Transcript
Narator:
Welcome to Cyber 909, your source for wit and wisdom and cybersecurity and beyond. On this podcast, your host, veteran chief security officer and cyber aficionado, Den Jones taps his vast network to bring you guests, stories, opinions, predictions and analysis you won't get anywhere else. Join us for Cyber 909's Women and Leadership Executive panel.
Den:
Welcome everybody to another episode of our Cyber 909 podcast. I am your host, Dan Jones, and this is one with a little bit of a twist in the difference. We have five amazing ladies that have joined me and this is a part one of a two part series. So believe it or not, we have another episode next month on women in technology, women in Leadership, and hopefully by the end of this you'll walk away learning one or two gems and so let's do a round of introductions. I'm just going to see it as I see it. So Shannon, you're up first.
Shannon:
Hello everybody, I'm Shannon Robery. I am a three-time Olympian and Olympic bronze medalist in track and field. And I currently am managing partner of West Strategy Group with Bob West, which is a cybersecurity consulting firm and I lead our leadership vertical. So I work with companies on performance optimization and taking athlete sports performance tools and applying them towards business and life goals.
Den:
Excellent. Melissa?
Melissa:
Hi everyone. Melissa O'Leary, partner and chief strategy officer at Fortalice Solutions. We are a boutique cybersecurity services firm, female led by Theresa Payton, the first CIO at the White House under President Bush, and I had the privilege of serving there with her and we've kind of gone out on our own to develop a bold and bespoke firm to support our clients. Happy to be here.
Den:
Excellent. Thanks Melissa. Sarah,
Sarah:
Hi everybody. I'm Sarah Tenisi. I'm the founder and CEO of Tenisi Tech. We're a managed services firm, started in 2012 and we're super focused on building IT strategy roadmaps and budgets, as well as fixing day-to-day computer issues. So I'm super excited to be here with everybody.
Den:
Thank you Sarah. Mona.
Mona:
Hi everybody. My name is Mona Ghadiri. I'm a two-time Microsoft, MVP in sim, XDR and cloud security. I am a senior director of product at Blue Voyant. We are specialized in security, operations, threat intelligence, and incident response.
Den:
Excellent. Thanks Sandy.
Sandi:
Hi everyone. I'm Sandy Green. I am the co-founder of Miracle Max Marketing. We are a growth company that helps early stage and startups with all things marketing, so everything from their positioning, messaging, go to market strategy, and we have a bit of a specialty in cybersecurity marketing.
Den:
Excellent. Thank you Sandy. Well everybody, we are going to jump in. We have a bunch of questions here and then I am trying to track on LinkedIn live to see if we get any questions there. So if there's anyone watching live that would love to submit a question for these excellent ladies jump in. So Sarah, I'm going to start with you. You and I have known each other for many years, 2001 I think it was. So I know your younger self, but what advice would you give your younger self and yeah, other than alcohol,
Sarah:
Other than not drinking so much? No, so it's kind of interesting. I was thinking about the question because it's pretty easy to look back in hindsight, and I sort of feel like there's a few things that sort of started to dawn on me as I've gotten older. And one is there's no substitute for experience. People are so impatient to do the next thing and to get the money and to have the titles and really what you need is time. There's no substitution for experience. So we don't really need to be so impatient with ourselves. And I think tied to that is also we don't have to be perfect. And I would say 20 years ago that might've been different. There was a different leadership style, leadership culture, I would say across companies, particularly for women in technology. We had to be the dudes and we don't really have to do that anymore. So I kind of love that. So I really think it's stay resourceful, stay curious, don't worry about being perfect and don't think that you can rush the experience piece of it.
Den:
Excellent, thanks. And so Shannon, I figured an Olympian, you'd probably have some advice for your younger self, especially that you've jumped from the sports field into the technology leadership field. So what would you give your younger self?
Shannon:
Well, I think what Sarah shared, it really resonates with me. I mean, my greatest successes have come from what felt like my biggest failures in the moment. I think that learning that comes from challenge enables us to be stronger, enables us to build self-confidence in ourselves. And I remember also as a kid or as an athlete, I have a leg length difference that caused my first major injury. Realizing that everybody has their Achilles heel and rather than being angry about it, being frustrated about it, being willing to just accept those things about ourselves that we cannot change and working with them, planning for them, I think that that friction against myself as I sort of let that pass and could accept those things, I was able to then focus on the things that I could control. And so I don't think I would go back and change anything because nothing exists in a vacuum and the life I have, I am here in this moment because of all those things along the way. So I think as Sarah said, sort of accepting the journey and learning from it along the way and just committing to being better each time.
Den:
Yeah, I mean if you change something your past and maybe it wouldn't lead you to where we are right now, which is for all of us. I think we're at the top of our career maybe or we're still climbing the hill, but I think we're always on a journey of leadership. It doesn't ever end. So Mona, one thing, we're still struggling to attract females into the technology space. So from a STEM perspective, what do you think we can do to foster and gar interest of younger females that think this could be a good career, but maybe they get put off by it?
Mona:
Hey, I always think this is such an interesting question because I think cybersecurity itself is a little bit struggling with how we want to bring more people into the fold. It was first a very much a journeyman type of activity. You sat with somebody, you learned next to somebody they taught, you sat with them in the soc, you sat with them on the consulting calls and listen to them get chewed up and start to get chewed up yourself. And then we moved into this culture of certifications and accreditations and classes and trying to figure out a way how to bridge the gap between needing enough subject matter expertise as a baseline to be successful when you get out the door. Knowing that so many different people had different experiences with computers growing up, had different experiences. I mean, my dad was a computer professor. I got lucky in a lot of ways because I knew a lot of stuff about computers.
My degree is in anthropology and history. I'm a double major from a small liberal arts college. So when I think about advancement and where cybersecurity was then and where cybersecurity is now, I think we need to solve for how do we create better programs that let people and students especially experience cybersecurity. So whether that's the student run SOC or the idea that you need a better farming internship type of program or more people need to be aware of programs that big corporations like Microsoft and IBM and Amazon have for different folks of who are coming in mid-career, later career who still want to get into cybersecurity. So the part of me is we need to figure out how we bring in other people as an organization, as a community, because I could ask each one of these wonderful ladies how they got into cybersecurity and sure they would say, somebody told me about it, I took the red pill, I fell into a hole somewhere.
But it's almost, I bet you raise your hand if you got into this in some sort of nontraditional kind of way. I think for students now, it's almost like each one of us has an obligation to almost do what the lawyers do pro bono, you got to do something nice for other people even if it's not something that's directly tied to your job. I wish there was some sort of thing like that that exists in cybersecurity because I think all of us own it a little bit more than other professions. And then I think in terms of getting young women involved in stem, STEM can take so many manifestations. I hardly think cybersecurity ever makes the top one partially because we have a good guys and bad guys way of thinking about cybersecurity. And so when folks say, well, what does cybersecurity say? I'm a hacker and there's not a whole lot of people who are saying, I'm a certified ethical hacker, I'm a white hat.
My job is to do good things and help people and protect people, not be somebody who breaks into things and hurts things and makes things bad. So when you think about what young girls want to do and what we as a society tell young girls to do, we tell them don't break into things. Don't be that person who goes out and finds a different way of doing things. So if we could pitch cybersecurity as being more about being a helper and more about being somebody who's a protector and somebody who's there to help other people, I really think it would change a lot of young people's perspective just on even what cybersecurity is. I hate when people are like, oh, you want to do cybersecurity? Start with try hack me. And I'm just like, well, what about starting with who are you trying to help and what problems are they having? I mean, I'm sure I could ask Sandy, if you were going to focus on identity and access management and somebody was going to get into cybersecurity, would not say go, just start with try hack me. Right? So I guess then to your question, we need a couple of different things, but I don't think anything any of us do is a bad thing. If you're individually taking on the charge of trying to help at least one person out there, learn more about what cybersecurity means than what you see in the cool movies and TV shows and stuff.
Den:
And I love the idea about the pro bono work. I mean I think that's a great idea, Sandy. So let's, we've got women here who have started their own businesses and yours and mine we're both new in this adventure, we're fledglings compared to the Sarahs and Melissas of the world. So what advice, what advice would you give early entrepreneurs, women that are trying to build their business and follow your footsteps?
Sandi:
I think number one bit of advice is if you're thinking about starting a business, start right now. Start today, don't wait. I made the mistake I'd say of waiting, right? I've been thinking about starting a business, gosh, it's been about 10 years now, and I finally just a few years ago just did it. I thought that there were some big barrier to getting started and really it was a matter of going on the Colorado Secretary of States or Secretary of Treasury's website and just coming up with a name and just registering the business and then figuring out the next couple of steps. It really wasn't that hard. Thankfully I had a great friend who walked me through it because I was on the most people thinking like, oh my gosh, can I leave corporate? Can I do this on my own? Is this even feasible?
And the answer was yes, absolutely it is. I think that's my first bit of advice is if you're thinking about it, just start it. Just do it. There is no better time than right now. Just do it right now. Google had to do it in your state, get registered, go for it. If you don't like your name, it's not a tattoo. You can change the name. You don't like the direction you're going, you can change it. The good news about starting your business is you are the boss, you make the rules, so just go for it. So that'd be my first bit of advice. And then my second bit of it would be tell people in your network, there's a great quote from, I think it's the Alchemist, that when you think about doing something, the universe conspires to help you do it. So just tell your friends, tell your circle.
I can't tell you the number of people who said, when I told 'em I'd started a business, oh, thank God we've been waiting for you to do this. Why haven't you done this earlier and how can I help you? So just tell your friends, tell your neighbors, tell your connections. Hit up your network and just tell them, start to spread the word because Dan, I think you're experiencing this just the way that I have is the first year of it is almost always it's through your first customers. Your first clients are almost always through your personal connections and then they tell someone and then they tell someone, and then that network effect really kicks in. So don't be afraid of that. There really is this beautiful thing that happens when you tell someone that you started a business. People will start thinking of you and mentioning your names in rooms that you're not in. So that's the advice that I would give everyone. Thanks
Den:
Andy. And our good friend Mel Reyes. He's saying on LinkedIn, he totally agrees with you, overcome the fear and take massive action. And yeah, Mel and I have done a few podcasts together. So yeah, we'll have him back one day to do more of this leadership stuff and starting a business. He is got some great coaching advice there. Sarah, you're what, 12 years in now? Do I remember that
Sarah:
Right? Yeah. I actually think we just had our 13th birthday in January and it's really interesting. I love to hear about the support of your personal network. I had a really different experience. I had the, oh my God, you're leaving your corporate job to start a business. Oh my God, that's so risky. I can't believe you're doing that. And literally, I would say there's been a handful of people den included of my personal network. I mean Dan, you're kind of both, but really we're like family. We're family. And so it's kind of interesting, right? Because from my personal network, I got a lot of, they were almost projecting fear on me. It was really my professional network from the company that I left to start 10 C Tech where I got all of my original referrals. So it was actually people that had worked with me. And I think there's kind of an interesting, at least in my experience that was different and I really had wished that I had a lot of personal connections going, Hey, you've got this. I didn't have that at all. So I really felt like I went out on my own and figured it out. And I agree with you, you just have to do it. There really isn't that much risk, guys. That's the one other thing I would say, and I have a whole story around that, but we probably don't have time to just listen.
Den:
We'll cover that story on the podcast when we get you in. And I think the one thing for the audience is almost all of these ladies are going to be on the pod at some point individually. So all these gems and nuggets, if you wish they deep dived into something a bit longer, trust me, you can reach out, give us those questions and we'll dig into them. So Melissa, what's your take on this? You guys have also been in business a long time. That's over 10 years, right?
Melissa:
Over 10 years. But I will say that this similar to what Sandy and Sarah were mentioning, it started as an idea for Theresa leaving the White House in 2008, 2009. In thinking I see these major gaps in cybersecurity and knowing with her background in finance and in politics that there was kind of a home for us and I think we've had to have some sharp elbows along the way, but really 10 years ago is when the idea formalized and she would tell you that she certainly had fits and starts and there's just so much to sort out. You have a great idea, but you need to determine how you're going to finance that. As we've mentioned, you need to network. There's just a lot that goes into it and it's terrific once you hit a stride I think as we've done. But there's certainly so much hard work that goes into it.
And my best advice is to try to have at least a six to 12 month plan and sometimes know when to throw that plan out. So we've had instances where we're charging ahead full steam ahead on the plan and we see an opportunity because of the way we're positioned across the public and private sectors and we go for it. An example for that for us is our third party tracking group. We had a number of clients, especially in healthcare that were facing lawsuits and other questions about what was happening with client data on their websites and applications. And we saw an avenue and we onboarded dozens of clients in the past 18 months in that area. So it wasn't necessarily something that was on our radar, but we were asked could we do this? And we said, yeah, we have an application security team and we can do it. So it's kind of knowing when to take that risk, when not to take that risk. I'm only going to share the glory story of where we succeeded. I'm not, it's not all the times where we failed, but it's fun. And to be a woman owned operated business is to have the latitude and to have worked so hard to get there and feel like you have it is really rewarding.
Den:
And so Bridget, from the teams being on our podcasts, and then Theresa was on our old manual ones and we'll be having her back on. And I love this story. I hear some of the adversity. Theresa and I have hung out a few times and stuff, and there are some hotter stories, and I'm going to get to that little bit in a minute. I don't want to make it negative, but I want to get to a bit where you can give advice based on some negative experiences without telling us all the details. But I want to on this topic, the best time to plant an acorn is 200 years ago. The second best time is today.
Mona:
So
Den:
I think going back, Sandy, to your point, and Sarah, Melissa, you guys echo is if you're thinking about starting a business, start a business now, Sarah will call me out here in this one because she's been telling me for about 10 years that I should start my own business. And for the exact same reason, Sandy, that you talk about, and Sarah, it took a certain set of circumstances before I thought, okay, I'll do this myself. But it's been years at Sarah's being on my ear being like, you should do it too, then you can do this. You got it, you know what you're doing, blah, blah. So here we all are, I guess. Okay, so I have heard horror stories over the years of females in business not getting the respect they deserve, being mistreated, not getting the promotion, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I don't want to dig into the negative side of it, but I would love to hear a little gem of advice when you're up against adversity, which is more about you're being a woman, then what did you do? How did you overcome that and share the lesson you learned. So Mona, let's start with you.
Mona:
I actually went to another talk recently where this woman used a term called Kill him with competence.
And I think it's something I suffered from a lot, especially early in my career. I thought that if I just knew every last bit that if I was the expert in that thing, that somehow some way that would make someone treat me differently or that something that was in my control could make somebody treat me differently. And I think what I realized is that you have literally no control over how are the people see you, how they act towards you. You have no idea what they ate for breakfast this morning and whether that's what's making their tummy hurt at making them act grumpy or whether it was something you said, I have a five-year-old, so tummy hurt maybe is not the right appropriate word for a business professional. But I think I took a lot of things personally and I thought that it was my job to be as exquisite and as much of an expert as humanly possible.
And while I have successfully been able to demonstrate my competence in lots of different ways, stepping back and knowing that how someone else treats you in a moment or how someone else sees you for a 45 minute meeting is not how you have to see yourself. And it doesn't have to be something that you step back and say, oh, did I do something wrong? Because the chances are somebody had something weird for breakfast or it has absolutely nothing to do with you and everything to do with how they're feeling. So I think my best piece of advice is don't take it personally. I mean everything that bad that happens hurts. And I'm not saying don't feel it, but I am saying that there's absolutely nothing wrong with you stepping back and saying, I like how I look in the mirror. I like how I am in a meeting. I like who I am, and that's more important than what someone else thinks of me for 45 minutes or a day or whatever. So I think that would be my advice.
Den:
Excellent. And I was just thinking, as you said, the tummy hurting a five-year old. I know a lot of execs that actually behave like five year olds, so I would probably play that in there.
Mona:
I know a lot also that have been really passionate, lovely human beings, but I think everybody's equal in that sometimes you just wake up with a tummy ache. And I think that's my other piece of advice is that we all wake up and we put our heads on and we get up out of bed same as everybody else. And it doesn't matter how expensive your bed is or whether you put slippers on or anything else, we all got the same memo and decided that we were going to get out of bed today. And so if nothing else, let's have something in common rather than trying to nitpick things that maybe people maybe think that are different about you or that maybe you don't look like anybody else in the room. Because my other favorite thing, and I'll just leave you with this, is that my dream come true is that when you go to a conference, there is a line for the women's bathroom. That is when I know
Den:
And Sandy not a marketing conference.
Mona:
Yes. Not the marketing. Yeah, not a marketing conference. I'm talking about, I was just at Microsoft Ignite or Microsoft partner airlift. Right. And blind for the men's room is there. And there was one time I bumped into another person in the 10 stall bathroom, otherwise I had the whole thing to myself.
Den:
Exactly.
Mona:
Yeah, that's a good
Den:
Point. Oh, sorry, Mona, Melissa. So I'd love to direct that question over to you. Do you have any good advice after all your experiences?
Melissa:
I think it's just keep moving and I think a lot of what Mona mentioned is don't be your own worst enemy and hold yourself back. Don't get in your head and always look for the next step and don't let anybody tell you that you don't belong where you are because you belong there, you got there somehow. So kind of keep moving ahead and also look for opportunities and cultures that are going to work for you. You don't have to go and be on a track at one of the major companies and make your way that way. I think I'm an example of somebody that was introduced into cybersecurity and was able to navigate and find a home in different areas and different boutique firms. So I kind of take your own blinders off and look at what opportunities are out there for you.
Den:
Excellent, excellent. And Mona, Amanda Gaffney, she's agreeing with you. Absolutely agree, Mona. She says, so you're hitting the cords here. So Sarah, what about you? You've done the corporate business, but then as you start your own company and you're jumping into some, I mean I think you had, was it pg e or bar? I think you had some BART work. And so you're going into these, I'd say old school technology companies. So what have you learned as part of that journey?
Sarah:
I mean, I will say it is pretty disheartening to be in a larger company and know that you are going to be held back because of someone else's stuff. So to Mona's point, it's not anything to do with you. And so kind of echoing what Melissa said is you have to take the opportunity, you have to look for new opportunities. So I think that's tricky, right? Plenty of people have been in that room where they realize they have this aha moment of this person is not going to help me. And there are plenty of lovely executives, so I totally echo that as well. And I've had amazing mentors who are men and women both. So I just want to say that sometimes you're stuck in a position that you literally are not going to be able to win in unless you leave. And so I feel like I've had those experiences for sure over the past 25 years.
And I would say, look, that's part of the beauty of starting your own business is once you catch your stride and you've got clients and kind of the types of people you want to work with, it's really easy to avoid the people that don't get it. They wouldn't be working with you, right, if they didn't get it. And so I just think that again, there's a little bit of an ownership to not settle for it because Mona's right, you're never going to change their mind. And so I think a lot of that's going away. Again, it's a whole different leadership world than it used to be, but I do think you've got to sort of know when you're not going to get anywhere and make a move, do not settle basically.
Den:
Yeah. The other thing is you can't control other people's behavior and actions. And I came up with this years ago in my head that I don't stress over things I can't control.
Sarah:
That's
Den:
Right. Literally, I'm just wasting energy. That's right. I also try not to spend much time around other people in business or personally that drain me or drain my energy or they're negative. I mean, I think that's a hard thing in life is as humans we tend to be pretty negative quite a lot. So especially internally
Mona:
Self, how much we evaluate ourselves and how high we hold ourselves to our own standard. No one else out there is doing that. They're so worried about themselves, they're not paying attention to you most of the time.
Sandi:
And I think that's the key. I think that really is the key is that a lot of times what we're reacting to and what we're feeling is it's somebody else's stuff. And we all come to this world into work with our own stuff. So the way that I think about it is one bad interaction, one negative interaction with someone that just may be a fluke. I can excuse that two might be a pattern. What I tend to look for is how is everyone else responding to this? Are they trying to make excuses for this scenario? Are they working around it? Because that to me says that's your culture. And I got advice a few years ago that I've taken a heart and it is, you go where the love is. So if you're in a room and it's not your room, go find another room.
And if you can't find another room, you build your own room and you bring in the people that you want to work with. Because ultimately, especially if you're thinking about starting your own business, you are filling your day with people that ultimately you're going to either be accountable to or have to work with. So choose very wisely. You do have that control, but you really do need to recognize if there's no love in that room, find another room. Life is too short to be in a room where you feel less than what you know are. I love
Den:
That. That's brilliant, Sandy, because it's also a great segue to a question about culture. So as a female owned business, what are you doing to build a culture and one that actually fosters and enables other females to grow as an equal within the business? So Sandy, I'll come back to you first. Let's start with Melissa and then I want to come back to you, Sandy on that one.
Melissa:
Yeah, what we really do is it started with the development of a culture book a couple of years ago and we went, it's a little bit soft skill management consultancy type thing, but it really gave us clarity on who we are as leaders and who we want to attract to our company. So it really for us started there with that exercise to be able to put on paper who we are, what we expect, and to be able to show that to incoming employees, to prospective employees. And we try to live around those various principles. And we have a lot of operating routines in our company because of our government background, military background for there's family. So we try really hard to bake that into everything that we do.
Den:
Excellent. That's great. Sarah, why don't you share your views there?
Sarah:
Well, it's interesting because we also did an exercise where we developed our core, what do you call it? Your core values, right? What's interesting is again, you come out of corporate America and you've got Microcultures everywhere. So I would say for example, the culture in it at Adobe was different than the culture in engineering at Adobe. One was really fun, one was really grind. And so we started with the core value exercise as well. And I think that really makes a difference. I never worked in a place before that the core values were actually reflected across the organization. Obviously doing it for 35 people is a lot different than doing it for 6,000 people. But I think part of the point is if you've got those core values, you should hold people accountable to those core values. And so again, weaving in things like you don't have to be perfect, just be curious, be resourceful, be driven.
Those are some of ours, and don't worry about being perfect. And so I think that's part of it. I like to tell our employees that this is a safe place to learn. I mean, don't mess up the client's environment, be really careful, but this should be a safe place to learn. And I think that that's part of what I would say is something that help probably even women more than men, because women are the perfectionists. We have to be better. We have to do it. And for me it's like you can make some mistakes. And I had a mentor tell me that in my very first leadership job. He said, Hey, this is a safe place to learn. And so I really try to foster that with our employees as well.
Den:
That's brilliant. As Sandy, as you're building Medical Max, tell me about culture there,
Sandi:
Dan. I love how you say Miracle Max. I need that as an audio clip. What we're doing is we spent a lot of time just the three of us talking before we even took on our first client just talking about what we wanted out of this, how we wanted to operate, what lessons we had learned, what our backgrounds are, what our own fears are, because all that really does, it does come out in the work. It comes out in the clients that you attract and the work that you do and the struggles that you have and the conflicts that you have. So we spent a lot of time working on our values and our culture. I think the number one thing that I think has served us well, and it was a hard lesson learned, but we learned it quickly and we said never again.
And that's this. When we're talking to new clients, a lot of times our clients are startups, so their culture is, it's nascent, but the founder is the brand. And so if any of the three of us feel like the vibes are off with the founder, we don't take on the client because ultimately we know that that headache, that little bit of doubt, that little bit of that dark flash that we saw that may be a yellow or red flag, it will show up later and it will prevent us from doing our best work. And we just never want to be in a situation where we can't be candid and frank and blunt with the client. One of my jobs is helping is with brand and messaging. And a lot of times founders take that incredibly personally, their baby. So I have to go in and say, your baby makes no sense.
I need to know that we've got enough trust and that I need to know that I can say that I can't cook without being able to say, Hey, this is not going to work and here is why. So the way that we think about culture is it's not only in how we operate as founders, but also in our relationship with our clients. I think ultimately like everyone, we wake up wanting to do the absolute best job. We want to knock it out of the park for everyone. And I don't know about you, but I can't do my best work if I've got one arm tied behind my back or if I feel like, hey, if I see this, this might rock the boat. Or if I'm walking on eggshells or my client's walking on eggshells because their culture is off in any way. So we take it very seriously. One of our favorite things to do is to say no to people right up front when we're screening them and disqualifying them because we just know we're like, Hey, we're not the ones for you. Maybe later, but not right now. And I think all of that really does speak back to how we think about culture and value and the lessons that we've learned from all working in corporate and working for a variety of great and not so great leaders.
Den:
And I think you hit a nail there for me, which is saying no is okay to some customers because not all prospects are actually a good fit for your company. So while we want the money and stuff, we're trying to build their businesses, but at the same time, I would rather turn away a customer if I just thought this is going to be gnarly and not the right fit. Not everyone's the right fit. So Shannon, this question is tailored specifically straight at you, our Olympian turn technology leader. So West strategy, I was thinking this, so how do you turn your personal passion or what is it about your personal passion that you've brought into the technology space and how has that helped you?
Shannon:
I started working in cybersecurity because my mentor Bob West had been in it for decades. And to be honest, it was not an area that was at all compelling to me, kind of Tim Mona's point, it had a of picture painted of it that wasn't something that I as a girl or as an athlete that I felt like I connected to. But what I discovered about specifically cybersecurity was the core drivers of the people in it that by and large, it's a lot of purpose-driven individuals. They have developed strong resiliency, they have to figure out how to perform under pressure, all these things that I as an athlete had to embody in the same way. And so I think for me, I've always also been really interested by that intersection of things and understanding where those similarities are. And so when I come into these spaces that I'm working with teams on performance optimization on leadership, it's very much about what are those core traits that we as humans and that high achievers have in common, and are there ways that we can leverage those tools for our own goals that we're trying to achieve?
And so I think to these conversations we've been having about core values and to who we are as a brand, it's also kind of what motivates us as an individual. How do you tap into that? How do you leverage that under pressure to achieve the things that you've set out to achieve?
Den:
Excellent. I'm going to open the floor to anybody else that wants to jump in.
Mona:
Oh, I just have to add this idea of that mission, mission-driven wide cybersecurity people I feel like are kind of weirdos in general got to be a little weird to get into cybersecurity. I don't know why, but I also feel like that the problem we're trying to solve is so interesting because it's coming from so many different intersections. There's so many tools and there's not enough people who even know how to do it. And then there are not enough people who understand, who do know how to do it, how to tap into themselves and get the most out of themselves to do a good job, which is the part that was really resonating to me with what Shannon was saying is that sometimes I feel more like an ER doctor than I do, like somebody who sits in an office some days because I don't know about you guys, but I've been screamed at because somebody couldn't get to their email for four hours.
And it's a transformative experience understanding how to deal with and be resilient to the idea that I know you think your email is so important, but I promise you not having access to it is better than you having access to it because there's some really bad people have access to it right now and I don't think you really want to be doing more things in there. But so much of it is about how do you explain perspective to people? How do you explain to somebody on the day that feels like it's literally the worst day of their lives that you're going to wake up tomorrow and there's more things to do. And a lot of those things you don't get to learn about in a traditional classroom, you don't get to learn about in your day-to-day life because you're just trying to get by or a lot of things are on fire at the same time.
So I would say if you are a cybersecurity practitioner and you're just getting started, a lot of the first jobs that you're going to get are very high pressure, somewhat stressful jobs where people either don't have access to the things they need it help support person, and somebody needs to reset their password for a meeting, they're late four or 10 minutes ago, or you are a SOC analyst who's doing cybersecurity investigations and you have a limited amount of time to look at every incident. It's not really a culture all the time that allows or creates space for mental health or being thoughtful about work-life balance because you get into these places where you're like, I just really want to protect or help people or there's somebody else if somebody's wrong on the internet, but it's translated into more like somebody's having a really hard time with whatever they're going through. All you say are professionals. I hope that you take some time and think about how to build resiliency strategies into your life and how you think about a lot of those leadership strategies because they're not things that are really baked into the curriculum of most cybersecurity programs. You look at most of 'em and they're like, let's learn about Cisco network engineering. Let's learn how to deal with the first time somebody screams at you when they can't get through their email.
Den:
That's brilliant. That's brilliant. And I was laughing there, Monica, because I think Sarah was there and remembers that day. Her boss came screaming down the hallway shouting and effing and blinding at me because my team didn't have active directory in its peak performance, I guess. And their email system had gone to shit and yeah,
Mona:
There you go. Everyone's had it. I feel like it's part of the unfortunate process of becoming a cyber professional
Den:
Inadvertently
Mona:
Or inadvertently. You two are the enemy.
Den:
And it is funny because I just done a post yesterday, our team did on, we do a weekly inspirational quote or we tried to make it inspirational and I was told this by an old mentor, which is someone who's not breaking things isn't working, and then I tagged on the end of it, which is nobody thanks you for the 99% of the time you got shit
Mona:
Right.
Den:
They just scream at you.
Mona:
Yeah.
Den:
Okay. So one thing that you mentioned there is work-life balance, right? So we have moms, moms on the panel here.
Mona:
Hey
Den:
Moms. Yeah, moms. I'm dog mom.
Sandi:
I'm the dog mom of the group dog mom.
Den:
Wow. If you want more dogs, Sandy, I'm trying to get rid of one. I've been trying to get rid of my dog for years, Harley. Okay, so work-life balance. I have been a huge advocate of this because I've always felt that you can't burn your team out, you can't work them 60 hours a week and then shit hits the fan and you think they're going to be fresh to join that 3:00 AM call on a Friday. So who wants to jump in and give a couple of, well, one I guess of your favorite tips on balancing being a mom, even a dog mom, but balancing your personal responsibilities with building your business or your work. Who wants to start?
Sandi:
I have a lot of strong feelings about this. I think my sandy,
There's just no such thing as the work life balance. I think it's a bit of a myth. The advice that I got very early on from my dad is just always remember why you are where you are, which is really just about being present. Whatever you're doing, just do that. Just be present in that. And that goes from when you're not supposed to be working and you're maybe low key checking your phone or thinking about something else to when you are supposed to be present and working because there's really no perfect delineation. And as someone who has no kids and no spouse, I'm just responsible to these two fur babies. I do think that as a business owner, I think that there are times when you think you need to work on Saturday, Sundays, nights, weekends, and I'd say no, it's always going to be there.
I think Mona, you and actually, sorry, you probably all have horror stories of working the 60 hours. And then the other thing breaks. And to me, that's your life's work. It's always going to be there. And so I think the way to balance against or guard against that burnout is when you have some downtime, take it when you have a moment to have some joy. Take it when you have that 10 minutes where you could either do that, send that one email or go take a walk, go take the walk, the email will wait because you never know what's going to happen on the other side of that. And the worst thing that can happen is when your family or loved ones or friends, they need you and you're burned out, that's the worst feeling ever. So don't let that happen. Do everything you can to recover. And I'm sure, Shannon, you've got Olympic training wisdom about the whole wisdom around the recoveries when you get stronger, not in the performance. So I would love to hear your thoughts on that specifically.
Shannon:
Well, yeah, I think you make a good point. I mean, I don't know the balance on a day-to-day when I was training for the Olympics, it was a necessary part of the job description to do things like pushing the envelope. I really tried to think about things maybe more in terms of prioritization. So I remember even in college, if I want to get good grades and I want to be a good athlete, then I need to downgrade the social life that I have. So understanding what are your priorities and where are you going to invest your time because we all have 24 hours in the day, and how are you going to spend those 24 hours? I think the other way that I would try to think of the year for myself as a pro athlete was the summer was our competition season with US nationals in June and worlds or Olympics in August.
And so I knew in advance that that was going to be all hands on deck, all focus on that, but that meant that if you're thinking about a given year as sort of a pendulum, and if I wanted to have that peak pendulum swing for performance, then I also needed to let it swing back the other way so that I could build up reserves to go high again. And so trying to figure out how to plan in those times of the year where I could de-stress a little bit. And so as an athlete, that would be the fall right after the Olympics. I could take the fall where maybe that's where I have a wedding I can go to or a vacation I can go on. And then the intensity starts to build towards that competition season. But I think within a lot of our careers and a lot of our daily lives, there is a seasonality to it. And if so, if we can take a little time to wrap our heads around that and try to identify periods where we can plan in a little bit of recovery or a little bit of putting that money back into the bank account so that we can draw from it later. But yeah, they're striving for not necessarily balance every day, but balance within that year so that you do feel that you can continue to build and year after year.
Den:
And how do you guys think? So we've done the whole work from home business and now some of us are being asked to go back into the office for either full-time or part-time, but I struggle to imagine five years from now what the working thing will be. I don't imagine a Monday to Friday, nine till five any longer. So Sandy, what you say about this, it's a myth maybe. So how do you guys think the whole return to the office is going to impact work-life balance?
Mona:
I think that there's a hybrid answer somewhere in between. I definitely have felt the positive impacts of being around other people. And I'm a product manager by trade, and so in product management they say nto, nothing happens in the office. It's not the job of the product manager to be sitting in the office anyways. It's your job to be out with customers and talking to people about different things. And if you're sitting in your office as a product manager, then you're kind of doing the wrong thing. But I do think that there is a place for collaboration in person for setting aside specific time to do things. But I think the best part about being a mom, and the best part about being in cybersecurity is that the bad stuff is happening on the internet, it's happening on the computers. So a lot of the times when it comes to doing things remotely or trying to do even forensic activities, so many of them don't require someone to be flown in onsite in the same way anymore, especially if it is a cloud specific incident response type of things.
So the arguments I think are a little bit different for us in cybersecurity, but I do think if you are used to being a SOC operator, you're going to go back to being in person. Being in a SOC is one of the benefits of being together is that you are protecting and defending together and sitting in your room all by yourself is not a good way, a particularly conducive way to do good job with something like security operations. So I do think it will be very dependent on the job role or the type of thing you're doing, right. Myself as a product manager, very different than somebody who's a SOC operator.
Den:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I used to think back years ago, but long before Covid, we'd do our leadership offsites or team building events, and then people would say, oh, we got so much more done when we're in the room together, whiteboarding together, and then all of a sudden covid hits and everyone's like, oh no, this is even better. I like this. So it's either is better when we're all in the room whiteboarding together or it's not. But I think, Mona, you're right, it depends on the job and it depends on the circumstance. So we'll see what the next five years bring anyone. Yeah, Sarah, on you go.
Sarah:
I mean, I just have a thought on this. It should be more about collaboration, not time and seats. So when I hear people are making everyone go back to work, we've always been remote, so I don't even know what that is. But anyways, the thing for me is if you are all going to have to be at the office, you should all have to be there at the same time so you can collaborate because no doubt, when you're in the room together, you are building a different type of relationship than when you're behind a screen. And so I think that's a really big kind of key is if you're going to mandate office work, mandate, what it's for. And also the second thought I have on that is we should really be more focused on results than time and seats. And then finally, I think it's one of those things where if we're talking about that balance of work and personal, it's kind of what you said, Dan, it's about prioritizing and when do you get to do which?
And again, this is all so different than it was two decades ago because two decades ago it was like, no, you will be there for 40, 50 hours and oh, by the way, you work in it, you work in security. That's expected. It's not like that anymore or it shouldn't be like that anymore. More companies, I would say, are swinging to the opposite. And it's not even just a thing for moms anymore. I know plenty of guys on my team that go pick up their kids or take 'em to school or whatever. It's like, yeah, you don't have seven 30 meetings doing family stuff at seven 30. Everyone that's totally different than it used to be, which I love. I mean, thank goodness we've come this far.
Melissa:
Just another thing to bring up on this front is kind of hearkening back to our discussion about bringing in new talent. I really feel strongly that you need in-person interaction for new talent. So as we try to grow cybersecurity and bring in folks out of trade schools or all of the amazing cyber programs that are out there today, having that in-person touch is going to be important. And we're also a fully remote company, but we are onboarding junior people, so that's something that we're actively talking about. How do you bring people in and meet them? And if you've done the work on the culture book and you have all these items, how do you bring that to a more junior to mid-level person? And I think in person is going to be a key to that.
Den:
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's it. I think you guys hit it on the head. It's specific. It is depending on the situation and the need. I think we've got about eight minutes left, and I guess we should maybe do something about AI because what would a webinar be without talking about AI at some point? I would just love one liner from each of you on what do you guys think AI is going to do to help or hinder cybersecurity or tech in the next couple of years? Shannon, let's start with you.
Shannon:
Well loaded question. I don't have my crystal ball, but I think one of the questions I hear often when I listen to an AI panel is all about how to put it into action at a business, how to make it serve the business best. But I would urge in that thought process around leveraging AI to the benefit of a business, and certainly it's a tool that many have and will continue to leverage. Making sure to think about the next step, not just how you're going to use it within the business, but if there is this, as it goes out into the world and as it interacts with customers, how will have you thought through how to put guardrails around that? How do ensure that it is not going to be manipulated to your disadvantage? There's an example from copilot when it launched and how it was a big exciting deal that it came out into the world, but a reporter that wanted to see if it could break. It did break it, but it was because that reporter was able to ask a large amount of questions and ultimately get the AI agent to or copilot to want to tell him to leave his wife and run away with him. So understanding that when we put things out into the world, chaos ensues, but being thoughtful both about why you're using it and what might be the outcomes of it as it goes out into that world.
Den:
Yeah. Excellent. Excellent. Melissa Fort Lace, what are you guys seeing in this space?
Melissa:
What comes to mind for me is that hacking is going to get weird. As Shannon mentioned, there's just, if there's something new technologically that's coming out, there's a number of interested parties on the hacking side of the equation that want to figure out how to manipulate that, how to find the vulnerabilities, how to create fraud, really. So I just see kind of an acceleration of the typically symmetric threats that we manage and face in cybersecurity, and there's the deep seek vulnerabilities that we're already seeing. So if there's going to be a race to ai, supremacy, security will probably be left behind and there will be a lot of just weird odd things that come up and are exploited. And then something that's important to me is digital protection of our elderly and other communities, and there's just a ton of impersonation going on making, I would say probably billions of dollars of revenue for organized crime and others. So leveraging deep fakes, everything in that space is just going to continue to accelerate and become more believable and be turned against people that are vulnerable.
Den:
Yeah. Sarah, what are Tim Nessi tech seeing?
Sarah:
Well, it's interesting. Absolutely. Those are the risks, and we would probably be partnering with some of you guys for that. But I would say on the positive side of it, allow me to be the positive person for a second, which I'm never, I kind of feel like there's some really big wins with it. If you just look at basic EDR tools that are able to recognize abnormal behavior. So it's like, wait a minute, you don't use your email like this, therefore I lock you down. That's really cool. That's one of the things that I think we can sort of start to leverage. Or how about a cis admin that just can't figure out a script and they can say, okay, this is what I'm using. What am I doing wrong? And get an answer. So all of a sudden, you're starting to solve customer problems a little bit faster or developing a little bit better. And so I think there's some huge, huge upsides to it, but agree, we have to stay on top of keeping people protected. The thing that, just the one other comment that I get really frustrated with is nobody's protecting themselves the way they need to anyways. And so Dan and I have had discussions around cybersecurity myths, and some of it isn't even that hard. They're just not doing it. So for me, that's my biggest concern is how are we going to address AI threats when we can't even get customers to address the yesterday
Mona:
They can't even do the easy things. Yeah. Yeah. The basics.
Sarah:
Basics, guys.
Mona:
I was thinking about this and I was like, this is no different than when cars were invented, right? Nobody, when they invented cars, put windshield wipers and seat belts in there. That's right. Unfortunately, thousands of people died. It took a really long time until seat belts became a law, right? The reality is it took a really long time, I hope, hope that we don't have the same type of, I think it was in the 70 years or eighties when seat belts became mandatory, right? And cars were invented almost a hundred years before that. So even if we just think of what the law says where it takes 50% less time to get to the next advancement or whatever it's talking, whatever that is, I'm hoping that sometime within the next 10 to 20 years we have things like seat belts and windshield wipers and turn signals.
But it's like we went all the way to cruise control and enabling cruise control for people in their cars before we had seat belts and windshield wipers or even windshields in some cases. I can see, yeah, the deep seat stuff has bug bugs in my teeth, man. I am like, yeah, anyways. But I do think that just rounding out thoughts on AI when there's small, discreet, wonderful things that I hate doing, AI is awesome. I use it every day. I hate coming up with what I'm going to make for dinner. You know what? It comes up with 20 things, 19, which I can say no to and feel fine about. And one of 'em that if I up another 20% will be something I would be happy to eat for dinner. So it's never going to be perfect, but will it help me do the things that I don't want to do better?
Yes. And I think in cybersecurity, we are an applied AI world where it's both how we want to use it and how we have a responsibility to protect against it that are currently two different hemispheres of the brain that currently the corpus cossum is severed, right? So it's like there's no ability for the two halves to really think together with each other. They're just really good at doing their own thing. So my hope is that also we get to the point where how people use AI in cybersecurity and how we are protecting everybody against AI become a similar conversation. But I realize that the Venn diagram of those two things is even smaller than the people who care about either of the first two things. And I think in terms of AI adoption more widely in terms of regular use, Mees and wees is somewhere south of 40%.
So I still think that in terms of regular people using AI on a regular basis, we're nowhere close to that. When the Tennessee value authority comes and gives everybody ai, they did help give everybody power. I think maybe things will be different, but my five-year-old loves my rabbit R one, which is this little handheld ai, but you'd be surprised. The questions she asks it are, how are you feeling today? And what's your name? It's not asking it questions about how to solve things. So I think also the younger brains have different ways of even thinking about how they may use AI than even we can even dream of. So I'm happy to work on seat belts and I'm happy to work on windshield wipers, but I'm sure someone like my daughter will figure out that actually being on the outside of the car is better on the inside for whatever reason, reinvent all of the security paradigms we need Anyways,
Den:
And so we're up on time ladies. So Sandy, we've got a podcast recording coming up, so I would love to dig into the AI and marketing with you on that one. So ladies, first of all, thank you very much for your time. It's been great spending an hour together. Like I said, I want to have you guys on the podcast soon individually so we can dig into some of these topics a bit further. People out there. Thank you very much for your questions, Mel, Amanda, Sean specifically. We appreciate you guys, and we'll also have this posted on the website probably within about a week, I guess. So thank you very much, ladies. Really appreciate your time. Have a great week.
Mona:
I'm inspired by all of you, so great. Thank you so much. Have a great one. Thanks everyone. Everyone. Super fun. Thanks Ben. See you.
Narator:
Thanks for listening to Cyber 9 0 9. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and don't miss an episode of your source for wit and Wisdom in cybersecurity.
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