:33] culture or the standard i'm sure there's some ryan speaks or crowd speaks at your company like every [01:21:39] company but does it not emanate from you to the rest of the team and so they you know you're leading [01:21:45] by example and they're following by uh by proxy if you will so those are my two questions evan yeah maybe [01:21:53] they should i'll do the second one first um i mean absolutely like you know any you know everyone in [01:21:58] the company right again whether the ceo or anyone else right like everything you do is kind of like [01:22:02] role model behavior and you know you know typically yeah that's always the the case right people need to [01:22:08] lead you know through their own behavior i can preach all day about how important customers are and how [01:22:13] we should be customer obsessed if i'm showing up late to customer meetings what's the signal that people [01:22:18] are really seeing right so you know i think every every leader needs to kind of lead through [01:22:23] through kind of their own you know behavior role models or by being a role model i would argue that [01:22:29] that's good but it's not it can be insufficient i think what sometimes is missing right is those [01:22:35] those behaviors sometimes implicit signals and i think it's really if you know in this in my experience [01:22:40] it's been really effective for me to kind of turn the implicit explicit and really kind of explain the why [01:22:44] behind it like hey guys the reason i'm always on time to customer meetings is because i want to show you [01:22:51] and show our customers for everyone else this company that we really value our customers input [01:22:55] and our time right and our jobs go help them solve their problems right so i think just maybe it's a [01:23:00] bad example but i think that everyone should lead by example but i think you can make that even more [01:23:05] effective by explicitly explaining the why explain the intent behind it um and kind of explicitly saying [01:23:13] here's what we value and here's what we don't value i think that helps people you know kind of just [01:23:17] understand the why behind the what and then on the mentorship side like i don't know if i could say [01:23:23] i mentor my staff because frankly my staff is a lot smarter and more accomplished than i am right and [01:23:30] you know maybe my only hidden talent is uh recruiting people um and i do try to mentor there [01:23:36] um but you know so i don't know how much mentorship i do for my team we do have kind of a mentorship [01:23:41] program right inside our company we try to pair you know kind of pair people up to help you know [01:23:45] with career coaching and then personally like you know my my personal passion is um mentoring entrepreneurs [01:23:52] um i like you know meeting you know especially people that are starting kind of new venture-backed [01:23:56] companies that's really where kind of my expertise um are and i just you know i i just don't want i just [01:24:04] like i've screwed up so many things in my life right that if i can help you know if i can help some [01:24:09] other entrepreneur avoid some of those mistakes then like i can feel less guilty about you know [01:24:13] screwing up and wasting a bunch of time money in my past that's it's absolutely great and i you know [01:24:20] it sounds like your mentor poured a lot of what he or she learned he learned into you so that you took [01:24:28] all of a good portion of that and you apply it to your company into your efforts because as you listen [01:24:35] to you talk about your evolution and how you evolved you know there's a maturation process that you seem [01:24:41] to have gone through and me being you know of the people process technology of what we do i spend a lot [01:24:48] of my time on people because i think that part is just in some sense almost missing in a lot of larger [01:24:55] companies and a lot of companies period because we're focused on the technology technology technology [01:24:59] but if we don't have the people to follow the right process to implement the right technology [01:25:05] and we may be far afield in customer obsession at the end of the day so thank you very much and [01:25:11] i'm really proud to uh to have heard honored to have heard you speak tonight and uh this is david i'm [01:25:17] going to stop talking thanks david thanks for popping up on stage as always good to uh hear from you my [01:25:24] friend uh ang what's up ang over to you hey tomas hey everyone um it's great to be up here tonight [01:25:33] um i uh i've just spent the last three some odd years uh doing uh forensics for business email [01:25:41] compromise uh incidents um and so my my background so far in the field although it's been really limited [01:25:49] because three years is also the amount of time that i've been in cyber security um i've had a really [01:25:54] laser sharp focus on bec eac uh crimes and fraud and so evan getting to come up here and kind of [01:26:01] listen to you talk about culture and the importance of your customers has been really really cool [01:26:07] um i would love to sort of pivot it although i i think we could all talk about culture for the [01:26:11] entire night i'd love to pivot it to be ec um you know i've tossed in the chat earlier this uh evening [01:26:18] for i i think the last what 10 years becs have gone up year over year uh for the amount of money lost [01:26:31] and so this year i you know fbi ic3 found that over two billion dollars was lost in scams just related [01:26:38] to bec eac that's not romance scams that's not gift card scams that's not ceo impersonation right it's just [01:26:45] bec eac the account compromise and so um i've asked a couple people this actually i think i asked katie [01:26:52] this at one point but evan to you from a technology perspective what does a year look like that reduces [01:27:01] that number that lost uh that money lost um so i'd love to kind of ask you the technology-based question [01:27:08] here of like what can we do to really bring that number slamming downward in your opinion [01:27:15] you know all my entrepreneurial instincts are uh telling me to like plug our product right here but [01:27:22] i'm going to try to avoid those because i'm trying to like you know grow mature as a ceo um so i think [01:27:27] like the um like and i think you're right like you know bc is one of these things that people don't [01:27:35] underestimate right when you look or they totally underestimate and when you look in like the internet [01:27:40] and the newspapers right all you hear about is ransomware and identity theft right these are a huge [01:27:44] disconnect between the kind of perceived cyber security problems versus the actual security [01:27:49] problems right and the the ic3 port report that you mentioned right by the fbi it's a really interesting [01:27:54] window right because when you lose money as a business right you don't go to twitter and new york [01:27:58] times to talk about it you do call the fbi to help you get your money back right so i think it's a really [01:28:03] good you know objective data source right that's helpful so i think that you know um you know uh bc and [01:28:11] maybe social engineering generally like um i think one of the big challenges is that a lot of the [01:28:16] conventional email security technologies were just not built for those type of attacks so if you kind [01:28:20] of go back like 15 years you think about kind of classic secure gateways the problems they're trying [01:28:25] to solve with the time where these kind of spray and pray campaigns right basically spam phishing and [01:28:30] malware and so the core technologies in those products right to stop spam you know you want to build [01:28:34] this giant database of bad stuff right ip addresses domains email addresses and if you maybe you miss a [01:28:40] couple spam messages but if you see you know but once you learn that you can go stop the next billion [01:28:45] right so you know these these gateways you know gateway type type technologies right you have these [01:28:50] reputation systems very similar for you know stop phishing right you have you know url analysis right [01:28:56] you're building up giant database of bad links bad domains same thing for malware where you're building [01:29:00] up your bad list database of all the you know file signatures that are known bad and so the kind of [01:29:05] primary use cases that a lot of these technologies were built for was this concept that there's a big [01:29:10] campaign going out to lots of people and um you know if maybe you missed one or two but like [01:29:15] eventually you'll figure it out and all the customers that use that product will be protected [01:29:18] the the challenge with kind of you know the rise of these kind of social engineering and business [01:29:23] email compromise attacks is if you think about the kind of canonical textbook example of business [01:29:27] email compromise attacker goes and creates a gmail account right they call it evan riser they email [01:29:33] you know the head of finance at abnormal security and they say hey can you help me pay this invoice and so [01:29:38] in that example right those technologies aren't going to work right there's no bad reputation because [01:29:43] gmails you can't block emails from gmail there's no links there's no attachments a lot of conventional [01:29:48] technologies right are going to be insufficient that's why we see these attacks kind of get through [01:29:53] you know um kind of conventional technologies right so i think one is like a technology gap [01:29:58] and then obviously as you probably know way better than i do there's also just you know just easier for [01:30:03] attackers right the attacker can go you know criminals are business people of sorts right and [01:30:08] they can wake up in the morning then go spin up a thousand aws servers and send a trillion spam messages [01:30:13] and make a thousand bucks or they can register a gmail account and look me up on linkedin and go make [01:30:17] a hundred thousand dollars so of course there's just like better economics and so we see more and [01:30:21] more criminals shifting to these kind of social engineering attacks that are very targeted personalized [01:30:26] and so it really requires kind of a different type of technology so at the risk of being you know [01:30:31] again i'm not trying to be too commercial here but you know the core technologies that we've built [01:30:35] right that's not you know that someone else can go copy if they want is rather than kind of you know [01:30:40] taking this threat intelligence based approach where you're kind of studying known bad um like that's [01:30:45] insufficient for these type of attacks they've never been seen before so instead kind of the general [01:30:49] approach that we use we try to study known good behavior so we integrate into you know email [01:30:53] platforms we build behavioral models of individual people then we kind of learn what are the normal [01:30:58] business processes right what are the normal relationships or communications you know if [01:31:02] you did that for abnormal right you'd realize that hey evan doesn't email invoices to our cfl right never [01:31:08] happens right even if it's my real email address right if that happens it's something suspicious going on [01:31:14] so some of the you know um i think the opportunity for you know this is what we do and other people [01:31:19] could copy us if they want the opportunity right is um given that emails move to the cloud those cloud [01:31:25] platforms have new apis to give you access to so much more data than just external emails coming in [01:31:30] so because you access you know through cloud-based architectures you can get so much more data from [01:31:34] these environments that enables you to take kind of this better machine learning ai based approach to [01:31:38] kind of build these behavioral models and those models are much more effective to stop these types [01:31:42] of attacks where you can have you know 10x reduction in false negatives while also reducing false [01:31:47] positives so i think that the fundamental kind of technology shift in terms of the approach [01:31:51] has to move away from kind of studying known bad which is very good for spam gray mail and kind of [01:31:56] some types of phishing and malware it needs to kind of focus on you know anomaly detection based on [01:32:01] known good and at least kind of in our experience and you know we protect about five percent of [01:32:05] the fortune 1000 today that is a very effective approach for stopping attack it's never been seen [01:32:09] before whether it's you know business email compromise or some general social engineering or kind of [01:32:15] you know zero day phishing or malware yeah i mean evan i think that's 100 correct and we've been [01:32:20] watching it year every year you know the call is coming from inside the house right like totally you [01:32:24] know oftentimes yeah i mean oftentimes they're known accounts uh or known contacts to you that are sending [01:32:31] you that phishing email or it's even coming from internal and so you know i i love the idea and i don't [01:32:36] work for abnormal i have not used your product but i love the idea of knowing where threat intelligence [01:32:44] exists and should live within becs but then saying you know we're smarter than that and just because [01:32:50] we've done status quo for a long time doesn't mean that we need to continue to create solutions around [01:32:55] threat intel or ttps or things like that um i think it's it's cool to to hear that as a sales solution [01:33:02] um when it comes to these ttps and things like that there's some really cool stuff that could be [01:33:07] done once an account is compromised to sort of recognize those things quickly and and remediate that [01:33:12] um do you have any general best security practices though to just i mean i know what you're gonna say but [01:33:18] i'd love for you to say them anyway like how can we just not let these accounts get compromised in [01:33:22] the first place aside from ascribing to to ai or machine learning yeah um i don't i uh i mean obviously [01:33:32] i have to say like you know buying our product helps i think there's probably just some you know basic things [01:33:37] um like i i don't know right it's really hard and i don't think the solution is just train all [01:33:45] our users to kind of understand phishing attacks um there there are some kind of ways to um mitigate [01:33:52] some of the more sophisticated types of attacks i mean we've seen that kind of uh monitoring um [01:33:58] you know like mail rule configuration changes is very effective for stopping kind of internal account [01:34:02] compromise looking for um uh payment request changes right from third-party vendors especially [01:34:09] when the reply to email is changed like that's very effective for supply chain compromise there's [01:34:15] probably some kind of rules and heuristics right to stop kind of the most basic things but um you [01:34:21] know but it's really hard to stop you know the new attack on that tomorrow no one's ever seen before [01:34:26] without kind of using a lot of data science and machine learning it's very difficult [01:34:31] no evan that's great answer thanks so much um and i really appreciate all the talk that you have about the [01:34:37] culture um i i think more than anything else that's the biggest thing that i've taken from tonight so [01:34:43] i really appreciate you sir thanks for letting me ask questions as usual you guys [01:34:49] thanks ash thanks for popping up on stage as always so look it's we we've got uh oh i see ryan's back [01:34:56] uh evan we've got i know we've got two to nine uh 9 30 our time uh trying to do my math what is that 6 30 our time [01:35:04] um but we've got maybe three questions if you can hang with us so ryan go ahead i can hang i just [01:35:10] gotta jump in the car so forgive me if there's a little bit of noise but happy to stay on um [01:35:14] yeah all right well i'll try not to keep you too long but we i know we've got three questions that [01:35:18] we want to get to so ryan go ahead you've got one of the three all right thanks so much hey i meant to [01:35:23] ask this earlier and it was one of the things i thought of you know you mentioned i think three times [01:35:27] evan that when your first you had your first business that um it failed because you barely or you [01:35:33] could only pay for the server fees you never thought about paying you know you and whoever [01:35:36] else was in that business and you know my first immediate thought was like well gee if you had [01:35:41] done that business today and had the cloud like would it have been successful and i just thought [01:35:46] that that would be kind of a funny you know one of those things where you know the idea was still [01:35:52] successful but maybe the timing wasn't right yeah it's a good question um i think that uh i think if [01:36:05] i could kind of go back in time i just never would have done [01:36:08] i think we lost him do we yeah he might be settling in the car yeah his phone is probably [01:36:23] syncing up with his uh with his car we'll give him a minute everyone we'll give you a minute um [01:36:27] um he's on mute i don't know if he knows he's on mute though too [01:36:37] evan you're on me if you uh if you don't already know that [01:36:47] oh no it's been a great session you know yeah ryan broke it we could we could blame ryan she broke [01:36:53] she broke the clubhouse this evening it was her hey oh ryan she's so sure that i got disconnected [01:37:01] no worries go ahead go ahead evan no they were blaming me i'm so sorry i had to leave the house [01:37:08] i forgot my the cell phone access was turned off um so sorry did uh did any of my answer come through i [01:37:14] didn't realize it until i stopped your famous last words where i never would have and i presumed you [01:37:19] were gonna say never would have had that company that's right so i think that um oh wow to make [01:37:27] to make a business successful um you know it's both picking the right business and the right product the [01:37:32] right market and execution and great execution can't make up for bad markets or bad products [01:37:38] so i think that like those businesses were just never kind of set up for success so you could have the best [01:37:43] managers and leaders in the world and you know they can only do so much so i think like a big part of [01:37:48] entrepreneurship is just picking you know really understanding kind of what the value you bring [01:37:52] your customers making sure it's a valuable business um and valuable business being it has good margins [01:37:58] it's scalable there's a big market and that at least for you know public companies right is there a good [01:38:02] multiple associated with that i feel like most people might ask what books you'd recommend i would [01:38:07] just like to say i kind of hope you write a book and if if you have then i need the title of it but [01:38:12] thanks so much and really can't emphasize enough that this was really an incredible story so um i [01:38:18] i sent you a message uh in clubhouse and thanks again and thanks tomas for letting me ask my question [01:38:23] yep no absolutely um and and everything in case you don't know there's a little back channel on [01:38:29] clubhouse uh you just gotta click through there uh to see your messages um so uh hussein i know you [01:38:36] want to ask a question do you want to ask it or you want to pass i'll pass you know it's getting [01:38:41] late i know evan's got plenty of things to do all right so thank you i i just want to ask you which [01:38:46] is typically our last one of the last questions that i ask and and sometimes i open up to the mods uh [01:38:52] to ask questions but i know we're pressed for time if you had any piece of advice for the younger evan [01:38:58] what would it be and why i'm glad you're asking me that question tomas because i was kind of terrified to [01:39:04] come on today because i thought you were going to ask me a question about football and i know [01:39:08] nothing about it so i'm glad that that's the last question so i gotta get you i'm gonna have to get [01:39:14] you out to a game ever next time i'm in uh in the bay area okay just don't tease me too much for being [01:39:20] like an amateur um so i think the um i mean the advice i would give myself is probably different than [01:39:27] i give other people the big one for me is like that i would give myself is you just you're not [01:39:33] going to learn by having an ego and that there's so much um there's only so many things you can teach [01:39:37] yourself it's very valuable to i think it's critical if you really want to learn right it requires some [01:39:43] vulnerability to admit that you don't know things it requires humility and a growth mindset to go [01:39:49] actively seek out advice and kind of mentorship um i think those are like the most important things [01:39:54] because with those things you can kind of learn everything else but if you if you're closed-minded [01:39:59] right if you think you know everything if you don't appreciate that you can learn something from [01:40:03] everyone you encounter right you're really going to get in the way of your own learning so that would [01:40:07] be kind of the advice for i'll give myself if i could [01:40:13] sounds good sounds good all right look it it is uh five minutes after i know you're in you're in transit [01:40:21] um but i do want to take a moment to thank you and just very very quickly before we sort of conclude [01:40:26] uh i want to just remind everybody we'll be back here next week uh taylor parker uh [01:40:33] taylor parker i believe i said that correctly will be joining us next week so please tune in next week [01:40:38] evan again a bunch of uh uh a bunch i don't know why i don't know what i'm talking about half the time [01:40:45] uh big big thank you for taking the time out of your day to spend with us sharing your words of your [01:40:50] words of wisdom or as it's commonly called on clubhouse gems uh you know you shared a lot of [01:40:57] interesting uh facts about yourself and your journey uh which i'm sure is very helpful for [01:41:03] people that are either trying to start a business going through the process of starting businesses [01:41:07] and maybe potentially failing or having those doubts um there was probably a bunch more stuff [01:41:12] that we could have talked about i know i would have liked to get into some of the vc side and how did [01:41:16] that all work out for uh for companies like like yourself as you're starting out but look find evan [01:41:22] on linkedin if you if you haven't already uh try to connect with him or send you know connect definitely [01:41:27] look at his company uh it's definitely one to uh to take advantage of if you are suffering for a [01:41:33] business email compromise or want to improve your your security uh email um products and product suite [01:41:40] so matt uh thank you any final words before we kind of wrap yes thank you evan for coming on tonight [01:41:48] and spending time with us thank you yeah thank you guys so much for hosting me i feel really privileged [01:41:54] to get to share my experience and your mileage will may vary and uh but um yeah i feel really thankful [01:42:00] to get uh spent time with you guys sounds good thanks evan thanks everybody have a good evening [01:42:06] evan stay safe i'll talk to you soon my friend have a good evening everybody cheers bye bye everyone