Fireside Chat w/Nicholas Stamos, Founder & CEO @ e-Share

[00:00:00] Hello everybody and welcome to our weekly fireside chat. Hey Nick, Nick or Nicholas, [00:00:13] what do you prefer? Oh Nick is fine. Nick what's going on? How are you? Good, doing well. Awesome, [00:00:21] awesome. How are you? I'm doing all right. I am doing okay. Let me just get this room set up. We got a few [00:00:30] folks popped in. Thank you everybody for joining us. Give us a few minutes. We'll get started. Hey [00:00:35] Russell, how are you doing? Quick microphone check for you. Tomas, hey, living the dream. How about [00:00:41] you? I'm doing all right, man. I am doing okay. Time to inhale a cupcake. All right, I got that out of [00:00:59] the way. All right, let me get this room set up real quick. Thanks everybody for joining. We will get [00:01:04] started in about five minutes. So just hang tight. Hang tight for a quick second while I get this room [00:01:14] set up. How's it? How are you doing Russell? How's your week going so far? It's been going good. Doing a lot [00:01:20] of good client work and preparing to go teach for the Army next week in Augustus. I'm excited to go [00:01:27] back on post. I've not been physically there in some time, so really looking forward to doing that. [00:01:33] That's cool. What class are you teaching? Yeah, it's a class on the critical security controls. [00:01:41] They are critical for a reason. They are. Yeah, and they recently been updated. So it's a newer version [00:01:49] of the class, but really excited to be on post. I went last week to go. There's a lot of, I guess, [00:01:56] background checks and stuff to go to get on base. And so I went last week, a special trip just to go [00:02:02] and make sure all that was in good shape. So they can come right in. Yeah. Hopefully they haven't [00:02:08] listened to all of your clubhouse. They might restrict your access. You know, they didn't ask [00:02:14] that. Of all the questions they asked for that and former times, they've never asked that before. [00:02:21] So I had to see if that comes out and haunts me. That's funny. Nick, how's your week going so far, [00:02:27] Nick? Good. Crazy good, but good. Busy. Much better than the alternative, so can't complain. [00:02:35] Yeah, busy is a good thing. I don't know. Something happened for me this week, you know, [00:02:40] like a season, I guess, kicked off this week. Hopefully everybody's been able to watch and [00:02:46] enjoy the season so far, cheering on your team. Hopefully they all won. [00:02:51] We watched it, but I didn't enjoy it. I didn't like losing. Which is your team? [00:02:59] Patriots. Down in Miami. The dreaded Miami. Yeah. Can't seem to pull it off down there. [00:03:07] Yeah. Tua, right? Tua. Tua and the Dolphins pulled it out. [00:03:11] Yep. I think we've won one out of the last 20 games. It's horrible. [00:03:17] Oh, wow. Yeah, that was like a really interesting finish a few years ago, right? Down in Miami [00:03:22] where people thought the game was over and they came back. [00:03:27] Yeah. It's a nightmare watching a game when they play in Miami. [00:03:34] I don't think I've asked you. Who's your team? [00:03:37] You know, I need to be like you, Tomas. All 32 should be my answer. [00:03:43] Instead, I suppose being in Atlanta, I need to be a Falcons fan, although it was hard to watch. [00:03:53] The Atlanta Falcons. Yeah, look, I have no comment. [00:03:59] I don't know if my app is working for me or not, but I think I selected it. Did it go through? [00:04:08] All right. We're good. We are good. Katie, how are you? [00:04:13] Well, I'm great. How are you guys doing? [00:04:17] Fantastic. Well, I'm doing fantastic. I don't know how everybody else is doing. [00:04:22] They all seem to be doing pretty well. [00:04:24] Yeah, I'm fantastic as well. Thank you. [00:04:27] All right. Awesome. [00:04:29] Yeah. Russell, Nicholas, are you fantastic? [00:04:31] Definitely. [00:04:32] Awesome. [00:04:33] Yeah, absolutely right now. [00:04:36] All right. [00:04:37] All right. So let me just do some very quick logistics, get those things out of the way, and then we'll get started. [00:04:45] So welcome, everybody, to our weekly Fireside Chat. [00:04:49] If it's the first time you've joined us, there's a little greenhouse on the top left of your screen. [00:04:52] Right next to us is Fireside Chat. [00:04:54] You can click that little Monopoly house and join our Fireside Chat club. [00:04:59] And you'll be alerted to when we do this. [00:05:01] But we do this every single Wednesday at the same time for about an hour and a half. [00:05:06] So 8 p.m. Eastern time, and we'll go for about an hour and a half. [00:05:09] We'll ask questions of our guests for about 30 to 45 minutes or so. [00:05:13] And then we'll open up for the audience to raise their hand and jump up our stage and ask questions. [00:05:17] So this evening, we're joined by Nick Stamos, who's the founder and CEO of VShare. [00:05:22] So we're going to get into that and learn more about Nick in a few minutes. [00:05:26] But before we do, it's the middle of the week. [00:05:29] Let's have a good time. [00:05:30] Let's have – let's use this as an opportunity to really relax, let our hair down, if you will. [00:05:34] Take away some of the distresses of work. [00:05:39] And the reason why I say that is because let's try to leave work aside or at least, you know, I was going to say at home, but you might be at home. [00:05:46] Let's try to leave work at work. [00:05:47] And use this as an opportunity for really just learning and growing, learning about a new individual and growing as individuals in our community. [00:05:57] So really, if you have – if you are a vendor out there and you do have a latest and greatest product that you do want to share, and yes, I know Nick is a founder and CEO of VShare, which is a solution, a product, if you will. [00:06:09] But if you are a vendor in the audience and you have a product that you do want to tell us about, don't do that today. [00:06:14] Let's really use this time to really get to know Nick, really get to know his journey and his origin story and what drives him and motivates him and has gotten him to where he is today. [00:06:26] Our comments, at least for some of us, I'll say, our comments and opinions are our own and do not – are not representative of our current or prior employer. [00:06:34] So please keep that in mind. [00:06:36] Yes, we know this is being recorded. [00:06:38] Feel free to quote us if you like, but just make sure you contact us and let us know. [00:06:42] So where are you going to use those quotes and whatnot, get our permission, if you will. [00:06:47] Besides all of that, let's have a good time. [00:06:50] Let's make this interactive. [00:06:52] Nick, I'm going to go around the room, introduce myself. [00:06:54] We'll leave you for last. [00:06:55] So I'm Tomas Maldonado. [00:06:56] I'm the CISO at the NFL. [00:06:57] Russell, over to you. [00:06:59] Thank you, Tomas. [00:07:00] Always fantastic to be here, to have Fireside Chat, get to meet others, be inspired. [00:07:05] A nice little break during the week. [00:07:07] Russell Eubanks, former CISO for the Federal Reserve of Atlanta, last two and a half years, been leading my company, Security Ever After, where I help cybersecurity professionals get promoted to CISO. [00:07:18] But, Katie, over to you. [00:07:21] Hi, good evening, everybody. [00:07:22] I'm Katie Hanahan. [00:07:23] I am the vice president of cybersecurity strategy for Boutique SI, where I lead a VCISO program, where I also am one of the CISOs. [00:07:30] I really enjoy this every single Wednesday. [00:07:33] Every time I can be here, I think I'm here about 90% of the time. [00:07:36] So really excited, Nicholas. [00:07:38] So thankful that you carved this time out to spend with us this evening and just really looking forward to the conversation. [00:07:44] Well, thank you so much. [00:07:46] My name is Nick Stamos. [00:07:48] I'm the founder and CEO of vShare. [00:07:50] And I just want to thank Samas for inviting me. [00:07:52] And thank you, Russell and Katie, for taking the time to participate. [00:07:56] Thanks, Nick. [00:07:57] Thanks. [00:07:57] And awesome that you, one, accepted the invitation to be part of our fireside chat. [00:08:04] So we do appreciate that. [00:08:05] And we do appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule to spend with us this evening. [00:08:11] So, Nick, I usually like to ask our guests this question. [00:08:14] And, you know, as you're going through, as you sort of think about your introduction and telling us a little bit more about yourself, why don't you tell us about your origin story? [00:08:23] Feel free to take as much time as you'd like to go through that. [00:08:26] But just, you know, give us a glimpse into you and where you've been in your journey. [00:08:33] Well, okay. [00:08:34] Careful what you ask for. [00:08:35] I'm a first generation immigrant. [00:08:41] My parents were both literally off the boat from Greece originally. [00:08:45] I was born here, raised here. [00:08:49] I did. [00:08:50] My parents did end up taking the family back to Athens, Greece for five years. [00:08:54] So third grade through seventh grade, I actually attended public Greek school and came back here and finished in the Boston area high school and then went to Tufts for a master's and bachelor's in electrical engineering. [00:09:12] And thought I wanted to be a VLSI chip designer. [00:09:18] And that was sort of my passion. [00:09:21] But it didn't quite work out that way. [00:09:23] I ended up going into the software space. [00:09:25] So as far as my professional journey, probably the first sort of moment that I remember was I was my dad was an electrician. [00:09:38] So I grew up blue collar and I would always sort of go out to work with him and help him with his jobs and this and that. [00:09:46] He was a union worker, a local 103, and then he would have his side jobs that I would go help with. [00:09:51] And that was an experience waking up early in the morning and working with live electricity as a, you know, young kid. [00:09:58] And then when I turned 16 and a half and I got my driver's license and I thought I'd have the summer off, my mom goes, hey, we got you a job. [00:10:04] And I said, oh, OK. [00:10:07] And she said, you're going to work for the pizza place, as every good Greek does. [00:10:12] Apparently a family friend had a pizza place down the street we were at, and that was going to be my summer job. [00:10:17] So I said, OK. [00:10:19] So and, you know, it wasn't a negotiation. [00:10:23] It was sort of what you did. [00:10:24] And so I took the job and it was run by two. [00:10:30] One kid was, I think, 18 or 19 and the other kid was 23. [00:10:33] The owner had sort of left his two sons to run the place. [00:10:37] And it was just the most horrible job I have in my life. [00:10:41] The younger of the two just would entertain himself by constantly bossing me around and having me clean the toilets and do all this horrible work. [00:10:51] And he loved torturing me. [00:10:54] And I remember I would, you know, sit down with my sandwich or supper or whatever before the rush would occur. [00:11:00] And he'd always have me, you know, go clean the toilet or go do this or just constantly interrupting me and making sure I didn't have a moment to sit. [00:11:05] So anyway, I started on a Monday. [00:11:08] I went through this every single day. [00:11:09] And then by Friday, when I was sitting down and trying to have my sandwich, he pulled the same stunt. [00:11:15] You know, he said, you know, go clean the toilet or something. [00:11:18] And at that point, it's like, no, I'm not going to. [00:11:20] I'm going to finish my meal in 10 minutes and then I'll go clean the toilets. [00:11:24] And he just picked up my sub and he literally threw it in the trash and said, no, you're going to do it now. [00:11:28] And it didn't quite go off that well. [00:11:30] And I just sort of a couple of expletives got exchanged. [00:11:34] I quit. [00:11:34] He said, what about your check? [00:11:37] And I told him he could shove his check. [00:11:39] And I quit. [00:11:40] So it's maybe around 1130 in the morning now when this has happened. [00:11:44] And now I realize what I did after I worked out. [00:11:46] I'm like, oh, my God. [00:11:47] Right. [00:11:48] My mother's going to kill me. [00:11:49] And she worked as a waitress. [00:11:51] And I had until 4 p.m. [00:11:52] She usually got home around 4 p.m. [00:11:54] So I have about four and a half hours to try to figure out the situation. [00:11:59] I said, what in the world can I do since I've embarrassed my mother? [00:12:03] I've embarrassed the family because it was a family friend that I basically, you know, she got me the job for. [00:12:08] I'm like, how can I possibly turn this around? [00:12:10] And I said, OK, the only way I can turn this around if I can get a better, higher paying job. [00:12:18] Right. [00:12:18] In four and a half hours as a 16 and a half year old, then I can get away with it. [00:12:23] Right. [00:12:24] So I'm like, now, how the heck am I going to do that? [00:12:27] So, again, fear sometimes works to your advantage. [00:12:30] So I remembered at my high school, I was the editor of the newspaper, the technical, the graphic artist editor of the newspaper. [00:12:37] And this is back in 1984. [00:12:38] So, yes, I'm 53 years old. [00:12:40] I'm up there. [00:12:41] And the Macintosh had just come out. [00:12:43] Right. [00:12:44] I think the Mac, maybe this is 85, because the Mac Plus, I remember, had just come out. [00:12:47] And I begged my parents to buy me one. [00:12:50] And I started doing typesetting on the computer, literally typing in all the articles. [00:12:55] Because back in those days, you would have to take the articles, take them to a typesetter. [00:12:58] They would charge you essentially a dollar a column inch to typeset and do the printout. [00:13:03] And then you would cut everything up, you know, use wax and like literally paste the stuff on blueboards. [00:13:09] And then the blueboards go to the printer. [00:13:10] And that's how sort of the printer happened sort of back then. [00:13:14] So I had the bright idea of typing this stuff out myself, finding somebody with a laser printer, which was brand new from Apple. [00:13:21] And they would charge me a dollar per page to print out on a laser printer. [00:13:25] And an eight and a half by 11 piece of page would put three columns. [00:13:29] So for one dollar, I would get 33, normally 33 inches worth of columns, which would normally cost $33 per dollar. [00:13:35] So I saved a lot of money by basically sort of doing this myself. [00:13:38] And so it was at a printing place called the Print Center that was not too far away from where I lived. [00:13:44] And I had gotten to know the owner a little bit because the laser printer happened to be in his office. [00:13:48] And he was kind of a technology geek kind of guy. [00:13:51] So I said, well, I'm going to go get a job there. [00:13:53] So I drove by. [00:13:54] I talked to the sort of the business manager. [00:13:56] I said, hey, can I talk to the guy's name was Joel. [00:13:58] Joel Skolnick. [00:13:59] I said, can I talk to Joel? [00:14:00] And she's like, okay, he's upstairs. [00:14:02] I go upstairs. [00:14:03] I remember I'm a 16 and a half year old kid, right? [00:14:05] And Joel's got to be in his 40-something. [00:14:09] He's an experienced business guy. [00:14:10] I've been around for a while. [00:14:11] I said, Joel, you need to hire me. [00:14:15] He said, why would I have to do that? [00:14:18] I said, well, the way I see it is your typesetting business is definitely not going to be around for many more years. [00:14:25] Desktop publishing is taking over, as you see with the Mac. [00:14:28] And, you know, you've seen my work. [00:14:30] I do excellent desktop publishing. [00:14:32] And you should hire me to do that because that's the future. [00:14:35] And, you know, I could just see a smirk out of his mouth going, like, who the heck is this little kid coming into my office telling me, you know, how to run my business and what's going to happen? [00:14:44] But I think I totally entertained him. [00:14:46] And he goes, so if I were to hire you, what would I pay you? [00:14:51] Which totally surprised me because I said, oh, my God, I didn't think about that. [00:14:54] I never thought I'd get this far. [00:14:55] So I'm thinking, OK, I think I was getting paid eight bucks an hour or something like that in the pizza place. [00:15:00] I'm like, OK, if I can double the salary, if I get 16, like I will not be in trouble with my mom about this. [00:15:05] I'm like, I think you should pay me 16 bucks an hour, which was a lot of money. [00:15:08] Right. Back then. [00:15:09] We're talking many, many years ago. [00:15:11] It's a lot of money today, but back then it was a lot more. [00:15:14] And he goes and I knew that he was paying the typesetting guy like 35 bucks an hour. [00:15:18] So I think it was a bargain for him. [00:15:19] So he goes, really? [00:15:20] I said, yeah. [00:15:21] And he goes, he goes, why do you think you deserve 16 bucks an hour? [00:15:25] And I said, well, because I know you're paying the guy next door more than twice that. [00:15:28] And he starts laughing. [00:15:29] I said, OK, he goes, tell you what, we'll try it for a week. [00:15:31] And that was my first job in terms of doing that. [00:15:34] And I did that for many years. [00:15:36] And it was an interesting learning experience because I actually got to learn about graphic design. [00:15:39] I got to learn about typefaces and styling. [00:15:42] I never went professionally to school, but just in doing sort of desktop publishing and having back then graphic artists bring me, [00:15:49] sort of designs and sketches that I had to implement. [00:15:51] I sort of learned a lot about that. [00:15:52] So it's kind of an interesting first job. [00:15:55] And it did well. [00:15:56] And it already sort of served me in the past. [00:15:58] So that was sort of my first experience in terms of being entrepreneurial, but purely a fear. [00:16:03] And, of course, when I told my mom, she goes, oh, how are you making that kind of money? [00:16:10] And I said, it's for real. [00:16:12] She didn't quite believe me. [00:16:13] She literally drove over and said, are you really going to pay my son that much money to do this? [00:16:16] And she said yes. [00:16:18] And I was off the hook. [00:16:21] Probably my next interesting job was when I was in Tufts. [00:16:25] I had actually finished my degree early and I wanted to graduate. [00:16:32] So I went to the dean and I had my papers and I said, okay, dean, I filled all my requirements, you know, blah, blah, blah. [00:16:39] I said, I'd like to walk, you know, with the, I was class of 91. [00:16:43] I wanted to walk with the class of 1990. [00:16:45] He said, yeah. [00:16:46] He goes, no. [00:16:47] I said, well, why not? [00:16:48] I met all the requirements. [00:16:49] He goes, well, he goes, when you matriculated, you sort of missed a small section where it said you have to pay for four years of college to get a bachelor's degree. [00:16:58] I said, well, what do you mean? [00:16:59] Like, I'm the first class to do that? [00:17:01] He goes, yep. [00:17:02] I said, well, but I wasn't planning on that. [00:17:05] Like I said, I'm from a blue collar background. [00:17:08] Now, at the time, Tufts, I think, was like $9,000 a year. [00:17:11] I think it's $70,000 a year. [00:17:12] Back then it was a lot less money, but it was a lot of money. [00:17:14] And the average cost for an engineer, the first year starts, the first year starting salary for an engineer, I think was $32,000 or something like that back then. [00:17:23] So I said, well, not only was I not planning on paying the additional, you know, $9,000 in tuition, I was hoping to actually make money. [00:17:29] So we sort of get in a heated argument negotiating, and he eventually threw me out of his office. [00:17:34] He calls me back a week later. [00:17:36] He goes, come in my office. [00:17:38] He goes, I looked at your grades. [00:17:40] He goes, you've done reasonably well. [00:17:42] He goes, I got a deal for you. [00:17:43] I'm like, oh, do I get to graduate? [00:17:45] He goes, no. [00:17:46] I said, well, what's the deal? [00:17:47] He goes, well, we have this five-year master's, bachelor's program. [00:17:50] If you pay for your fourth, I'll give you the fifth year for free. [00:17:52] You get a master's degree for the price of a bachelor's. [00:17:55] I said, best and final. [00:17:57] He goes, yes. [00:17:58] So I took the deal. [00:18:00] And literally right after I took the deal, a friend of mine tells me about this company called Lotus that was offering, if you were an intern, if you were a master's or a PhD student, [00:18:10] and they had an internship program where they were paying like $25 an hour with unlimited hours, as many hours as you could work. [00:18:18] So this is back in the days of Lotus 123 and WordPerfect. [00:18:23] And Microsoft back then was really a nobody or an up-and-comer. [00:18:26] So I went in and I interviewed. [00:18:30] And honestly, I thought I was interviewing at the car company. [00:18:32] I didn't even realize it was a software company. [00:18:34] It's a little bit into the interview process. [00:18:36] So I went in and I got the job. [00:18:38] And I started sort of understanding what software development really looked like professionally in sort of a large organization. [00:18:48] And it was an interesting time. [00:18:49] It was the times when I remember when I go into the cafeteria that they had at Lotus, you'd have a big picture of Bill Gates with a circle and a line through his head. [00:18:58] And right under it, it would say, this man wants to eat your lunch, right? [00:19:01] And she was sort of walking into the whole Lotus-Microsoft rivalry back then. [00:19:05] And so anyway, so I started some work on just plain old QA and, you know, like a bug system forum and did some small things. [00:19:13] And then one day the director of QA comes up to me and he goes, you're an intern, right? [00:19:20] I go, yeah. [00:19:21] He goes, you know any frat boys that want to work a graveyard shift? [00:19:26] I said, what on earth would you want them to do for a graveyard shift? [00:19:33] And he said, well, we've done all this QA automation technology. [00:19:36] And this is in the days when we were working on a Windows 386 platform because Windows XP had not come out yet. [00:19:46] So he said, you know, we're doing all this QA automation. [00:19:50] We've invested sort of millions of dollars in it. [00:19:52] And the idea is that the developers and the QA people, the developers write code, the QA people write test cases and test scripts. [00:19:59] And we do a build. [00:20:00] We execute all the automation at night. [00:20:02] We come in the morning and we see the results. [00:20:04] The problem is that since Windows at the time wasn't a real operating system, every time something would hang, the whole test suite would hang. [00:20:12] And so they wanted somebody to just walk around the office all night. [00:20:15] It was about, I think, 30 QA people. [00:20:17] And if they saw a computer, a QA person's computer hung, they just turn it on and off. [00:20:23] And then the system was smart enough to pick up on the next test case. [00:20:26] So I said, well, that's kind of stupid to have somebody hire that. [00:20:30] I said, what if I could build your box to do that? [00:20:32] And he goes, how would you do that? [00:20:33] And I said, don't worry about it. [00:20:34] So what if I could build you a box to do that? [00:20:37] And I said, give it a shot. [00:20:38] So I spent two weekends in the computer lab and I built this. [00:20:43] In fact, if you go to my LinkedIn profile, there's a picture of the, I think I called it the Lotus Time Control Reboot Box. [00:20:49] It was basically a box where you would plug the serial port and the computer into the box. [00:20:55] You'd plug in my box into the wall. [00:20:57] And it had a timer on it. [00:20:59] And essentially, if you, if the test case would, if the machine would hang and the test case basically hung, there was a timer where if you sent essentially any sort of garbage to the serial port, it would reset the timer. [00:21:14] And if it hung basically, it wouldn't send, it wouldn't reset the timer. [00:21:17] And therefore it would, there was a relay, would shut it off, shut the computer off for 30 seconds and turn it back on again. [00:21:23] So I show him this thing. [00:21:24] I go, here you go. [00:21:24] This is your solution. [00:21:26] So he goes, he goes, what the heck is that? [00:21:29] I'm like, no, it's, it's, it'll work. [00:21:31] He goes, I'm not touching that because it looks kind of weird. [00:21:34] If you see the picture in my LinkedIn, you'll understand. [00:21:36] I said, no, really, it's safe. [00:21:37] Right. [00:21:38] I even have a fuse on it. [00:21:39] It'll be fine. [00:21:40] So I hook it up for him. [00:21:41] He tries it out. [00:21:42] And a week later he comes back and he's like, this is awesome. [00:21:45] This is great. [00:21:46] I go, hey, great. [00:21:47] I'm glad, I'm glad you liked it. [00:21:48] He goes, yeah, I want 60 of them. [00:21:50] I said, what? [00:21:51] He goes, I want 60 boxes. [00:21:52] How much? [00:21:54] I said, well, Brian, like I, I, I like, you know, sort of borrowed the parts for one box. [00:21:59] There's no way they're not going to notice me borrowing the parts for 60 boxes. [00:22:02] That's not going to happen. [00:22:04] He goes, no, he goes, we'll pay for it. [00:22:05] He goes, tell me, tell me how much? [00:22:07] I said, I don't know. [00:22:08] I got to figure it out. [00:22:09] And that was one of the, it was sort of my first opportunity as an entrepreneur, completely clueless entrepreneur to try to do something in the hardware space. [00:22:16] So being completely clueless. [00:22:18] And back then you didn't have professors that, yeah, there's real, there was no real support for entrepreneurs. [00:22:24] And again, I'm not from a business background. [00:22:26] My, my dad was a blue collar attrition. [00:22:28] So I didn't have anybody to go to my professors. [00:22:30] You know, traditional professors, not entrepreneurs. [00:22:32] I went to radio shack, if, if some of you remember what radio shack was, I priced out the parts and the parts alone ended up being $300. [00:22:40] Which is the worst possible thing I can do because radio shack had the biggest margins. [00:22:44] Like if a transistor costs you, like, you know, if a transistor in volume costs, you know, a fraction of a penny, they would charge you like a dollar and a half. [00:22:52] They literally have multi thousand percent margins on their stuff. [00:22:54] So it was the worst of worst cases. [00:22:56] So anyway, anyone in 60 boxes, now 60 boxes at $300 just for the parts. [00:23:02] It's $18,000 that I need just to buy the parts to purchase, to make 60 boxes. [00:23:08] And remember, I'm, I'm poor kid that is going through school from a blue collar background. [00:23:13] I don't have $18,000 lying around. [00:23:16] And then I'm like, well, how am I going to get that money? [00:23:18] And then I'm like, well, what am I going to charge? [00:23:20] How do I know what to charge to build it? [00:23:21] Right. [00:23:22] And I had no idea. [00:23:23] And I'm like, well, if I charge another 300, that should cover it. [00:23:27] Big mistake. [00:23:28] So I said, I'm going to charge $600. [00:23:30] So now $600 per box, which doesn't sound like a lot today. [00:23:33] But back then a new computer was about $3,000 and a car was about maybe about $12,000 per car. [00:23:39] So this is a lot of money. [00:23:42] Back. [00:23:43] And so 60 of these at $600 is $36,000. [00:23:47] Now $36,000 is the starting salary of a recent college graduate with a master's degree or an engineer right back then. [00:23:54] So it's a lot of money. [00:23:56] And I'm like, okay, I'm going to ask for $36,000. [00:23:59] Oh, and by the way, I need half the money up front. [00:24:02] This is stupid. [00:24:03] Like who would trust a kid? [00:24:04] Literally, I haven't graduated whenever I am, 20 years old, 21 years old, something like that. [00:24:09] And I'm going to ask for an $18,000 check up front. [00:24:13] I'm like, not going to happen. [00:24:14] But I promised I would give him a proposal. [00:24:16] So I wrote this all down in a proposal, like a one-page thing. [00:24:20] And I hand it to him. [00:24:22] I hand it to Brian. [00:24:23] Brian's looking at it. [00:24:24] And he's not saying a word. [00:24:25] He's reading it. [00:24:26] It's very quiet. [00:24:27] Puts his glasses up. [00:24:29] Looking at it, looking at me. [00:24:31] I'm getting all nervous. [00:24:33] And I'm like, I said, Brian, listen, just so that you understand, the parts alone are $300. [00:24:38] I said, I need $18,000 just to buy the parts. [00:24:41] And I'm not being greedy, but I'm in college. [00:24:44] I don't have that kind of money. [00:24:45] I don't have credit or anything like that. [00:24:48] I said, so if you want me to do this, you guys are going to have to front me the cash for the parts. [00:24:51] And I said, you can pay me the rest on delivery, but I can't get around that one. [00:24:55] And he's not saying anything. [00:24:57] And he's thinking. [00:24:59] And he goes, I'll be back with a check. [00:25:03] And literally, he came back with a cashier's check, I think, in a couple of hours for $18,000 and handed it to like a 20-year-old kid. [00:25:09] So at that point, if you've ever seen the, what's that movie called, about the guys that were selling the weapons in Iran and they totally underbid the contract for like $30 million and the guy goes crazy. [00:25:25] War dogs. [00:25:26] Yes, yes. [00:25:27] I felt like the guy, and that's, yes, where he was going crazy when he realized that he basically gave it away for way of the length that he needed. [00:25:33] That's how I, because at that point, I realized that I way underpriced this thing if they were that desperate and they're trusting some kid with an $18,000 this year's check. [00:25:41] But I kept my word. [00:25:42] I delivered it. [00:25:43] I lost my shirt, basically. [00:25:44] I probably, if I made five cents an hour, that would be amazing. [00:25:48] But they loved the product. [00:25:49] They were using it 10 years later. [00:25:51] And my lesson learned out of that was there was no way I was going to go into the hardware business. [00:25:56] I'm like, screw this. [00:25:57] It's too hard. [00:25:58] This software stuff sounds a lot better. [00:26:00] So I sort of stuck to that side of the house. [00:26:03] So from there, I took a job. [00:26:06] In fact, from there, I was graduating with my master's degree, and I never really properly interviewed for a job. [00:26:14] I always sort of get a job. [00:26:15] Somebody knew me or somebody knew of me or something like that. [00:26:17] And I said, hey, I get a practice, right, in terms of, you know, going for a job interview because I've never really done this. [00:26:24] So I said, hey, let me look at the career sort of department, career counseling department on campus and see if I can find somebody to do some practice interviews. [00:26:33] And at the time, there was this company called Wang Labs that was literally in the middle of bankruptcy at the time. [00:26:39] And they were interviewing for Fresh Blood on campus. [00:26:42] And I said, hey, what a better place to do a practice interview because why would I leave, you know, Lotus to go to a bankrupt company, right? [00:26:51] And so I went on the first practice interview and I did well. [00:26:55] And I guess they invited me back and I went to a second practice interview, actually, at their headquarters in Lowell, Massachusetts, in what used to be called Wang Towers back then. [00:27:03] And I met this guy named Dan Cerruti. [00:27:06] That was the youngest vice president they'd ever hired. [00:27:08] He had just come over, vice president of engineering. [00:27:11] He had just come over from IBM. [00:27:13] He was running the AIX group over there. [00:27:15] And he was the most charismatic guy I'd ever met. [00:27:20] He was speaking to about 30 of us. [00:27:23] And he's like, you know, you guys are here today because we want new ideas and fresh ideas. [00:27:30] And you're surrounded by a lot of people that have, you know, 20, 30 years experience. [00:27:34] But let's face it, their ideas aren't working great. [00:27:36] Otherwise, we wouldn't be in bankruptcy. [00:27:38] So it's a big opportunity for you guys to come and try it and do things that you probably couldn't do company, right? [00:27:45] Because we're going to listen to you. [00:27:47] And number one, you know, I said, I want to work for that guy. [00:27:51] I don't care if they're in bankruptcy. [00:27:52] And then number two, I'm like, at Lotus, which was a phenomenal company, you know, they had something like 30, you know, software developers of which like 28 of the 30 were like at a senior architect level, right? [00:28:04] So me coming in as a fresh kid on the block, if I stayed at Lotus, I would have, you know, not gotten to do anything interesting. [00:28:10] So I said, screw it. [00:28:11] I took the job and I went to work for Wang Labs. [00:28:14] And it was great. [00:28:15] I got to, you know, I got to do stuff that I would have never done before in my life. [00:28:19] In fact, I ended up doing the JPEG compression decompression DLL form that eventually ended up in Windows NT. [00:28:25] So I can say I got some code in Windows when I was young in my career. [00:28:30] And it was a good step. [00:28:34] And then Dan left. [00:28:36] And then I decided to leave. [00:28:37] And then I took a job at another company called Softkey, otherwise known as a learning company. [00:28:45] And that was an interesting experience. [00:28:47] My first time sort of being a engineering manager, a lead sort of for a product. [00:28:51] And I did the job for maybe three or four, maybe three years, something like that. [00:29:01] I eventually had my own product. [00:29:02] I had my own team, sort of went up the ranks. [00:29:04] And if any of you watch Shark Tank, that was the company that Mr. Wonderful, Kevin O'Leary, is part of at Shark Tank. [00:29:12] And one of my projects was a Windows 95 first wave product, a product called Calendar Creator. [00:29:18] And we had some serious bug that we had to fix. [00:29:22] And I stayed up sort of three days straight when I was much younger back then. [00:29:26] I could pull it off. [00:29:27] And we fixed the bug and we shipped the product. [00:29:30] So maybe a week or two later, I'm in the elevator. [00:29:34] And the executives were in 19, engineering was in 16. [00:29:38] So I walk in the elevator and Kevin O'Leary is sitting there, right, Mr. Wonderful. [00:29:41] And I have zero expectation of him having any clue who I am, right? [00:29:45] I'm one of 3,000 employees. [00:29:46] I'd seen him in certain functions and stuff with the other 1,000 people there. [00:29:52] So no expectation. [00:29:52] But I see him and I go, oh, hi, Mr. O'Leary. [00:29:55] How you doing? [00:29:56] And he looks at me and he goes, are you Nick Stamos? [00:29:59] I'm like, holy shit. [00:30:01] And he was the president of the company, the president. [00:30:03] And the president of the company was like, oh, yeah, that's me. [00:30:05] And he goes, are you the guy that fixed that bug? [00:30:09] I'm like, holy shit. [00:30:10] The guy knows my name and he knows who I am and what I've done. [00:30:13] I'm like, yeah, that's me. [00:30:15] And then he leans over, he puts his hand on my shoulder and he goes, good thing you fixed that bug. [00:30:20] It would have been too bad to see you go. [00:30:22] And needless to say, I wasn't particularly happy with this comment. [00:30:26] And I decided life is too short. [00:30:29] And this is when Mark Andreessen actually had taken Netscape public. [00:30:33] And I said, well, if he can do it, I can do it. [00:30:34] I'm going to start doing startups. [00:30:36] And that's how I first started, you know, thanks to the motivation from Mr. Wonderful. [00:30:41] So my first startup was in the business informatics space. [00:30:45] And we did essentially sort of a search engine type thing, but it was specialized around business information. [00:30:51] Company called Amulet that went belly up. [00:30:54] And then did another company called Face Forward that was in the clinical trial space. [00:30:59] That did well. [00:31:01] We did basically clinical trials on the web and did quite well. [00:31:06] Went public, IPO'd. [00:31:08] I think Pete did about a billion and a quarter or so. [00:31:10] And then eventually Oracle bought them for like 700 or 800 million. [00:31:13] And then after that, and I was the CTO at Face Forward. [00:31:18] Then after that, I did a company called Digital Guardian. [00:31:22] And Digital Guardian is really sort of from personal experience. [00:31:28] I had, when I was doing Face Forward, I was getting a hard time from the board because they wanted me to do outsourcing. [00:31:34] This is the whole sort of craze of outsourcing back then. [00:31:37] And we were dealing with, you know, highly sensitive clinical trial information. [00:31:43] We were hosting the clinical trials. [00:31:45] And I just wasn't comfortable doing outsourcing. [00:31:48] But you only say no to the board so many times. [00:31:50] So I said, all right, I'll consider it. [00:31:53] And I go to my IT guy and I said, hey, go find me some sort of technology that keeps an eye on what people are doing with my data when they're, you know, thousands of miles around the globe. [00:32:04] And I said, it's not about unauthorized access. [00:32:06] It's about monitoring essentially for abuse of authority. [00:32:10] Right. [00:32:11] And I said, you know, this outsourcing thing has been going on for a while. [00:32:15] You know, I can't be the only one having indigestion. [00:32:17] Somebody must have solved this problem. [00:32:19] So a month later, I'm like, okay, what's the deal? [00:32:23] What are the options? [00:32:25] And he goes, there aren't any. [00:32:26] I said, come on, this can't be the case. [00:32:28] I said, you know, I'm not the first guy doing outsourcing. [00:32:31] I'm not the first guy that has concerns about their data information. [00:32:34] Somebody must have built something, right, to do that. [00:32:36] And he goes, no. [00:32:36] He goes, nothing's out there, but everybody wants a solution if it exists. [00:32:42] And that was the idea behind Digital Guardian. [00:32:43] DLP didn't exist back then, but it was us and Bantu that started. [00:32:47] I think we started within a few months of each other, just coincidentally. [00:32:50] Digital Guardian was the endpoint platform, for those of you that may remember. [00:32:56] And Bantu, basically, which eventually got by Semantic, was that they took the network [00:33:00] appliance approach. [00:33:01] And eventually, we were both right. [00:33:03] You need sort of both to have a comprehensive solution in terms of what was there. [00:33:07] But my concern was IP protection and source code and that type of a thing. [00:33:11] And that's why we sort of took the approach that we took. [00:33:13] So that was Digital Guardian. [00:33:15] And then after that, I sort of saw the cloud coming. [00:33:19] And I said, you know, we've gotten pretty good at containing data with a myriad of different [00:33:25] solutions. [00:33:26] But the reality is companies have to share data all the time, right? [00:33:30] Highly sensitive data all the time. [00:33:33] And there's no centralized solution. [00:33:35] Like, you know, there's data rooms for M&A transactions. [00:33:38] There's like Interlinks and Merrill. [00:33:40] There's secure mail solutions from Proofpoint or Mimecast or whatever. [00:33:44] There's, you know, SFTP solutions. [00:33:46] There's all these different solutions for data exfiltration from the company. [00:33:50] But there's no central control, no central repository. [00:33:53] No, you know, once DLP sort of says, hey, yeah, the data has to leave, you know, DLP goes, [00:33:59] hey, it's not my problem. [00:33:59] Good luck. [00:34:00] Have a nice life, right? [00:34:01] I shirk all responsibility. [00:34:03] And so that was sort of the idea behind eShare was, well, how do we sort of provide an [00:34:07] external collaboration platform that gives you the ability to have that central manageability? [00:34:11] So that's my story. [00:34:16] Wow. [00:34:18] So much, so much, so much to dive into there. [00:34:23] Nick, thanks for sharing that story. [00:34:26] I'll pass it over to you, Russell. [00:34:28] Thanks, Tomas. [00:34:30] Nick, man, you took us down memory lane of the companies, the things. [00:34:34] And I'll just say, you know, I'm looking at your LinkedIn, you know, you and I share something. [00:34:39] We both graduated high school the same year. [00:34:41] Oh, really? [00:34:42] Yeah, yeah. [00:34:43] I respect your age. [00:34:45] Yeah, class of 87. [00:34:46] Yeah, see, see, see. [00:34:47] It's been a while. [00:34:48] It's been a minute. [00:34:48] But I can think of like a hundred questions. [00:34:51] But one thing I noticed in your LinkedIn, you talked about how you're kind of obsessed with [00:34:56] customer satisfaction. [00:34:58] You know, when I think of customer satisfaction, I think, I'm in Atlanta, I think of Chick-fil-A. [00:35:01] You know, when you go get a chicken sandwich, they say what they say. [00:35:04] And it's like, you know, it's just a chicken sandwich. [00:35:07] But the way I feel there, I mean, I just want to go there versus anywhere else. [00:35:10] So it's more common. [00:35:11] But in cyber, I can't say it's that way. [00:35:15] Why is that? [00:35:16] And what can we as security leaders, security professionals do to be more geared towards [00:35:22] customer satisfaction? [00:35:23] Love to hear some advice there. [00:35:25] I think probably my biggest lesson learned between sort of DG and eShare, so sort of in [00:35:34] that space, was that you have to remember at the end of the day, the company's got to pay [00:35:40] the bills, right? [00:35:41] And probably my best sort of mentor from, and I think one of the most amazing CISOs I worked [00:35:50] with, a guy named Chuck Deaton that used to be at Humana for many years. [00:35:53] And his attitude, and there was a few more CISOs that were out there, but the CISOs, another [00:35:58] old guy named from Cigna, what was, oh God, it was Cigna CISOs' name, I can't remember. [00:36:05] But their attitude, sort of the commonality that they had was that they viewed that they [00:36:10] were there to service the business, right? [00:36:13] They were there to help business people stay safe, be competitive, and be productive, right? [00:36:19] In everything that they did. [00:36:20] And which goes against most sort of natural instincts, which is lock down the environment, [00:36:27] assume people are dumb, prevent them from, you know, save people from themselves, right? [00:36:31] In terms of what was there. [00:36:32] But he sort of had a very different attitude, which is very critical in sort of the design [00:36:37] of Digital Guardian. [00:36:38] And what he realized is that if you tell people, most people, the assumption was most people [00:36:43] want to do the right thing. [00:36:44] They need guardrails to help them do the right thing when they go off track, because you can't [00:36:49] possibly expect them to always keep every situation in mind. [00:36:53] And one of the experiments that he did was that he, DG was famous for having prompting. [00:36:59] So you could, we monitored every single action that you did, network uploads, files, transfers, [00:37:05] everything, everything you could do. [00:37:06] We had a sort of a kernel shim in to track it, you know, back then. [00:37:10] But the more critical part is that we could prompt the user before any action actually occurred. [00:37:15] So, you know, when you copied something through mobile media, when you uploaded something to [00:37:19] a certain website, when you took certain actions. [00:37:21] And his idea was, I don't want to block, you know, I just want to prompt the user and let them know, [00:37:28] hey, what you're about to do is a risky behavior. [00:37:31] And, you know, we suggest you don't continue. [00:37:33] But if you want to continue, click, you know, click yes. [00:37:35] And by the way, you know, this event is tracked and audited, right, in terms of what's there. [00:37:39] And what he found is through a non-enforcement, purely a voluntary informational, what I thought [00:37:46] at the time was a silly prompt, he got like 98% of the users to change their behavior, right, [00:37:52] which just was mind-blowing to me. [00:37:54] And so when you think of yourself as a partner to the business and not sort of somebody there [00:38:02] to keep them in line and, you know, lock them down and that type of thing, [00:38:05] but you really take more of the consultative approach and that sort of mindset, [00:38:09] it is essentially a customer satisfaction mindset, which is how do I best serve my business, [00:38:13] which is how do I best serve, you know, the people that are trying every day to make sure [00:38:17] that we make our numbers and we make our payrolls and we have the money to buy the cyber tools [00:38:20] that we need and sort of work in that cycle. [00:38:23] So I think, you know, coming to the table with the right mindset is probably one of the most [00:38:29] critical components in getting the appropriate, you know, customer satisfaction. [00:38:32] And, you know, the old joke I tell all my people is the reason God gave us two ears [00:38:36] and one mouth is because we should listen more than we speak, right? [00:38:39] And so listening to people's problems and challenges and really being able to, you know, [00:38:45] give the user what they need, not necessarily what they want, but if you understand, you know, [00:38:49] what they want and why they want it, and then you can give them essentially what they need [00:38:53] so they get their job done, that's usually a really good compromise, you know, [00:38:58] for that particular situation. [00:39:00] I don't know if that answered your question or not. [00:39:01] That was fantastic. [00:39:03] I love it. [00:39:04] You talked about architecting environments to be able to partner with the business. [00:39:07] I love that so much. [00:39:09] I can think of like 100 questions, but I think it's time for me to pass over to Katie. [00:39:13] So Katie, over to you. [00:39:16] Well, thanks, Russell. [00:39:17] Yeah, real quick before I jump into my questions, I'm going to just do a quick room reset. [00:39:23] So this is Fireside Chat with Nicholas Stamos. [00:39:26] We're here every single Wednesday night between 8 and 9.30 Eastern Time. [00:39:31] If you'd like to be alerted to when the club is meeting, just click on the little green box, [00:39:37] the little green house right next to Fireside Chat. [00:39:41] You'll be alerted to those. [00:39:42] But then the nice thing is if you missed part of tonight or if you'd like to go back and listen [00:39:46] to some previous guests and we've had some amazing guests, as you can tell from what we're doing [00:39:51] tonight with Nicholas here, you can go back and listen to those as well. [00:39:54] I do that a lot. [00:39:55] Sometimes when there are nuggets, I'll just listen to it as I'm walking around the block [00:40:00] with my dog or whatever. [00:40:01] So just thank you all for being here. [00:40:03] And just want to let you know after my question, just please raise your hand if you have any [00:40:06] questions as well. [00:40:08] And we'll bring you up on the stage. [00:40:09] I'm sure if you're like me, you already have 15. [00:40:11] And I'm looking at the people in the audience tonight, I'm sure we'll have plenty of questions [00:40:17] to bring to Nicholas. [00:40:20] But if I could then, Nicholas, I'm going to jump into my question. [00:40:26] First of all, the war dogs thing was really funny to me because early on in my career, [00:40:31] the DOT was my client and I was very new, like I was just out of college, my very first job. [00:40:38] And I at one point won a bid off of Fed BizOps, which is what they used in war dogs to find [00:40:45] the thing out of Rock Island, our soul and the same the same contracting office and everything. [00:40:51] I overbid by a million dollars on a three million dollar bid. [00:40:55] So that is the worst feeling. [00:40:57] But don't you learn a lesson about value, right? [00:41:01] Oh, yeah, absolutely. [00:41:02] And that's what I picked up on. [00:41:05] You know, early on, you being able to really recognize your value as an intern, recognize [00:41:09] your value as, you know, you had the power to just go ahead and ask, like, listen, this [00:41:16] is what I need to be able to accomplish this goal in my internship. [00:41:20] You, you know, you met with Kevin O'Leary and thought, you know what, that's motivation [00:41:24] enough for me to just throw myself into something else. [00:41:27] And then, you know, go find a technology that monitors for your for abuse of authority. [00:41:32] Like all those things to me are super interesting. [00:41:35] I would love to know two things. [00:41:38] One, a little bit more about where do you if you know some people I don't know if I even [00:41:43] know where some of my personality traits come from. [00:41:45] But if you know where that came from for you, that gumption, that motivation to always strive [00:41:52] forward and defining kind of the power in your individuality and then also how you apply that [00:41:58] when you look at the next kind of wave of technology, where you're putting your energy [00:42:07] into, you know, that entrepreneurial spirit that you have. [00:42:13] So those are two tough and great questions. [00:42:16] Your first question, where do I sort of get the personality from? [00:42:20] I think I think a lot of it and I think I mentioned in my first story, a lot of it is sort of being able [00:42:27] to harness fear, right? [00:42:29] We're all afraid, whether it's afraid of at the time what I was going to say to my mother [00:42:34] after what I said to them or whether it was fear of failure or feel of not succeeding or sort of, [00:42:40] you know, fear in my point of view is something to be sort of embraced. [00:42:45] And if you can embrace it and harness it rather than having it be demotivational or have it prevent [00:42:51] you from doing something, I think that's sort of a key skill is sort of embrace the fear sort of [00:42:56] and leverage it to sort of accomplish what you want to do and to get the gumption and the courage, [00:43:01] right, to move forward. [00:43:04] So, you know, that's the best insight I can give you in terms of what's there is fear has been [00:43:09] very motivational for me, whether it was, you know, putting myself in an uncomfortable position [00:43:15] at Lotus and going, how do I get myself? [00:43:18] I don't want to be embarrassed, right? [00:43:19] But the numbers are the numbers and I'm asking for something that sounds crazy, at least from [00:43:24] my point of view. [00:43:25] And then, you know, later on realizing I didn't ask enough. [00:43:28] But I think fear, you know, being able to harness fear and to turn it into something positive [00:43:33] rather than something that prevents you from doing things, I think is probably one of the [00:43:38] the key sort of techniques to try to leverage is, you know, understand that and don't let [00:43:43] it demotivate you, but use it to motivate you to move forward and plow through things. [00:43:50] Your second question in terms of the technology, you know, the challenge that sort of I've always [00:43:57] had is, is I always want to, and I know Russell's my age and but you and Tomas are definitely [00:44:04] much younger, but, you know, Russell maybe remembers the day of Egghead. [00:44:09] There's a store that actually sold like in the olden days, you know, when you actually bought [00:44:13] software on discs, you would go to a store to buy a box, right? [00:44:17] And the box had the software in it. [00:44:19] And at the time, the famous store that was out there was a store called Egghead. [00:44:23] And they were selling basically, you know, boxes where you'd buy your Lotus one, two, [00:44:27] three or whatever. [00:44:29] And the the motivation that I had is when I when I worked on my project at Lotus and and [00:44:34] we actually had the ability to go to the assembly line, build the first boxes with the discs. [00:44:39] I think it was like a I think it was still going on. [00:44:42] Yeah, it was discs and CD. [00:44:43] CDs were just coming out. [00:44:45] So you get it in a three and a half inch disc or you get an SCD and we got to build the [00:44:49] boxes. [00:44:49] And then when I go into Egghead and I see like, you know, I work on a product called Improv. [00:44:53] It's sort of a multidimensional spreadsheet. [00:44:55] When I saw the Improv product on the shelves, it just gave me such a sense of pride. [00:44:58] And I'd see people buying it and talking about it positively. [00:45:02] It's just the ability to build something that people admire and find useful. [00:45:07] It's just a high motivation. [00:45:08] And so the trick in doing startups is sort of realizing, you know, where are the trends [00:45:13] going? [00:45:14] What are some of the pain points that people are seeing? [00:45:17] And, you know, trying to think, you know, you have to think ahead of the market. [00:45:24] So, you know, if you're building what Gartner is talking about, you're dead because it's already [00:45:28] too old, so to speak. [00:45:30] But if you're building something that, you know, Gartner is not going to talk about for [00:45:35] 15 years, you're not going to survive either. [00:45:38] So it's that magic act between sort of looking far ahead into what you think are serious, [00:45:43] big issues and challenges that people have, but not too far ahead where, you know, you're [00:45:50] not going to be able to monetize things. [00:45:52] And I've gotten very close to making mistakes. [00:45:54] I mean, with eShare, I just personally talking about eShare, we have a dependency on cloud [00:46:00] adoption of M365 and Google. [00:46:03] And our target customer is mainly Fortune 2000 organizations, mainly regulated Fortune 2000 [00:46:08] organizations, right? [00:46:09] Some level of regulation. [00:46:11] And quite frankly, pre-COVID, you know, the banks and the highly regulated industries were [00:46:17] like, yeah, we're not going to the cloud. [00:46:18] We don't trust Microsoft. [00:46:19] We don't trust Google. [00:46:20] We don't trust this. [00:46:21] We don't trust that. [00:46:22] Right. [00:46:23] And COVID came and all of a sudden they have to have, you know, 200,000, 100,000, 200,000 [00:46:28] employees working from home. [00:46:29] And they realized their on-prem data centers weren't going to cut it. [00:46:32] And all of a sudden they were rushing to implement, you know, Microsoft or Google or, you know, [00:46:36] take a cloud for a strategy and the whole world sort of turned upside down within, within [00:46:40] sort of those two, two and a half years, probably, you know, 10 years of acceleration in [00:46:44] a matter of two and a half years. [00:46:45] And so we got lucky, right? [00:46:47] Our business totally turned around, not because of anything we did, but because, you know, [00:46:51] we got lucky in terms of the circumstances. [00:46:54] And that's another thing as a founder, you have to remember, you could be the smartest [00:46:58] guy or gal in the world and you can have the best product in the world. [00:47:02] But if you don't have a little bit of luck on your side, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, [00:47:07] it's not going to work out because there is a timing component to everything that you do [00:47:10] as well. [00:47:11] So I don't know how insightful that was, but that's the, that's the reality, at least [00:47:16] from my point of view. [00:47:18] No, incredibly insightful. [00:47:20] Yeah. [00:47:20] Thank you. [00:47:21] Yeah. [00:47:21] There's so much there too. [00:47:23] I mean, even bringing up the, the concept too, of trust in our industry and developing [00:47:27] solutions around the engagement of our employees and consumers and things. [00:47:32] So I'm sure we could have a few hours of conversation just around the word trust as [00:47:36] it relates to our, our business. [00:47:38] But with that, one of our frequent contributors and guests here and part of this community, [00:47:45] Jennifer Sanders, just joined the stage. [00:47:48] So I would love to give the mic over to the esteemed Jennifer Sanders. [00:47:55] No, thanks, Katie. [00:47:57] Hi, Nicholas. [00:47:57] I think we've met in this room before. [00:48:00] Great, great background. [00:48:01] And your stories are hilarious. [00:48:04] Thank you. [00:48:05] You're welcome. [00:48:06] Following you, you kind of just got into what I was going to ask the question on as [00:48:11] I was sitting here, but how do you look ahead? [00:48:14] Because I think, like, do you think, is that a skillset or where you're placed? [00:48:19] You said there's luck, there's, you know, looking ahead. [00:48:21] So many different people in tech don't look ahead or don't get that right or don't seem [00:48:28] to have that perspective and drive. [00:48:29] I mean, you said, you know, probably mid conversation, you saw the cloud coming and, and then it was [00:48:34] COVID that actually drove that, but even seeing that coming. [00:48:40] Yeah. [00:48:41] Where do you, where do you get that skillset or that, that perspective? [00:48:44] So probably my biggest success is sort of having relationships with people that I've, I've, I've, [00:48:50] were customers originally that I, you know, was relentless about customer satisfaction and [00:48:56] to make sure they were happy. [00:48:57] And then we became friends. [00:48:59] Right. [00:49:00] And then we just talk about stuff and talk, I mean, I'm, I'm a tech geek. [00:49:05] I just, I, I, I really don't have any hobbies. [00:49:08] I just love technology. [00:49:09] I love talking about it. [00:49:10] I actually, during COVID, Tomas did this. [00:49:14] I did a YouTube thing called Collaboration Chronicles. [00:49:18] I started talking about different sort of points of view around Microsoft and MT65 and [00:49:25] sort of the way they saw collaboration going and what I thought people were doing right [00:49:28] and wrong. [00:49:29] And, and I did it with a friend that, that's at Humana as a co-host for a while. [00:49:33] And, you know, just, we, we were always having these discussions in private and more of a [00:49:37] stream of consciousness. [00:49:38] And we said, Hey, maybe some people want to hear about it. [00:49:40] And we had different guests and it was kind of fun. [00:49:42] It's a lot of work though. [00:49:43] I mean, you know, kudos to Tomas and everybody else doing this on a regular basis. [00:49:47] I think I lasted eight months or something like that. [00:49:49] And I'm like, okay, this is too much work. [00:49:50] Like it's really hard to do on a, on a continuous regular basis, but, but sort of having that [00:49:57] network. [00:49:57] So that when you see a trend, you write, you talk about it with, with sort of your trusted [00:50:01] advisors or your third parties. [00:50:02] And you say, Hey, what do you think about this? [00:50:04] And, you know, what about that? [00:50:05] Like one of the big trends that I see that are completely untapped that I don't see people [00:50:09] talking about is we have this work from home thing is really interesting, right? [00:50:14] In terms of the ability to that, that large companies, you know, Jamie Dimon from, from [00:50:20] JP Morgan Chase. [00:50:20] I mean, that in a million years, would he ever have all of his people work from home, but [00:50:24] it, it sort of worked right. [00:50:25] The, the company function, it was able to operate. [00:50:27] Um, you know, I think maybe he wants people back in the office these days, but I think [00:50:31] that, uh, that boat has sailed. [00:50:33] There's, there's always going to be this hybrid work environment. [00:50:36] Um, but I think that the, so the good news is that people sort of open their eyes to [00:50:40] the possibilities that this, this could happen. [00:50:42] And the failure that I see in it and the opportunity is that we took something from the physical [00:50:48] world and transformed it into the virtual world. [00:50:51] Right? [00:50:52] So you would have your, you know, weekly meeting at, you know, 9am on Monday morning, and you [00:50:58] would normally be in the office and now you're doing it in zoom or in teams or Webex or whatever [00:51:02] your sort of technology or choices. [00:51:06] But did that, and maybe you save the efficiency of driving, you know, to the office and back, [00:51:11] you still, everybody still has to align to that, a geo time. [00:51:17] Right? [00:51:18] So it doesn't matter whether, you know, uh, irrespective of your time zone, if the meetings [00:51:23] that, you know, 9am Eastern, right. [00:51:26] You got to line up to that 9am Eastern time zone. [00:51:29] Right. [00:51:29] And you have to stop what you're doing and you have to join and, and, and you have to [00:51:33] be part of that. [00:51:33] You have to be part of that meeting. [00:51:35] And one of my pet peeves is always have your camera on to make sure that people are paying [00:51:39] attention in terms of what's there. [00:51:41] Um, but either way, but we, we haven't gone to what I call what I view as the asynchronous [00:51:47] work environment. [00:51:47] Why do we all need to be on the call at the same time to review and comment on a document? [00:51:52] Why can't we all do it at our discretion? [00:51:55] And our time, whenever we feel that it's appropriate. [00:51:57] So, you know, um, if I'm a, you know, if I'm a father with some young children and, you know, [00:52:03] my schedule is I get up at, you know, 4am in the morning, I do my workout, whatever. [00:52:08] I then take care of the kids, you know, between seven and eight, you know, then I work and [00:52:12] then I, you know, I leave, you know, work at three, I take care of the kids, you know, [00:52:15] whatever. [00:52:16] And then I go to bed early and that's my work schedule as opposed to maybe somebody who's [00:52:20] older like myself. [00:52:21] And, you know, I don't have any kids and, you know, I'm a night owl, I'll stay, you know, [00:52:25] I'll, I'll, you know, get up later and I'll be working until 10, 11 o'clock at night. [00:52:30] And that's sort of my style. [00:52:31] Why do we have to, why do I have to change my lifestyle or, or, or, or him or her change [00:52:36] their lifestyle for us to collaborate? [00:52:38] That shouldn't be the case, right? [00:52:39] I should be able to get on a, on a, and the technology is there. [00:52:42] This isn't a technology issue, right? [00:52:43] This college is there. [00:52:44] We can get on a document. [00:52:46] We can chat, uh, asynchronously. [00:52:48] We can make comments. [00:52:49] We can put notes in the document. [00:52:50] We can, you know, you make red lines, put opinions. [00:52:53] Um, and we can, you know, we could probably get through more efficient work in a much shorter [00:52:58] timeframe and still accommodate sort of people's lifestyles without, with an increase in productivity. [00:53:04] I don't see people working that way. [00:53:06] And, and, and it's not, it's not a technical issue. [00:53:08] The technology is there to do it. [00:53:10] It's, it's a people sort of thinking out of the box issue and accepting that. [00:53:15] I don't, I don't need to be there. [00:53:16] I don't need to geo sync my time for every single meeting in order to be productive. [00:53:19] So anyway, my two cents. [00:53:20] Uh, two great points there. [00:53:22] First, the people side of it that you're talking to customers is where you get a lot of this. [00:53:26] That was a surprise for me to hear that. [00:53:27] That was awesome. [00:53:28] And the whole asynchronous, um, I'm totally with you on that one. [00:53:32] I think we're still stuck in this, um, FaceTime, you know, there's a little bit of that nine [00:53:37] to five holdover where I'm like, maybe you wanted an admin and not me, but, um, I, I told, [00:53:42] I just, I just told one boss, he's like, you work nine to five. [00:53:45] And I was like, absolutely not. [00:53:46] And, um, I'm asynchronous and he did not, he was kind of pissed. [00:53:50] So I completely hear you on that. [00:53:52] That's, that's awesome. [00:53:53] You know, efficiency versus time. [00:53:55] Well, and it's the next, we, we haven't gotten any significant productivity games from the [00:54:00] workforce in a long time because we haven't done anything revolutionary, right? [00:54:04] We sort of the same stuff that we've been doing for the last 30 years. [00:54:07] Right? [00:54:08] So I think we've been presented an opportunity to gain huge amounts of efficiencies from the [00:54:12] workforce and productivity, but, you know, our own sort of, you know, legacy holdups and [00:54:19] ways of working as was holding us back. [00:54:21] You're preaching to the choir in more ways than, you know, um, that's awesome. [00:54:28] Thank you. [00:54:29] Thanks, Jennifer. [00:54:31] Thanks for joining us this evening and thanks for joining us every evening, every Wednesday [00:54:36] that we do this. [00:54:37] So thank you for your question. [00:54:39] Nate, over to you. [00:54:40] Yeah, certainly. [00:54:41] Hey, Nick, it's Nate Vanderheiden with Morgan Stanley. [00:54:44] It's been a minute since we've chatted, but I've been a fan of yours since a few years [00:54:49] back when we were first introduced, and I really appreciate you sharing your story this [00:54:52] evening. [00:54:53] It's just really great to hear, you know, your, your early starts and all the way through to where [00:54:57] you are currently. [00:54:58] You just have this authenticity about you, which is, you know, a trait that I just greatly [00:55:02] appreciate. [00:55:03] My question for you though is, you know, you've obviously been keeping your eye on, on kind [00:55:07] of what's over the horizon. [00:55:08] Where do you draw your inspiration from? [00:55:10] And more importantly, where have you drawn inspiration from recently? [00:55:13] Huh. [00:55:14] You know, I, I always like to sort of look at, you know, companies that are just blowing [00:55:27] it out of the water and succeeding really well and doing well and trying to see sort of what, [00:55:32] you know, what, you know, is there a secret basically that they have? [00:55:35] Do they know something that I don't know? [00:55:37] Is there sort of certain approach that, that is admirable in terms of, in terms of what [00:55:41] they're doing? [00:55:42] And, and, and, and then just sort of being self-aware in terms of what I do and what I'm [00:55:47] doing with others. [00:55:48] And, and so this whole concept of what I talked about with Jennifer asked me about in terms [00:55:53] of this asynchronous collaboration, that was simply an observation. [00:55:57] So we were, we were, we were talking with at the time, my, my, my head of engineering [00:56:05] that we had my, my chief product officer, and we're talking about a feature or something [00:56:08] like that. [00:56:09] And, and we're sort of brainstorming between the two of us. [00:56:11] And, and I said, you know, why don't you put it down? [00:56:15] And I said, let's, let's run it by, I've got like, you know, two or three sort of customers [00:56:20] that I trust a lot and really are advisors to the company almost, uh, and any sort of [00:56:25] feature I said, you know, put it down in writing and just send it out to, you know, this person [00:56:29] and that person and let's get some feedback. [00:56:32] So he was based on the, he's based on out of LA. [00:56:35] So by the time he got it out, it was, I think maybe four or 5 PM Eastern time. [00:56:43] And so he sent out the, um, he sent out the, the document. [00:56:47] I took a look at it. [00:56:48] I invited the two sort of, uh, clients, customer, customer advisors to it, to take a look at [00:56:54] it and gave it my thoughts. [00:56:55] This is maybe like 5 30. [00:56:57] Um, one of them basically immediately commented. [00:57:00] Um, uh, so, so the, the case that I gave about the young person and the older person [00:57:05] is real actually. [00:57:06] So, so the younger guy basically that, that I know sort of, you know, um, uh, has some [00:57:11] time between five and six sort of after he feeds the kids and before he puts them to bed [00:57:15] at some private time, sort of was catching up and work and he made a bunch of comments. [00:57:18] And, uh, and then I commented back on that. [00:57:21] And then the older gentleman that I know is more of a night owl, I think commented to his [00:57:25] comments and my comments around, I think maybe nine or 10 at night. [00:57:29] Um, and then, um, uh, the guy from my, uh, chief product officer from, uh, LA, which [00:57:36] still early for him, he made a comment on both those two comments. [00:57:40] And then, um, my guy, basically I told you wakes up at 4 AM. [00:57:44] So around 5 AM, he's making comments as well to the other comments. [00:57:47] So, you know, I sort of, when I observed this and I sort of took a step back, I'm like, oh my God. [00:57:53] Like we, we probably did like two weeks with the work in less than 24 hours because everybody [00:57:58] gets to work at their, on their time schedule. [00:58:00] This, this wholly synchronous concept. [00:58:02] And it just struck me like, holy shit. [00:58:04] Like this is amazing. [00:58:05] Like we should, you know, how do we do this more and more? [00:58:09] Cause the tech part works, right. [00:58:11] But people don't naturally do this. [00:58:13] Um, so, you know, part of it is sort of looking at what, you know, great companies do and, and, and succeed. [00:58:19] And part of it is just self observing, you know, interesting trends that you see in, in, in every life, because, you know, whether you're working at, you know, Morgan Stanley, you're working at, uh, [00:58:29] uh, zoom or you're working at, uh, you know, any sort of large enterprise, you know, uh, the NFL or, or, or, or, or L brands or retail, you know, your, your, your general sort of business productivity, uh, activity is kind of the same, right? [00:58:44] You get information, you analyze information, you make comments on it, you create data, you, it's sort of the same thing. [00:58:49] So, you know, being able to sort of observe your behavior, observe other people's behaviors, um, see what people say, you know, what they're thinking, how they approach things and, and, and getting a diverse, I guess, diversities, you know, getting a diverse point of view. [00:59:02] I love listening to people and, and hearing different perspectives. [00:59:05] That's sort of where you sort of, uh, get as much information and then sort of mesh into some sort of conclusion is, uh, I guess a long answer to your simple question, Nate. [00:59:15] No, it was absolutely spot on. [00:59:18] And I mean, you know, further diving into this whole asynchronous concept, uh, obviously there's, there's implication just within your local time zone and everyone's different schedule. [00:59:25] But when you start talking about global enterprises and everything else, there's just a lot of efficiency to be gained instead of chasing time zones and common time and whatnot. [00:59:33] I absolutely love it. [00:59:34] You know, just really appreciate you sharing the way you process things and, and approach, uh, you know, inspiration and keeping your eye open and close on the world. [00:59:42] So thanks. [00:59:43] Thanks for that, Nick. [00:59:44] Absolutely. [00:59:45] Thank you. [00:59:46] Thanks. [00:59:47] Thanks for joining us this evening and asking you a question. [00:59:50] Uh, if, if you just joined us, this is our weekly fireside chat. [00:59:53] Uh, we're going to go for about, uh, maybe about another 35 minutes or so. [00:59:57] So if you do have a question that you want to ask of, uh, of Nick, uh, this evening, feel free to jump up on stage or raise your hand. [01:00:03] We'll bring you up on stage and, uh, and you can ask your question live, or if you want to put it in the chat, you know, and you, you can't talk for whatever reason, just put it in the chat and I'll read it off to Nick. [01:00:13] Nick, let's talk about challenges. [01:00:15] You you've had a few, sorry, Jennifer, you wanted to say something. [01:00:18] I just, just follow on that asynchronous thread because to me, I'm with one of the challenges. [01:00:22] To me, I I'm with Nick as to why isn't it that way. [01:00:25] And Nate brought up a good point, which is, um, I mean, I can remember 10, 15 years ago, I'm supporting global sales forces. [01:00:33] So if I wait until nine o'clock in the morning to start my day, China's offline or whoever you're, you know, the different ones are offline. [01:00:41] I get up at six, I get it going, I go for my bike ride and back by time I've done that they're back. [01:00:45] And so people have been working more globally and also these different personalities. [01:00:48] We do work asynchronously, but that's been going on for more than a decade. [01:00:52] So, and I know that the tech is there and getting better, like Google docs, like where you're saying you can all comment in Google docs. [01:00:58] And I think Slack has added voice so that you can actually make it sound like, um, you know, a little bit more like real time, even though it is asynchronous. [01:01:06] So what do you see is the challenges there? [01:01:09] Like, why aren't companies more open to this? [01:01:11] Do you think it's just the, um, sort of the antiquated behaviors, Nick, or do they not under the, where do you see those, those challenges? [01:01:19] It's exactly what you said. [01:01:21] It's people have a certain management, especially many times leadership, um, has a difficult time embracing new technology. [01:01:29] And so as an example, I was talking to a friend at a, you know, fortune 50 company, and we were talking about empty six, five and how, you know, instead of attaching a document, attach a link to the document, right. [01:01:42] Into it. [01:01:43] And cause if you put a link, right. [01:01:45] There's, there's one, there's one source of truth. [01:01:48] Anybody can edit it. [01:01:49] They can comment on it. [01:01:50] And you're not sitting there coordinating changes and adding this and that. [01:01:53] And you can sort of do this asynchronous communication, sort of a collaboration thing that I talked about. [01:01:58] And, um, and he, and he said, you know, and, and he tries to lead by example, right? [01:02:02] So when he finds new things, cause we were talking about, well, how do you get a large corporation of 150,000 people to embrace this new technology? [01:02:09] And his, his, his attitude was, or his, his sort of philosophy was, well, there's always a subset of key people that sort of are, you know, those people that always want the early beta of something. [01:02:20] And they're willing to go through the pain. [01:02:21] Cause they want to be first, right. [01:02:22] And they want to learn things. [01:02:23] And, and those are the people that many times people will look to for, uh, Hey, I'm thinking about getting the new phone or I want to get a new this, or I need an application. [01:02:32] This, what do you think I should use? [01:02:33] Right. [01:02:34] They're the, the, the sort of the people that know things that the trusted advisors and his attitude is like, I try to, you know, follow what I preach. [01:02:41] So, you know, if I think link sharing is better, uh, and I think it's a better way of doing it. [01:02:46] That's what I, I try to set the example by doing that, right. [01:02:49] With my, my, my associates, my staff and, and, and sort of upper management. [01:02:53] So anyway, he, he started doing it and he says, you know, he sent, uh, a project plan or something like that, or the, some sort of document to a bunch of executives, top level executives. [01:03:05] And one of the admins basically wrote back to him and said, please don't send links, send the actual document attached. [01:03:11] Right. [01:03:12] Um, which is like, wait a minute, you know, management should be supporting this new way of working and not resisting it and, and, and, and actually making their staff do it, not sort of discouraging people from doing it. [01:03:24] And, and I think that's, you know, people are used to sort of doing things a certain way. [01:03:29] Hey, I'm, I'm guilty of it myself. [01:03:30] I don't know about you, Russell, but cause we're the same age, right. [01:03:33] I've gone through many technology evolutions and, you know, to this day, to be honest, I still don't get slack. [01:03:39] I don't get it. [01:03:40] I don't understand it. [01:03:42] I don't quite follow exactly how it works. [01:03:44] It's not the way that would, you know, I get teams, you know, I get Google docs, I get a lot of the other stuff, but I can't, you know, quite follow it. [01:03:51] Although I, I try. [01:03:52] Um, but, but I know I have to evolve, right. [01:03:55] It's this part of what I know I have to do, whether I like it or not. [01:03:58] And I almost force myself to do it. [01:04:00] Uh, and then eventually you sort of get used to it and you like it. [01:04:03] So I think it's, you know, too much of management, not being willing to be first, not being willing to embrace it, not being willing to, to go through any discomfort whatsoever. [01:04:12] Like I'm on my, on my, on my chair here, but here's a pet peeve of mine. [01:04:17] Um, if your organization has dedicated it staff to your quote unquote top management, I think that's totally wrong. [01:04:25] Right. [01:04:26] Right. [01:04:27] Because if, if your top executives aren't getting the same experience as your low level person and, and the expectation of it is to not meet that standard where every single employee is the CEO. [01:04:38] Right. [01:04:39] Or can be the CEO and should expect that level of functionality and reliability and behavior. [01:04:43] Um, then that basically is, is, is wrong. [01:04:46] And you're not serving your, your, your, your company or your staff or your employees appropriately. [01:04:51] It, it hides issues and it hides problems. [01:04:53] And I've seen too many companies that do that specifically for that purpose. [01:04:57] Right. [01:04:58] And I, I think that's wrong. [01:04:59] Anyway, I'm off my, uh, two, two funny. [01:05:01] Okay. [01:05:02] Two points on that one. [01:05:03] So the only one is, um, I think I'm older than both you and Russell. [01:05:05] And, um, I, I come from the days of stenography pools at the big law firms. [01:05:09] So, uh, people definitely had to upgrade from there and you're right. [01:05:12] Um, I could see some antiquated people, but I still am surprised about this. [01:05:15] And the other one is it's the only thing about links. [01:05:18] One is email is not designed for documents, but, um, so links is better, but also is, um, security issues. [01:05:24] So in companies I'm in, um, they may not have the right security controls around that. [01:05:29] And the developers start using Google docs and sending those links and it, it makes everybody crazy. [01:05:34] But, but that, that's really the only. [01:05:37] Links are links are actually much more secure because links essentially don't transfer data. [01:05:44] Right. [01:05:45] But this is the other thing. [01:05:46] Yeah. [01:05:47] This is where cyber folks have, have to rethink the whole myth. [01:05:49] They have to rethink the methodology. [01:05:51] Right. [01:05:52] So this is the reality. [01:05:53] The reality is links basically break everything that cyber folks know about information security. [01:05:57] Right. [01:05:58] And, and what they would, and, and because they're in, so cyber folks are just as responsible for [01:06:03] this as well. [01:06:04] Cause they're not typically, I don't see many cyber folks supporting link based collaboration [01:06:08] and sharing. [01:06:09] And, and the reason they don't, which I understand, right. [01:06:12] Cause I was part of the problem way back when, um, the way that you do, if you take something [01:06:16] simple like email, right. [01:06:17] How, how do you do sort of info sec on email? [01:06:20] Well, you, you, you write an email, you attach a document and click send. [01:06:23] Okay. [01:06:24] What happens? [01:06:25] It goes to some sort of network DLP or end point DLP. [01:06:28] It makes a decision. [01:06:29] If it finds something problematic with the body of the email or the attachment, and then [01:06:32] it makes a decision, right. [01:06:33] You know, block it, encrypt it, whatever. [01:06:35] It doesn't matter. [01:06:36] Okay. [01:06:37] Now when that becomes a link, how does this work? [01:06:40] Right. [01:06:41] Well, the link could be a file. [01:06:42] The link could be a folder that can link it'd be a million documents. [01:06:45] Right. [01:06:46] Okay. [01:06:47] So now let's pretend that I had some pixie dust, like it's sprinkle and you could instantaneously [01:06:52] do old school DLP and every single file and document, no matter how many or how few there [01:06:57] was, right. [01:06:58] You could make that decision. [01:06:59] So you do that. [01:07:00] So at the point of sharing, you make a decision that, yeah, there's no problem here. [01:07:04] I'm going to let the document go out with the link and there's no issue, but there's no [01:07:10] data in there. [01:07:11] And the link actually points to something dynamic. [01:07:15] So at the time of inspection, there was no problems, but five seconds later, there are [01:07:20] problems. [01:07:21] 10 seconds later, they're not and so on and so forth. [01:07:24] Right. [01:07:25] So it totally breaks the way that we think about info security and cyber security to a [01:07:30] point where you're not making a decision. [01:07:33] The act of collaborating and sharing doesn't represent the risk when it's link based. [01:07:37] The act of accessing a document at the point of access is when the risk actually occurs, because [01:07:42] that's how that's when the that's when the content of the document is defined and matters. [01:07:46] Right. [01:07:47] Because it could be changing all all the way along. [01:07:49] Well, how do you do that? [01:07:51] How do you change your InfoSec model to this new way of doing things in terms of what's there? [01:07:56] Now, there's ways of doing it. [01:07:58] Right. [01:07:59] There's techniques and technologies. [01:08:00] And I'm not going to make this into a sales pitch or anything like that. [01:08:02] But my point is, you got to think out of the box. [01:08:04] Right. [01:08:05] To be able to do this. [01:08:06] And again, this puts people in a discomfort zone because a lot of folks are just getting [01:08:09] around to implementing their basic InfoSec policies, their basic DLP capabilities. [01:08:14] And now it's like, oh, yeah, you're going to throw that out the window and you got to think [01:08:17] of a whole new way of how you strategize around this thing. [01:08:19] So, you know, we're also at fault here as well. [01:08:22] You know, we all can take some of the blame. [01:08:28] Well, I can tell you that. [01:08:30] Very Greek, but awesome. [01:08:31] Thanks. [01:08:33] I can tell you that this time, several times throughout my day that I would love to give [01:08:38] people with links browsers to view their email so that they couldn't actually click on links [01:08:43] and open documents or see images or anything like that. [01:08:46] Make it sort of just text. [01:08:47] But thanks for adding on to that conversation, Jennifer. [01:08:51] I think the other comment that I would make on the, I guess, the asynchronously of the [01:08:57] topic, if you will, it won't work for everybody. [01:09:02] It won't work for a lot of companies that have, you know, different variations of talent [01:09:08] or people who are at different stages in their career. [01:09:12] Right. [01:09:13] You have. [01:09:15] Well, I'll just, I'll just leave it at that. [01:09:18] I think it's an interesting topic. [01:09:19] It's not for everything. [01:09:20] I agree. [01:09:21] It's not for everything. [01:09:22] It's, you know, it's fact. [01:09:23] It's a factual use base. [01:09:24] And I think it's also just to point though, it's just, that's also just one example of where we're behind what companies aren't adopting. [01:09:31] As you said, you're taking the physical environment and trying to make it virtual. [01:09:33] And there's other, there's automating. [01:09:34] I'm an attorney. [01:09:35] You could automate so many of our contracts. [01:09:37] I don't need to touch them. [01:09:38] And it's, it, you know, lawyers are just so far behind. [01:09:41] So I could just rant forever. [01:09:42] But so it's, yes. [01:09:43] I would not disagree with you on that. [01:09:45] Right. [01:09:46] Right. [01:09:47] Jesus. [01:09:48] Yeah. [01:09:49] I would not disagree with you on that, but I do think that, I do think that, you know, Nick being a CEO of his own company and having that sort of thought process, it's, it's definitely a good thing. [01:10:02] Right. [01:10:03] Cause he's not only challenging the, the makeup of his company and the HR department of his company, they sort of think differently, but that also starts to move the industry. [01:10:13] Right. [01:10:14] And, and other types of, I don't want to call you, you're a startup, but other sort of companies in that sort of phase where you are in your, in your, in your company's journey and career. [01:10:24] So I think, you know, I think bigger companies like, you know, like that I've come from, or even where I am now, I think it's a challenge. [01:10:31] Um, because of, because there's so variations of different levels of skillset and talent, but I, I, I like the idea. [01:10:40] And, you know, I think what, one of the things that the pandemic has, has forced us to do, right. [01:10:45] It is, is to definitely think differently and be more agile and look, look at, I don't want to say accommodating people's life, but. [01:10:53] I mean, really take into consideration that concept of work life balance, you know, we, before it was just a buzzword, right? [01:11:01] Yeah. We have work life balance. We have flexible work arrangements. [01:11:03] Well now with, you know, with the pandemic that sort of pushed the boundaries of what that really meant for, for several companies. [01:11:09] Right. Where, where they just were using those things as like catchphrases to hire talent. [01:11:14] Now it's like, well, no, you really actually have to work completely remote. [01:11:18] You know, there were, you know, there was, I want to sort of make this into a, you know, [01:11:23] a me conversation, but I recall working several years in banking where you couldn't trade. [01:11:28] If you weren't, you couldn't do equities trading. If you were not physically in a location, that was part of the company that you work for. [01:11:36] What did they do during the pandemic? Cause I'm sure they were trading. [01:11:39] Cause I, I saw the equities market continue to continue to go up or down or sideways. [01:11:44] So I'm sure those regulations and, and those restrictions, if you will, were alleviated and they were alleviated for a purpose, right. [01:11:52] And I think that's the, to continue to economy, to continue to make money. [01:11:55] Well, if we were able to do that, then are we going to go back to, you know, having to physically be in a location now? [01:12:00] Or can you, can I trade from, you know, a remote location? [01:12:04] I don't know. I'm not in banking anymore. [01:12:06] I don't know if Nate, you want to pop up on stage and chat about that, but, you know, I just think, you know, just to finish my point, I think the pandemic has definitely, has definitely pushed the boundaries for certain companies to try to get comfortable or not comfortable with forcing them to change in a, in a positive or negative direction, right. [01:12:25] Depending upon what their tolerance is. [01:12:27] Go ahead, Nick, you want to say something and then Nate, you wanted to add or comment on my comment? [01:12:34] I was going to say is that, you know, the, you know, for all of the negatives of COVID, right, it forced the evolution of technology, whether we liked it or not, right. [01:12:43] It forced financial institutions to adapt whether they liked it or not, because it was survival, right. [01:12:48] The, one of the benefits or positives or negatives when you're doing startups is everything is forced evolution. [01:12:55] You know, the standard quo will never, you will never succeed building your own company if you just follow the standard, the standard process of doing things. [01:13:03] So, you know, I, I would say, I think we need to build a culture where we support people in failing and learning, right. [01:13:13] It's okay to make a mistake once it's not okay to make a mistake twice, you know, and celebrate mistakes because you only learn by making mistakes. [01:13:20] You only learn by, you know, you hear people talking about fail fast, right. [01:13:23] That's great. [01:13:24] But do we really support it, right. [01:13:26] Or do we basically, you know, provide a culture where people are not comfortable sort of failing in order to succeed at times. [01:13:36] I'll tell you one personal story. [01:13:37] So I remember I told you my first real job was at Lotus, right. [01:13:40] And I had this thing called CC mail that I'd never heard of before. [01:13:44] And it had like a real sort of, you know, you, you, you click new mail and it had a to, a from, I mean, it had a, a, a, a, a, a to a CC and a BCC. [01:13:55] Right. [01:13:56] So again, you know, from engineering school, I never done in business and I'm like, oh, that is just so I get the two thing. [01:14:04] And I'm like, what's the CC and a BCC. [01:14:06] Like, I don't, I don't understand what that is, but I'm like, okay. [01:14:09] So, so my rationalization was, oh, they just given you three lines, right. [01:14:14] Your a line and your C line. [01:14:15] Right. [01:14:16] And then the two must be the, the a line, the B line and the C line. [01:14:18] So I would put in like, you know, one email address in the two and one email address in the CC and one email address in the BCC. [01:14:24] Right. [01:14:25] And, and that's what I did because I was clueless, right. [01:14:28] I was a young, clueless kid. [01:14:30] And maybe the third day or something like that, the person comes up to me and he goes, why do you keep on BCC and stuff? [01:14:36] And I said, I don't understand the question. [01:14:39] He goes, you keep on putting me on the BCC. [01:14:41] Why do you keep on being in the BCC? [01:14:43] I said, I don't know. [01:14:44] What does it matter? [01:14:45] It's isn't that just another C, you know, it's ABC. [01:14:48] I said, what the, I had no idea. [01:14:52] And he explained to me blind carbon copy and car, like I had no idea. [01:14:56] But, you know, I learned, I was a little bit embarrassed and then, okay, off into the races, you learn the next thing, right. [01:15:01] In terms of what's there. [01:15:02] And I, you know, I think we need to encourage, you know, people to, to be able to play with things and learn things and, and understand that, hey, you're going to make a mistake. [01:15:11] It's totally okay. [01:15:12] You learn from it and you sort of move on sort of, you know, that, that, that culture of continuously learning, continuously learning. [01:15:17] Continuously evolving, you know, in, in every aspect of life, including technology. [01:15:21] My two cents. [01:15:22] Yeah. [01:15:23] Look, I, I, I, I'm just, I'm sitting here laughing because I'm like, yeah, that, that's actually funny, you know, but if you, if you, I remember early stages of seeing that. [01:15:33] And I, and I remember thinking, well, my mom was a, was a, was an administrative assistant. [01:15:38] I remember she would make carbon copies of, of, of her, you know, when she typed up something and I would smell the carbon copy. [01:15:44] I'm like, is that what that means? [01:15:47] So, but yeah, that, that, that's funny. [01:15:50] And, and, you know, I, I, I, I'll save my thoughts on the, on the fail fast because I think that, that, that, well, I'm not, maybe I won't save my thoughts, but I think that that applies, but it's really hard in cyber. [01:16:04] Right. [01:16:05] It, and, and I don't, you know, again, it's, I, I say it's hard in cyber because there's certain ways that you could fail and you could fail miserably. [01:16:14] There's other ways that you could fail and it's a teaching moment. [01:16:17] Right. [01:16:18] And so I think trying to find that balance as to when that is a teaching moment versus a, like, Hey, you really messed up, you know, like, are you oblivious to what you're doing? [01:16:28] You know, as, as managers, that that's our job, right. [01:16:31] To figure that out, to figure out, all right, you know, what do we do? [01:16:34] But, you know, anyways, it's just a difficult line. [01:16:38] Let me, let me, let me, I'll share my philosophy on that. [01:16:42] So not at my current company, but at a previous company, I had a, I had an IT guy and he's a good guy, smart, young guy. [01:16:52] And he was always one of the latest technology, always the latest and greatest. [01:16:57] He was always into, you know, the latest thing. [01:16:59] The latest thing. [01:17:00] And many times he, he would overcomplicate solutions. [01:17:04] Right. [01:17:05] But, you know, he always pulled it off and he always sort of make it work and his systems are pretty solid. [01:17:11] But one day he went too far and he caused me a four hour outage. [01:17:14] Right. [01:17:15] That was incredibly embarrassing. [01:17:16] Right. [01:17:17] In terms of what was there. [01:17:18] And, but he stuck with it and he was sweating, but he made it work and he brought the system back and it was, it was the wrong time, the wrong, the wrong, you know, he couldn't have done it any worse. [01:17:28] Right. [01:17:29] In terms of what was there. [01:17:30] And he thought I was going to, he just knew I was going to fire him. [01:17:31] Right. [01:17:32] In terms of what's there. [01:17:33] And so afterward we did a debrief and he said, you know, I'm really sorry. [01:17:37] I'll just resign and blah, blah, blah. [01:17:39] I'm like, no, I don't, I don't want you to resign. [01:17:43] He goes, I don't understand. [01:17:44] I just, I cost you a lot of money. [01:17:46] Embarrassment. [01:17:47] Well, I figured you'd fire me. [01:17:49] I said, absolutely not. [01:17:50] I said, you just learned a very valuable lesson in your life that I'm sure you're never going to repeat. [01:17:54] And I paid for it. [01:17:55] So why would I fire you for teaching you, you know, one of your life lessons that you will never, ever repeat. [01:18:00] And, uh, he didn't understand that at first. [01:18:04] And he goes, he goes, no, no, no. [01:18:06] I think I should resign. [01:18:07] I said, why don't you go think about what I said and come back to me. [01:18:10] And, and, and, and, uh, in two days. [01:18:13] And he thought about it and keep back. [01:18:14] He goes, I understand what you said. [01:18:16] He goes, I appreciate it. [01:18:17] Thank you. [01:18:18] Right. [01:18:19] And he had no reason to thank me. [01:18:21] Right. [01:18:22] He screwed up. [01:18:23] It happened. [01:18:24] Stuff happens. [01:18:25] Right. [01:18:26] But he was never going to repeat that lesson. [01:18:27] Right. [01:18:28] So why on earth would I let somebody like that go when he clearly stuck? [01:18:31] Now, if he quit in the middle of it or freaked out or couldn't recover on his own, he would have been fired. [01:18:36] Right. [01:18:37] But he stuck through it. [01:18:38] He sweat through it. [01:18:39] He recovered it. [01:18:40] So, you know, I think. [01:18:41] Sort of how you have to think about it. [01:18:43] Right. [01:18:44] In terms of, you know, you paid dearly for that lesson learned. [01:18:47] If he's a, if he's a, if he has any sort of conscience and respect for himself, he's never going to make it happen again. [01:18:53] Um, so, you know, you paid, you know, dearly for that lesson. [01:18:57] You want to keep that employee around. [01:18:59] If they do it again, it's a different story. [01:19:00] Right. [01:19:01] But, uh, if it's a habit, but, um, you know, I think it's important to, you know, give, you know, guide people, let them go up to the mark, but, you know, pull them back when they're going to jump, you know, when you can, but you're never going to be able to save everybody all the time. [01:19:16] Right. [01:19:17] You want to, the opposite side of it, which is, and I see this in a lot of large companies where, you know, people get punished for making mistakes. [01:19:24] And they, they, there's innovation goes out the window. [01:19:27] Right. [01:19:28] Because what they do is they tell the staff and the employees, if you innovate, you're most likely are going to get fired. [01:19:34] Because when you're innovating, you're going to make mistakes. [01:19:36] Something's going to happen. [01:19:37] It never goes according to plan. [01:19:39] Right. [01:19:40] In terms of what's there. [01:19:41] And we don't tolerate mistakes. [01:19:42] Right. [01:19:43] And you're gone. [01:19:44] So it's my personal opinion. [01:19:45] Um, but I, but I think innovation is critical to embrace and support, uh, because the, the lack of it, it's going to kill you. [01:19:53] And I, and I agree with you a hundred percent on that. [01:19:57] And I just want to clarify, cause I do notice this is being recorded. [01:20:01] I want to make sure that people get my full thought on this, you know, cause I've had instances where people have actually sort of made mistakes in my department, right. [01:20:09] In my team, my cyber team. [01:20:11] And what I'll say, you know, we just broadly for, for folks that, that might listen to this. [01:20:15] Or even folks that are in the room, if you make a mistake, it's not a problem to make a mistake. [01:20:20] As long as you fess up to your mistake. [01:20:22] Right. [01:20:23] But if you make a mistake and you try to cover up your mistake and what we do for a living, that's a big no, no. [01:20:29] So I encourage, you know, I don't encourage people to fail, but if you do fail and you may, and I'll call that a, an opportunity for you to learn from a mistake. [01:20:38] And you do fess up to your mistake more, I'll say nine times out of 10, or maybe even 10 times out of 10, you will not lose your job or, you know, have any sort of further repercussions. [01:20:50] It'll be used as a teaching model because you fessed up to the fact that you made a mistake and we're all humans, right? [01:20:56] We're not robots, but if you make a mistake and you try to sort of brush it under the rug and blame other people and not take responsibility or accountability for your, for your actions. [01:21:05] That's when I have a problem as a, as a manager. [01:21:07] And that's when we have different types of conversation. [01:21:09] But I did say something that was kind of sorry, Jennifer. [01:21:12] Go on. [01:21:13] Okay. [01:21:14] Go ahead, Jennifer. [01:21:15] Go ahead. [01:21:16] Sorry. [01:21:17] I was just gonna follow on that. [01:21:18] I was gonna ask, sort of a question is what, how do you see those mistakes? [01:21:19] Cause I'm looking at a couple, okay. [01:21:21] I work with, you know, I work with varying teams. [01:21:23] So say I'm working with a sales team and the sales person is making repeated mistakes in how we work together. [01:21:28] And I am demanding around this and what you give me and how we do it. [01:21:31] But if it's, you get two fails with me. [01:21:33] But if you continue it, it's usually something's wrong in the process, unless you're a total idiot, but something's wrong in the process. [01:21:40] So coming, so I look at it as, okay, if you continue, I'm not gonna say, Oh, sales is terrible. [01:21:44] They're not working perfectly legal. [01:21:45] I'm gonna go, where's the breakdown in process here? [01:21:47] Where are we not communicating? [01:21:48] What are we not doing? [01:21:49] Which gives an opportunity for growth or development. [01:21:52] So that's a process failure. [01:21:54] And then your tech side, I would wonder if the, the mistakes when people are making those changes or, you know, being appropriately encouraged to make those changes, it's not like go haywire, but, but they're addressing something that's a pain point or something that they see as an opportunity. [01:22:09] Right. [01:22:10] So they may fail. [01:22:11] And then to Tomas's point, if it's a failure, how did you mitigate it? [01:22:14] How do you address it? [01:22:15] How do you respond to it? [01:22:16] But do you see that as, you know, people aren't doing this just to be crazy and try some, you know, they're usually trying to address a pain point, right? [01:22:22] Or an opportunity. [01:22:23] Is that, yeah. [01:22:25] So, so I'll, I'll give you a quick example. [01:22:28] And then I don't know, Nick, if you want to respond, but then, then maybe we'll just move, keep, keep it moving. [01:22:33] But, you know, I had somebody do a firewall change and they fat fingered the firewall change and wiped out my, my entire firewall stack. [01:22:40] And we had to go back to backup. [01:22:41] It wasn't that they did it maliciously. [01:22:43] They were doing their job. [01:22:44] They just did it wrong. [01:22:45] They were copying one firewall rule base to another firewall rule base and literally wiped out the entire firewall rule base from one of our firewalls. [01:22:52] That was a mistake, a very big mistake. [01:22:55] Very, I'm not going to talk about the time as to when that actually occurred or what company I was with. [01:22:59] But that was very, at the time, it was very, very detrimental to that person's career. [01:23:04] And even to the cut to, to the business that, that we hired that individual from, but they fessed up to it. [01:23:12] We recognized that it was something that was somewhat very common. [01:23:16] And, you know, yeah, I was upset. [01:23:18] Right. [01:23:19] I'm genuine. [01:23:20] I'm a human person. [01:23:21] I have to answer questions to senior management as to what happened, how did it occur? [01:23:26] And, and, you know, we went through all of those motions and realized, look, it was an actual genuine mistake. [01:23:31] We did not get rid of the person. [01:23:33] We just put in, we instilled safeguards to protect against that. [01:23:36] And we moved on. [01:23:37] Right. [01:23:38] We use that as a teaching in one way and we moved on and we modified our processes to avoid that. [01:23:43] Now it hasn't happened again, which is great. [01:23:45] Or it never happened again. [01:23:46] Sorry, I should say it never happened again after that, but the person learned and look, they were very, they were very fearful for their, you know, for their job. [01:23:55] Right. [01:23:56] As, as if it would have been me, if I would have made the mistake, I would have been fearful for my job. [01:23:59] So that, that's just one example, but you know, I'm sure we could probably talk about others. [01:24:03] Nick, I don't know if you want to chime in on. [01:24:05] No, I think the most important thing you said, which I have zero tolerance for is people basically facing up to their mistake and admitting it. [01:24:14] And I, I tell anybody that works for me, I'm like, there's one simple rule, right? [01:24:18] I will give you the benefit of the doubt. [01:24:19] And I will trust you until you give me a reason not to. [01:24:21] And once you give me a reason not to, you will never get that trust again. [01:24:25] And if you lie to me and lying includes admitting the truth, which may not be the legal definition. [01:24:30] And I guess Jennifer, you can say that or not. [01:24:32] It is lying by omission. [01:24:34] Absolutely. [01:24:35] All right. [01:24:36] If, if, if, if you're not telling me the full truth of what's there or what happened, then you're done and you're fired. [01:24:42] So that I have zero tolerance for. [01:24:44] But if you're genuine, as you said, you admit it and you're learning from it and you're trying to fix it and doing your best, then totally agree with you, Tomas, 100%. [01:24:54] Okay. [01:24:55] Thank you. [01:24:56] Nate, I said something controversial earlier around banking. [01:24:59] Go ahead. [01:25:00] You want to, you want to chime in or clarify? [01:25:03] Well, Tomas, I don't know if it was that controversial. [01:25:05] I know it was. [01:25:06] Not to retread too far back in the conversation, but I think, you know, with, with the conditions of the world changing under the pandemic, Nick, Nick hit it on the head. [01:25:14] It was about evolution. [01:25:15] We're either going to adapt and overcome or we were, we were not. [01:25:19] And that goes for, for everyone across the street. [01:25:22] And so all these hard lines and things that we, you know, previously decided we would never do like trading from home. [01:25:28] It was the business decision as to whether or not we would continue with the business there or not. [01:25:33] I think the real thing that's really fascinating out of the pandemic is, you know, speaking of teaching moments, is whether or not we're actually going to revisit those red lines or hard lines or, you know, the risk tolerance and, and ask ourselves the honest question of whether or not this is within our best interest. [01:25:49] Or if there's, there's areas that we've set arbitrary lines up for. [01:25:53] I think it's very similar to the work from home conversation. [01:25:56] And, you know, there are plenty of companies that never would have expected to, to move their workforce to work from home. [01:26:02] And yet they were wildly successful over the last two, two and a half years and are now taking a hard stance to, to get back in the office. [01:26:10] And you have to ask yourself, why is, is that, is that reasonable? [01:26:13] Is that in our best interest? [01:26:14] And I, I really hope that that as a, as an industry and more, more just from, from, you know, private sector, I hope we, we ask ourselves those tough questions and kind of revisit and learn from, from the world that's, that's forced us into this evolution and change. [01:26:29] Yeah, no, absolutely. [01:26:32] And look at, and, you know, I'll say that. [01:26:35] I'll say, I'll say one thing. [01:26:37] And then I want to introduce Lisa Beth, who joined us, but I'll say one thing when we think about the banking industry, right. [01:26:44] And this is just my opinion, not. [01:26:47] So just my opinion, please keep that in mind. [01:26:50] You know, you have $300,000 or so employees at, at one of the biggest banks in the world, JP Morgan Chase. [01:26:56] You've got 300 or so, 200 or so at Citibank. [01:26:59] You've got another, however many at, at Wells and, and let's leave Wells out because they do a lot of a go from home. [01:27:05] But between Citibank and Chase, you've got, let's say you've got about $500,000 employees spread across the, the, the, the world and the majority that is in the U S right. [01:27:14] If you think about it from this, from the CEO perspective, a lot of their commerce is retail banking, right. [01:27:20] Transactions, credit card transactions. [01:27:22] If you have a lot of people at home, they're not going into the stores, generating credit card transactions. [01:27:27] They're not generating revenue for not only the small businesses that might need to take our loan or pay or pay loans, but you've got this whole trickle down of, of economic cashflow. [01:27:37] That will just have to be shifted and find a new way to be generated. [01:27:42] If you're in a complete work from home environment, it's not beneficial is what I'm saying. [01:27:47] It's not beneficial for the economy. [01:27:49] It's not beneficial for the small business owners. [01:27:51] It's not beneficial for the, for the, the real estate companies that, that have all the high property real estate in New York city, in the major cities where they're charging X amount of dollars in rent. [01:28:01] Right. It's, it's a whole trickle down process, which is why, you know, from the comments of like, Hey, we need to get back into the office. [01:28:08] You have to get, you have to appeal that back. [01:28:10] In my opinion, peel that back and figure out what are the real motivations behind the economy. [01:28:14] And look, we're a capitalist society, right? [01:28:15] We, you know, people have to hit these profit margins for their shareholders. [01:28:19] And, you know, it's all of that that goes into play. [01:28:21] And yes, obviously for the, for the U S government, sorry, not the U S to be able to continue to generate the economy. [01:28:28] You need to have all of these transactions continue to occur or have a new way of generating that cashflow. [01:28:34] And I don't think we figured out the new way of generating the cashflow within the two year period of the pandemic. [01:28:40] And, you know, I'd argue we're probably still in the midst of the pandemic. [01:28:44] Um, but if, if the financial services areas found a new way of generating that cashflow, then that might change people's perspectives at that very senior level, uh, for work from home for certain individuals. [01:28:56] So again, just my opinion, happy for anybody to sort of, uh, say, say otherwise, because, you know, I don't think I'm a hundred percent right, but I don't think I'm that far off. [01:29:04] No, I think it plays a big role into it. [01:29:06] And I would share your independent view and perspective on, on that particular topic. [01:29:10] Um, I, I'm very much in line with that. [01:29:13] Okay. [01:29:14] Um, thanks, Nate. [01:29:15] Nick, you want to say something? [01:29:16] Now I'm going to move to Lisa Beth, introduce Lisa Beth, or let Lisa Beth introduce herself. [01:29:23] And then, uh, see if she has a question for you. [01:29:26] The, the, the only, I think part that I would say to that is that, you know, evolution is always going to be painful. [01:29:33] And, and I think we're, I think, you know, we're in a work from home revolution stage right now where we're, that cat's out of the bag and everything you said is a hundred percent correct. [01:29:43] It will impact small business. [01:29:44] It will impact cities. [01:29:45] It will impact real estate. [01:29:46] It will impact all of these things. [01:29:48] There's no question about it, but I think there's no choice. [01:29:52] I think we have to figure out how to evolve, um, and take us to the next level of, you know, productivity enhancement. [01:29:58] And, and, and there are absolutely consequences that, that are going to come away from that, but you can't stop evolution. [01:30:04] I agree. [01:30:08] Lisa Beth, over to you. [01:30:10] I love it. [01:30:11] And I'm so sad that I missed out on a part of this discussion because it sounds absolutely fascinating. [01:30:19] And I'm so glad that you're here, Nicholas. [01:30:21] Um, my name is Lisa Beth. [01:30:24] Absolutely. [01:30:25] Um, my name is Lisa Beth and, um, I run a compliance ethics and corporate governance consulting firm and I'm a regular moderator here. [01:30:34] So my question to you is, um, I just got back from a back to school night. [01:30:40] I'm a school night for one of my children. [01:30:42] And if you were to recommend something to children today, I think high school, college, in terms of what they can read, what they can, um, you know, view, what they can do that would be beneficial for the economy of the future. [01:31:00] What would you recommend to them? [01:31:01] You know, I, I think there is something innate in every person. [01:31:10] Um, every child in terms of something that draws them to things. [01:31:15] Um, for me, when I was a little kid, I don't even remember this and told this, like when I was a little kid, my, my grandfather was around and my grandfather was Cooper. [01:31:25] So he used to make barrels right out of, out of, uh, out of wood, you know, and, and, and, and, and Greece back in the olden days. [01:31:33] And so he was always kind of handy and always sort of, you know, working around the house and doing a type of thing. [01:31:38] And for whatever reason, at one point he gave me like a little stool and he gave me some nails and he gave me a hammer and I would just sit there and I would, you know, take 20 nails and put it in the stool and then take them out and put it. [01:31:51] It just fascinated me. [01:31:52] Um, and I like, you know, playing with things and taking things apart. [01:31:56] And story goes at one point, they got me a little piano or, you know, a little small, you know, kids piano type of thing. [01:32:02] And, you know, I found it really interesting and I wanted to know how it worked and I grabbed the hammer. [01:32:08] So I found that how it worked. [01:32:10] Um, so I, you know, that was sort of my, you know, I was a physical person. [01:32:14] I liked to, you know, physically touch things and probably why I chose to sort of be an engineer. [01:32:19] Uh, although I eventually ended up in software. [01:32:21] Uh, but that was sort of what I found interesting, right. [01:32:24] It's sort of working with my hands and stuff. [01:32:25] So I would say, you know, everything from, you know, if they, if they want to do things with their hands and they want to do things with their hands. [01:32:31] And they want to do things in the physical world that has sort of that instant gratification. [01:32:35] Grab yourself a raspberry pie and Adreno, you know, build yourself a little project, you know, even just turning a light on and off or, or, you know, some sort of robotics thing. [01:32:44] I think it's sort of like a great positive experience for people that want to sort of touch things. [01:32:48] Um, physically, um, if they're more of a sort of, uh, you know, like to design things in the cloud, just learning any sort of programming language or learning how to, you know, even just, you know, uh, you know, playing a game to design a game, right. [01:33:05] It's perfectly fine, but any sort of programming that goes into their level of interest, you can't sort of force it on them. [01:33:11] But then I think you can always introduce technology to compliment whatever sort of natural interest that, that the child has in that particular area. [01:33:19] Uh, but obviously, you know, any sort of, um, any sort of programming knowledge, essentially of, uh, you know, basic electricity, physics, science, math. [01:33:28] I mean, all that kind of stuff, uh, will give you a basic foundation. [01:33:31] So, so my background was in electrical engineering, but the reality is, I don't know, for, for those of you that are not engineers, the first two years of any electric, of any engineering program is the same, no matter what you want to be. [01:33:41] So I don't care whether you want to be a electrical engineer, a mechanical engineer, a, uh, uh, sort of a thermodynamics engineer, whatever you are, your first two years of the same math, same physics, same chemistry, same, basically everything. [01:33:53] And you specialize sort of in the last two years of whatever decision you make. [01:33:57] So, um, having that, you know, background of, uh, of, uh, practical sort of math and science. [01:34:04] And like, one of the things I remember, which was still to this day, I remember when I went into, I think it was chemistry. [01:34:09] I think it was my chemistry class when I was in high school, I think it was a, a sophomore or something like that. [01:34:14] And, you know, like I'm not that old. There were calculators when I was in high school, right? [01:34:18] So, um, uh, so, and, and they were cheap enough where you could buy them. [01:34:23] But I remember that the, the, the teacher essentially of the class introduced us to a slide rule. [01:34:28] And I was like, holy shit, what, what a slide rule. [01:34:31] Why would I use a slide rule? [01:34:32] I didn't understand why he was trying to teach us how to use a slide rule. [01:34:36] And most of you probably don't remember what a slide will even is. [01:34:39] Um, so you can Google it on your own and see what a slide will is. [01:34:42] Essentially it lets you do math through a, uh, through, um, uh, to log based arithmetic. [01:34:47] For doing calculations. [01:34:49] So he taught us how to do it. [01:34:51] And it was really valuable because it helped me better understand numbers so that when you multiply, you know, 10 times 10 and you write down a thousand, right? [01:35:01] You re or 10,000 or one, right? [01:35:04] If you just naturally get an instinct for the fact that that number is wrong, right? [01:35:08] You're not brainlessly typing in something into a computer or a calculator and assuming that it's always correct because you can make typos in terms of what's there. [01:35:16] So forcing us to use a slide rule and doing all the calculations by hand, uh, for that particular chemistry class, uh, really made it made a big difference in having a better feel for the number. [01:35:26] So, you know, my two senses, you know, anything that, that you can't force it onto a child. [01:35:32] I mean, if somebody would force something on me, it'd be horrible. [01:35:35] I probably wouldn't have done it, but you can compliment it with any sort of technology that might help them get a better knowledge of their interests and explore it further to, to, to more satisfaction for themselves. [01:35:47] I love that. [01:35:48] And I love, um, that you explain how basically, you know, different minds are gonna learn differently and you should look at things from multiple different vantage points to make sure that you're getting it right. [01:36:01] So thank you for sharing that. Tomas, I'll turn it over to you. [01:36:05] Thanks, Lisa Beth. Um, Katie, I know you have a question you want to ask, and I'm just going to go to the chat. There's a question in the chat. [01:36:13] I'm going to change this because it does say C. So I'm going to change this to CEO because, uh, Caitlin is trying to start trouble here on the, in the chat. I see. [01:36:20] Uh, so I'll change this for you, Nick. Do you feel like when you, uh, get up to the CEO level, you're offered similar grace and opportunities to recover when it comes to your mistakes. [01:36:31] I guess that's going back to our mistake conversation and failing fast. So you as a CEO, how do you, how do you feel about that? And if you make a mistake. [01:36:41] There are mistakes and there are mistakes. Um, you know, the mistake of not making payroll is a big mistake, right? In terms of what's there. Um, the mistake of firing the wrong employee is also a mistake with constant points. [01:36:57] It's not as big as not making payroll, right? In terms of what says, so they're the consequences of, of errors and mistakes are, are, are, are, I guess, much more impactful to the employees and the company many times as you get up there. [01:37:09] So, um, so you, so you have, I guess, um, uh, you have more responsibility, right? And, and, and, uh, and as such, you have to be more careful about what you're doing. [01:37:22] Um, and, um, and, um, and the part that people sort of many times forget is the, the higher up you get in the organization, the less you can really tell people what to do, right? [01:37:32] You have to motivate people into doing the right thing and helping them do the right thing and setting the right culture around that and setting a culture that supports innovation. [01:37:41] Um, and doesn't, uh, sort of discourage it. And, uh, and you have to, you know, set the example sort of by what you do. Uh, but there are certain mistakes that you, you simply cannot make. [01:37:53] Um, and, and, and those are sort of black and white and you can't, there's just no way you can get over that. [01:37:58] Um, you know, people expect their paycheck. You gotta get it delivered. Um, you know, sorry, my, my, uh, my, uh, my dog ate my, uh, my homework doesn't sort of work in that, in that situation. [01:38:09] So your responsibilities get greater, the impact of your mistakes get larger, but you also have a lot more people supporting you. [01:38:15] And if, and, uh, and, um, you just have to make sure that if you have the right culture and the right folks supporting you, you're not going to make those, those huge mistakes. [01:38:24] And, and you could survive a lot of the smaller mistakes. Um, hopefully that answers the question. [01:38:30] Well, she's not on stage. So I will say it does very well. Uh, Katie, I know you have a question, uh, that you want to ask Nick. Go ahead. [01:38:38] Yeah, I do. And I realize we're coming up to the end of our time, so I'll make it brief, but, um, throughout the evening, we've been talking a lot about, um, the, uh, workforce that we have in our industry. [01:38:50] Um, and I'm thinking a little bit more about, you know, academia. I mean, just now you mentioned, you know, you have a, you started out your, your electrical engineering degree by having the same course as every engineer has. [01:39:00] Well, now we have all of these cybersecurity degrees, um, kind of, kind of coming into the market. [01:39:05] Um, but I'm wondering where is that gap? Do you think, um, and is there anything else that we could, should be, or are you doing as a thought leader and an industry leader to bridge that gap between the academic and the, um, you know, cybersecurity degree? [01:39:21] That's not necessarily, um, you know, in practice, like are, are there more opportunities for internships or things that, um, people can be doing with these cybersecurity careers to maybe fail more in a lab environment so that they're not failing so fast in the corporate environment? [01:39:37] I guess I just wondered what your thoughts were overall on, on that degree program, um, in general. [01:39:42] So I'll give you an analogy. So when I was, um, so I told you, I, I, I got my master's degree into my, in my, my fifth year of electrical engineering. [01:39:52] Um, because I wanted to do chip design. I had to take a course in semiconductor physics. [01:39:58] Um, and I had this, uh, professor named Lewis plot that was the, the, the, no, Lewis, I think his last name. [01:40:05] Um, but, um, anyway, he was an old timer that, uh, worked for Raytheon and literally was at the beginning of the semiconductor revolution. [01:40:13] Um, and he had a midterm and a final. [01:40:17] He gave you basically, um, six questions, 10 parts per question. [01:40:22] And you had, uh, as much time as you wanted, you needed at least six hours to really do his exam. [01:40:27] And it would typically take one, remember those blue booklets. [01:40:30] It would take one booklet per question. [01:40:32] So I remember the first time the, the, the, the first exam I took, so you had 60 points. [01:40:36] It was one point per thing. [01:40:37] And I think at the first time I got a, you got a 28 or something like that on the first midterm that we had. [01:40:42] And I was freaking out because anything less than a B is failing for a master's degree. [01:40:46] So I went up and I said, I'm really sorry, professor. [01:40:48] I clearly I failed and I don't know what I can do to make it up. [01:40:51] And he said, take out the highest creating the class letter. [01:40:53] It shut up, you know, to go on and stuff. [01:40:54] So he was, he was a smart guy, really, really tough guy. [01:40:57] And he said, you could bring anything you want in class, as long as it doesn't breathe. [01:41:00] Right. [01:41:01] To, to sort of take your exam. [01:41:02] But the point of it was when you asked them a question about, Hey, how does this particular work? [01:41:08] Or how do you come up with this doping coefficient for the semiconductor or whatever? [01:41:11] He would go back to like, you know, boards model of the, of the atom and since he deduce everything from there for you. [01:41:18] And like six. [01:41:19] So you had a, he had a level of understanding that was just unbelievable because he didn't learn about it. [01:41:26] He lived it right. [01:41:27] In terms of what's there. [01:41:28] And so, you know, when I, when I started digital guardian, right, there was no such thing as a CISO data loss prevention. [01:41:34] The terms, I think Gartner named it like three years after we started the company. [01:41:37] Right. [01:41:38] In terms of what was there. [01:41:39] And the CISO, you know, main role sort of came out maybe a year or two after that. [01:41:45] So there was no degree. [01:41:46] There was no, whatever. [01:41:47] None of this stuff existed. [01:41:49] People sort of figured it out as they went along. [01:41:51] Right. [01:41:52] And what I find is those folks, you know, guys and gals that sort of, you know, figured it out as they went and did the best they could. [01:42:01] And sort of, were sort of constantly working the problem have achieved the level of understanding and appreciation of the problem. [01:42:07] That's really hard to do when you get a degree in it, so to speak. [01:42:12] Right. [01:42:13] You get a, you get a much more practical sense of what that actually means. [01:42:16] So to answer your question, I think there's a lot of these folks like Craig Schumart from Cigna was, you know, one of these early guys. [01:42:24] It's I think now retired. [01:42:25] But, but a lot of these old timers, not that that old, but I mean, relatively to this generation now. [01:42:33] They really, it would do them good for us to sort of bring them back and talk about, you know, how they evolved their programs, how they thought about the problem, how they went about, you know, doing things. [01:42:44] To your point, provide essentially more, more internship programs, more hands on experience, more sort of knowing how to do things. [01:42:54] You know, I think the, the, you graduate and we're going to throw you into a position, you have a degree, and we're going to expect you to perform flawlessly, not even realize, you know, like my first day at Lotus and I didn't understand how to send an email. [01:43:06] I didn't know what the CC and the BCC was. [01:43:08] Well, how would I know? [01:43:09] They never taught me that in college. [01:43:10] Right. [01:43:11] How am I supposed to know that? [01:43:13] But it's important, right, to know these things. [01:43:15] I think the, the, the, the concept of an internship and, and, and large companies sort of providing that I think is important to do that and sort of combining some of the folks that have lived it historically and, you know, having them as advisors and having them, you know, teach things and talk about things. [01:43:32] And, you know, not even though I'm a vendor, you know, not having the vendors drive the conversation so much. [01:43:38] Right. [01:43:39] Right. [01:43:40] I mean, yes, vendors need to, you know, put their message out and the latest product and whatever, but it'd be good if, if, if you could, if there was also sort of a point of view that was, you know, kind of like my professor was where he can explain things to you for, you know, how things evolved over time, right. [01:43:56] To a level of degree that you couldn't appreciate any other way than having somebody that had sort of grown up with it, so to speak, in that environment. [01:44:04] And those folks are still out there, but I don't see them being leveraged as much as I would have hoped they would, or people going to them for, for the wisdom that, you know, their, their technology may not be as relevant today as it was maybe 20 years ago, but the strategy and the philosophy and the approach, I think still is. [01:44:20] Anyway, my two cents. [01:44:22] Well, I think we can take that as a call to action. [01:44:25] Somebody clip that and then send it to all your global leaders that can spend time with people. [01:44:30] No, thank you. [01:44:31] I really appreciate that insight. [01:44:32] Thanks. [01:44:33] Absolutely. [01:44:34] Thanks. [01:44:35] Thanks. [01:44:36] Thanks, Katie and Nick. [01:44:37] I know we're sort of running a little bit over. [01:44:40] I do want to ask you one more question, if you do have the time, and I just want to make a couple of quick announcements. [01:44:46] So one, there are some folks in the audience with the little sort of celebration or party hat. [01:44:51] That means you just joined Clubhouse. [01:44:53] So welcome to Clubhouse and thanks for joining us this evening. [01:44:56] Again, click that little greenhouse on the top left of your screen. [01:44:58] You can join our fireside chat club and you can listen to the playbacks. [01:45:02] Your microphone is a microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone microphone [01:45:32] try to minimize it, but George is a regular, he regularly joins our fireside chats. He is the [01:45:40] senior director and host of First Watch, so tune back in next Wednesday to hear that conversation [01:45:45] with George and learn more about him and how he got started in what he's doing and his origin story. [01:45:51] So Nick, I usually like to ask this question of our guests, and it's really, as we start to [01:45:57] conclude, and it's more of a reflection question, you know, if you have one piece of advice for [01:46:02] the younger Nick, what would it be and why? [01:46:09] I think the best advice I could give is trust your instinct more than I did originally. [01:46:22] Doubt yourself less. I think we all, I don't know what to call it, I think we all have an instinct, [01:46:28] we have a little voice inside of us that too many times we rationalize to not listen to, [01:46:33] and then it ends up being correct. And I would say, listen to that inside voice a lot more than [01:46:41] you do and don't try to talk yourself out of it. Because many times it's right more than it's wrong. [01:46:49] I agree with that. Sometimes we could be our own worst enemies, right? By having a little bit of [01:46:57] self-doubt. Trust ourselves more. So, Mads, any final thoughts for Nick? [01:47:04] My moderators went shy on me. [01:47:11] Well, I just didn't want them to stand alone on, yeah, listen, I've also not trusted my instincts. [01:47:17] So, yeah, you're not alone there, Nick. And a great reminder for everyone. So, thank you. Thank [01:47:23] you for your time tonight. I really, really enjoyed this conversation. [01:47:26] Thank you. It was a lot of fun and I appreciate all the questions. [01:47:31] Thanks for joining us, Nicholas. We really appreciate your time. So, it's been a great [01:47:36] evening to learn with you. Well, thank you. [01:47:40] Yeah, absolutely. It's so much inspiration. Walk down memory lane, [01:47:46] class of 87 grad, love it. [01:47:50] Thank you. [01:47:50] Yeah, Nick, you know, again, thanks. Thanks again for taking time out of your busy schedule [01:47:56] to spend it with us this evening. I know you could have been anywhere else in the world, [01:48:00] but you chose to spend it with us, sharing your journey and your story and insightful thoughts. [01:48:06] So, I really appreciate that sincerely. I'll leave you with the final words to bring us home. [01:48:12] Well, I just want to thank you, Tomas, for giving me the opportunity to join this. I know I've [01:48:17] really admired what you're doing and admired the commitment of you and Russell and Katie and Lisa. [01:48:24] I know you were all at the last fireside chat that I had listened to a couple weeks ago and [01:48:30] clearly your commitment is great and it's a very unique offering. And I listen to a lot of these [01:48:36] chats myself all the time just and I always learn something no matter who's speaking. [01:48:40] So, thank you for your continued commitment and thank you for the opportunity. [01:48:44] And thank you. Thank you, everybody, for joining. We'll see you all next week, Wednesday. Don't [01:48:51] forget, if you joined us late, as soon as I end this room this evening, you'll be able to [01:48:56] listen to the playback and see what you missed. It's been a great conversation so far. Have a good [01:49:01] rest of your week, everybody. Cheers. Good night. [01:49:03] Yeah, thank you. Bye-bye. [01:49:05] Bye. [01:49:06] Bye, everyone.