13. Paul Nguyen, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Permiso Security, On Innovating Security Postures

Welcome to the Security Podcast of Silicon Valley. I am your host, John McLaughlin, and I am here with a very special guest, Paul Nguyen. Thanks for having me. No, thanks for joining.

So you are co-founder, co-CEO of Permiso Security. Yeah, the co-CEO part is always the fun part. People are like, why co-CEOs? The funny story is I've already been a CEO and my co-founder's already been a CEO, and we both tried not to be CEOs this time.

So do you guys flip a coin on who's going to be the CEO for a certain? I try to fire myself as a co-CEO every day and make him the CEO, but he doesn't want that, though. No, I love it. I'm looking at your LinkedIn, lots of engagement in the security community.

You've spent some time at Symantec, Deloitte. This is not your first startup, so congratulations. And you studied in Carnegie Mellon. Very nice.

Yeah, it's been, you're just making me feel old now because now I'm reliving how long my career has been in this industry and in almost two decades. So now I feel old. The way I would phrase that is you bring a lot of experience to the table. Not when I look in the mirror and I see the gray hairs.

That's when it's hurt. Well, okay, so for our guests, who can't see the video, he has absolutely no gray hair, as far as I can tell. So what do you guys do at Permiso? Yeah, you know, it's interesting.

Let's take all those 20 years of experience and just one tagline. Yeah, I think the experience does actually lend itself because in a lot of ways, what we're seeing in the cloud security market is basically just history repeating itself. And for those of us that started way back when we're seeing new data centers being built and people were standing up, you know, servers and firewalls. And what we saw was people were doing, I'd say, things that were probably not the most secure because they didn't know any better, right?

They were just unpacking like firewalls and setting them up with default credentials and leaving them wide open for attackers to compromise. And I think we're seeing that history repeat itself and not because of negligence, but just because of the learning curve you have to go through to learn new technologies and to secure them. And then, you know, what we saw was compliance is the start of security and that's, you know, the minimum security you have to do. From there, people started doing quote-unquote real security when bad guys started to attack and started to steal your data and take things down.

Then, you know, you had these detection and response products that came about to start to fill that void. So, you know, we felt like if we're going to do something, we're going to do something where it's not today's problem. We want to be ahead of it and have some fun pioneering. I mean, I did that in my previous startup.

We were one of the first security orchestration automation companies. Actually, we were the first one and, you know, it was fun and I got, I'd say, addicted to trying to prove to people that, you know, your market is a thing and it actually is a market. And I think we're in that current state right now. And so we felt like cloud security in particular wasn't quite ready for detection because there's not a ton of attacks happening yet in cloud.

We focused on that primary area and then that turned and we've talked to Jason Chan. Jason Chan was also one of our first angel investors. He's head of security at Netflix. I've known Jason for 20 years.

So, you know, he and I started when we were, you know, little punk 20-year-olds who didn't know any better. So he was the one that really set us on this path of looking at identity. And so we married identity and detection response and at 200 customer conversations later, we said, yeah, we got it. We're going to focus on cloud identity detection response as our core area.

So awesome. So you had 200 conversations with customers already. Yeah, we spent about 18 months doing that. So the good thing about being old in this industry is you pretty much have six degrees of Kevin Bacon to anyone that you want to talk to, right?

So it's interesting when you talk to investors and say, oh, we have access to all these people. It's like, oh, we do too, between Jason and I. Jason's also famous for running a hacker con conference out in Hawaii called ShakaCon. And so Jason, he hasn't been able to do it with COVID, but you know, we kept this old school community where we got access to people and say, hey, what are your problems?

If you could magically solve something, you know, what could it be? And that's how we started to survey the industry. And I ran product for FireEye, which was almost a billion dollar business. Jason ran the engineering side.

So together we almost, we ran a pretty big business. And part of my job was corporate development in terms of acquiring new companies to build our portfolio from an integrated standpoint. Yep. And that gave me a perspective that I looked at a lot of companies and could see where different companies were positioning and where the, because I needed to look three to five years out.

Right. And we're a public company. So you always have to be on the cutting edge of that. And so that all been forward what.

for me. So and it took us about two, you know, almost two years to come out of stealth, but we were, like I said, very purposeful in terms of where we wanted to go, what we wanted to do, and who we would tell. Excellent. So you mentioned Jason Martin.

Is that your co-founder? Jason is my co-founder and co-CEO, yeah. Awesome. So he's the other, he's the one who you're trying to kick over the full-time job of CEO too.

Yeah, he's the better looking and smarter one, so. Oh, sure. We'll have to do a follow-up podcast on that one with all three of us. So, so you already had a working relationship with Jason.

How far back did that go? Let's see, it's going on about, I don't know, six years. That's good. That's good.

Like that trust is very important between co-founders. So yeah, culturally, that, that was actually our number one pillar was really trust. And I don't know if it's because, you know, I'm from Jersey or not, but, you know, maybe I'm just pessimistic about people in general and trust is hard to build with me, but Jason and I built a great relationship and we both could have gone off and done our own things, but in reality, we were like, yeah, let's join forces. This is way more fun to do it together and combine our capabilities.

And the good thing is neither of us have an ego. I mean, quite honestly, it starts with that whole, I don't need to be CEO. You don't either. And I have nothing to prove to anyone outside of just doing something interesting and fun and building a company with people that I want to work with every day.

And that's more important to me is enjoying going to work every day with the culture that you've built from the ground up. That's the part that I get addicted to in startups is being able to do that. I'm not a big company kind of guy. That's a little too big of a machine and politics and bureaucracy that just doesn't quite.

Doesn't jive. Doesn't jive. Yeah, I know. I can understand that sentiment completely being in both big companies and small companies myself.

So I get that in probably a lot of our listeners, even if they're only in one side of that, you know, grass is always greener on the other side. Well, you know, try it and you'll see. For sure. For sure.

So if we go all the way back to your childhood, you know, I feel like you bring a lot of passion and a lot of great values to the table, trust being one of them. But clearly security is also a passion of yours too. But in your childhood, was there really a story there that sort of helped shape who you are today? I was always a kid that would take things apart just to figure out how they worked.

I probably destroyed most of my toys and whether you call that kind of like an engineer's mentality or whatever, I like to build stuff, right? And actually one of my hobbies, because I grew up completely dirt poor. We were immigrants, right? So my parents were boat people that escaped Vietnam, the typical story that you'd probably hear.

And, you know, I was engineered to East by SATs and did a pretty good job, decent job enough, you know, not enough to go to a Ivy League school, but Carnegie Mellon was something I could settle for. And it was a great experience for me. But yeah, I always had this natural curiosity around how things worked. And I had a Commodore 64, first computer that my dad had.

And I remember programming games in basic, learning how to do that. I just had a natural tendency towards computers as well. So I think all of that together and then being at Carnegie Mellon, I actually wanted, I graduated 2002. I actually wanted to be an investment banker.

So I was an developer for many years in college and to pay for, you know, it might be partying and all the good stuff that I enjoyed, but I ultimately wanted to be an investment banker. But in 2002, everyone was getting fired out of Wall Street because of the dot-com bust. And I ended up getting exposed to security at Carnegie Mellon. That's where they were one of the, actually the first cert for emergency response, like computer emergency response.

And there you go. Yeah, that's one of the best universities. You're very humble about going to Carnegie Mellon, but that's actually one of the best universities out there for computer science and security in particular too. So yeah, I would think that's.

This was way back in the day in the 90s. It's like that since it is computers. Yeah, definitely for sure. Security was still very nascent and emerging.

And so it was fun to be at the ground floor of that industry. Although it took over a decade before security became serious and people cared. I was a CISO somewhere in between and being a CISO at the time was not enjoyable because you basically couldn't get any budget and you couldn't get anything done without begging and pleading. So it was nice to see the day when security became a real thing in this industry and we can have some fun with it.

It takes up, you know, like the whole Moscone Center and then some at the conference, right? That wasn't the way RSA conferences and all that stuff. Yeah, it wasn't like that back then. So maybe through those experiences or just through your own traveling through life, what's one truth that you see in the world that most people miss?

You know, I try to tell this to a lot of my employees that work for me. And probably the greatest joy that I see is, I was talking to someone the other day who was an investor and they were telling me, oh, do you know this company? And So yeah, we worked for 10 years ago when he was 19. And you get to see a family tree of different, especially being in the industry for so long, your folks are going off and being successful.

But the one thing I've always told them is, sometimes as engineers, one of the things that we shy away from is relationships and building those types of personal relationships. But networking and relationship building is one of the things I learned early on and I was very fortunate and I'll give him a shout out too, is my very first manager was this gentleman named Matt Miller. Now he's a partner big wig at KPMG. But I would watch him and he had this knack for just knowing everybody.

And I was like, wow, this is fascinating. Like everyone likes him and he knows everyone and he's like a phone call away from. So I learned that literally when I was 21 and I emulated that for years. And I would say that's where you get to manufacture luck in the sense of the more opportunities you create with people that you know.

I sold my last company, not because it was a great company. It just happened to know the CEO and president of FireEye who were, you know, looking at a company and they're like, hey, we know a guy. So that's always been how it's worked out for me is I've manufactured luck by just having, having to know people and investing in those relationships, like genuine building genuine relationships with people and not real. I'd say I want to go sell you something.

I'm going to call you five years after I haven't talked to you. I'm going to say I need something for you. That's not how it works. Right.

So you have to actually invest in these relationships and help people along the way. And I believe in things coming back around if you're just a good person and do the right thing. And that's always been the mantra that I live by and I try to tell my folks is invest in people, invest in relationships. Yeah.

It's not about just what's in front of you. You have to think longer term about. It's not about stuff. It's not about the products.

It's about the people. I love that. Yes. Always about the people.

I'm with you there. There is a minimalist book called the title of the book is Love People, Use Things because the opposite never works. I like that. I'm about to look it up.

Yeah, it seems to fit pretty well. Well, uh, Like people use things. Okay, got it. Very straightforward.

You can summarize the entire book with just the title. You don't have to read it. You don't have to buy it. There it is.

The secret message right there. I'm exactly the same way, but I think that for me, I learned that much later in my career. I didn't have the great experience that you did in quite so early. So.

Internship is big for me. I actually, Jason and I have our philosophy and every time that we bring someone new, we said, we can teach you a lot of things about startups because we've made lots of mistakes. And the last thing we want to do is have you make the same mistakes. So it's a learning culture in the sense that we share probably a lot more than most founders would because we want to give them the transparency.

So you're giving. Don't be, don't be, oh, it's so fun and glitz and glamour and they don't see the bad parts. Like sometimes you have to expose the bad parts. It's just part of the journey, right?

It's part of the journey. You need to learn from those, those parts that you don't want to shield them completely from it. And then they're naturally inquisitive. I don't know anything about marketing.

Can I learn about marketing? We work with some really strong, smart technical people. And we, Jason and I also do some angel investing and see some very strong technical founders. It's, you know, sometimes they may not have a go to market experience, so we help them with that and we try to mentor on that side.

And so, yeah, we're very much in the giving phase of our career where we want to build the next set of entrepreneurs. I would love to see all of our employees go off and start their own companies. And I've had a couple of those over the years where you can look back and go, yeah, you know, you made some kind of impact on their life and career. And I have a few of those mentors in my life that I give full credit to Matt Miller being one.

James Mobley, who was my CEO at two different startups. You know, I think he's at Cisco now. And he, he was a former football player, like made it to the NFL. And he's, he looks like he could probably still be a strong safety and hitting someone.

And, but he's, you know, I've been surrounded by great mentors, even to this day, being older and experienced, I still have my mentors I go to for, for in times of crisis when I need my help. So I want to be the same for, for others. I love that, that giving spirit, the generosity, the, the passing it forward that you bring to the table. So, I mean, if, if you think about your experience with Permiso so far, what would you say has been the absolute hands down best day of your journey?

Best day was when we started it. Well, okay, so let me ask you, so what did that mean to start? Does that mean like the inception day where you had the idea or you met your co-founder or when you incorporated or closed funding or? Yeah, I'll never forget it, right?

So I, I'll say the inception date was Jason used to live in Palo Alto. He lives in Reno now, but I remember flying out and I said, okay, Jason, let's go figure this out. And we spent six hours. This may sound terrible, but there was a six hours at this hookah bar.

We're just like, what are we going to do? We just had to be straight mates. And we finally said, okay, I think this is it. You know, we're going to go do this and we're both going to quit.

And, you know, that's, it's big because you take that leap. You make that commitment to each other. You have to take that leap. Leave your day job too.

Yeah, and we're both. Leave the security of the, you know, the steady paycheck, the RSUs, the options, whatever it is, like. Yeah, and you talk about executives at a public company. It's a nice little.

It's a big, it's a big commitment. Yeah. We had done well in the past, but it's easy to take it easy for the rest of your, I mean, I could have rode out a job for a long time, but I think making that commitment and taking the risk. And even though, you know, it's probably less of a risk for us because we're not first-time founders and we've been through this and we've been lucky enough to be successful.

But even then, that's still a risk. I mean, we haven't paid ourselves in, you know, two years, almost three years. And, you know, we're investing everything into the business. We bootstrapped it ourselves.

That shows commitment. Yeah. And we want it to be on our own terms and make our own mistakes. And so, but I think, you know, the second best day was the launch, like two days ago when you get to tell everyone what you're doing and then you see, is this going to be a complete dud or is this going to be just like massive fanfare?

And even though I just sold my last startup, what, six, six years ago, six, seven years ago, it's very different. Like I know so much more and I'm much more comfortable and at ease and more even keeled than when I was back then when it was super stressful. But I think that's a part of being a repeat founder is you know how to deal with a lot of the emotional side a lot better. Yes.

And you've been there, you've done that, you got the t-shirt. Yeah. Our co-founder, he's done the same thing. So now, you know, and we both run, you know, we were at big companies and did the executive thing and we had a lot more experience, even I'm not a big company person.

I learned a lot. So I could still take the benefit of having been good. It's been a good education at FireEye. I can't dismiss that at all.

It was a good experience for me anyways. No, that's spectacular. Even at a big company, you still got your learning head on, you're staying humble, you're staying hungry, just making the most of wherever it is that you are. Yep.

So what was, what's been the worst day? Just maybe filled with dread or doubt or something at your journey. So I can't say it's one day, but you go through these peaks and valleys, right? There, there's definitely valleys.

Yeah. We have a hundred percent conviction. You are absolutely on to the right thing. And it's hard, although I am better equipped to deal with the emotional side.

It is hard at times when you might get a little bit of doubt when you have a customer conversation and someone, you know, you think is, oh yeah, this is like a big customer and it's not really, you get rejected, right? So like rejection, even though you're used to it, still tough sometimes because you could still say, yeah, this might not be the best thing, but that's a part of being an entrepreneur is that, that fortitude and conviction to stay a path and identify what the right thing to do is.

And, you know, the thing I learned over the years, you get told no way more than you get told yes, especially in the early days of, if you're pioneering a market, you're going to get no told no nine times out of 10. And no one else is going to have more conviction around this than you are. And so you need to stay the course. Now you do need to make minor course corrections along the way, but yeah, those valleys do come along, right?

Every once in a while. And you're like, oh boy. And then that's where having a co-CEO is great. You go, look, we still on the right path.

And yeah, we're still on the right path. And then, you know, he has his days. I have my days and we just balance each other and we're good. No, that's, that's awesome.

I like the support network that you've built in with your co-founder, but I'm also jealous that you get told no. Like oftentimes you'll be having these discussions and they just get drawn out and drawn out and you realize that at some point they're not going to say no, but they're not saying yes either. And so where does that leave you? So when you're actually told no, when someone uses that word with you, especially if it's a potential customer, it's like, it's information.

It's okay. We can move forward. I can try the next potential customer at this point. Reconnect in five years, in three years or whatever.

Yeah. But you, but you hit on like a nuance too, right? Because there are ways to get people to answer. And part of it's like, just be honest with you.

It may not be a good fit. You know, I don't want to waste your time, don't waste my time. If it's going to work, it's going to work. If you want to commit to it.

And it's more of a partnership. That's it. If you don't have the time, that's okay. I understand you have 15 million projects that you're working on and maybe we're not in your priority and that's fine.

Like, I'd rather be honest and upfront. That's just my mentality. I'm much more of a direct person than Jason. Jason is definitely the nicer one.

You know, so the yin and the yang, I'm the more direct. I want to make it because I seem very nice. Yeah, I'm pretty nice. I, I, I can go from nice to like.

All right, let's get this done. Who are we? Let's get ready quickly. That's a great quality to have, to be able to switch.

I think like you could be firm without being aggressive. And it seems like you bring that firmness to the table. You know exactly what you want. You know you're going to timebox it and you're going to drive towards a decision towards, you know, within a timebox.

Time is the most precious thing that I have right now. And I have to make sure that for me and the company, it makes sense. And I've done this, you know, in previous companies. I've told customers, like, I will personally come down as the CEO, especially in early stages, you're involved in everything.

But later stage, I want to listen just to make sure it's good for you. And if it's good for us, if it's not good for us, I'm going to tell you it's not good for us. And there are such things as bad customers. Not because they're bad, like behavior-wise, internally.

They're just not a fit for where you want the company to be. And I have a vision of where I want the company to be. And you have to have. .

. To have you told potential customers, I think, I don't think this is a good fit. Yeah. Really?

Yeah. So what tends to be a driving factor when you reach that conclusion? Because when I think about what they're asking for and the requirements and their use cases, I think it's orthogonal to where we want to go or where we believe things are. So then it's okay.

There's somebody else that may solve that problem, but it won't necessarily be us. So that's a part of the tough part of being an entrepreneur is being able to say no when you always want to say yes. The problem is when you say yes, you start going down tangents that take you off course. Right.

Now maybe lost six to nine months and a lot of engineering effort that could have been directed towards where the ultimate goal was. And I think this is where I tell a lot of first-time founders too, is you need to have your conviction and understand what that means. And right while we're different, you have to be decisive and stay on the path. If not, you'll end up dying by a thousand cuts because that's what happens when you get pulled in 50 different directions.

So you have to be able to say, it's not easy to do, but. . . Right.

No, that's not easy to do. I didn't think of it that way, no being a two-way street. It is. Yeah, for sure.

I look at it as a two-way street. Maybe not everyone does, but I definitely do. I think that's super healthy, very honest perspective. So if you fast forward into the future, I'll let you decide how far into the future you'd like to take this question, but when you look into that future, what does success look like for Permiso?

I think everyone normally measures it in terms of, oh, some IPO or some exit. And I'm am jealous because Jason did get acquired right before the fire IPO. So he's got his picture on the NASDAQ and I haven't done that yet. So I am jealous of that aspect.

Do I need it? No. You know, we've both enacted it. I think if I look, let's say it's five years from now and I'm still having fun waking up every day and doing my Permiso, hopefully not in my own office because I can't, I'm a social person, so I can't do this COVID thing anymore.

Oh, I know what you mean. I used to say, there was an article I remember reading, it was different styles of CEOs. I was the walking CEO, so I'd be the annoying one walking to people's desks going, hey, what are you doing? What are you doing?

Like, you're working on it. You just want to be involved. Yeah. I just like the social interaction.

But I think if, you know, we've got a bunch of happy customers and a bunch of happy employees and we're going to have our bumps and bruises along the way, then great. I mean, I'm not looking for a specific outcome of, I need to sell this thing by X date or I need to IPO. If we can build a sustainable business and still have fun, I'm getting old enough, much older now where I want to have fun, right? It's more about enjoying the experience than it is about any particular financial outcome or anything like that.

Oh, but family too. You know, I do, Jason and I both prioritize it. I have six kids, so. Six kids, that's a lot of, that's a big family.

Congratulations. Yes. I married a nice Catholic and did not read the contract, is my. Okay.

Very nice. That's funny. I mean, you're both well on your way towards your vision of success and just enjoying the journey, I think is a healthy perspective as well. Well, you recently closed, to share with our listeners, you recently closed 10 million in a seed round there at Permiso.

So congratulations. Thank you. That's difficult to do. And that usually means you're entering a explosive growth mode.

So are you guys aggressively hiring or? We are. We are. We are hiring like crazy on the engineering side.

I wouldn't say we're sitting here ready to go and tackle this market that's ready to go have a thousand customers in it. As I bet you, I think it's still early, but I think we want to invest in the customer asks that we've gotten. And there's a lot of customer asks from our existing customers that we're working with that, and a lot of those that are partnering with us and kind enough to. Give us their time, so we want to make sure we can execute on that.

That's the first and foremost priority. And then, you know, when we think about sales and marketing, I mean, the most marketing we did was this whole launch, which it was great. Quite successful. That's how I found you guys.

Yeah, yeah. The media coverage was fantastic, and we ended up in Dark Reading and VentureBeat and TechCrunch and Security Week, so it was awesome. I couldn't have asked for a better launch. We got a lot of inbound, you know, folks looking to work with us, and I.

. . It's on the order of like tens or hundreds or thousands or. .

. Yeah, we'll probably hire about tens in the next. . .

I'm hoping to probably triple the engineering team in the next couple months, and Jason's gone on his way. The good thing about Jason is he had 1, 300 engineers working for him, so he's got a lot of. . .

Oh, so a couple people know about him already. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. We had folks that we didn't know were attracting some pretty, pretty good top talent, so we're humbled that people would want to take a risk on two yahoos that, you know, hopefully know what they're doing and. .

. They must be doing something right, right? Hey, you know, you try to do the right things, and then hopefully it comes back around. That's the best, that's the best you can do.

Yeah, we're definitely hiring like crazy, and we're not really in super sales mode and trying to sell the product to everyone under the sun. I think we're. . .

We want to make sure we have a good product that actually solves the customer's problems instead of artificially pushing something that isn't ready. That's one thing that we want to do a little bit different than, I think, other startups right now is they're hurrying up and raising a lot of money, and they're trying to sell some products that may or may not be ready. I'm not going to judge it one way or another, but a lot of times, you know, I've been pushed prematurely to go sell a product, and I, you know, I don't like that experience. That operational maturity that goes with the product so you can close the market that you're going after, you know, that's important.

It goes back to what we talked about before. It's also relationships. So these are relationships that I have had for over, you know, two decades, and the last thing I want to do is disappoint someone that's a friend or colleague that has placed their trust in us. So I don't want to sell any vaporware either.

So the bad part of being in this industry for so long is Jason and I do have a reputation that we want to maintain, which is we always try to do right by our customers, and the last thing I want to do is create some half-baked product that's not ready, and I'm like, yeah, you should pay, you know, a couple hundred thousand dollars for this thing. It's not quite ready. That's. .

. I don't feel good about that. I understand completely. It goes back to the relationship, you know, relationship between you and a customer is the same as, you know, you and a friend.

Yeah, 100%. Going back to your hiring, do you have a favorite interview question? Oh, maybe you don't want to share on a podcast your favorite interview question, but. .

. We did, we have one that we're definitely. . .

We do these weekly. It's a get to know each other from. . .

Because we're in a fully remote culture. Right, this Zoom stuff is. . .

Yeah. We make sure we focus on some of the elements that you normally get when you're in a physical office together and getting to know each other. It's not as easy. We have a widely distributed team internationally.

So the last fun one was, which created quite a bit of controversy, was, you know, which one is your favorite Avenger? Which spawned, like, why are we just talking about Marvel? Why are we talking about DC? Like, why does it just have to be Avengers?

And we got to nerd out a little bit about comic books and Avengers and stuff like that. But we had a good. . .

Yeah, you asked me a question like that, I'd probably pick the wrong comic. Someone that's not an Avenger. Yeah. Sure.

Exactly. We do a lot of culture questions. Culture is important. Oh, man, it's ever important.

Especially for startups. It comes from the leadership, too. You know, you guys started. I tell everyone the first 20 hires and foundation of the company, because as we grow, culture persists to everyone who's been able to interact with Jason and I every day.

And it's not quite at 20, but, you know, as we get to 100 people or 200, 300 people, it's going to be set. It's a little bit harder for us to be able to do it personally, so we will need to make sure that we cultivate that early on. So we have these fun culture questions we do every week and learning a little bit about each other. And, you know, for us, that culture is, you know, trust and transparency.

That's really the two pillars that we've built the company on. And some of it is, you know, my style where, you know, sometimes you need to have some tough conversations. Let's get it out on the table. Let's solve the problem and move on, right?

I don't want things to fester. We've got, you know, you've seen it sometimes in larger company politics. People talk about things in the background and if you don't agree with yourself, then let's just have the conversation and we can get all perspectives. At some point, yes, a decision has to be made and we need to move forward, but there's nothing wrong with having a conversation.

A disagreement is a wonderful thing in my books. Oh. Because someone is either going to learn something new about how the world works or have an opportunity to see the world from a different perspective that. .

. from a different set of experiences where the problem looks much different from their perspective, you know? I'm not the answer. I'm also not to believe I'm right all the time.

Although, you know, I just. . . That's the wrong sense of accountability.

Yeah, I've learned that at home too. Like, I'm never right with my wife. She's always right. So I'm conditioned to it.

That's funny. Would you like to leave our listeners with any parting words of wisdom? Yeah, depending upon where you are in your career and your life, make sure you build those meaningful relationships and they will yield in both a lot of ways, personally and professionally over time. That's the best thing I can always tell everyone and what's been really useful for me over the years.

And I tell my kids, I tell my employees, build those relationships. I would second that. Very wise words. Thank you so much, Paul, for joining us on the Security Podcast of Silicon Valley.

And thanks to everyone for tuning in and listening for yet another episode here in the Valley. Thank you.