Fireside Chat w/John McGloughlin, Founder & CEO @ GuardSight

[00:00:00] Hello, hello. Thank you for joining this evening. We will get started in about five minutes. [00:00:15] Thank you for joining. Let me get this room set up. [00:00:18] John, John, Matt, quick microphone check for you, sir. [00:00:33] It should be on the lower right of your screen, a little microphone. You can click that and it [00:00:38] should allow you to unmute. How's that? There we go. Say something. [00:00:49] There you go. I hear you loud and clear. [00:00:52] We figured it out. You sound a little far from the mic though for me. [00:00:58] I don't know if you are. Yeah, maybe it's my volume. Let me see. No, my volume is turned up. [00:01:04] How's that? There you go. That's better. All right. I'll just talk. I'll talk louder. That's all. [00:01:10] All right. Sounds good. I'll go on mute until you call me out. How's that? [00:01:16] Sounds perfect. Sounds perfect. I'm just going to get the room set up. Let people fall in. [00:01:21] And then we'll make a start in a few minutes. Just bear with me. [00:01:27] Yes, sir. [00:01:28] Okay. [00:01:28] I'm curious if we'll have anybody from Florida on. I noticed the hurricane's making their way, [00:01:49] or the hurricane is making its way, doing some damage along the lines of knocking out [00:01:58] internet and communication systems and the like. So hopefully everybody in the Florida area are doing well. [00:02:07] Here. [00:02:14] How's your week going so far, John? [00:02:38] Fantastic. So you opened up at that conference. [00:02:48] Yeah, I was on the, I did a keynote panel at which, yeah, it was actually a lot of fun. [00:02:59] It was fun. I made it into Orlando and managed to make it back just before the hurricane. [00:03:11] So yeah, Hurricane Ian did not delay me. [00:03:16] Oh, good. [00:03:18] And there were a good amount of people that actually attended the conference. So the conference, I think, was pretty successful, all things considering. [00:03:28] Fantastic. [00:03:30] Let's see. [00:03:33] Oh, wow. There's no topic from military service. That is interesting. [00:03:46] That is interesting. Okay. [00:03:50] Trying to add some topics to the room this evening. [00:03:54] And let's see. Here we go. All right. I think I'm good right now. I think I got the three topics. [00:04:07] Here it is. Entrepreneurship, some networking and chill vibes. I know. I know. [00:04:13] Okay. Lisa Beth, quick microphone check for you. [00:04:20] Hello, hello, hello. Can you hear me? [00:04:23] Loud and clear. Coming in loud and clear. [00:04:26] Excelente. It's good to see everybody here tonight. [00:04:30] Awesome. I like that. All right. Excelente. That's a Latino heritage month or Hispanic heritage month. I appreciate that. [00:04:39] Okay. [00:04:40] Anil, quick microphone check for you, my friend. [00:04:43] Hello, hello. [00:04:45] There it is. There he is. [00:04:48] All right. [00:04:49] Oh, we're doing okay. Doing okay. [00:04:52] Staying dry. Not in Florida. So staying dry. Hopefully our friends in Florida are doing okay down south. [00:04:59] Or south of where I am. [00:05:01] I'll say east of where you are, Lisa Beth. Far east. [00:05:07] All right. Look, this is our weekly fireside chat. [00:05:10] Everybody, I do see a lot of familiar faces in the room. [00:05:14] I do see just one person that's new. [00:05:16] So I just want to give you a quick shout out. [00:05:18] Thanks for joining. [00:05:19] And you have that little party hat or celebration hat. [00:05:21] So thanks for joining Clubhouse. [00:05:22] And thanks for being a part of this conversation this evening. [00:05:26] We do this every single Wednesday for about an hour and a half or so. We'll ask our guests. [00:05:31] In this case, we have John McLaughlin, who's the CEO, founder and CEO of a company called GuardSight. [00:05:39] And we'll get into that in a little bit. [00:05:41] We'll ask him questions for about 30 or 45 minutes or so. [00:05:44] And then we'll open up for the audience to raise their hand, jump up on stage, and we'll bring you up on stage and you can ask a question. [00:05:51] Top left of your screen right next to where it says fireside chat. [00:05:54] If you are not a member of our club, you can click that little greenhouse and join our club. [00:05:59] You can listen to playbacks from prior guests, and you'll be able to listen to this one as well once we conclude the show. [00:06:05] And you can see who's going to be on the show next week and thereafter. [00:06:09] So we encourage you to join our club. [00:06:12] We're friendly. We don't bite. [00:06:14] Unless we're really hungry, but I don't think we bite at all. [00:06:18] Our comments for the majority, for some of us, at least our comments and opinions expressed this evening are our own and do not represent our current or prior employers. [00:06:27] So please keep that in mind. [00:06:29] Feel free to, you know, take a little snapshot and things like that and share with your folks on Twitter, LinkedIn, or wherever you want. [00:06:37] Any of the portions of the show that are recorded, you can feel free to share that. [00:06:41] If you do want to quote us in the newspaper or whoever buys a newspaper or electronic, we ask that you just please connect with the individual that you want to quote and be respectful of that. [00:06:54] So, the last thing that I'll say is, look, let's have fun. [00:06:57] It's Wednesday. [00:06:58] It's the middle of the week. [00:07:00] We try to do this as an opportunity to sort of let our hair down, if you will, de-stress, and really just have a conversation and get to know our guests. [00:07:08] So, if you're a vendor in the audience and you do want to come up on stage and sell us on your latest and greatest product or service offering, one, I appreciate you, but two, let's not do that this evening. [00:07:19] Let's really focus in on John McLaughlin or John Mack, as I know he likes to be called. [00:07:27] Let's focus in on him and his journey and get to know a little bit more about the man who created GuardSight. [00:07:34] So, without further ado, I'm just going to go around the room. [00:07:37] John, I'll leave you for last. [00:07:39] We'll just introduce ourselves. [00:07:40] I'm Tomas Maldonado. [00:07:41] I'm the CISO at the NFL. [00:07:42] Lisa Beth, go with you. [00:07:44] Hi, my name is Lisa Beth Glentini Walker. [00:07:48] I have a compliance ethics and corporate governance consulting firm. [00:07:53] And my new news from this week is that I am also the assistant general counsel at Marketo, which is a fintech company running the backbone of lots of payments that you may enjoy, like Uber and DoorDash and a whole bunch of other stuff. [00:08:10] I teach compliance and ethics and legal things and also wrote a book, but I'm excited to be here. [00:08:17] Let me turn it over to Anil. [00:08:20] Thanks, Lisa. [00:08:22] Anil Parghese. [00:08:23] I'm a virtual CISO and also the co-author of CISO Mentor. [00:08:27] Just a fun fact for this week, got back in from overseas and just in time to evacuate from Temple Bay. [00:08:34] So, I'm hoteling it for the week, but it's all good. [00:08:37] Part of the business and travel. [00:08:39] Back to you, Dimas. [00:08:41] Man, Anil, are you evacuated outside of Florida or are you evacuated to a hotel still in Florida? [00:08:47] That's a different part that's not going to be impacted. [00:08:50] I thought about hanging out close by, but I went ahead and evacuated to Nashville. [00:08:55] So, I'm hoteling in Nashville for the week. [00:08:58] Awesome. [00:08:59] Well, that's a good state. [00:09:00] Nice city, I guess. [00:09:01] I've never been, but I hear good things about that Nashville area. [00:09:04] All right. [00:09:05] I do see, hang on. [00:09:06] I thought I saw something. [00:09:07] Oh, wow. [00:09:08] I do see Naveen has joined us. [00:09:11] Naveen, a quick introduction for you, my friend. [00:09:13] Hey, Tomas. [00:09:14] I'm on a trade, but I'll introduce myself. [00:09:15] I'm Naveen. [00:09:16] They had a third party for TD Bank and I'm looking forward to today's conversation. [00:09:23] Thanks, Naveen. [00:09:24] Thanks for joining us. [00:09:25] And Lisa Beth, congratulations on your new role. [00:09:29] Really excited to hear how that goes at some point in time. [00:09:34] So, without further ado, I want to introduce John Mack. [00:09:38] John Mack, why don't you take a few moments and you can take as long as you want to get [00:09:43] to introduce yourself. [00:09:44] And while you're doing that introduction, John, why don't you tell us about you and your origin story? [00:09:50] Okay, I can do that. [00:09:53] So, Tomas, first, thanks so much for inviting me. [00:09:57] I appreciate it. [00:09:58] I've attended several of these fireside chats. [00:10:02] They're great. [00:10:03] They're educational and inspirational. [00:10:05] They're fun. [00:10:06] Kind of a good way to break up the middle of the week. [00:10:08] So, I appreciate the invite and I appreciate the panel taking time out of their schedule tonight, too. [00:10:16] And, of course, all the people that have joined us as well. [00:10:19] So, yeah, my name is John McLaughlin. [00:10:22] John Mack is what they call me. [00:10:24] They've called me that since I was a kid. [00:10:26] And, you know, my story starts, you know, in the late. [00:10:30] I'm the CEO of GuardSite, founder and CEO of GuardSite. [00:10:33] My story starts, you know, in the late 1960s in Boston. [00:10:38] So, I'm a Boston guy. [00:10:40] Although I live out west now. [00:10:42] I live in Utah. [00:10:43] But I was born in St. [00:10:45] Elizabeth in Brighton. [00:10:47] So, for those of you who are familiar with the Boston area, if you know where Fenway Park is, you probably know where Brighton is. [00:10:56] My family is all from Mission Hill and Roxbury. [00:10:58] Is that where the Red Sox lost to the Mets? [00:11:03] John Mack? [00:11:04] I'm just curious. [00:11:05] I don't know. [00:11:06] You know I teed that up for you, right? [00:11:08] So. [00:11:09] I think the Pats made it also lost to one of your teams, too. [00:11:13] But we'll save that for later. [00:11:15] But, yeah, you know, when you're a kid growing up in the Boston area, you know, they basically, when you're born, they put, you know, Red Sox caps on you and that kind of stuff. [00:11:26] So, anyway, for those of you who are familiar with the Boston area, you most certainly know where Fenway is and it's a great place and a lot of history. [00:11:34] My family is all from Mission Hill and Roxbury. [00:11:37] I think it's all been since gentrified, but, you know, when they were growing up there, it was a little bit different. [00:11:42] One of my uncles has a saying that, you know, he spent his entire life, he couldn't afford to get out and now he can't afford to get back in. [00:11:49] So, that kind of deal. [00:11:51] When I was probably six-ish, my parents, you know, moved my brothers. [00:11:56] There was four of us. [00:11:57] I was the first one out. [00:11:58] First of four boys. [00:12:00] They moved us up to a small town on the seacoast of New Hampshire called New Market. [00:12:06] So, if you're familiar with the seacoast of New Hampshire, you know that's it. [00:12:09] Exeter, Portsmouth, Durham. [00:12:10] We're just a neighboring town for the University of New Hampshire, which is a great school and awesome, awesome place to grow up. [00:12:18] You know, my parents were, they were disciplinarians. [00:12:21] You know, not ridiculous, but, you know, they taught us how to work hard and be respectful, be polite. [00:12:26] You know, I grew up Irish Catholic, you know, giving, helping others, doing, you know, serving a community, that type of stuff. [00:12:32] And, you know, most importantly, we were, you know, expected to do well in school, which we did. [00:12:36] You know, we were accountable for our actions, that kind of stuff. [00:12:40] And, you know, my brothers and I were always outside back then, you know, when I was growing up in the late 70s, I guess. [00:12:47] The late 70s. [00:12:48] You know, there were no, you know, I guess, you know, computer games and stuff were just starting to come in, but we weren't really introduced to them. [00:12:54] So we were always outside playing sports and fighting each other and fighting anybody who wanted to fight us and, you know, just being, just being kids, being boys. [00:13:02] And, you know, it was a great place. [00:13:04] You know, we were probably lower middle class, middle class, lower middle class back then, but, you know, we had a really great loving family. [00:13:12] And I would say, you know, today, if I look back and see, you know, what was the root of, you know, my love for teens, which is what I've always grown through my career and been a part of throughout my career, I'd have to say it was, you know, my family. [00:13:27] And, you know, my parents and my brothers were definitely the root of that, my love for teens. [00:13:34] But, you know, teens, teens break up. [00:13:36] And so, I think when I was around a freshman in high school, my parents got divorced. [00:13:42] It wasn't like a brutal divorce or anything like that. [00:13:45] But my mom did decide to move out to California for a couple of years. [00:13:49] And I went with her because as a kid growing up, even though I think we had rabbit ears or, you know, television and television, [00:13:56] you can imagine things like chips and what was it, Squad 51 and Adam 12 and, you know, all those things. [00:14:05] And, you know, California was the place you wanted to be. [00:14:09] And so my mom moved to California and I said, hey, I'm going with you. [00:14:13] And so I went out, one of my other brothers went out with me and I spent a year out there. [00:14:21] And it was much different. [00:14:25] So in the town that I grew up in, in New Hampshire, you know, it was, we had our primary education was awesome. [00:14:32] I mean, we'd have, you know, 13 kids and, you know, high level math class or a high level, you know, English and debating and civics and all these things that they taught us. [00:14:42] But the classes were really small. So you got a lot of attention. [00:14:45] You're expected to read. When I went to California, that was much different. [00:14:49] Not that the education was bad. It was just, you know, the classes were huge. [00:14:52] I mean, there was probably more kids in a gym class and, you know, Monterey High where I went than maybe it was in my entire graduating class when I returned. [00:15:02] When I returned to, you know, New Hampshire for my junior, senior year. [00:15:07] But it was a great experience. It was almost like a, you know, foreign exchange experience. [00:15:12] And then I went 3,500 miles away to a different coast with much different weather, much different culture. [00:15:19] People were pronouncing their ahs, which is much different. And, you know, and I was, you know, the captain of the soccer team as a sophomore. [00:15:27] So, you know, there was a lot of good vibe from that. And I learned a lot. [00:15:32] And, you know, growing up, I played all kinds of sports. I played high school soccer. I played baseball. I played ice hockey. [00:15:39] What was called Junior B's. Back then, I don't know if they still have it, but that's what it was when I played. [00:15:45] And, you know, I went to college in Ohio. I walked on a D1 team as a soccer player. [00:15:52] But when I was in school, you know, my dad died when I was like 19 and I kind of lost interest in college. [00:16:00] And I was admittedly lost for probably a couple of years. And so, you know, my parents had taught us how to work. [00:16:09] And they had always, we'd always had that work ethic and that grind, which I still have today. [00:16:15] And it's through the culture of my company for any of you that know, for any of you that know my company and my team, you'll experience that culture. [00:16:24] And I owe that to my parents. And so, when I left school, you know, I needed to work. I needed to make money just like every other, you know, tax paying American adult. [00:16:35] And I got on to probably one of the best jobs I ever had, had nothing to do with tech. [00:16:44] It was a job that was a house framing crew. So I was like the low man on the totem pole of a house framing crew. [00:16:53] And I learned so much about systems and organizational efficiency and all these things that I would learn later on in life through not only my experiences, but the books that I read and the people that I hung out with and, you know, really sharp entrepreneurs, business people. [00:17:08] But, you know, a lot of that came from, from the systems. It was, you know, the guy that ran that was this just hardcore disciplinarian systems guy, high level of intellect. [00:17:19] And he was like, you know, I put himself through school and just knew how to get stuff done. And it was, it was, it was awesome. [00:17:24] It's crazy. It really had nothing to do with the technical aspects of anything that I, that I would do later on in my career. [00:17:31] But it had a lot to do with understanding how to get people motivated, you know, and how to accomplish shared objectives. [00:17:38] I mean, when you're, you know, in a, if you're familiar with the region in, in New England, you know, if you're in a, you know, zero degree weather or minus zero degree weather in the middle of the winter roofing houses, you know, you got to get people motivated. [00:17:52] And he figured out how to do that. And it was, it was just phenomenal. I was a student of the system more than, more than anything else. [00:18:01] So it was, it was an awesome experience. And I learned to trade and I always felt like that was something that I could always fall back on. [00:18:07] And even today, you know, if I, you know, mostly today I hire contractors to do stuff, but if I have to do something, you know, I know how to do it because I learned that. [00:18:15] I also learned that from my dad and other things. Anyway, you know, that was good, but I, you know, I moved back to California when I was in my twenties and, and I did a little bit of construction there, but what I, I got a break. [00:18:30] I just, you know, I didn't know what I didn't know. And probably, you know, one of the, one of the, you know, we have a professional, our director of professional development here at GuardSite, this guy named Richard Vallejo. [00:18:43] And if any of you have met him, he's a, he's just a phenomenal individual, super talented, super intellectual, same kind of background. [00:18:51] You know, he's done really well for himself, put himself through school, you know, he's got a couple of master's degrees. [00:18:56] One of the things he says is that, you know, we hire potential. And I think we hire potential. [00:19:02] You know, we also have PhDs and masters of computer science and everybody's formally educated on my team, but we also have, you know, guys that come out of the military that have no education inside of the new training. [00:19:12] We hire potential. And I would say those experiences that, you know, both of us had coming up into our careers probably, you know, probably help with that. [00:19:21] And, you know, I, I know, you know, I spent my career in corporate America before I started GuardSite. [00:19:26] I'm still in corporate America because many of them, you know, large customers, of course, large corporations, and we deal with, you know, hundreds of smaller corporations. [00:19:35] And, you know, sometimes, you know, they're reluctant to take those, you know, those types of individuals, mainly because they didn't have experience or they're risking their careers. [00:19:47] But we're not because the aptitude and the attitude is what we're interested in there. [00:19:54] But anyway, so I go back to California and catch a break. [00:19:57] So if you remember, there was a company called Cabletron. [00:20:00] If you're old enough to remember Cabletron, they were a networking company that spawned up in, you know, their early to mid 80s and, you know, mid to late 80s. [00:20:09] And this was back before, you know, this is just when we were starting to network computers together. [00:20:14] So we could, you know, network Apple IIs together and PCs. [00:20:18] And if you remember back in the day, we, you know, they had these big, huge transceivers. [00:20:22] And, like, I think ours was called an ST500. [00:20:25] And, you know, you'd tap, you know, cable, coaxial cable, and you'd run this cable, you know, coaxial cable down to these computers. [00:20:33] And that's how they talk. [00:20:34] You know, you'd have, you know, different topologies, but, you know, most of it was like bus topologies. [00:20:39] And I got an opportunity to go to work for Cabletron. [00:20:44] And I went there as a project manager, or project coordinator. [00:20:49] That's where I started my career. [00:20:51] Started my career project coordination. [00:20:52] I had no idea what project coordination was about from maybe a formal perspective, but I had that experience working on various construction teams. [00:21:01] So this is in my early 20s, probably 21, 22-ish, somewhere in there. [00:21:06] And I just, you know, I knew what I, I didn't know what I didn't know, but I knew what I had. [00:21:11] And I didn't let it go. [00:21:12] And I took advantage of it. [00:21:13] And I took it seriously. [00:21:14] And took, you know, every, you know, every chance I had to learn that craft. [00:21:21] And the thing that I did, that I encouraged all, even, you know, my kids, my, I said my kids, my employees that come out of, you know, four-year colleges or kids that, you know, have come out of tech schools or whatever it is, is, you know, you know, you're going to be the average of the best people that you hang out with. [00:21:39] So be the best people that you possibly can find in your field, learn from them and find out what they're reading or what they've read and get those books and learn those books, read those books and then, you know, observe. [00:21:51] And that's what I did. [00:21:52] I just would ask people questions, you know, what do you guys read? [00:21:55] What is it, you know, what do I need to do? [00:21:57] Where do I need to go to school? [00:21:58] What do I need to do all that? [00:21:59] And so I did that and I started hanging out with systems engineers who were, you know, as we all know, were kind of the little column, the people that I was working on. [00:22:08] We'll call them, you know, the glue between maybe the biz dev community. [00:22:11] I don't know if we called it biz dev back then, but biz dev community and our technical communities. [00:22:15] So they're technical, but, you know, we, you know, joke back in the day, they can, they can talk to people and they like to do that. [00:22:22] They like to do that kind of stuff. [00:22:23] And so I started hanging out with systems engineers and I learned that job, even though I was, you know, over, you know, you know, basically being a project coordinator, which was, you know, kind of like, you know, customers would order something and we, you know, frame up, you know, documentation. [00:22:37] And then, you know, documentation on what they ordered, which was an awesome experience, but I really wanted to be out with, you know, where the action was. [00:22:44] And so I applied for a systems engineering job within the company and they took me. [00:22:51] And, and I also was assigned to a technical support team. [00:22:54] And so I was on the ground, you know, where the action was dealing with salespeople, dealing with customers who, you know, were already once one of my, you know, my best stories is that I remember this distinctly. [00:23:06] One of my probably, you know, maybe not one of my first, but pretty close to one of my first technical sport experiences where a lady calls and says, this was just when we were starting to build hubs. [00:23:18] And she said, our whole network's down and, you know, obviously, you know, very distraught and under stress. [00:23:25] And which is also a great experience because I learned how to deal with people that were under stress. [00:23:30] So later on when, you know, when I was an incident responder and large companies like America or these, you know, other Warner Brothers or wherever it was, [00:23:38] Harbor Freight, wherever these organizations were where I was assigned, you know, you have to learn how to deal with that. [00:23:44] And these are really big situations and I'm sure, you know, several people in this organization, CISOs or other high level, you know, technical people know exactly what happens when that goes down. [00:23:53] And so it's very stressful. And I learned to deal with that primarily through tech support. [00:23:58] But anyway, this lady called, she says, hey, my whole network's down. It's, you know, it's like, okay, let's see if we can help you out. [00:24:04] You know, why don't you go to where this hub is? And she says, okay. And she goes. [00:24:08] And of course, back then there were no cell phones or anything. So we were probably transferring calls on the rooms. [00:24:13] And she's talking to me from this data center. And I said, okay, so there should be a bunch of, you know, lights on the box. What's that? [00:24:18] Oh, there are no lights on the box. No lights on the box. Well, that's not good. So, well, what do you see? [00:24:23] Well, there was this thing. It says, there's two modes. It's in the OFF mode and the ON mode. [00:24:29] And I said, why don't we go ahead and flip it into the ON mode. That's a true story. She put, turn it on the ON and, you know, congratulations to networkers. [00:24:35] Superhero. But it kind of taught me also, like, you know, how to work stuff from the stack up, from the bottom up and down. [00:24:42] And that's the way I was trained, classically trained by, you know, the people that I worked with in the technical support community and systems engineers, learning how to work things from the ground up. [00:24:52] And when I was on the ground as, you know, a cyber, a cyber warrior, if you will, that's always how I dealt with stuff. I understood network communication really well. So I could intercept traffic and I could study traffic at various layers and determine, you know, how threat actors are moving through the environment. And all that came from those jobs. [00:25:10] Those jobs. I mean, that was just a kick-ass, that was a kick-ass job. I loved that job. While I was there, though, one of the things that I got introduced to, that I, you know, was foreign to me, were recruiters. [00:25:22] Or recruiters. Job recruiters. And I didn't know anything about job recruiters, except that they would somehow, you know, learn who I was. And they contacted me because, of course, you remember back then there was no LinkedIn. There was none of that. I mean, the web wasn't even around. [00:25:37] And so, they called me and said, hey, we've got this, you know, great job. It's going to pay you more money. And, you know, you're going to be, you know, a gajillionaire by coming to work for this company. And I'm in my early twenties thinking that's exactly what I want to do. [00:25:50] The gajillionaire part was interesting, but it was more interesting what, you know, the next company was about. So I went to work for this company called Rakel Datacom out of Florida. Many of you may know that company. These are old school companies. [00:26:02] And I continued to live in the Silicon Valley. I should mention that the Cabletron was in the Silicon Valley. And that's another great thing that happened to me was, you know, I got to move into the Silicon Valley and work with these great tech companies. [00:26:15] And this is back before the Silicon Valley is what it is today. It was just, it was a crazy cool place to live. And it was all tech. You know, this 24-7 tech. It was amazing. [00:26:27] There were so many super smart people and of course great institutions out there. And I was, I was fortunate and blessed that I just happened to be in the right place at the right time and be around just some crazy smart people who taught me a lot of really cool stuff. [00:26:42] And, you know, again, would, you know, allow me to educate myself. And so I did that. I tried to, I went to work for this company called Rakel Datacom. I was living in the tech capital of the U.S. [00:26:55] I was making good money and probably maybe 18 months after that, I got another call from a recruiter. And this recruiter says, Hey, there's this company out of Massachusetts on the 128, for those of you who are familiar with it, called Proteon. [00:27:11] And if you remember Proteon, there was a guy named there, two scientists there named John Moy. And John Moy was one of the inventors and co-authors of OSPF, which of course is a routing protocol. [00:27:26] And Proteon was, you know, going to kick Cisco's ass and they were doing all that. They didn't quite achieve that status. But, but the OSPF protocol was super interesting. And, you know, I kept moving up the stack. [00:27:39] So, you know, when I was at Kittletron, you know, I was kind of down in, you know, layer two, layer three, and I went to Proteon and I kind of moved up the stack to four or five, I guess. And then, you know, and then later on, of course, I would move up to the top of the stack and then I would, I would know all versions. [00:27:54] So I kind of, my career kind of started at the bottom of the OSI model. When I say the stack, for those people that may not know what that is, the OSI model, of course, is a, is a, you know, abstract model that we use in science. [00:28:06] And, and that's what I did. I studied various things, different layers of the stack and took that throughout my career. [00:28:12] So while I'm at Proteon, you know, 1993-ish, maybe three years, somewhere in there. [00:28:20] So this is when Tim Berners-Lee, you know, you know, develops the web and releases the web. It might have been a little bit before that. It might have been a while back. But it was somewhere in there, 93 or so. [00:28:36] But what happened right after that was that Marc and Drayson from Nixa at the time where it was at school in Illinois releases Mosaic. [00:28:48] And Mosaic was, for those of us that are old enough, remember, was, you know, really the first browser, the GUI-based browser. [00:28:56] We had other tools like Archie and Veronica and all those tools. And, but, but 93 was when, when, when, when, when Andreson releases Nixa. [00:29:07] So I think Berners-Lee was probably a few years before that, maybe 90 or so, I mean, what, so yeah. [00:29:12] So, so anyway, that, you know, the next best thing that happens, of course, is right around 1994, Torvalds releases Linux. [00:29:19] And, you know, I've been a Linux guy since then. I mean, I, I, even when I started my career, I, I don't, I think maybe one, for one short stint, I might've been out of Microsoft system, you know, as a user, of course, throughout my security cyber career, you know, I was on lots of Microsoft systems and, you know, in terms of investigations and figuring out what happened. [00:29:40] But, you know, Torvalds releases Linux and my buddies and I are all Linux guys. And so, you know, we, we know how the web works. We know how the internet works. Not very many other people know how all this stuff works. [00:29:53] And so we start doing things like setting up email servers and, you know, building websites. And so, you know, not only do we start building those websites, but, you know, again, we're hosting these, these email systems. And, you know, so we decided to get to the website. [00:30:08] And, you know, so we decided to start a company called Web Vision. And I started that company out of my living room in Pacific Grove, California. It was kind of maybe, you know, the, like the life of Jim Morrison, new car, you know, not a lot of money, but a lot of cool tech. [00:30:24] And some of the largest financial institutions were running the email through, through my house. And of course, so we had no clue about business. I mean, nothing yet. You know, we probably had one guy on our team. [00:30:35] It was maybe three or four of us. We have one guy on our team had some business acumen, you know, knew how to, you know, invoice people and that kind of stuff. But, but, you know, the, the, the rest of us knew nothing about that. [00:30:45] So, you know, we, we needed to get some adult supervision, you know, we needed some, we need to get some people going. We're still in our twenties. You know, we got this business. I've got this, you know, job over at Proteon. [00:30:57] And then I got this side hustle going on and that company down in Southern California, you know, essentially buys us. And I, you know, I moved to Southern California. We, we keep our name the same. We don't rebrand. And, you know, these people are stacked with, you know, sophisticated business people. [00:31:16] We start learning from them. We start building more websites. You know, we built auction sites, you know, we built, we hosted systems. We had a data center, we built email systems. [00:31:25] The dot com era is coming around. We raised north of, you know, $72 million from well-known institutions. And, you know, they bring in all kinds of professional management from, you know, all the, you know, some of the Ivy League schools and, you know, places like G Capital and all these, you know, top level guys. [00:31:44] And, you know, we're down on the ground banging it out. And, you know, it started to change for me. It was, the culture change. You know, it was almost like our North Star, you know, started to evaporate or, you know, disappear into the background. [00:32:00] The motives that changed for me, not me personally, but for the company. And I had gotten a lot of people, you know, good jobs. And, you know, we had a really good culture and we were doing really good things. [00:32:13] You know, I look back now and think about, you know, the discipline that I have in my company today and, you know, the discipline that I could have applied in that organization. But I just, at that time, I just didn't know it. And I was different role. And so I left. [00:32:29] And, you know, that was hard. That was, you know, kind of, you know, kind of a family disruption for me. I'm still, you know, friends of many of the people that were back then. [00:32:41] But it was an awesome experience and I loved it. Not shortly after that, you know, they kind of, you know, they became a victim of, you know, what I would say is the doc bomb that we all aren't familiar with. [00:32:54] I was probably out a year, you know, maybe more. When that all happened, it was unfortunate. We had a really good gig, but that's business. That's high stakes. That's the way it works. You learn. [00:33:06] I, you know, learned so much from web application development, data race involvement. And I was very, still very technical. I had, you know, started to learn how to manage people. I had started taking management courses and learning about leadership. [00:33:21] You know, my sports background and being captains on teams and stuff helped. I had always respected teams, my teammates. I got them motivated. But that part of my life was over. And probably took, you know, close to a year off. [00:33:34] And, you know, did some up and down the coast, California playing some golf. And, but I, you know, then I was ready to go back in. So, you know, I got called by a company down in LA. [00:33:46] And went to work running their engineering team, what they call Infosys. And I started to get more involved with security. I knew it when I was even, you know, in 1996, 1997, if I was thinking about how we designed stuff and built stuff back then with an application perspective and databases. [00:34:04] You know, I think about, you know, even something as simple as SQL I today, which is, you know, really kind of, I would say, you know, it's unfortunate that we still have that. [00:34:14] Those errors still happen. But back then that was crazy. I mean, nobody ever thought about that. That would have been like shooting fish in a barrel. [00:34:22] But it wasn't really well known. Maybe even the Loughcrack guys came around and, you know, much of this whole crew, those guys came around. They started exposing on that. [00:34:32] But I could see it coming. And it wasn't just at the application layer. It was across the board. It was throughout the stack. So I started to educate myself in cyber. Back then, I don't think we called it cyber. [00:34:44] Maybe we started to at the turn of the century. You know, by 2004, I had, you know, I picked up my CSSP, which was, I don't know how many folks had it back then, but it wasn't, you know, maybe 10,000. [00:34:58] I don't know, Tomas, you may know the answer to that, but it wasn't as many as we have today. Besides, I think it's still, you know, something people should go get. I don't specifically look for that. [00:35:08] I don't advertise it much. But it was, I think it was a bold statement back then. It was probably still, you know, I would say probably a certificate that we encouraged, you know, people to get. [00:35:20] But anyway, I got that. And a colleague of mine that I actually knew from Webvision was running countrywide security. [00:35:28] It was a lot of perimeter security, networking security. There were some really sharp people in the countrywide, super sharp people. [00:35:36] And he called me and said, Ed, I'd like you to come over here. What are you doing? And I told him what I was up to and said, you know, how'd you like to come over here and manage one of our security teams? [00:35:48] And said, sure. So I'd love that. So I went over. It wasn't too far from where I was living at the time in Southern California. [00:35:54] We were in Turner. And of course, they were assuming that. And our office was in Sydney. Beautiful cybersecurity operations center. [00:36:04] We had, you know, when I got there, that didn't exist at the time, but eventually it did. Buildings there. [00:36:11] When I got there, the team was, you know, somewhat immature. We matured that. We brought in good weaponry tools. [00:36:18] You'll hear me use those terms that have changed now. And, you know, we just, we stood up a beautiful security operations center. [00:36:28] And we did all the right things. We were early adopters of ArcSight. We, you know, we were the first guys in Sim. [00:36:36] I've had a lot of Linux experience and background in that. So we were heavy syslog folks. Some of you that know, you know, my company [00:36:43] would probably still see some of that around in terms of just like rough syslog environments and that kind of stuff. [00:36:48] So we knew all that. And now it's very technical. And now I had some, you know, I had also acquired some management experience throughout the year. [00:36:54] So I was leading these teams and I love those teams. Matter of fact, I have a food drive here at our building in Utah, in Southern Utah, [00:37:04] and I was working on Saturday, October 1. And before that, right before that is, I have a call with one of the folks that was one of the first guys on my team, [00:37:14] came out of the military, who were Patriot missiles, and he was probably a help desk guy. And I recruited him over to work on the firewall team. [00:37:22] And, you know, we're still, you know, great friends today. He lives out on the East Coast, but, you know, he sent me a text a couple days ago, [00:37:28] said, hey, I felt to catch up. So I said, well, I'm on a food drive on Saturday, why don't we talk? [00:37:33] Anyway, you know, the point about that is that all those relationships, all those connections, all those teammates, [00:37:39] all that experience, all that, you know, came right up to Countrywide. And then of course, you know, the financial crisis hits. [00:37:47] We get bought by Bank of America. And that was, well, boom, that got even bigger. Like, my world got really big. [00:37:59] I had been part of large organizations, because even though the companies I worked for, maybe, you know, [00:38:06] Raykel was a fairly large organization, and Pritian, I don't know how many people that had 500 or whatever, [00:38:12] but now I was, you know, in a company of 300,000 people, and, you know, massive mumps of assets, huge landscapes, places, [00:38:21] you know, applications and systems and data, like, all over the country, all over the world for that matter. [00:38:28] And we ended up taking over the security operations for Bank of America. And as a matter of fact, the CISO Bank of America today, Craig Froehlich, who some of you may know, [00:38:41] was still a very good friend of mine. And he was, you know, he ended up becoming a CISO Bank of America. And it started back then. [00:38:50] And there were so many great guys in Bank of America, great people. And I'm still, you know, colleagues with them. [00:38:57] But I really learned that, you know, high stakes, large enterprise, you know, governance risk compliance, [00:39:05] those things I really hadn't been exposed to, because up until that point, I was really on the customer side. [00:39:12] And now I was, excuse me, on the supplier side, service provider side. And now I'm actually on the customer side. And I develop relationships with, you know, legal and compliance and governance risk and architecture, [00:39:29] just all the things that, you know, all of you, many of you that are on the call understand today, you know, talk about, you know, being, you know, anyway, in governance risk compliance. [00:39:40] So I developed all those skills and learning how to work with those teams. And, you know, when there were some people down, you know, check boxes and stuff like that. And, you know, making sure that we were good to go. [00:39:51] And all, and our security was so, so great. And the other thing that I, that we had there that was just massively cool was the amount of, you know, it was like we had unlimited budget. [00:40:03] Of course, I would say it was unlimited, but we had, you know, budgets that we had never seen before. It was like, you know, you could spend money to, you know, get the weaponry that you needed to fight the bad guys. [00:40:14] And, and I think that's smart. You know, I, I, I train with, I'm a civilian, but I train with a lot of military people still today and various, you know, tactical things. [00:40:25] And we, we always talk about, you know, applying the best, you know, the best equipment, the best kit, the best tools to the situation that we're going to be dealing with. [00:40:33] And, and that's what we did. And, you know, and I learned all that there at Bank of America. And I had a great time and I built, you know, I managed lots of people there and have offshore teams and teams across the country. [00:40:45] And I had just a fantastic experience. I'm still friends with so many people there. And I learned incredible amount. I, you know, always thankful for the opportunity that I got there. [00:40:56] When I was there, you know, one of the things that I noticed was that there were so many, there was very, a lot of soft targets. [00:41:05] And these soft targets were, you know, compliance folks, you know, our CISOs, you know, just supply chain soft targets. And it wasn't so much that they could attack, you know, the Central Fortress of Bank of America. [00:41:18] Because we had the weaponry, we had the talent, we had the tools, we had the best people that we could acquire talent, we had headcount. It was that they would attack these soft targets. [00:41:27] And these soft targets were essentially straws and, you know, up into the liquid, if you will, as a conduit, a way to get in. And I saw that as a market opportunity. [00:41:39] And I, you know, predominantly saw that as small businesses and small business and small enterprise businesses. [00:41:45] And so, I think, you know, that was probably when I started to itch again for entrepreneurship. [00:41:51] I had been out for, you know, probably 10 years as an entrepreneur and back in, you know, working corporate America and I just started to itch again. [00:41:59] So, I left. And I stayed on for a year. I was going to leave it almost a year earlier. And, you know, they said, if you stay on, we'll see where it goes. [00:42:09] So, I did that. But, you know, the whole time, I just wanted to get out and go do my own thing. And quite frankly, if I look back, probably the thing that drove me out of there the most, I wasn't driving out. [00:42:19] I was driving towards something. So, I'll change that. But if I had to look back and say, what didn't you like about that? [00:42:25] I would say, you know, the endless meetings that I had to go to probably was one of the things that I just didn't get out. [00:42:32] Like one of my favorite books is, you know, Meetings Suck or the seven books that are written on Meetings Suck, maybe more than that now. [00:42:38] And, but if anything, it was just, you know, another motivator for me. But that, but I wasn't like I was running away from anything. I was running towards, towards something. [00:42:46] So, I started GuardSite. And, you know, the idea was, I would, you know, I raised a small amount of friends and friends and family capital. [00:42:59] And I wanted to target the small to medium sized business and small to medium sized enterprise today, which of course is just a massive market opportunity. And that's predominantly our market opportunity. [00:43:09] We, you know, we, we have both the large enterprise premium customers. And, but the, you know, the majority of our units, if you will, is spent in the SMB SME space. [00:43:19] But back then the SMB SME space wasn't nearly as sophisticated as it was now. And the bad guys still weren't really targeting them the way that they target them now. They were still going after, you know, the, the, the big guys. [00:43:32] Not that they don't do that today. You know, many of you on the call know that, that they still do that today, but they are certainly going after the stock targets. [00:43:39] And so I did that. And, but probably for the next five years of six years of GuardSite, you know, it was really more like, Hey, come, come, you know, can you come, you know, help us get our security operations center together? [00:43:55] Can you help run our security operations center? And so I spent more time doing that, you know, really as a consultant than I did building, you know, building what if my business or what GuardSite's business is today, I should say our business, all of my employees are on our capital. [00:44:07] Our business today, which is servicing the SMB SME market space, probably around 213 to 214. Maybe, maybe yeah, right around there. You know, the business started to transform into what it is today, which is a predictable revenue model, limited set of core services that our customer, all of our customers buy from us. [00:44:29] And it's, you know, we're in a growth market, but one of the cool things that I got between, you know, say the time that I was, you know, when I started GuardSite, I was very much on the ground as an entrepreneur, you know, wearing multiple hats. [00:44:43] I had got so much experience with corporate America, I've been exposed to great attorneys, and, you know, every everybody across, you know, all spectrums of business, and they were all my colleagues, and they're all mentors, and, you know, I did great advice. [00:44:55] I'm really blessed to have known all these people, and the deal, but, you know, I was a ground pounder, but what I got up until that point was just, I saw so many environments, and I was in some of the largest security operations center in the world. [00:45:10] And I'll give a shout out to one guy that probably, you know, really kind of helped me from a mentor perspective, he was a couple years younger than me, but it was, you know, a guy over at Warner Brothers. [00:45:23] I had gone over to Warner Brothers to, the interesting thing about that is I had been, I had taken an assignment down at Sony, and I, about, when I was scheduled to go down there, you know, [00:45:39] Warner Brothers called, Warner Brothers was close to my home, so, you know, it would be easier for me to get back and forth on the weekends, that kind of stuff. [00:45:49] And this is LA, I was only probably, you know, 80 miles from, you know, the studios, but for those of you that are familiar with LA, 80 miles, you know, that might, that could be a day, day worth a problem. [00:46:00] And so, you know, Sonya is out in San Diego, and interestingly enough, I rejected that offer, and I ended up going to, you know, run to Warner Brothers, work with, work with Ron Dilley over at Warner Brothers. [00:46:14] And, you know, he is, he ended up being a CISO over there, and, you know, I worked directly with him. [00:46:20] Of course, I was a gunslinger on my own corporation, and had people working there, but I would say, if I look back at one of the single, one of my single greatest mentors was wrong. [00:46:31] And, you know, I was mid-stage of my career, I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I got some just hardcore mentoring on that, and some hardcore, you know, security operations. [00:46:44] I had LA at Bank of America, but this was even more intense. [00:46:48] And, you know, we had, you know, studios all around the world, and, you know, and just, you know, a wonderful experience. [00:46:55] I'll tell a funny story, and then I'll start to wrap up here, Tomas, Tomas, so that people can ask questions. [00:47:01] One of my first times on the lot at WB, when I would say, you know, that you were allowed to, you know, go on the lot without adult supervision, [00:47:10] you're all badged up, and you're going to be in the commissary, and, you know, Hollywood still, you know, today, you know, could be a romantic place. [00:47:16] Like, we think about old Hollywood, it was, you know, it was just cool, you know, straight up cool. [00:47:21] And I was on the lot, and I'm walking from back from the commissary back to our tower on Olive, and, you know, it's a working lot. [00:47:32] It's a working studio. They're making movies there, making TV, you know, a lot of TV stuff. [00:47:36] You say today is still made up a lot, and it's also a tour. People are touring. [00:47:40] They have little tour buses that run through. They have little trams. [00:47:43] And there's a tour tram full of, you know, just Japanese tourists that are running, and they had stopped, and whatever picture they were taking, [00:47:50] of course, I somehow was, you know, in line with that, and, you know, so I start waving to them, and all of their pictures just start, you know, taking pictures of me. [00:47:57] So I'm convinced that throughout, you know, Mantles in Japan, there's pictures of Johnny Mac running around there, you know, [00:48:04] because I just happened to be in the show. Photobomb, I guess is what they would call it today. [00:48:08] But anyway, those experiences are great. I started to, you know, I had some butt in the seat. [00:48:13] I had a butt in the seat business back then, staff augmentation, had a bunch of really great people, and then I just started to transform the business. [00:48:19] 214, 215, 216, really started to pick up some speed. And, you know, and now today we have, you know, a company of, you know, 45 people. [00:48:29] We have, you know, multiple customer spectrums across, you know, just a plethora of industries. [00:48:36] You know, I learned how to manage at scale through my experiences with all the big stocks that are forming, you know, supply, [00:48:43] or those home breaks, all these just massive stocks and learning how to run those ops. [00:48:49] And, and, you know, and today that's what we have. We have a, you know, a robust, very robust business. [00:48:56] You know, we probably have been, we still are on our own capital, our own dime. [00:49:01] We've probably been quartered by, I don't know, no, no, you know, this is probably understating it, you know, well over 125, you know, PE, you know, IB, you know, not so much VC. [00:49:15] We're not widget makers, so they're not so much interested in, you know, family offices, investors, everybody knows. [00:49:20] And, and we just stayed to continue to grow our business organically and, you know, build a really good, strong, solid culture of, you know, mission-oriented teams. [00:49:29] And, and, and, you know, so that, that's kind of leads up to where I'm at and what I'm doing now. [00:49:35] Wow. So, so much there to unpack. You definitely set the record for, for intros, John Mack. So take your time. [00:49:44] Grab a, grab some water. I'm just going to do a very quick room reset and I'll turn it over to, to our other mods to ask questions. [00:49:52] If you just joined us, you, you missed a, a very rich and detailed story of John Mack's pretty, pretty interesting career. [00:50:02] He's took us down memory lane, made a few references to, to technologies and, and showed us the before and after of, of the internet, if you will, which I'm sure many of us have. [00:50:13] I'm sure many of us in the audience and on stage can, can relate with. [00:50:18] With that said, this is our weekly fireside chat. [00:50:21] I do see some party hats or celebration hats. [00:50:23] Thank you again for joining us. [00:50:25] I see a few new faces. [00:50:27] Some who may look like bots in the audience, but hey, all are welcome. [00:50:31] And if you, if you want to sort of ask a question, raise your hand, we'll bring you up on stage. [00:50:37] And you can queue up. [00:50:39] We're going to pass it over to Lisa Beth Lentini Walker to ask her a question of John Mack. [00:50:45] Hey, John, I have been enjoying listening to you this evening. [00:50:50] And my question for you really revolves around skills for the new environment. [00:50:57] I hear a lot of people who are interested in making transitions into compliance, security, risk, et cetera. [00:51:09] What do you think are the skills that will be needed going forward? [00:51:14] Yeah, so thank you for the question, Lisa. [00:51:18] Yeah, so I kind of, I try, I think of, you know, I, I bifurcate, you know, there are, I don't know how many domains we have in security. [00:51:28] Probably a dozen. [00:51:30] And, you know, it's, I kind of think of those as like your MOS, you know, after you've been in security for some time. [00:51:39] And I bifurcated into just our tactical operational units, and then our strategic, you know, and I'll put governance, risk, and compliance in there. [00:51:48] And we both need each other. [00:51:50] And for those of us that have spent a lot of time in large corporations, we fully appreciate that. [00:51:55] I don't know, I don't always, I don't know that tactical people when they first enter, [00:51:59] you know, the arena, I always appreciate that. [00:52:02] But for us experienced people, we more certainly appreciate that. [00:52:06] So what I would say is, you know, governance, risk, and compliance. [00:52:10] I mean, I would love to see people start at the tactical, you know, the tactical level when they enter cyber. [00:52:18] And the reason I say that is because, and you may, you may, you may, you may agree or disagree with me on this, Lisa, but I, but I think sometimes, you know, [00:52:26] GRC teams don't understand the tactical teams, what they do, and the tactical teams don't understand the GRC teams and what they're doing. [00:52:34] And really more rich than that is their value proposition. [00:52:37] And so I'd like to see team, I'd like to see players that you're even going to GRC space, you know, either start in the tactical space and or rotate into tactical for a while. [00:52:49] And I would say vice versa, getting tactical people into the GRC space, you know, oftentimes tactical people get into the GRC space and, you know, that's not for them. [00:52:58] Or GRC people get into the tactical space and that's not for them. But as far as the skill sets go, you know, they're, they're, they're two different worlds. [00:53:08] And so for the tap for the GRC side, which is the side, I think you were talking about for in terms of risk and risk management, I think there's a lot more education, you know, formal education that needs to happen there than, you know, maybe just making daily contact, you know, the enemy, enemy contact on a daily basis if you're in a tactical unit, because there's this ground, you know, fighting unit that can be taught and go through boot camps pretty quick on how to deal with, you know, [00:53:37] deal with, you know, attackers and learn things like top IOC progression, you know, how to do, you know, model, you know, execution models and execution analysis models, these kinds of things for quickly being able to determine, you know, whether we've got, you know, a bad guy on-prem or, you know, bad guy in our environment or not, and whether they were successful or not, we could teach that pretty quick. [00:53:59] And, you know, probably, you know, maybe within, you know, call it six months to a year, you know, you're going to be up to speed on the tactical unit, you'll be able to hold real weight provided you, you know, gone through the correct boot camps and the correct training. [00:54:12] The governance risk compliance side, though, on the other hand, that's a completely different skill set. And I think that, you know, coming out of school, at least, understanding of having any type of legal background is awesome. [00:54:23] Having, you know, the capability to author, write well, communicate well, customer experiences, learning how to deal with the business units that you're going to deal with in large corporations is extremely important. Getting those business units motivated to get their job done. [00:54:44] So there's probably some leadership in there. I think it's probably more soft skills on the GRC side than are needed maybe on the tactical side. I'm not saying we don't teach our tactical teams soft skills because we do. [00:54:56] They interface with our customers and a lot of that's, you know, through electronic communication which sometimes can be horrifying when you see the way people write. [00:55:04] But on the GRC side, you know, on the risk side, you know, I think, you know, some of the soft skills are probably more important. And then of course, just, you know, critical thinking and experience is really what rides there. [00:55:17] I don't think you can, I don't think you can go get a C-risk or, you know, have never been inside or like that. You know, you can, I don't, I'm not excluding people from doing this, but I don't think you can be on a help desk team and just go right into GRC and expect to interface with, you know, any of the, you know, [00:55:33] any of the high level people on this call. That's not going to happen. But you might be able to do that, you know, if you're on the help desk team to go to a tactical deal. [00:55:42] So I kind of bifurcated them into two, I think they're two different skill sets. But what I would like to see more of is, you know, cross function, cross experiences so that people can understand the value proposition on both sides. [00:55:54] I think we would reduce some of the friction that traditionally I've seen in large organizations between those two camps. And more importantly, getting the friction reduced with the business units, having business units understand our value proposition as a security team, you know, we probably have the smallest budgets and the smallest teams. [00:56:10] We could have the biggest impact if we don't do our jobs well for the entire company. So I hope that answers your question. [00:56:19] That was terrific. Thank you so much for sharing your perspectives tonight. I'm going to turn it over to Anil. [00:56:28] Thanks Lisa. John Mack, I know when you talked about your background, your experiences, you definitely highlighted some of the strong family work ethic and also giving back. Can you give us, you know, some of your insights on the importance of mentorship and some of the stuff you do outside of work? I know you're actively involved a lot of volunteer groups, some cyber, some outside of cyber. Can you speak to that? And again, some of those [00:56:58] traits that you think is not serving as a great leader, but also instills that some of that camaraderie and capabilities within your teams? [00:57:07] Yes, sir. So, yeah, I mean, I involved with, you know, several volunteer organizations. I probably, when I got to my mid thirties, I really started to appreciate [00:57:27] you know, volunteerism more than I ever had. I always, I think I always appreciated mentorship. I don't know that I was always, I might have mentored people in my thirties. [00:57:39] I probably didn't start until I got to my point. I might have, maybe I mentored them on, you know, tactical, you know, ways to do things tactically. But, you know, from a leadership perspective, that didn't happen until later. I didn't, you know, I didn't, I probably didn't believe that I was qualified for that. And, you know, I could continue to educate myself, make myself a stronger leader, become more disciplined in that. [00:58:31] I mean, I don't know how we can train each other. My outside involvement is, you know, I'm involved with the Marine Corps, their cyber team. I'm, you know, a volunteer firefighter in my community. I recently, I've taken a, somewhat of an LOA, but I'm still involved with that. [00:58:49] And I help those teams, especially if we have wildland issues, you know, I'm not involved as much as like when there's a car crash on the freeway, I don't go out on those as much anymore. But I do, you know, stay tight with the team. We have wildland learning that, you know, because, you know, there's less equipment involved, less, you know, things that you have to operate when you're on the side of the freeway or if you're dealing with a structural fire, you know, there's a lot of equipment and you need constant training and constant reps on that. [00:59:16] But really, the bottom of that is just learning volunteerism. I think volunteerism, for me anyway, has spiritually helped guide me. It makes me a better individual. It helps me become a better version of myself, which I'm always trying to do. You know, I'm involved with the jiu-jitsu community. I like to, you know, I'm in my mid-50s, but I very much enjoy fighting people that are in their 20s. [00:59:42] It keeps you in good shape and it's a challenge, but it's a lot of fun. And so, you know, I'm involved in my local community here. I mentioned I'm doing food drives. And I don't really think about it as though me. I don't really think about it that way. [00:59:58] I think about it as, you know, what teams I can be involved in that can help improve our society and help improve us as individuals and make us better and contribute to a better America. [01:00:07] How can we all do that? I'd like to see more people do that, but I can only control me. So I find teams and groups and people that are into that kind of thing. And I try to get involved with them and help them. [01:00:19] And as far as mentorship goes, I mean, you know, I would say, you know, 98, one of my, we have a thing here at GardenSide called Clarity. It happens once a week on Wednesdays. [01:00:30] Anybody can present on any topic. You get, you know, probably 65% of the company shows up. It's volunteer. It's awesome. [01:00:37] You know, we have everything from, you know, how to deal with fatigue to, you know, how to communicate well. We have all types of really cool things. And that's a form of mentorship. And it's critically important for us all to find that. But I think it's also critically important for us to listen for it. [01:00:57] And I mentioned, like, I had some good mentors throughout my career. What I didn't mention is that I didn't always listen for the mentorship. You know, I was, it happened, you know, later, probably, you know, my mid-30s to early 40s. That might be normal. I don't know. I've never really studied that. But, you know, I didn't always listen for it. [01:01:19] You know, I had my way. And I was disciplined about the way we were going to get something done. And my mission was to find a bad guy to terminate it. We were going to all do it that way. We were going to listen. But I didn't. It took me a while to appreciate mentorship. Once I, once I embraced that, once I received that, you know, I became a better mentor. I became a better leader for that. And I knew the value in that. And still today, we, you know, I'm, I would say, you know, a predominant mentor in our company. [01:01:47] I think my employees would agree with that. But we have that throughout our company. So, for any of those that interface with us, you'll know that. Like, we develop our employees as assets. And we want them to be marketable. That's one of the first things we tell people when they come in. We want you to be marketable. And we're going to help you be marketable. But you're going to control your own destiny and do it. So, you know, mentorship is a critical component for any of any teams to develop. [01:02:10] And it's, I think, you know, for me, the birth of mentorship was when I started to receive and accept it. And, you know, today I focus on mentoring others. It doesn't matter where they came from. You know, I recently hired a PhD, you know, PhD in humanities, who have just had enough of, you know, theory and academia and wanted to get in the fight. [01:02:29] And we mentor him. And, I mean, he provides mentorship in other ways for our employees that normally traditionally wouldn't be associated with cyber. [01:02:38] But it's critically important, I think, volunteerism and mentorship. And they're both things that, you know, I'm involved in. [01:02:44] Thanks, John. Thanks, Anil. You good, Anil? You want to say something? Sorry. [01:02:55] Yeah, no, I'm just kind of appreciate that, the insights, John. You know, and I enjoyed that write-up about your internal clarity session regarding the night shift presentation. [01:03:05] So I thought that was great. But also the fact that, also you give the fact that you highlight your teammates, right, with the video, giving the team collectively individual, you know, time, airtime to showcase that individual personality and, you know, what they do. So that's great. [01:03:25] Thank you, sir. I appreciate that. [01:03:28] On to you, Anil. [01:03:29] I'll say real quick, hey, Tomas, before you jump in on that, Anil, I'm just going to add something real quick on that, by the way. [01:03:33] Sure. [01:03:34] What I would say is there is in no way do I direct every one of those, you know, mentorship comms, mentorship committees, mentorship groups. Those are developed by my teammates. [01:03:44] They get all the credit for that. I may have provided them a framework. I may have provided them a path of opportunity. I may have provided them insight and vision on how to get that done. [01:03:54] But they're the ones that actually get it done in technical. So I appreciate you, you know, recognizing some of those write ups and, you know, us being a little bit transparent with, you know, how we run our business here. [01:04:04] And a lot of that is to, you know, attract new talent where, you know, if you've got that mindset, you'll be good for us. But I want to make it, you know, abundantly clear that it's my teammates that actually do that. [01:04:16] You know, I just happen to be, I just happen to be at the top seat with just a great view of, you know, that culture and their collaboration. [01:04:24] You know, and that's great. And like you said, I think part of that is you're empowering the team, but, but you're also giving them the latitude to shine in that environment to give them the avenue. [01:04:37] So that's great. The great that you're offering that out. [01:04:45] Naveen, over to you. [01:04:47] Hey, John, thank you for being open and sharing your insights. [01:04:50] As you were giving us your journey, two words that stuck out for me, which we talk about all the time, is learning how to pivot and adapting. [01:04:59] So I'd love for you to share some tips on how you've learned to pivot so successfully and learn to adapt to all the different things in your journey for the audience for us today. Thank you. [01:05:13] Yes, sir. [01:05:13] I mean, everybody on this call does this work. It's a failure. [01:05:22] I probably failed at 30 things already today. [01:05:25] Yeah, I know I, I probably, you know, I, you know, I start, I start my day around, you know, most days, or at least three days a week, you know, about 3.30 in the morning. [01:05:35] And, you know, I drive, so that, you know, so that I'm in the dojo by six. [01:05:42] And that, that usually starts with some kind of failure. [01:05:45] And so, you know, the way that I learned to pivot and adapt was probably much the same way, you know, I became a better mentor was I started to embrace failure. [01:05:58] I started to listen to it. [01:05:59] Interestingly enough, the, I would say there's probably a couple of significant, you know, points in my, in my life. [01:06:07] But one of them that I'll bring up today actually happened at a driving range. [01:06:15] And so I worked with a professional instructor, you know, when I was living in California, I don't, I haven't lived in California for a while. [01:06:24] When I was living in California, it was nice weather in California and Southern California and winter. [01:06:28] And I had always been an athlete and I probably started playing golf when I was 19, 20. [01:06:34] And, you know, I got, I got pretty good. [01:06:36] And, you know, I played in a lot of county and city and state tournaments and stuff like that. [01:06:40] But as, you know, I got to this point where I just, I couldn't, and you learn, you know, and of course, if you've ever played any time. [01:06:45] I'm a sport or golf or anything, you know, something like that. [01:06:48] You know, you learn, you fail. [01:06:49] What I wasn't learning when I was failing there was I was, I was just trying to win. [01:06:53] I wasn't embracing the failure. [01:06:55] I wasn't learning from the failure the way that I should have, the way that I do now, the way that I take failure. [01:07:00] And I use that as, you know, opportunity for improvement, which is a term that we use throughout Gargson. [01:07:06] What is the opportunity for improvement? [01:07:08] And so what happened to me was I was on, you know, I had a professional instructor, you know, he played on the tour. [01:07:14] And it's, you know, European tour, the U.S. tour, it was really, you know, top-level golfer. [01:07:19] And I played much match, he was a crazy good golfer. [01:07:22] And I and I was an instructor. [01:07:24] And one time when we were instructing, I think, you know, he was like hitting a low hook with, you know, up to 175, you know, 150 yards with, you know, this, you know, low iron that we might not normally hit something at 200 yards with. [01:07:36] And, of course, I hit it three or four times. [01:07:38] And I got frustrated and I wasn't doing it. [01:07:40] And, you know, I was, you know, openly frustrated. [01:07:44] And, you know, he read me the riot act. [01:07:47] I mean, here I am paying this guy to help me become a better player. [01:07:50] And I had been working with him for a while. [01:07:52] And he stopped and he said, you know, I'm not going to spend my time with you anymore because, you know what, you don't learn from failure. [01:07:58] You never learn from failure. [01:07:59] I mean, literally in my face, he's screaming at me. [01:08:01] We're on the driving range. [01:08:02] People are looking at us. [01:08:03] And, you know, boy, did that, that just, that just hit me, like, right viscerally, just like from the gut up. [01:08:11] And I thought about that on my way home. [01:08:14] And I just started to embrace it. [01:08:16] I just started to embrace failure. [01:08:19] And that was probably my, you know, growing, maybe, I don't know, maybe somewhere in my 30s. [01:08:24] And, you know, I started to become, you know, more, more receptive to failure. [01:08:30] And that's probably what taught me better how to pivot and how to adapt. [01:08:36] And in business, as an entrepreneur, for those of you that are entrepreneurs, for those of you that own your own businesses, and even for those that you haven't, you know, you're failing all the time, especially in high-level positions. [01:08:48] We see those and stuff that are on the call. [01:08:50] You know, it's challenging. [01:08:51] One of my employees asked me during a clarity session, we had a clarity session about conflict. [01:08:56] And they asked me, you know, hey, you know, do you spend a lot of time dealing with conflict? [01:08:59] And I said, 98% of my time is about dealing with conflict. [01:09:02] I'm not talking about customer, you know, dissatisfaction, not that kind of conflict. [01:09:06] Although that could be conflict. [01:09:08] It's just different conflict. [01:09:09] As the CEO of a company, you're always dealing with conflict. [01:09:13] And if you don't embrace, you know, some of the failures of those, then you won't get better. [01:09:17] And so you have to fail a thousand times. [01:09:20] You know, I mean, it's very good. [01:09:21] It was Malcolm Widal, so it's 8,000 times for reps. [01:09:24] But, you know, if you're just really good at something all the time, you're probably not learning. [01:09:28] You're probably not seeing the entire, you know, landscape. [01:09:32] You're not seeing the opportunities that are around you because you're just so focused on, you know, just winning and succeeding. [01:09:38] You're letting your ego get in the way. [01:09:40] I've never been somebody like an ego. [01:09:42] I'm not a narcissist. [01:09:43] But we all have egos. [01:09:44] I mean, we all know that. [01:09:46] And so it was just learning how to tame that. [01:09:48] Understanding, you know, how my neurology, my physiology, my neurology work better. [01:09:52] And being able to help tame that. [01:09:54] And most importantly, just embracing it. [01:09:56] And also embracing the fear. [01:09:57] And you learn a lot of that through, you know, if you're doing any type of, you know, hand-to-hand combat with, you know, full-grown adult males. [01:10:04] You'll learn that real quick. [01:10:05] You just have to kind of retain that. [01:10:07] And that's probably how I did that. [01:10:09] And I still do that today. [01:10:11] And in business, you know, like I said, I probably failed at 30 things today. [01:10:16] You know, I'm being hyperbolic. [01:10:17] But, you know, when I fail, I'm not emotional about it. [01:10:22] I assist data points. [01:10:24] I ask, when I'm working with my teammates, I require them to bring me data so that I can make decisions. [01:10:30] And when we fail, when we succeed. [01:10:32] But I would say probably the thing that, you know, the way that I learned to pivot was I learned to fail. [01:10:40] Thank you, John. [01:10:41] There's nothing more humbling when it comes to failure than the game of golf. [01:10:45] So I agree with you. [01:10:45] Thank you so much for sharing that. [01:10:48] Tomas, back to you. [01:10:54] Thanks, Levine. [01:10:55] Thanks, John Mack. [01:10:57] Thanks for that. [01:10:57] Bez, thanks for joining us this evening. [01:10:59] Anything you want to ask John Mack? [01:11:09] There's no bathroom breaks. [01:11:15] Sorry about that. [01:11:17] No, you're good. [01:11:18] Go ahead. [01:11:18] I just came on board here. [01:11:22] Hey, John, thanks for taking us down that memory lane. [01:11:27] And, you know, with some of the technology, I do remember those days. [01:11:32] But you and I may know the same person. [01:11:36] Do you know Jake Chisana? [01:11:38] He used to work for Proteon and Raycal Datacom. [01:11:46] That was back in the day. [01:11:48] That's a long time ago. [01:11:48] Yeah, you know, I would say at my advanced young age, you know, sometimes I have trouble remembering what I had for breakfast on Tuesday. [01:11:58] I got you. [01:11:59] I don't remember that name specifically. [01:12:01] Yeah, there was some Burkharts. [01:12:04] Oh, yeah, yeah. [01:12:06] I remember a Burkhart from back in, I think it was a Cabletron day. [01:12:11] It could have been, but there was a couple of them. [01:12:18] But, yeah, Cabletron. [01:12:20] I think you and I know that I was in Southern California at that time. [01:12:24] In 92, I had come out of college and decided to be a headhunter and really disappointed everybody in my family. [01:12:32] And, you know, my mom asked me, how much are you going to get paid? [01:12:38] And I'm like, it's commissioned 100%. [01:12:40] I didn't want to tell her that I was going to make $5 an hour draw, you know, because that's not what you go to college for. [01:12:48] But I was there in Orange County off One City Plaza. [01:12:51] And, you know, after year one, I decided to focus in the telecom industry. [01:12:59] And, yeah, that was good times up till, you know, the clock struck midnight in 2000. [01:13:10] It was some wild days and great times. [01:13:14] Met a lot of great people. [01:13:17] But you just bring in some of these companies. [01:13:19] I was like, oh, my goodness, I know so many people from those companies. [01:13:22] So it's nice to just come up here and say hi. [01:13:26] I appreciate that. [01:13:28] I think I have probably had employees, you know, or my teammates. [01:13:32] I try to refer to them as my teammates because that's what they are. [01:13:36] You know, some of them were born after, you know, I started my career and probably even before I started my first company. [01:13:44] So, yeah, we're older than dirt, man. [01:13:47] Back when dinosaurs were on the earth. [01:13:50] Yeah. [01:13:51] I'm still having a hard time with that. [01:13:54] But my kids tell me I'm old. [01:13:56] But I'm like, I'm only 53. [01:13:58] Come on. [01:13:58] I still got half a life to live. [01:14:01] So your mid-50s is the new 30s. [01:14:04] There you go. [01:14:05] Yeah. [01:14:05] There you go. [01:14:06] But let me ask you this. [01:14:09] You know, just listening to your story was really fascinating. [01:14:13] How do you think cybersecurity is going to change? [01:14:18] Or what's going to happen when quantum computing shows up? [01:14:22] You know, I've written so much on quantum both sides. [01:14:33] You know, but let's say it plays out. [01:14:37] You know, I think the biggest challenge we would have there is, you know, just, you know, our wire security. [01:14:45] And most certainly anything that we've encrypted at rest. [01:14:48] Because, of course, you know, the thing about encryption is it's just only a matter of time. [01:14:55] And that's why it keeps getting better. [01:14:57] It's about speed, power, mathematical computation. [01:15:01] And that's probably the thing that, you know, probably scares people most about quantum. [01:15:06] You know, where that's at in terms of application, in terms of usefulness. [01:15:12] You know, that would be the other side of the story that I've read. [01:15:15] I'm not sure. [01:15:16] It's definitely not a priority, you know, for our company. [01:15:21] And I don't see, I expect, you know, some of the enterprise firms have, you know, their downfield looking at that. [01:15:29] Because that's a huge impact. [01:15:30] But I don't see, like, tomorrow, you know, that somebody's just going to, you know, again, I could be wrong. [01:15:36] You know, how tech works. [01:15:37] They could just have them all. [01:15:39] But reality is there's some, you know, serious, you know, technology that has to happen there. [01:15:43] So we'll see where that goes. [01:15:46] But I would think that's probably the biggest threat to us immediately would just be, you know, [01:15:51] does our wire security stand up to it? [01:15:54] And does our, you know, data at rest that's encrypted stand up to that? [01:15:58] Is that? [01:15:59] I think probably, you know, I think that the bigger problem for us now and in the foreseeable future, [01:16:08] there's a couple things that I'm looking downfield at. [01:16:12] I'm looking at something near term. [01:16:14] It's just a problem. [01:16:16] It's just the explosion of data in terms of where it's at and the exposure of that. [01:16:21] So I'll give you an example of that. [01:16:23] And all of us are familiar with it. [01:16:26] You know, the due diligence area of life. [01:16:31] So auditors, specifically when we hire outside of, you know, large auditing firms to do various things, [01:16:39] whether it's, you know, audited financials, whether it's SOC 2, you know, whether it's company due diligence, [01:16:47] employee benefits, data, whatever it is. [01:16:52] The reality of it is, is that we try to do a pretty good job. [01:16:55] We have zero trust architectures and all of us, which is fantastic. [01:16:58] And I think we've had those for a while. [01:16:59] We've reframed those and, you know, we put them into something that's digestible for people to understand. [01:17:04] But the issue we have is we have these, you know, secure systems that have vaults of data that's protected, [01:17:11] but that data is, it moves in transit. [01:17:14] And it oftentimes is not, you know, what we would see back in the day, like a green screen, [01:17:19] where we know where it got, you know, where it leaked, where it was out. [01:17:23] And sometimes today that data, when we think about a hack, you know, we think about, you know, [01:17:28] Uber just got hacked and, you know, somebody reached in and grabbed a database, you know, [01:17:32] sort of a repository somewhere. [01:17:34] But the reality of it is, for those of us that are, you know, digitally familiar with, you know, [01:17:38] dark web channels, there's a lot of data out there. [01:17:42] And that data often, you know, comes from parties that, you know, are actually touching that data [01:17:48] and they may have really good controls. [01:17:50] But the data is, you know, I call it residue. [01:17:54] There's a lot of residue all over the place that leads to, you know, bigger attacks. [01:17:59] How you solve that problem is, you know, definitely our compliance folks help us with that [01:18:04] and creating awareness programs with that and, you know, showing people, you know, [01:18:09] the right ways to handle data. [01:18:11] I don't think we, you know, we'd say, well, sensitive data, to me, it's, you know, [01:18:16] what's not sensitive about it all? [01:18:17] It's all sensitive. [01:18:18] Let's just try to get that problem solved. [01:18:22] We have this proliferation of, you know, just data residue all over the place about all of us. [01:18:29] And, you know, that data is valuable not only to criminal actors, but, you know, [01:18:34] it's also valuable to nation states and anybody that has a border. [01:18:37] So I think that's something that I see, you know, and it's not just, you know, [01:18:42] I don't think it can rely on the user. [01:18:47] We have to have better sophistication. [01:18:49] And I know at the enterprise companies, we have that type of weaponry. [01:18:52] You can see both in the wire and, you know, we have the ability to, you know, [01:18:57] detect those kinds of things. [01:18:58] But you think about the, sometimes the nature of data when it lands on an asset [01:19:05] and how long that stays there, you know, that's a problem. [01:19:09] And some, again, you know, large enterprises have sophisticated weaponry for that. [01:19:14] But that's not always the case when you're dealing with, you know, [01:19:18] maybe an auditing firm or something like that. [01:19:20] It just doesn't exist. [01:19:21] And it might exist, but it might not be able to do quicker. [01:19:24] So I think that's the first problem that I see. [01:19:25] You would address some quality of computing I mentioned that. [01:19:27] I think the other thing that is really important were just some of the technologies [01:19:31] that are outside, maybe our typical, you know, thought process, [01:19:36] which is just in general drones. [01:19:38] I think we've got, you know, security around drones is massive. [01:19:43] It's not only a massive opportunity. [01:19:46] And Tomas may, you know, have a perspective on this just because of his niche [01:19:50] or his job in the stadiums and all this stuff that he has to protect. [01:19:54] But drones themselves are really interesting. [01:19:57] As a matter of fact, I saw an article this morning, you know, [01:20:00] about a drone that was so small that it unlocked the vault. [01:20:03] Drones are getting smaller. [01:20:04] It's not just the supply chain and the security of a drone, [01:20:08] but if you think about, like, drone delivery in itself, you know, [01:20:11] if you think about back in the West when we had stagecoaches that got robbed, [01:20:14] drones are going to get robbed. [01:20:16] The actual software that goes into drones, drone surveillance, just drones in general, [01:20:21] I think are something that probably CISOs are going to start to pick up, [01:20:25] especially if you're a large, you know, [01:20:27] we have large retail customers in our portfolio with, you know, [01:20:29] thousands of retail locations across the country, and there's a convergence there. [01:20:34] Anyway, I think drone security is going to be a real big issue. [01:20:38] We're not talking a lot about that. [01:20:40] We're talking about drones and drones from military applications and drone swarms [01:20:43] and drone delivery and drone charging and all the, you know, ecosystem around drones. [01:20:48] But again, security is an afterthought, almost like it was, you know, [01:20:51] as we came up, you know, security was an afterthought. [01:20:54] And of course, today it's in the forefront of our IT systems. [01:20:58] But I would say, you know, that's probably something we need to consider [01:21:01] even before we're considering quantum, because drones are here and they're coming. [01:21:05] I mean, we've got guys on our team that, you know, [01:21:07] come out of the military that, you know, [01:21:09] are intimately familiar with that technology and those technologies in the UAB systems [01:21:14] themselves. [01:21:15] And so I'm really tracking and kind of keeping an eye on that stuff [01:21:18] and trying to see what's going to happen. [01:21:22] Thanks, Pez. [01:21:23] Thanks for your question. [01:21:25] I was going to comment and say one thing. [01:21:27] I think with respect to the quantum computing, [01:21:31] I think we will see a lot more attacks on those cold storage locations, [01:21:38] so physical attacks, people trying to actually steal, [01:21:40] steal disk and then potentially using the advances in technology [01:21:46] to encrypt that data. [01:21:47] So that may be an interesting thing to keep an eye on as quantum computing [01:21:52] becomes a little bit popular or I don't want to call it popular, [01:21:56] but mainstream in addition to everything else that might entail. [01:21:59] So just a thought on that. [01:22:02] Not going to comment on the drone thing, [01:22:03] but I agree with you, John Mack, that is a problem. [01:22:05] And Irvin, thanks for joining us this evening. [01:22:10] Welcome to Clubhouse. [01:22:11] You got the little party hat or celebration hat, [01:22:13] so thanks for taking the time out of your day to join us. [01:22:16] Anything you want to ask John Mack? [01:22:18] And if you need a quick tutorial, you got it. [01:22:21] Oh, yeah, sorry. [01:22:22] It got me last week too. [01:22:24] Hey, John, I really appreciate you sharing your story with us. [01:22:27] Anytime you can get Nate to say Semper Fi, [01:22:29] I think that's a good meeting. [01:22:30] So always, always appreciate that. [01:22:32] One thing I take away from your story is there's a lot of great transition [01:22:37] opportunities that you had that were kind of, to me, scary. [01:22:41] What is the transition that you had that you went in with both feet [01:22:44] that you were like, I don't know, this may be the scariest thing I've ever done? [01:22:49] Because I have a lot of guys transitioning out of the military, [01:22:51] and I love your military lens, [01:22:53] that they're transitioning from something that's very known, [01:22:55] even though it's very tactical. [01:22:57] They're changing entire career ways of life almost. [01:23:01] And so those are very scary transitions. [01:23:03] But you had a lot of those. [01:23:04] So what's the one that you had that you were like, [01:23:06] I don't know if this is going to work? [01:23:07] And how'd that turn out? [01:23:08] I mean, entrepreneurship for sure. [01:23:19] You know, think about it. [01:23:21] You know, I'm a Bank of America. [01:23:23] I'm happily married. [01:23:28] I've got security, property, assets, all that kind of stuff. [01:23:34] And then, you know, I wake up and say, hey, this one will do it. [01:23:36] And, you know, of course, for those entrepreneurs that are on the call, [01:23:39] those people that are involved at, you know, early on, you know, [01:23:42] as you mature, that kind of fades a little bit. [01:23:44] But, you know, 98%, you know, it's like being a fighter pilot, you know, 98%, you know. [01:23:51] Well, I would say cyber is like being a fighter pilot. [01:23:53] 98%, you know, boredom, accentuated by 2% sheer terror. [01:23:56] But being an entrepreneur is 98% sheer terror, accentuated by 2% boredom. [01:24:01] So probably the thing of the unknown to jump into is, you know, is entrepreneurship. [01:24:07] I don't think that was ever so much of my career because I was always, you know, [01:24:12] I was so focused on a tactical domain that I wanted to pursue that it wasn't scary for me. [01:24:21] But, you know, maybe leaving, you know, all of that security behind. [01:24:27] I think, again, I'd have to probably bring that back to my childhood. [01:24:31] Like, the material aspects of my being are less important to me than, you know, [01:24:38] the spiritual aspects of my being and, you know, the discipline approach that I have in life. [01:24:43] So anything that involved, you know, money, insecurity, I could deal with that. [01:24:53] When you're, of course, you know, but, you know, I've got people that depend on me inside. [01:24:57] They have to be part of that mission. [01:24:59] And I would say that, you know, like for entrepreneurs that know that, you know, [01:25:03] my spouse, my wife, my best friend, she's been married for 20 years. [01:25:07] You know, she's been along for that whole ride. [01:25:09] And they're off an old book. [01:25:10] Probably just like, you know, oftentimes military spouses are. [01:25:13] We have that here because we still have folks that, you know, they're employed here, [01:25:17] but they'll get, you know, they'll get deployed, you know, in various theaters for some time. [01:25:22] And, you know, their military spouses are impacted by that. [01:25:24] I would say your spouses are impacted by that. [01:25:27] So I would say that's probably it. [01:25:28] But I would like to comment too on, if I could, on just military transition. [01:25:32] So, you know, that, oh, man, you know, we recently just, to simplify you there, [01:25:39] we just recently hired two more Marines. [01:25:42] And I don't, you know, I don't think I can get in trouble for this for, you know, [01:25:46] from an HR perspective and for all my, you know, for all the other, you know, [01:25:49] service people, you know, Army, Navy, you know, Air Force, Coast Guard. [01:25:54] You know, my Marines are my favorite, my favorite. [01:25:57] They come pre-baked with some serious disciplines, [01:26:01] some serious fight. [01:26:02] Although, again, I have, you know, all the branches of service on our roster. [01:26:06] So those guys will be hitting me up tomorrow morning if they get wind of this. [01:26:09] Maybe they'll be at the dojo. [01:26:11] But what I would say to those folks is that if there's any fear there, just abandon it. [01:26:16] I'm going to give you an example. [01:26:17] We have a guy on our team that I actually saw him on a LinkedIn post because I'm connected [01:26:24] to a Marine who is, you know, does a lot of good work in the industrial control [01:26:31] space. [01:26:32] He was a scout sniper back in the 90s. [01:26:34] And I've trained with, you know, scout sniper recon guys. [01:26:38] So I know their mentality and their makeup and the way they work. [01:26:41] And I really like when I'm with those guys. [01:26:43] But this guy, you know, was Marine. [01:26:46] You know, there still is Marine. [01:26:47] Let's run in the Army. [01:26:48] And he's, you know, he put a post out there and said, hey, you know, [01:26:51] I'm trying to transition. [01:26:52] He wasn't whining. [01:26:53] He wasn't complaining. [01:26:53] He was just pointing out the fact that, you know, cyber is, you know, [01:26:56] we've got this huge demand in cyber and such a low supply. [01:26:58] But it's tough for these folks to break in because, you know, [01:27:01] they don't have that initial experience. [01:27:03] And that's what I was talking in the beginning when I was talking to Lisa about, [01:27:05] you know, just the tactical experience. [01:27:07] And, you know, start there. [01:27:09] You know, get on a grunt team and work your way up. [01:27:12] You know, start just go make contact with the enemy on a daily basis. [01:27:15] Learn how to fight. [01:27:16] Learn how to do some analysis. [01:27:17] Learn how to talk up the chain. [01:27:18] Those kind of things. [01:27:19] And that's what I would recommend for those guys. [01:27:21] But anyway, this guy posted on there, you know, I don't understand if, you know, [01:27:25] I tried to get out of this. [01:27:26] He had gotten into LEO. [01:27:27] He was doing some stuff. [01:27:29] And, you know, wanted to get out of LEO. [01:27:31] It was dangerous. [01:27:31] And, you know, wanted to still fight bad guys working in air conditioning buildings, [01:27:34] get paid to do it. [01:27:35] Probably go home alive at night. [01:27:37] That's cyber. [01:27:37] That's where you want to be. [01:27:39] But he couldn't get hired because, you know, you need, you know, five years of, [01:27:42] you know, something, even though, you know, you probably don't need that. [01:27:46] We could probably get you in. [01:27:47] So I recall that, you know, he wasn't whining again. [01:27:50] But I recall everybody writing to him. [01:27:52] Oh, you need to go get this, sir. [01:27:53] Oh, hey, you got to go over here. [01:27:54] Oh, hey, you got to spend. [01:27:55] And that's not what he needed. [01:27:57] What he needed was a shop. [01:27:59] So I just wrote a one-liner, apply here. [01:28:02] And that's it. [01:28:04] Like, they won't get any help from me beyond that because that's not fair to my teammates [01:28:07] or my customers where if he had to get employed in those environments, like, [01:28:10] he has to go through that. [01:28:11] And he did it. [01:28:12] And he's on the team. [01:28:13] And he's a stud. [01:28:14] And I would say for any of the folks that are on the call, and I don't know that we have [01:28:18] that, but for those folks that are in the military that know those people, that's what [01:28:22] you want to do. [01:28:22] Like, abandon that fear. [01:28:24] Go for it. [01:28:25] There's a real good possibility they're going to say no. [01:28:27] Here's what you'll get, though. [01:28:29] You'll get that no experience. [01:28:30] You'll fail. [01:28:31] You'll learn the questions they're asking you. [01:28:33] You'll be able to appreciate that. [01:28:34] And you'll just keep grinding because that's what you're made up of. [01:28:36] So, you know, the second part of my response wasn't a question that you asked, but I wanted [01:28:43] to bring that up because I think it's important. [01:28:45] And, you know, we have, you know, well over 20% of our team is veterans. [01:28:52] And we owe that, you know, to them. [01:28:54] While I was building my career throughout, you know, the 2000s, and, you know, the men [01:29:00] and women that were, you know, now that we've, you know, come, you know, now that we're not [01:29:04] really fighting anywhere, you know, they were fighting. [01:29:07] And they were overseas. [01:29:09] And, you know, I was under their blanket of freedom. [01:29:11] And I owe that to them. [01:29:13] And I think we all do as leaders. [01:29:16] We need to give them a shot. [01:29:17] So find out where we can put them. [01:29:19] You can run around and tell people you support the military, but what you really need to do [01:29:23] is hire them. [01:29:24] And that doesn't exclude people that aren't in the military. [01:29:26] It just means, hey, you know, give them a shot. [01:29:28] And they probably come pre-baked with discipline. [01:29:30] I mean, our culture, for those of you that have dealt with us, will know it's a Roger [01:29:34] Mack culture. [01:29:35] Like, yes, sir, no, sir. [01:29:36] We'll get that done for you, sir. [01:29:38] Thank you for the opportunity, sir. [01:29:39] All that comes with our military book. [01:29:41] So sorry, I went off on that tangent. [01:29:43] It wasn't a question you asked, but I thought it was important for the audience to hear that. [01:29:47] No, I really appreciate it. [01:29:48] That's great feedback. [01:29:49] And that's definitely something I'm taking back to my Joes. [01:29:51] I do have a follow-up real quick, if I have time. [01:29:54] Is there something that could tempt you now to transition again? [01:29:56] I know you're at where you want to be, but is there a field or a thing that you could [01:30:00] do that you would like, you know what? [01:30:02] Yeah, I'm in. [01:30:04] Oh, just, you know, tactical, you know, training, teaching, you know, civilians primarily, you [01:30:15] know, various tactical aspects. [01:30:16] I'm just really attracted to that. [01:30:21] It's something I'm passionate about. [01:30:22] You know, non-tech related, if you mean. [01:30:24] If it were tech related, you know, drone security is high on my list. [01:30:28] But I think, you know, that'll probably be an adjacency or maybe even a core service that we [01:30:32] add here to GuardSight. [01:30:34] So from a tech perspective, it's probably drones, you know. [01:30:38] But the part that I'm really attracted to in life is just, you know, the tactical aspects [01:30:43] of, you know, shooting a mile off a target a mile out with, you know, a long range sniper [01:30:49] rifle. [01:30:50] Teaching people, you know, hand-to-hand combat. [01:30:52] Teaching people, you know, how to operate and shoot houses. [01:30:55] And, you know, there may be people on the call that, you know, that's not their thing. [01:30:58] But these are things that I do. [01:31:00] They're therapeutic for me. [01:31:02] I enjoy teaching people how to do it and how to be safe and how to be responsible, how [01:31:08] to protect themselves, how to protect those around them. [01:31:11] So, yeah, that's probably what I would do if I had to transition. [01:31:16] I appreciate it. [01:31:17] Thanks, John. [01:31:20] Thanks, everyone. [01:31:21] Thanks for joining the conversation this evening. [01:31:23] Great to have you here. [01:31:24] Just looking quickly at the chat. [01:31:28] There's a lot of no questions in the chat. [01:31:30] All right. [01:31:31] John Mack, look, it is close to the end of the segment. [01:31:35] We've got about three minutes or so, and I want to be respectful of everybody's time. [01:31:39] I do want to just make a very quick announcement. [01:31:42] As I mentioned in the outset, we do this every single Wednesday for about an hour and a half [01:31:48] or so. [01:31:49] Please tune back in next week, Wednesday, October 5th. [01:31:52] We're joined by Zanette, who's actually in the audience this evening. [01:31:57] Zanette will be joining us and sharing her origin story, her journey. [01:32:02] So I'm looking forward to that conversation. [01:32:04] Looking forward to everybody coming back and tuning in for that conversation as well. [01:32:08] So, John Mack, without further ado, I do want to ask you, which is, I'll call it typically [01:32:15] my last question, but this is a reflection question. [01:32:19] You've got a lot of years of experience. [01:32:22] You've got maybe just a couple of years on me, I'll say. [01:32:24] But, you know, if you had to look back and you had to give one piece of advice to the younger [01:32:34] John Mack, what would it be and why? [01:32:39] Get disciplined sooner. [01:32:41] I would say I've lived two adult lives. [01:32:49] One, I was never completely undisciplined. [01:32:52] I always had some level of discipline. [01:32:54] But, you know, when I hit my 30s, I started to become really disciplined. [01:33:02] And today, I'm extremely disciplined in everything that I do. [01:33:08] And the team that I lead follows that lead. [01:33:13] And so, it's not a regret. [01:33:14] I don't have any regrets. [01:33:16] I will just, you know, the answer to the question is, become more disciplined. [01:33:19] And do more for your community. [01:33:24] You know, I didn't appreciate that until, you know, I began, like, I probably got into [01:33:28] my 30s. [01:33:29] That may be a natural thing. [01:33:30] You know, I don't know. [01:33:32] But, yeah, just get disciplined sooner. [01:33:38] I like it. [01:33:39] Get disciplined sooner and do more for your community. [01:33:42] The biggest gift is the one that you give, I think. [01:33:46] So, moderators, any final words for John Mack? [01:33:49] I just wanted to thank you for joining us tonight. [01:33:55] Thank you, Lisa. [01:33:57] John Mack, thanks for taking the time and providing your insights. [01:34:02] Yes, sir. [01:34:02] Thank you, Anu. [01:34:03] I appreciate it. [01:34:04] John, thanks for, again, taking us down memory lane with some of the earlier part of the conversation. [01:34:11] Thanks for sharing your insight and your journey. [01:34:13] It's been a very interesting one. [01:34:15] And you're still going, which is great. [01:34:17] So, it's not over for you. [01:34:20] I'm looking forward to seeing where you take guard sight and what you do next, you know, into the future. [01:34:26] So, thanks again for taking the time. [01:34:29] I'll leave you with the final words. [01:34:31] Yep. [01:34:33] So, thank you. [01:34:34] Thank you again to everybody that participated. [01:34:36] I really appreciate it. [01:34:37] Thank you to the panel for the great, wonderful questions. [01:34:39] Thanks for all the military teams and military folks who enjoyed it. [01:34:43] And, Tomas, thank you so much, sir. [01:34:45] I appreciate the invite. [01:34:46] That's a cool thing for you to reach out to me and say, hey, jump on here and share some stuff. [01:34:50] I really appreciate that about you and, you know, just you embracing that and inviting people to collaborate. [01:34:56] That's really important to me. [01:34:58] So, thank you, sir. [01:35:00] No, the pleasure is all mine. [01:35:01] You're welcome. [01:35:02] Look forward to chatting with you soon again. [01:35:05] And everybody who tuned in, thank you all for attending and participating. [01:35:10] Have a good rest of your week. [01:35:11] We will see you back next Wednesday. [01:35:15] Same time, same channel. [01:35:17] See you all. [01:35:17] Bye, everybody. [01:35:18] Have a good rest of your week. [01:35:18] Cheers.