Fireside Chat w/Ravi Khatod Founder & CEO @ Ambient Security

Hello and welcome to our fireside chat. This is the replay and you got here right on time. So thanks for joining and thanks for being a member of our community. We hope you enjoy the rest of the show. I'm really excited for this conversation this evening. Before we jump right in, as you know, we do this every single month for about 90 minutes or so. So just some very quick guardrails, if you will, for the conversation. It's Wednesday. It's the middle of the week. Let's have a good time. As Vijay always tells me, let's try to use this as an opportunity to de-stress, if you will, from that busy cyber week or that busy sales week or that busy business week that you might have. And let's leave all of those sort of concerns and things that you have going on and use this as an opportunity to really grow and hear some, use this as an opportunity to gain knowledge as cheaply as possible to steal Russell's line. So if you are rendering the audience, we appreciate you. We're really happy that you're here, but we ask that you please don't use this as an opportunity to sell us on your product or your solution. We will have folks come up within about 30 to 45 minutes or so. We'll open up for folks to come up and ask questions of Robbie as we get into the conversation. The other sort of quick thing that I want to mention for the majority of us, our comments and opinion are our own and do not, are not to be interpreted at us, as us speaking on behalf of our respective companies. I don't know why I've got this tongue twister thing going on. It must be because I'm nervous that Robbie's here. He's got me, he's got me on edge. But please keep that in mind as we work through the conversation this evening. If you do want to quote us on anything, I ask that you just get in touch with us beforehand and just validate that with us before you do. Without further ado, I'm going to go quickly around the room. Robbie will leave you for last. So I'm Tomas Martonado. I'm the CISO for the NFL. Vijay, over to you. Thank you, Tomas. Happy Renestay, everybody. Vijay Balah here, CISO for the Assets Management Business at Goldman Sachs. Russ? Hey, everybody. Russell Eubanks here. Started my company, Secured Ever After. Several years ago, I teach with SANS, work with INS quite a bit. But the highlight for me, for sure, as Tomas was mentioning earlier, is being a part of Fireside Chat and looking forward to conversations just like this. Katie, over to you. Hi, good evening. Katie Hanahan, a cybersecurity strategist, former virtual CISO. I'm in transition right now. So my opinions are definitely my own this evening. Looking forward to the conversation with Robbie, former colleague slash my boss's boss at previous companies and great mentors. Really looking forward to the extended insight we'll hear about, his origin story, and all of the nuggets. I promise everyone should have a piece of paper and a pencil handy. Over to you, Stephen. Thank you, Katie. Hi, everyone. Stephen Garcia. I've been to CISO several times. Also a board advisor. Security's been my lifeblood for quite some time now. Always happy to be here with everyone and share and learn about what everybody's up to. Robbie, really looking forward to your origin story. And I'm sure the gang's got a bunch of questions coming up. Anil, handing it off to you. Thanks, Stephen. Anil Varghese, Senior Operating Advisor with Francisco Partners. Looking forward to the Indian conversation this evening. Back to you, Tomas. Sounds good. Thanks, co-host. And as you all know, we do this every month. So if you're not following the Fireside Chat group on LinkedIn, you're doing yourself a disservice, please follow that group. You'll be alerted to when we pop up again because we only do this once a month, unlike with our prior script. So anyways, without further ado, I want everybody to, you can click on his LinkedIn profile and you can read more about him. But Robbie, why don't you take a few moments and talk to us in the, actually, why don't you take a few moments and go and introduce yourself? And while you're working through your introduction, and you can take as long as you would like to, for your introduction, why don't you tell us a little bit more about you and your origin story? First of all, what a privilege and honor. So thank you, Tomas and the rest of the folks here to invite me. And I know Katie knows me, Tomas knows me, and I look forward to getting everybody else on the call and some good questions. One thing you'll find about me is I'm a cards on the table kind of guy. And I've been very blessed throughout my life and people have done, gone out of the way to share their insights, opportunities, coaching, learning, and sometimes critical feedback to me. And so for me, this is an opportunity really to do what I, little I can, to pay it forward and see if I can help others as well. Maybe just avoid a few of the puddles in the world that I hit or accelerate down straightaways when you see them. Again, very privileged and excited to be a part of this and look forward to the questions. A couple of things. So I was very fortunate to be the son of immigrants. So while I am technically also an immigrant, I was born in India. We moved here when I was three years old and my brother was one. I have one sibling. I was born in India and my parents are, of course, of Indian origin. And one of the funny things we always joke with, many of the folks in technology or many of our Asian descent. And one fun thing we always tease my mom about is she has one son that became an engineer and one son that became a doctor so she can walk proudly at Indian dinner parties. So anyway, my parents were a huge influence in my life. I really learned because I saw how hard they worked. I saw how they were blessed and grateful just to have the opportunity. My father used to always tell me, hey, son, you may not be at the same starting point as everybody else who may have started a little ahead of you in life or their parents gave them a bit more. But in the United States, you get to run the race. And that's a unique opportunity. So seize that moment. And it doesn't matter where you start, apply yourself, work hard, and just appreciate the opportunity to run the race. And so that's something I've really always thought about and tried to instill. I have two daughters and tried to instill my two daughters as well. One of the early things I learned as I watched my parents and I watched myself, hard work and a lot of looking to study really pays off. Throughout my education, I worked hard and I realized I loved sports, played sports in high school and was actually recruited to run track and caught in college, but didn't end up doing it because I took an engineering degree and I was thoughtful of the time commitment. But I realized early on in my career, and I think this dovetails in when we talk about what I've done in my career and where perhaps what I've learned and what I could pass on is I learned I'm not, I wasn't the tallest. I love basketball. I was never the tallest person. I really loved math and science and I'm a big fan of history, but I also realized I wasn't the smartest in the class. But the one thing I learned early on is that I could outwork most of the people and I could study the craft that I cared about. And so that's one of the things that truly served me well is I haven't built the biggest companies and I haven't had the biggest exits. But when I put my mind to something, I'm going to work very hard at it and I'm going to take a lot of time to carefully understand what made others successful and what can I understand and emulate from that success. And the last thing I learned is, especially in software, it's really about people. I know people say that all the time. I've learned very early on that first and foremost, we all work for our customers. We need to understand who our customers work for. Oftentimes their enterprises, their businesses and their customers. And we have to be maniacally focused on understanding their business and making sure they win. And if they win, then the employees that serve them win. And if they win, then I win. And then my investors and shareholders win. And I've been very fortunate to really follow that objective in applying, trying to just work hard, out-hustle, be a master study of my craft and try to hire people like that. And that served me well. So without going into the whole job history and things like that, anybody can look up on LinkedIn. I thought what made me helpful is to just talk about three things in my learnings. And I've been very fortunate. This is the eighth company I've started. We've had seven successful exits in terms of returning shareholder value and employee value as well. I have been the CEO of turnaround situations, oftentimes tough. And 50, $40, $50 million companies. I've been the CEO of companies in growth mode and helped to go up over a hundred plus million dollars. And I've been the founder and CEO of this will be my third startup where it's a clean sheet of paper, no customers, no employees, no revenues, but a lot of deep conviction and a lot of hard work. And I find that actually to be one of the most fun. One thing early in my career, I didn't start in security. I actually started, so I learned three things along the way. The size of the market, the type of people you put around it, and then how are you driving an advantage using tech through your technology? Again, you want to have great process. You want to great people. But again, at the end of the day, you want to be able to, I found what really works is being able to create a very difficult technical mode, a very difficult technical advantage for your competitors to emulate and for you to well position your proposition to your customers. Now, one of the ways I found that early in my career, I was actually, I worked for a company I call Unique Business Systems and we sold business process management, ERP, if you will, right? Early stage ERP. And what I learned that was very valuable was we weren't actually selling technology. We were solving a set of business problems using technology and our competition wasn't even another technology competitor or software competitors. Oftentimes, the best use of capital, we'd sell to the CFO, we'd sell to the CIO, CFO, see why they should go from disparate systems around sales, order management, supply chain, and billing and accounting to a connected system. And so very early on, I learned the discipline around what is the problem my customers currently trying to solve? What does it cost them in terms of dollars, people, etc. How can I improve that by an order of magnitude? And then how do I quantify that proposition? So they not only choose me over the other technology vendor, but they prioritize me as one of the projects for the year that I'm, or the timeframe I'm looking for. So that was significant because when I came into security about 20 years ago, I was very fortunate to work for a company called Cypher Trust and a CEO named Jay Chaudhry, who's gone on maybe to start Zscaler. I really learned that at the time in security, especially when we're selling gateways and email gateways and web gateways, a lot of the selling was around speeds and feeds. And what we really try to do is drive a new discipline around understanding the customer, the current technology they had, the current problems that they have, what they were trying to solve for, and really be a business partner to them. Because oftentimes the difference between our box and somebody else's box wasn't highly different. But oftentimes we won a lot of the customers because they really felt that we listened, we understood their pain, and we were going to really work hard to deliver a solution that made them look good in their organization. So really understanding business value and using technology to solve the customer problem, but making sure that we listen, learn. I'll share one story. I remember going on a sales call and talking to the rep and I said, hey, what does the company do? And he paused and he goes, yeah, I think they're manufacturing. I said, what's the revenue? What are the types of things that they're trying to solve for? What compliance objectives? And I was, hopefully this is only a unique incident, but I was really shocked at the lack of homework to be, have empathy for the customer and go into that. So that's something that I really taught, not just when I was running products and marketing and sales and a lot of go to market functions, but when I became a CEO, even with engineering, we really want to make sure we understand what the path the customer walks in, the shoes that they walk in, because we're not just selling them a solution using technology. We're also selling them a partnership with us. And as Katie knows, because she worked at one of my companies, I love subscription businesses. We would never ring the bell when we got a new customer PO. We'd ring the bell and celebrate when we would renew the customer year one. And especially if the customer expanded, how they were going to use us or bought us, second product, because that means we not only delivered the first product and the first proposition, but we also demonstrated value as a vendor. And they made a decision to trust us with additional responsibilities in their business. And to me, that is one of the biggest values. And on that fun note, I'll tell you two things that used to drive me crazy. One was technologists that said the customer's an idiot and they just had a basic technology dogma. I said, I don't think the customer's an idiot. The customer's articulating a need to go from A to B. And they may be thinking the classic case of faster horse and buggy. It's our job to understand that journey and then come back with a proposal that shows them something they didn't understand. It's an 10X advantage. So that's one. The second one, and again, I think many of you can relate to this, is when we'd have a all-hands company. And I'm not going to, I'm going to pick on salespeople here today for a second, but they would tell the story about a customer win and really make it about the sales effort and how they sold ice to an Eskimo. And I said, that's not how, why we won. We won because we had a better product. We knew how to communicate the proposition of our product in the position of this competition. And that's why the engineers stay up late solving hard problems. That's what the product managers get deeply embedded to understand the next problem. And so at the end of the day, I really have come from the school of thought. I really appreciate sales and marketing, but at the end of the day, the customers more and more becoming very sophisticated, very smart. And in a subscription business, you can't pull the wool over their eyes in year two and year three. You have to deliver the value that you promise. And to me, that's really exciting, especially in the world of cloud technologies. The last thing I really learned and especially after my first part of my career is big markets really solve a lot of problems. You can make mistakes in big markets and recover from it and still go out to be a leader. Number one. Number two, looking for those big markets, I learned this in the last couple of companies, not in the early in my career, but big markets that are already going through, they're going through an arc. Remember that three-year arc, they're going to go through a massive disruption, cloud adoption around modern applications. It's driving zero trust architecture, driving the least privilege management, driving the edge to move 20 years ago from our perimeter, where everything sat nicely inside a data center to then SaaS and the data center. And we implemented SSO and we managed endpoints where people can work many, anyway. So the edge now moved to authentication and managed endpoints. And now the edge is really truly moving to identity. And that's what we're doing in my new company is understanding that people want to work from where they want, from what they want, with what applications they want. They want to be best in class at doing their job. And so we think that's going to be an exciting next frontier. So again, a very big market that over the next three to five year arc is going to go through its own massive disruption. I call it the super wave. And our job is to understand what is the entry point for us, because we can't be all things to all people initially, but what's the beachhead? What's the market entry point? What's the proposition? Who are we competing with? And how do we make the customer a hero and demonstrate a 10x advantage compared to something safe is really a winning strategy. And to do that requires tremendous discipline around being hyper focused, working with customers early to iterate with them. They've got skin in the game. They're working with you. It's not, Hey, we think there's a thesis. We've talked to a bunch of customers. We went in a cave, worked on something for 18 months. We came back out and it's not exactly what the market wanted. Really borrowing from the Steve Jobs playbook of just release the iPhone. What it's not perfect. It doesn't support active sync, things like that. And let's just keep iterating to, we end up having a product that, that people love. And so again, don't build it and hope they will come look for that big market. You cannot create the wave look for the disruption that's happening. It's going to cause that big market to have to go through a change cycle. Look at that chain, look at that and figure out where can I be world-class to a set of customers. It's the classic crossing the chasm. And they go work with early customers that desperately want innovation. They're not getting innovation from the incumbents where they could become a design partner. They have skin in the game and they're going to iterate with you because they also want to realize the value of that innovation. We see that about every decade. And I've been fortunate enough now, initially I kind of bungled my way into it. And then I started developing a little bit of ability to rise up to 40,000 feet and look at it objectively and say, Hey, for example, 10 years ago, I started a company in the BYOD space and we helped a very large wall street bank deploy MacBook Airs, iPads, iPhones in a day where they had to carry Blackberries. And it was more than just MDM. It wasn't the managed device. In the last couple of years working as the chairman of the board of Securov. And I stepped in the role as interim CEO, because the company had gone through some change, which has resulted in great new momentum. I learned a lot about identity. I learned a lot about, especially during COVID, how people wanted to work, one, and that's the rank and file. And then how privileged users had access, not only to crown jewels that used to just live nicely in the data center, but now in SAF, but now in third party apps that are distributed across a large workloads that distribute everywhere. There's 10-year-old legacy applications. There's modern applications that run in GCP, run in Azure, there's third party APIs. So there's a lot of places for something to go wrong, especially if you look at things like the privileged user and the joiner, move, or lever processes. That got me excited as well, because I said, there's a huge market, one, currently served by 20 plus year old technologies. And I won't name them, but they're 20 plus years old. So there's a huge market. And the majority of IAM market owned by PE firms, which don't tend to give a lot of money for innovation. And yet the customers having to get their arms around a highly distributed set of workloads, users and access. So there was a real opportunity to provide a cloud native, hybrid cloud native, converged, unified platform, starting with disability. So we're doing for identity, security posture management, much like what Wiz is doing for cloud security posture management, starting with visibility. So very excited about my new company, Ambient Security. You won't see a lot on the website. The reason we named it Ambient, if any of you have gone to Black Hat, I'll share a story. You go to the airport, security is atrocious. You're taking off shoes, we're taking out our iPads, etc. It's very disrupted to get from where I'm at to the gate. I get to Vegas. And by the way, the security, and I would even argue is not even effective from a GSA standpoint. When you get to security, when you get to the casino, you walk in, I don't see security. I walk to a table, I play, I spend money, I take my money. But the minute I try to do something that's out of bounds, security is right there. So our goal now is to help the chief security officer, the chief risk officer, the VP of identity and access management, say yes to the business. Yes, we can support that new digital platform. Yes, we can support that acquisition. And we run AWS, they run GCP. We're also doing new applications in Azure, but we still have legacy applications that run in our data center that need AD. We want to be ambient. It's just there. It's automated. It's continuous. It's just in time. And so that's the thesis around our new company. And we're really excited that we've already got a set of early customers to Fortune 500 working with us design partners and working with several others in the POC stage and a fantastic team. So again, I hope that helps just paint a little picture about myself from an enterprise or from a work standpoint and from a life standpoint. Loving fun. I'm blessed with a wonderful family. And I love doing things in nature. I love to trek. I've been to large. I've been to base camp. I've been to the largest peak in Western Himalayas and India. I love to surf, mountain bike. And the reason I do these things is it just reminds me about humility. When you're sitting in the mountain, when you're sitting in the ocean, it's just a very humbling experience to be around such grandeur in nature and take off the Silicon Valley hype a little bit. So anyway, I appreciate that and I hope that was a helpful introduction. Robby, that was excellent. That was definitely excellent. It gave us a good sort of background and understanding of you. It also gives you a moment to grab a drink of water. But so much to unpack there. There's so much to unpack there. I'm just going to do a very quick room reset because we did have some people join as you were going through your opening. If it's the first time you've joined us, again, we do this every single month for about 90 minutes or so. We'll open up for questions, usually about 30 to 45 minutes. So if we get to the, I'll say 45 minute mark or just shortly before Anil goes and you do have a question, feel free to raise your hand and we'll bring you up on stage. You can ask a question and enter the conversation. With that said, I will pass it over to Vijay. Thank you, Tomas. Robby, firstly, what a fascinating journey. I'm going to see a lot of familiar faces on the crowd. So you're going to be at Black Hat this year? I am. I'm looking forward to it. And I enjoy reconnecting with both. I really actually enjoy reconnecting with the people and people change companies. But there's some great learning and it's just part of it. It's fun being a part of the village. Excellent. Excellent. So maybe we can catch up live. So my question for you, on our Fireside chats, we've heard numerous times from fellow CISOs talking about their 90 day journey when they take on a new role. So my question to you is, what does your typical 90 day journey look like at a new place? Yeah, I know that's a very good question. I'd break it into two things. And one of the things that probably gives me the most amount of satisfaction is mentoring. I learned two things early on. And by the way, there's a great YouTube talk given by Bill Gurley called Running Down a Dream, the Tom Petty song. And he just talked about making sure you have mentors in your life and then a peer group. And especially once you become a founder and a CEO, it can oftentimes be a very lonely job. So what do I look for in the first 90 days, first 100 days? It's really just learning. And whenever I, for example, let me give an example. When I came into SecureOff, I just wanted to learn two things. Can the team that I have in the business execute the plan just for six months? And therefore, I can zoom out and think about strategy, long-term opportunities, and how do we grow the business, et cetera. And the first thing first is people. Do we have, do I have the right people? Because the right people can not only execute, they can build the processes, drive a measurable process. And you have to have what I find, I have found, have to have measurable KPIs. Because people want to know where they stand. And it's not just a chat. They want to be able to measure themselves, especially really good people. So the first thing I do is in my first 90 days is like, I want to get to know the people in the business as quickly as possible. I want to understand their current processes and challenges. And how are they measuring themselves, their team? What does success mean to them? One. And then second is get out there and validate that with existing customers. I don't even go on new customer calls. It's SecureOff. Even during COVID, I visited 63 customers in the first six months. And I learned a lot. I learned a lot from the customers about the pain they were having, the opportunities that they saw for us to continue to partner with them. I made some changes. Very difficult, but I made some changes with people. And even though it's a challenge, it's a good thing, right? Because people want to be, good people want to be successful. And if they're sometimes good, people are put in the wrong roles or given the wrong metrics and measurements. So for me, the first 90 days is really about learning the state of the business. So I can make those decisions around three things. Do we have the right people first and foremost? Do we have the right processes in place? And then, how do we measure what progress? Love it. Thank you so much. And folks, do take a listen into that video Ravi mentioned. All right. Russ, over to you. Thanks, Vijay. Ravi, thanks so much for being here. I've got already a page of notes of the things that you said in your opening. Just amazed by how well-spoken and the achievements that you've made. One thing that you said, that you mentioned one of the three things that you, areas that you look to be very successful is to look for specific habits of outworking your competitors or your peers. Can you give us several specific things that are on your always do list or must do list, whether daily, weekly, or otherwise, so that we can be inspired and perhaps adopt one or more of those habits? Yeah, absolutely. I learned two things. Russ, that's such an amazing question. And I really try to teach, especially young folks coming into the organization, regardless of function. And that is, you've got to be the white knight, the shiny armor for your customer at the end of the day. And again, customers aren't always right, but they have to trust that you're always advocating and working hard to make them successful. We work hard to make our customers heroes in the organization. So what does it take to do that? Ask them questions. What are your projects this year? How is your team managed? What are the bonuses? What are the challenges you perceive? Give me an example. And Katie and I did this in a couple of large companies. We just straight out asked, what does success look like with this project? And when do you need to have this project done? People sometimes are scared to ask that, but you can't help that customer solve that business problem if you truly have the mindset of being a partner. And on that note, I will always tell customers, I may not be your biggest vendor, but I'm going to work very hard to be your best and winning your best. I'm going to be the vendor who's true partner that you can call on a Saturday and say, we're doing a big cutover. I'm calling the CEO, we have PagerDuty. Or I'm going to be the one that's going to embed a product manager into your new product project to really understand that. And it's paid off. Both my daughters are intact. And my younger one is actually a product manager and her company, world-class by the way, in SaaS security, net retention is about 130, 140%. Her company, and they're at scale, they're about $40 million. They're at 270% because they spend a lot of time embedding themselves with customers. So again, you may not always be the biggest vendor. There's probably a Fortune 500, there's a Cisco team with a $10 million quota in the lobby as well. But we look for demonstrating to not just the CISO, but to the team lead or the project lead that we're going to be the vendor that puts tents and sleeping bags in the lobby and works their butt off to make them successful. And the last two things we used to measure, or we still measure, usually by day 90, oftentimes a customer will form an opinion about the vendor based upon that with the project. And now the project may not be deployed, it may be very large, very complex, lots of professional services. So I would always ask for a day 45 and a day 90, just a 15 minute business review. And it did for two reasons. One is I truly wanted to know. And two, it also put my team and their team, the project team on notice that there was going to be an executive review. Number one, and then number two, usually at the six month mark, I would start to ask the customer about their next 18 to 24 month set of projects in the space that we believe we could help them or maybe in orthogonal space. And by that time, my intent was that we were demonstrating that we're a vendor that can jump higher than others, that is smarter than others and can solve problems and innovate faster for them. And so there's no magic to it. It's just doing it well and doing it as part of your culture. Wow. That's my hand is tired from running. Raffi, I feel like you gave a little master class and customer satisfaction there. And I really appreciate what you shared, some practical things as well as some things that maybe some of us have not thought of before that we could consider implementing ourselves. I definitely appreciate that. Thank you so much, Raffi. And Katie, oh my gosh, over to you. Can't wait to hear your questions and things that you'll share. Thank you. And Raffi, so many things to ask you here. You've already given a lot of nuggets. Early on in the conversation, you said you enjoy mentoring people, which I am one of them and so thankful for it. And by the way, even today, you took time out of your day to have a conversation with me about my career and some things going on with me. And I appreciate that so much. And you have this deep humility. And that's why I think I'm calling it out publicly is that, yeah, Raffi does spend time time with his former colleagues and employees and friends in the industry because he really clearly wants to engage with this cybersecurity community that we're all a part of, which is really in line with the spirit of what we do here every month at the Fireside Chat because this is a non-sponsored, we just get together because we want to learn from thought leaders in our industry. And one of the things that not only I've been able to see in my own experience in working with you, I know that your clients have been able to see or other colleagues have been able to see is this deep empathy. You even used a term earlier that I've never heard you use before, but you used it today, empathy and engineering even. And empathy really runs through everything that you do as a human being and the way that you conduct yourself in our industry and even outside of that. Curious, because this is an origin story podcast, to dig a little bit deeper, I'd love to know where do you think that comes from? And then also as you lead teams and you walk in in that 90 days, if you see people who are lacking empathy in your organization, what are the steps that you take at that point in terms of the importance? But if you could answer both of those in one nugget, that would be amazing. Yeah, let me make sure I get the question correctly, but I think it's a good important because it really comes down to people treating other people, working with other people and understanding both their strengths and weaknesses. And Katie, I think it'd also be great because you and I spent some time together, you can throw me some curveballs as well. Because there's a lot I learned, both while at Agari and subsequent to Agari. And I think oftentimes we learn more from when we crash our bicycle than when we successfully ride the trail. So I think the first thing around the empathy, you asked two questions, which is where did I get my deep rooted sense of empathy? Number one, and then number two, how do you manage an environment? And I'm going to talk about performance, sports teams and culture, and basically being a part of a team and a mission versus an individual contributor. Because I think that's a root of empathy, whether it's for the customer or for your colleagues. I really learned it from my dad. My father was an immigrant. He was the head of the household. Even though he was exceptional in terms of his education, he graduated college at 19, went on to become a GM of a large company in India, but was never satisfied, became an immigrant. And literally, you can't write the book. A classic $113 wife. And by the way, I was three years old and my brother was just under one. And they left my brother in India and went back almost nine months later. I can't even imagine asking my wife to leave our second child to pursue a dream. Good, better and different. And he, and I talked to this early, he was, he is, my father passed 15 years ago, but he was the ultimate patriot. And he seized every opportunity, whether it be to have a customer conversation, even when he became a CEO of a very large, several hundred million dollars publicly traded company, he would, he would leave his upgraded seat and walk back and pull out a pad, a pad of paper and sit in economy with engineers and just say, Hey guys, walk me through how you're solving this problem. Wow. That's amazing. Really was an early believer in two things. One is really understand your customer and then really understand how the technology will build a product to solve that with an advantage, because those are sustainable. You might have an early go to market advantage, the competitors will catch that up because that's a process advantage. And those are not, those are very difficult to defend. So he was telling me three things, which is what's the customer problem? How are you going to solve that problem? Then how are you going to make it scalable and ultimately durable? That really comes from that. So I saw him literally the, with one company sit down because I, he would invite me. It was funny early on in my career. And I'm like, dad, you're inviting me to dinner with your customer. He goes, yeah, I'm in town. Come to dinner. You'll get a nice steak out of it. I was going to school at UCLA. And so we went to dinner and he asked questions, not about the customer's project, not about their budget. And again, he was the CEO and the VP of sales is sitting next to him, but he was so curious and he goes, what are the new markets you guys are trying to enter? And he went back and he started iterating with that customer with engineers and they literally built an extension of their product to help that customer go into that market. I remember that customer basically becoming a customer for life, obviously, and becoming the biggest marketing, basically revenue, but because it was, it was based in the payment industry, digital transactions and digital payments. And he talked about that to his customers. And then when my, and the second thing is when my brother and I were underway, married, my father had a deep passion to go back to India and, and start to build a company and solve problems of his people of India. And Kate, I'm so glad you brought this up because I literally got the other day in India, he saw that people had to carry large amounts of cash, one, and that credit cards wouldn't work because at that time credit cards required payment verification. And so a small $3 transaction with a street vendor or buying groceries wasn't going to work. They wouldn't have dial-up modem. They just wouldn't work. And so the notion of a stored value card and digital wallet was almost 20 years ago. And he brought that into India, into Bangladesh, into Sri Lanka, where people could put a little bit of money on a card and pay their cell phone bill, pay these things. And we take this for granted now because it first came to universities, but I had a really neat message that came from his VP of engineering. And he said, Ravi, your dad would be proud. His vision for a digital wallet to serve the masses in India. And he had a picture of a priest who, when they come through, they look for donations. The priest had a QR code to take donations instead of people having to put bills in. Just really learning from my dad about having a deep curiosity almost, and then working really passionately to help that customer understand their business and their next problem. And using technology to drive a multiplier advantage is where I got it. And then when it comes to employees and empathy, for me, and again, I'm not saying this works for everybody else, but for me, what has worked for me is in that first hundred days when I'm interviewing people, I'm not even asking them about their accolades and things like that. I'm asking them, do they understand? Does the company have a mission? Do they understand the customer? How are we working as a team to go solve that problem? Because everybody's got a functional role. And, but there's no real, I believe in swim lanes, by the same token, I also say, look, we're playing water polo. If you see an opportunity to grab the ball and go to solve the problem for a customer, go do it. Then we can figure out later with a team where we broke down and what happened and how can we build a better process? And I'm a big believer. I know that people talk about the word culture. And for five years ago, and even at a garden, you might remember this, okay, we were trying to, people were trying to manufacture culture. We need better kombucha. We need better. Yeah. These things are all good, but the number one drive culture, it, for me, what I've seen culture, great culture is a by-product of people working as a team on a collective mission and objective and seeing progress and success. You don't see sports teams that are winning and seeing more fans and seeing more championships. They tend not to have a culture problem. And they still have to work out people who are individuals versus team players. But if you could take a collection of really people who are really capable at their craft, but make sure that they understand and they commit to being a part of a common mission, a common team, helping across lines, giving constructive, candid, and respectful feedback to each other in the objective to get better. And if you're not going to be a part of a company, then you will start to see an empathy, not just for the customer, but for their colleagues as well. Because one day, one person's job is crushing it. The other day, somebody's job is not crushing it because of success. They're trying to ask engineering for help. And when the team knows that there's a team objective and they're working as a team, I start to see the empathy come out. And if it's not, then we make changes. We make changes very fast. It's not an individual sport, especially as you scale and grow a company. And I know that's hard sometimes, but that's your job as a leader is to make sure that the team and the objective of the team is the number one thing that's sacred. Thank you for that. And thank you for my colleagues and co-hosts for allowing me two questions in one tonight. But yeah, I really do appreciate that because you're right. You can't build a culture with kombucha. I agree. I think that might be my quote of the night, but in your backstory as well, it was really, it just, it's, I've always known that was part of your leadership style and I never really knew where it came from. So hearing that story from you is just really incredible. And thank you for really coming with all your cards on the table. You said it the first thing you said. So I said, okay, we can ask them whatever we need to ask. So with that, thank you again, Ravi and Steven, over to you. Thank you, Katie. Yes. Good stuff. Ravi, thank you again for your time here. I appreciate it. I'm enjoying everything I'm hearing. Definitely enjoyed hearing about Ambien's game plan. It's a plan after my own heart because I always thought security people should be like, yes, CISOs, since our job is to enable business not to get in the way. But look, in these discussions in the past, we cover a lot of topics, including cybersecurity and DEI. And I think you're in a unique position because if I understand your background correctly, you've done the gamut of business, right? From sales, security, CEO, interim CEO, and chairman. And some of these things are happening in a time where DEI and cybersecurity are two things that are high on the list of things that boards are looking for. So I think as one of the few people that have probably walked this line, what kind of lessons learned could you share with the audience here and in regards to what is a chair of the board looking for in terms of modern day, not just security folks, but people being security aware and what that brings to the business as a whole. Because my statements to boards and things like that have been, you can't really look at security as just like a tech function. For me, it's a risk management function. And when you wrap it up that way, I think boards and other folks like that tend to look at it differently. Because I think instinctively, through our own experience, whether it's car insurance, home insurance, whatever, people understand that a lot better than they understand tech. So just looking to see what nuggets you can share with the team here. No, I think it's a very relevant question and timely right now because we've been talking about digital transformation and stuff like that for years, but the acceleration now is just massive and really accelerated, I think by COVID or the pandemic, if you will. And digital storefronts, digital workplaces, all that kind of stuff. My goal is that the chief security, that my ultimate customer is perceived as a part of the business and not guardrails to the business. At the end of the day, we are guardrails to the business and we have to demonstrate that we can keep the business in compliance. We can confirm compliance, rather just always be talking about audit deficiencies and things like that. But the more that we can transfer security speak, and there's great lessons from great leaders, let's say you've got to dumb it down and almost articulate it to a five-year-old. And again, not that your board is dumb, but make it so easily understand, again, having an empathy for them to help them make a decision to say, okay, let me get this straight. We can manage risk, 5% risk to drive this new project or drive this new storefront or drive this new initiative and give us a head of our competitor, which will yield this shareholder value at this potential risk. Help them understand that or at least demonstrate that you understand that. Look, here's the good news. It's an aligned incentive structure. The better our companies do as measured by the shareholder value they're creating, as measured by the customer value they're creating, right? It equates to our bonuses, our job security, our abilities to reward our people and team members. I think there's some new companies coming out that are really helping with quantifying cyber risk. It can even lead to very simple and immediate objectives, such as I imagine a world where there's a reverse auction for cyber insurance, where we go out and we get a rating against an acknowledged framework that everybody can agree upon, kind of like we do from a security standpoint. So what are the KPMGs and they do, so we already know how we're going to score and we go out into a marketplace and say, hey, you guys, the reinsurers, you bid on my business. No different than my 16 year old, my kid was 16 year old with a clean driving record, but I'm getting charged to shame insurance as the guy who's 16 year old doesn't have a clean driving record. I think a lot of those opportunities are going to emerge, again, driven by this whole notion of digital transformation and whether it's telling the application development team, you guys go for it. If you guys want to move to AWS or we want to acquire the country GCP, we'll figure it out. Go. Just go. And what we'll come back with is not a yes or no. We'll come back with here's what we obsessed as risk. Here are the tradeoffs. We've done our best to quantify that, whether it be cyber insurance or whether it be risk reduction. I guess there's lots of tools out there. So where are your partners bringing your data? We're your co-pilot. And now you can make an informed decision. And therefore, if there is an issue, a security incident or an audit deficiency, up front, we talked about this, right? So we decided that the $500 TV, which is going to be behind the front locked door, the $50,000 of the jewelry behind the lock door, behind the bedroom door, and in a safe. So it's a bit more friction to get to. But that was a measure that we took commensurate with the value and the risk. So I think that opportunity right now is really important. And I encourage, I'm actually working with a couple of folks to bring them onto boards, not as advisors around security, but around, hey, here's how our business operates. And here's how we think, demonstrating to our customers that we not only can give them a better user experience, but also a more secure one. It's huge. My mom, for example, high net worth individual, when it comes to certain transactions on one platform, she does it on her laptop. Other ones, I'm like, Mom, where are you going? She's got her file folder. She goes, I'm going to go see him. In the office, I'm like, Mom, you don't have to do that. People wire out, whatever, imagine if they lost her trust from a security standpoint. They lost a customer for life. So I think all of those are coming together. And wouldn't it be wonderful to have almost like a shortened nine-month Khan Academy delivered, let's call it an MBA for risk management and how to quantify that from tech speak into business speak? That would be great indeed. Yeah, thank you for that. You brought up some good points. And this is something that I share with some of the folks in the space. And just before I say these words, it's not invite to sell us stuff. But what I've talked to the vendors about is even now, as some of us are serving on boards, and I think about all the time we've spent in tech. And I'm like, now that we're on boards, I look back and say, what technology have I used that as a board member, I would like to have that dashboard up in front of me that's going to tell me what the risk is and what it measures. And as of yet, I've not seen it. Don't know if it exists. But that would be like almost like a holy grail kind of thing once you understand what risk is. But very much appreciate that feedback. So thank you, Robbie. Yeah, no, and again, it's been wonderful. It's been wonderful to learn from customers. Because by the way, I also asked them. We did this last time. I go, can you anonymize the data? Can you at least show me the key metrics that you present at your board meetings when you have the 15 minutes? And what do your peers do? I just, I call it the Columbo. I just kind of scratched my head and said, how do you do this? I might have an insight, but it's amazing how much you learn when you almost just go, assume I know nothing. How do you do this? Excellent. Thank you again, Robbie. Neil, passing the ball to you. Thanks, Stephen. Robbie, thanks for carving out some time this evening. One quick story I want to convey to the group is a firsthand experience with working with one of your teams at one of your former organizations. We reached out to them, engaged with them, had a conversation, didn't work out. But you came aboard. A couple months later, that firm, the CISO there, reached out to me and said, hey, didn't we talk to these guys? And he said, yeah, it didn't go well the first time, but now they're asking the right questions. Along those same lines, when we step back into your leadership journey, over those years from sales, from operating roles into the CEO steps, what are the insights that you've gleaned that have carried you forward into your current roles that you can pass on to a lot of folks on the call, on the stage, that are different phases in their journey? First of all, thank you, Anil. And again, I would love to learn more about that because, again, I always sit there. Oftentimes, I will come into an organization. And I'll go, and by the way, I ask for customers that have churned. And that's one of the first set of customers to talk to. And I think I'm either they think I'm really dumb or you guys really want to teach the vendors what they did wrong. And you know what? A hundred times literally out of a hundred, my recollection is that we weren't a good vendor. We weren't listening. You can always solve the technology problem. But oftentimes, we let the companies, when I come in as, let's say, an interim CEO or a turnaround CEO, and when I learn about the losses, it's oftentimes that we failed to deliver as a vendor. I'm coming back to the empathy and all that kind of stuff. But in the leadership journey, I think, like I said in the very beginning, I love basketball, but I'm not as tall as Kevin Durant. And I just, I'll never be able to, I'll play basketball for fun. But in terms of the work that I do here, just study the people who are the best, one, and then understand what you're capable of and then really apply yourself. And that sounds a little bit like motherhood and apple pie, but it's not. I'm a big fan. So as a CEO, there's so much I can learn. I'm a huge, massive fan of Frank Slootman. And when I listened to his podcast and read his book, Amped Up, for those of you who don't know, Frank Slootman is the CEO of Snowflake. Before that, he was a CEO of ServiceNow. Before that, I think Data Domain. And this guy, one would say, has nothing left to prove, but he wakes up every day and is paranoid about somebody else, a competitor coming after his customer and works in that kind of fashion. Again, now, you do it in a respectful way. People have families. People have lives. They have other interests, right? So you don't want to drive people nuts. But you always, customers will always have options. Employees will always have options. So every day, what am I doing to learn more about my customer's problem, learn more about how we can be a great place to work, build great teams, align people around a mission statement. And then when it comes to what I call the functional roles, I had – this actually comes good and bad. I had one time in an exec staff meeting afterwards, I had the chief revenue officer come up to me. And this was the second time he worked for me. He goes – we had a little bit of – I had to interject a little bit on some of the work the CMO was doing and some of the metrics and product officer before he had to. And he said, Ravi, the good thing and the bad thing about you is you've done all of our jobs. So we can't call – you call bullshit on us. You have an empathy for us, but you can also push us a little bit as well. So I've been fortunate enough, blessed enough that people have given me the opportunity to have what I call step-up roles. I always look to do that when I see people who are capable and apply themselves. If they have experience, I will give them that opportunity because a really capable person who's willing to apply themselves will study to be – to improve the mastery of that particular craft. So I'm a big fan of giving people opportunities, step-up roles that they can demonstrate. They've given that. They'll apply themselves. And to my other point is learn. I listen to – every time Frank Schluman does a podcast with somebody, I learn. Every time a bill, girl, and investment does a podcast or something, I'll listen to it. I'll learn. So I'm a big believer in learning as well as from other founders. I love reading Ben Horowitz's book. It was a great book around the journey that he and Marc Andreessen had. There's a lot of learning out there if we take the time. And by the way, you realize you're not alone because what we're doing is hard. I always tell people come up to me and say, this is hard. I said, yes, and that's why it's valuable because it was easy. It wouldn't be valuable because lots of people can do it. So I know I'm asking you to do something hard, but we're not bending light. We're not breaking the laws of physics. It can be done, and other people have also done this. So let's apply ourselves. Let's have a mission. Let's put together a team. Let's understand the plan. Let's understand what success looks like along the milestones, milestone driven. And let's also be ready as we hit these milestones and we don't have the success we hope for to look at the data and look at the process and make a change. It's okay to fail. It's okay. What's not okay is to become dogmatic and start pointing fingers because somebody said your plan didn't get us to where we wanted to get to. Yeah, that's great, Robbie. Thanks for sharing that. I just finished the audio book today, in fact, and appreciate hearing that from you directly because part of that, too, is you've encapsulated environments where that mindset can flourish. So great to hear. Yeah. It's been great. It would be great to hear from you guys. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks, Robbie. Thanks. And thanks for the conversation so far. Look, we've got about 30 minutes or so left of Robbie's time because I do want to be respectful of his time and everyone's time. So if you do have a question, if there's anyone in the audience and you do have a question, feel free to raise your hand or we will bring you up on stage. And Robbie, I finished that book that you told me about some time ago, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, which is a pretty fascinating and amazing book. So if you haven't read that, I recommend it as well. And thanks to Robbie, I was able to learn about it. So, James, thanks for taking a moment to join us this evening. Anything you want to ask Robbie? So, Robbie, I want to give you credit. When you started speaking, he sounded like my Mexican grandfather. The first generation came across Work the Fields. What you said. Yeah. What you said. But let me bring something up. And this is something I challenge with. So I might ask a little patience because I might get emotional on this. I view there's three groups here. There's people, and this goes to tech. There's people who are in the choir and there's people who are preparing to go in the choir. If we look at statistically speaking, most people in tech usually have one or both parents who are educated. There's an easier migration path. I was lucky enough to have my father as a pharmacist and my grandfather who introduced me to Pong. That's where I come from. But as I've done my mentoring, as other people have done mentoring, there's groups out there when they hear music, they think they shrill. They cannot grasp it. It's not part of their vision. How, as a leader, have you been able to reach those people? What are some of your lessons learned and what are some of your pitfalls? What are some of your lessons learned and what are some of your lessons learned and what are some of your lessons learned? Boy, I'm going to have to do a memory recall on that. Let me just start talking about one thing you talked about. I'm actually going to answer your question, but really talk about the immigrant story as well. One of the things that I think tech can do uniquely that under-industries cannot do, and that is really lift people from one point of life to literally go through three generations of transformation in terms of what they can do for their family and themselves. Let me give you a very specific example. My parents had to travel 11,000, whatever, 10,000 miles. Today, I'm a big fan, and I'm especially like I've helped some people in sales and become a BDR because they simply weren't able to afford to leave their family because they were helping their family and go to a four-year university. It wasn't even the cost of the university. It was just away from the family and helping be a contributor and helping with the family. But we can open up opportunities for these people too because they also have capability and want to apply themselves. For example, it doesn't take – I'm not trying to dismiss a role in, let's say, a sales development rep or someone that's doing some QA testing. It doesn't take a four-year degree from Stanford. Wouldn't it be wonderful? Wouldn't it be wonderful if they're – like I said, it was like – I forget about the NBA, but it was like a Khan Academy where a young woman in Bangladesh in a village could learn after she has a high school education, has decent math, logic skills, and learned how to become a QA tester for mobile apps or for mobile portals or things like that. The company benefits from that person. This person benefits. They literally left generations. They didn't have to go to a four-year college. And now they can participate in what used to be just the American dream, which is a better education, participate in potential equity. So just as we had vocational schools when I was in high school that, again, college may not be for everybody for a multitude of reasons and we shouldn't judge. And there was an ability to go become an electrician, buy it through an apprenticeship, and then earn a job through a union that had benefits and things like that. I think there's a real opportunity in the future for us to create – just as we create 10X advantages for our customers with technology, I think technology also affords an ability to give people almost like what I call knowledge worker vocational skill sets. Again, I think there's a huge value in going to a four-year university around culture and learning and people and just the college experience. I certainly remember enjoying it. But again, not everybody can do that for a multitude of reasons. So I'm not sure if that answers your questions about the course and all that, but you touched a nerve when you talked about the Emmerbin story and see what people go through. And I think all sides benefit if we can – I'm certainly very passionate about them. I'm trying to help – I'm trying to do what I can on a small local level, which I'm working with a couple of people who were successful in a junior college. But just life does not afford them the ability to go to a four-year college if they need to start to do something sooner to help their family. And they can come into tech, and tech needs those folks as well. Thank you. Thanks, James. Thanks for joining us this evening and asking your question. Kumar, over to you. Thanks for joining us. Thanks, Thomas. And thank you all the hosts and all the speakers. My one question is regarding how do you convince small businesses to take cybersecurity serious? Yeah. Could you elaborate on that, please? That's a tough question. I had not spent a lot of time, in my companies at least, to focus on SMB. But I have friends that have small businesses, and they called me because they know me. One of the areas where it's unfortunate, but now people have realized that things like phishing have become so cost-effective, so cheap and cost-effective, that even an SMB of a small company who gets an alert that they need to change their password to payroll or wire money. So that's one area, which is one. Number two, some of their customers might be bigger customers. They want to be able to see they're subject to a third-party risk. So I would start with a couple of things that are super, super tangible. Crawl, walk, run, and say, have you ever been a subject of a phishing attack? We have, but we're smart. Okay. I believe you are. But if you have 20 employees, and they get 20 emails a day, that's 40 a day, and you have 200 working days in a year, you know, the attacker has 80,000 chances of being successful just one time at 80,000. So the object stack, so let's talk about not just phishing training, but some technology solutions as well. Second part is, I have a good friend of mine. He has got a janitorial service, and they've done extremely well, and they landed LAX as a big contract. And he was suddenly subject to third-party risk management, trying to, because he was now in his company, and the technology his employees use were, and connecting to Wi-Fi, they were in scope. And so I think these are some examples that are very tangible. Back to my first example, which is an SMB is the ultimate example of you're not asking for budget that's in competition with another security budget. You don't be asking for budget in competition with another business project. And so I think, again, having an understanding of that, having empathy for that, and then saying, hey, I'm not here just to sell you on fear about being breached. Phishing is real. So the odds are it's only a matter of time. Here's two examples of how you can literally 10x the advantage that you have with your employees for this not to happen at a fraction of the cost of a breach. So that's just one example. But I have to profess I'm not an expert in the SMB market. Our intent for my companies has always been to work with MSSPs, who I think can more cost-effectively deliver a suite of solutions. I think Microsoft and Microsoft E3, the Microsoft Small Business Suite, is a great place to start. I'm sure Google as well. I'm just not as familiar with it. And so today we are talking literally to Microsoft and NTD, who are very excited about the work we're doing, for them to be our global distribution partners for the SMB, which helps us as well. Because it would take us years to build that kind of a Salesforce or channel presence. Thanks, Ravi. Thanks, Kamal. Thanks, Kamal. Go ahead, Kamal. Oh, sorry. No, thanks, Kamal. Thanks for jumping up a stage and asking your question. I'm going to bring a couple of folks up as well. But while they get settled on, Katie, over to you. Yeah, thank you. Ravi, you mentioned a couple of times throughout the discussion, the way that you've grounded yourself throughout your career is with data and data and data. I wrote data down three times, so I had to read it back three times. And it's one of the things that I appreciate about you as a leader as well is that as much empathy as you can have for your team or for your client at the end of the day, data is really what is going to drive that relationship. One of the toughest things that I had in moving from what was a revenue side of the business and working for companies like you were leading to being a virtual CISO was trying to figure out how to decipher the data that I was receiving. And just now you spouted out some really interesting statistics that were compelling to me. And I know you as a person who always goes to a source that is credible. For those of us who are looking for the credible sources in our practitioner side, where are the places that you're spending your time when you wake up in the morning? Do you have a dashboard of information that you're going to see where the market's going? Where are you consuming that data and where do you suggest that people who are trying to run these security organizations and ingest this data not get overwhelmed? So, again, I think data to me is like pieces of a puzzle. It helps make the more data you have, the more informed decisions you can make. Having said that, people, we have the term analysis paralysis. So, one thing I try to really teach my leadership, and we do coaching, and I bring in external coaches as well, is that we want as much data as we can. So, let's work very hard to collect that data. But at the end of the day, we have to make a decision. And we're paid sometimes to lean in and make a decision, even though we'd love to wait for another month or two weeks or 10 more customer calls. To get more data. So, again, data helps to start to paint the picture. Helps you make an even more informed decision. But you're still, at the end of the day, you're paid not necessarily to go with your gut instinct, but to go with your best forecast, guesstimate, if you will, with the data that you have. Because also time, whether it's time of delivery of new technology, time to enter a new market, time to hire a team, time to acquire a company, time to move something out. Is really where it comes down to. So, that's the outcome that I'm trying to drive. And I'm trying to use data to help drive as much information as I can to get it. So, think of a dartboard, right? The closer I get to that dartboard, but at some point I have to throw the dart. I can't get right to the nose because before then, somebody else with my competitors might have thrown the dart already. So, it's a little bit of a balance. Where do I get my data? Honestly, one of the best places is a peer group. You can read information. Like, again, in my role, I read it. I went over. The bankers sent out their cybersecurity monthly review. I listened to earnings calls. So, I used to listen to earnings calls. Okay, when we were competing with ThruPont, I listened to the earnings calls. I had so much respect for Gary Steele. So, I listened to earnings calls of companies that I think might be potential acquirers of our company in the future. And to hear and get some ideas of how they're thinking about their future and what are their strategic moves that they're making that aren't always covered in just the quarterly numbers that they send out to Wall Street. So, the actual analyst calls are really insightful. But for me, one of the biggest areas of real-time data, not snapshot data looking backwards, but real-time data of what's happening exactly in the battlefield is my peer group. And I know that I've spoken to a lot of folks in the industry on the customer side. And whether it be, again, now today there's CISO Slack channels. And we don't have to wait to get the RSA or get the Black Hat or only have a couple of small folks on a WhatsApp thread. There's great ways to quickly say, hey, you guys, are you guys looking at this space? Are you looking at this vendor? Or, hey, we're dealing with this project. Like, it's taken us much longer. Is it my team? Or did you guys see, we were talking to a customer, not even a very large customer, certainly not a Fortune 500. And it was in the IGA space. And the guy just looked at me. It was the chief security officer. Tomas, you met him at the event. And he just kind of looked at me. He goes, where were you guys six months ago? This is going to end up taking us over a year of a project I inherited. And I'm going to spend more on professional services than I am on software. I think just the peer group is a great way to get real-time data. But in addition, at least for me, reading competitor stuff, reading, listening to analyst briefings, reading about market trends, really helpful. I hope no one from Gartner doesn't call. I find the Gartner briefings of value. But again, a lot of times, by the time you're reading it, the market has already moved. Yeah, thank you. That's what I was getting at, too, is that kind of more informal way with the Slack channels. And I told you earlier, the mentee group that I'm a part of has been a big influence on me in the last few months as well. And yeah, appreciate that, Ravi. And I think that we have a couple more people who have joined us on stage, and we're quickly running out of time. I think Kapil is on the stage next. Over to you. Yeah. And Kapil's coming up. I'll just say one last thing, Katie. Of course. My first executive role, I got when I was 27 or 28, and the CEO of the company hired someone from the industry to come in and be my mentor. And what was really interesting, he looked at me, he goes, and I was now managing people that when I came in, I was in a training program. They trained me. And he looked at me, he goes, stop waiting for data, right? So I was an engineer. David, he goes, you were hired and you were promoting this industry because we really trust your decision-making skills and your ability to quickly go, man, I made a mistake. I'm going to quickly fix that. So we get the data, but make the decision and move with it and be ready to, of course, correct quickly. Sorry. No, I appreciate that caveat, too. We were talking about that earlier. Fail forward, fail fast, and analysis paralysis. Yeah, and I think it's probably why I touched on it is it has been a little bit of some of the struggle is where should I stop and stop the analysis paralysis and the right places to go to. So, yeah, I appreciate that extra caveat. Thank you. Yeah. Sorry, Kapil. I apologize. No worries. No worries. Thank you. Ravi, it's a really inspiring story. It's a lot of valuable points I noted from this conversation. So I have a question about what more can we get out of what we already have? This is like from our CEO and the boardroom perspective. We started this year with what more we can do. So I just want to take your take on this. And the second part is what's your advice for the future aspiring CISOs who are coming in this field in the profession and building their career? That's it. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. So I think actually I have a question to the group and I know we don't have time to touch on it, but I'd love to get some DMs from you guys. I'd be really interested in understanding how things like AI and AI models. And I don't use the word chat GPT because there's lots of other like approaches, but how can using that to go through your corpus of data and do things such as accelerate the development of new runtime and new playbooks for security orchestration? Because today, again, these are effective, but they're highly manual processes to build the models, to build the rules, to build the runbooks, the playbooks, et cetera. So one is I think there's actually technology that can make you as the chief security officer do the following, which is what the business cares about, better, faster, cheaper. And again, it's not necessarily you want to get rid of people, but imagine if you could support the growth of 50% of revenue of your business that you serve over the next three or four years with the same effective or with a not 50% increase in direct cost structure. That means the business is more profitable. So I'd be really, I'm really curious to watch this. And I think there's going to be a lot of, you know, there's going to be a lot of smoke before there's fire, but I think there's going to be something there that we should all be thinking about as well. And not just as opportunity, but also a little bit of paranoia, right? Because there's always disruption cycles. So I think the one thing is don't every, your strategic offsets with your team. In my opinion, imagine if you could say, Hey guys, let's talk about two ends of the book. Let's come away with at least three things we're going to do to run our business 10% better. We're not leaving until we do that. And then tomorrow we're going to talk about how we literally disrupt ourselves over the next 18 months. What is strategic? So what's tactical that we can implement tomorrow in the business that when we look at the metrics, we've improved by 10%. We're better, faster, cheaper. And the business cares because at the end of the day that delivers custom, you know, cost value, shareholder value, customer value. One. Number two, I want you to zoom out. And by the way, people really appreciate it. Your team will really appreciate being asked to think strategically, to think out, not in the Boston industry, but zoom at 40,000 feet. Look at the battlefield and go. So one of the things I've always, and people, oftentimes the quietest people, which is why I love the in-person off-sites, right? With the whiteboard. It's the quietest person will say, I've been always been giving thought to how we do this. And I know we can do this a little better, faster, cheaper. We probably should do it next quarter. But we should really think about overhauling the whole way we even think about solving this problem. And again, you may get zero out of it in terms of practical instruction to go execute on, but people feel included in the process of thinking about how the business runs. And I believe you owe it to the folks in your organization to teach them how to become a CISO in the future and maybe hire you to their board. Thank you. Ray? Did I pronounce that right or wrong? I'm sorry if I did, but... Maybe Raji? Yeah, Raji. Yeah, yeah. Oh, Raji. Oh, I didn't see the J. I'm sorry about that, Raji. Over to you. Thank you for joining us. Anything you want to ask Ravi? Yeah. Hi, Ravi. And thank you. And also thank you to all the hosts. So my question is around, I was curious about what's the trend you are seeing. I know I think the cybersecurity is always looking for more people, is always lack of enough people coming into cybersecurity side. In order for creating the interest for high school kids or even the college kids, like, one question is, what's the trend you are seeing? Is more people, more younger generation pursuing the careers towards cybersecurity? Or what exactly can be done that might help to get more people towards it? I don't think I have a large enough data set to answer that with, you know, with something that's quantifiable. I can only tell you what I'm seeing. And what I'm seeing is I'm seeing people are definitely going into cybersecurity. And I don't know how that compares to, let's say, IT infrastructure. But there's two areas that are really attracting the young talent. And by the way, we, even at Ampute Security, we have what we call the grand experiment. We've hired basically four graduates, undergrads, and they passed the technical scores really fast. They don't understand how to build enterprise software. And they're mapped to a mentor. And it's not just a summer internship. Like, we're committed to helping these people become world class, which we think they're capable. And their only goal in the first year is to demonstrate their work ethic and ability to learn. But so when I talked to them and I asked them, I said, you know, how did you think about where did your classmates go? There were two areas. One is, by the way, no one's going to crypto anymore. That's one thing that was funny. But there were two areas. One is modern application development. Like, people wanted to build apps. They want to see, because they like to interact and they think about applications that are really cool and they want to build apps. Not just mobile apps, but actual both B2C and B2B enterprise applications. And then the other one is around cybersecurity, because they've seen it firsthand. They think the notion of the mission statement of doing good against evil, white hat approach is very appealing. Because it kind of appeals to, here's all these problems, here's what's happening, enter the hero. And I think that's one of the things we talk about, which is, it's not just stopping bad guys. It's really helping good guys keep doing what they're good. But I don't have really large data to tell you what I'm seeing. But I'm just giving you firsthand what I see from both graduates who we talk to. Both of my daughters are in the workforce, but they're not too far out of college. I ask them questions. And like I said, I ask my peers. A little bit of it's being diluted right now by the following. One is, there's been obviously a lot of folks that have been impacted by some of the challenging economic times in terms of startups and funding. So that's one. And then the real second one is that on the operations side, let's say a red team, a blue team, or a team in a SOC, a lot of times the value is not so much do they know how to use the tool. Do they know how to use CrowdStrike? Do they know how to use QRadar? The real question is, do they understand the rabbit or just the amount of Christmas wires that are tangled in our organization? Do they have deep knowledge in our organizations? And so one of the things I learned from the chief security officers that I talked to, I said, what keeps you up at night? And they said, oh, my God, I can't afford to lose Sally in this office. She's the only one who knows where all the bodies are buried. I said, so you could hire somebody that's incredibly competent in CrowdStrike or Tenable or QRadar or whatever it is, right? But it's not about operating the tool. It's basically having deep visibility knowledge and almost tribal knowledge. And so that's an area I think that we can also really help with technology, which is bringing someone that's competent and have really competent tools that can really do that discovery and help you see, hey, we're going to help you untangle those crystals. Here's all these service accounts that are duplicates and they're 20 years old and you can start to run what-if scenarios before you actually do them, almost like a sandbox. So I think those are two areas, which is it's not just people wanting to go in to write code and cybersecurity. It's also people that want to come in and be a part of cybersecurity operations. Yep. Thank you, Ravi. Definitely. That's a great insight. Yeah. Thanks, Raji. Thanks for joining us this evening and asking your question. Russell, I know you had another question you wanted to ask Ravi. Go ahead. Yeah, I do, and I appreciate that. I've loved all these questions. My pen's about to run out of ink, all the good things you've been sharing, Ravi. But one of the things you mentioned earlier, you said one of the three areas where you give yourself an advantage in your career is to look at or find or surround yourself with the people that you put around yourself. So what's some of the tricks or maybe some of the ways to do that? Are there any indicators to help you find the right person or the right set of folks to help you pursue those goals? No. For me, what has worked is to really put their objectives first. Let me talk about folks that I've hired. I try to understand. I go, literally. And at one company, I didn't just interact. This was a 40-plus million dollar company, several hundred people. Once a week, I would go into the cold calling room with the reps. I'd bring in movie tickets, and I said, okay, two-hour call down. Whoever wins gets the movie tickets, gets the bragging rights when they go home, and 20 bucks popcorn. And what really – two things. It demonstrated to everybody in the organization, executives and people, there was nothing – I'm not asking anybody to do anything I wouldn't do myself. Michael Jordan famously talked about him at Last Dance. And again, I did. But the secret for me when I was getting out of this, I then walked back, and I'd say to the marketing team, I said, hey, guys, you guys are doing a great job. But we need to listen more because the number one reps aren't using our script. And here's what they are using, and it's working. I found that to be very valuable, number one, which is demonstrate that you're constantly learning from everybody. I'm not above everybody. The second thing is their success comes first. If they're successful, I'm successful. I always tell people, if the customer is successful, then you're successful. If you're successful, I'm successful. And then I back it up. I've been in my current company. One of my folks is doing such a great job, such a great job. And he's from out of town, and his wife and he had come into town. I said, bring your wife for the next trip. California weather is great. Texas is hot. And I made it a point to take them out to dinner with my wife. And at dinner, I gave him a raise and additional equity before he even didn't have to ask. And when you do little things like that, people work so hard for you. I was very fortunate. I had a CRO who was wonderful. And I went to visit, and we went to dinner. And he goes, you have to come to my house. I said, Steve, it's okay. We'll go to the restaurant. He goes, no, we're cooking dinner for you. He goes, I want you to see the house that we paid off because of the last time we worked together. And I said, gosh, Steve, you made me successful as well. When people believe that you are going to care for them, advocate for them before they ask, and really invest in their success, all that goodness flows up. So whether it be me sitting with SDRs and they're going, hey, this is great. The CEO is sitting with us. I'm me working with an executive. That's just a really simple thing that's been incredibly effective for me. And it feels great to do that as well. Beyond amazing. I'm so glad I asked, and thank you. Ravi, I got a quick, really quick question before we head it over to Tomas to close it out. Any tips for us CISOs or fellow CISOs, CyberCity members in the audience on how to be a CEO or a startup founder like yourself? Yeah, absolutely. I'm actually talking to a CISO right now. And we become friends. And I told him, I said, dude, you could easily be the CEO of a company as long as you're open to really good coaching. And working closely. Because talk about the ultimate person that knows the customer. And the customer problems walk the shoes. Right? I think all of you would be, one, incredible board members. To get count. You don't have to spend $50,000 on the event. A lot of think about is a hands-on training for our team and give them a cool pair of Nike kicks, right? They'll all sign up for that in a heartbeat. So whether it be on a board, whether it be an advisor, or whether it be a CEO. Now, what I would say is you're probably not going to get the call from George Kirch at CrowdStrike. But you are going to get the call from a great technology founder that you worked with in the past who's saying, hey, look, I really love building technology. And I'd love for someone to help me get the first 100 customers, get the first $10 million. Because you've walked the shoes and really be disciplined around our, what I talk about, our entry point. What does our ideal customer profile look like? What problems does that customer have? What options does that customer have to solve that problem, both existing incumbent and new? And then how do we best communicate position and get to have that conversation with the customer? You guys would all be phenomenal at that. I would absolutely. I'm an investor in three other companies as well. I would love to see a CISO come in and take some level of whether a product, some strategic role around how we make decisions about what markets we serve, what problems we solve first, how we communicate the proposition and the positioning. And how we go and talk with the customers. Katie and I were talking earlier, I'm tired of paying for these big expensive steak dinners. I would love to just spend more money on product marketing and for hands-on demos for you guys to get your teams trained. And then get the halo from that, right? Thank you, Ravi. Dropping gems all day, all night. Thomas, over to you. Thanks, Vijay. Thanks for asking that question there. That was actually a great one. Look, it is towards the end of our segment this evening. I want to be respectful of everybody's time. Obviously, Ravi, you spent a good 90 minutes talking through your origin story, dropping so much wisdom and advice and guidance and even concluding now with helping us see that sort of road to CEO, if you will, right? I do want to ask you one of the final questions I usually like to ask, and it's more of a reflection question. If you have one piece of advice for the younger Ravi, what would it be and why? That is such a great question. That laugh tells me that there's so much there. Oh, man. There's so much. Yeah, there's so much. One is plan out. Continually make a five-year plan. Continually make a five-year plan because I thought that I just keep hitting short-term goals, milestones with a certain product and end up running sales and marketing and hitting the goals and measuring myself just as the business did on an annual basis. But not building my own, what I'll call my own personal business plan. And my father learned this. I will take two seconds on this. When I turned 30, my father came to visit me and we went to dinner and he goes, how are you feeling? I said, I feel great. He goes, yeah, but you see a little trepidation in your voice. And I said, I thought I'd be a CEO by now and a founder of a company. And I feel great. I've got a house and the kids and family and a great job and blah, blah, blah. And he goes, okay, what were you doing last year? This. What were you doing two years ago? This. He goes, did you have a plan? No. He goes, oh, so you had a fantasy. You didn't have a goal backed up by a plan. And I literally quit my job like within six months and started a company. So have a personal five-year plan. That is awesome. That is awesome. That's a great piece of advice. And quite frankly, you're right. It's a lot of people try to have aspirations, but they don't have that pathway to get there or even that thought process, how they'll get there. Yeah. That's great. Thank you. It's been a wonderful evening. Moderators, of course, any final words for Robbie before we wrap, wrap? Just thank you. Thanks. Yes. Thanks. Thank you. Yeah. You said at the very beginning, people have gone out of their way to help you in your career. It's really evident that you're paying that forward. You've done that with us tonight. And thank you for doing that on this program. For all the people in the audience and for me personally. Thank you. Agreed. Thank you. It's a privilege. It's a privilege. Well, thank you, Golf. And I actually want to thank the moderators. These things take time and coordination. And you're serving the community. And I appreciate that, too. So what little I can do to participate is a privilege. So thank you. Thank you. No, thanks, Robbie. Look, we definitely appreciate everybody hanging in there. If you missed the earlier part of today's segment, don't worry. We will have the replay put up on our Fireside Chat group. So feel free to, if you're not following that group on LinkedIn, follow the group and you'll be able to listen to all the playbacks, not only today's, but also prior guests that we've had on the show, which have been really fascinating. So we just keep stacking them, stacking up those quality guests every month. And Katie, you've got the helm next month. We will have Katie. So please tune back in next month. We will post the event exact date soon. But Katie will be on the hot seat next month. So we're looking forward to that conversation. Robbie, a pleasure as always. I look forward to chatting with you again. And thank you, everybody, for tuning in. Have a good one. Thank you. Bye-bye.