28. David Carpe - How to Network, and The Myth of The Great Silent Resignation

Welcome everyone to another episode of the security podcast in Silicon Valley. I'm your host, John McLaughlin, and I'm here today with a very special guest, David Karp, the founder of Karp Search Partners. Welcome to the show, David. Hey, thanks for having me.

Would you like to share with our listeners your background? Sure. I will give you the short version. I was a BFA, stone sculptor, studio art, spent some time in fidelity and equity research and then in trading and ops, and then went off to grad school, did an MBA in finance, did a startup that blew up in the dot-com boom.

Congratulations. Congratulations. Ran a corporate espionage firm for seven. That was fun.

And in that period of time, spent a lot of time with Microsoft. I worked in the old office of the CTO and then the CSA when Ray was there. So it was 12 years there. Took over a search firm and then landed through people I knew at SignalFire.

So I just recently left a venture fund, a wonderful tier one fund called SignalFire. And I spent, I don't know, five and a half years there. Had some crazy personal stuff happen. So I left this past winter on great terms.

So I'm doing work in the portfolio and with other startups. So I spend, for the last 10 years, 15 years, 10 to 14, has been just intensely focused on early stage startup activities. Separate from some large clients like Microsoft, TiVo, PGP. Really, my focus is early stage.

Incubation, studio, pre-seed, pay, sometimes growth stage in our portfolio. That's fun. It's just product and engineering. That's all I do, the build.

I just focus on co-founders, first builders, first heads of product, but really helping founders build companies. No, that's amazing. We have plenty of startups in the security world here. Yeah.

And sometimes these two worlds don't overlap very often. So I'm very excited to have you on our show. And as you think through your perpetual journey, what do you think the best day has ever been for you? The best day?

On a gut, what literally popped into my mind was in my early 20s, I had this job with Fidelity, Capital Markets, working on the trading floor. And so I'd spend a lot of time in equity, sometime in fixed income. And hired this guy, this is like the 90s, okay? So for some of your listeners, this is like right after the dinosaurs came and went and the earth peaked.

And it was like early 90s. So up here, and the financial services industry was very, it's a very buttoned out industry. And in Boston, I had this, they hired this guy who was the worst operational executive I've ever seen. Like he made people cry.

Like he was that kind of command control, screaming at people, threatening people, like nonstop, rattling cages all day, real like tough guy. Yeah. So I couldn't stand him. And I had been looking for a way out, looking for a way out.

I wound up getting a job inside Fidelity Capital, like the venture side. And the day I was able to announce my internal move and just like say goodbye to this man, just say goodbye to this horribly toxic, destructive, just like the worst man in the world. I was just like over there. It was like this weight lifted.

I can't explain it. Wow. Wow. So your best day is when you actually got away from this toxic person.

Got away from a horrible boss. I took my earliest memory. It's really my earliest memory of a horrible boss. Everyone's probably had one in their life.

This was my worst. I had jobs in high school, never had anybody like this. This particular man was a deeply flawed individual and I endured it for about a year. And I just made my break.

And I was like, it was so awesome. Freedom. Freedom. Okay.

So how about the worst day in your entire professional journey? Yeah. Probably one of the worst was shutting down my startup at the dot-com boom, raising it from some big, some notable tier. It was a big LPO fund.

So it was like the young president's organization, YPO. It was just like a bunch of play it up. Founders, Aples, the guy who built Wembley Stadium, these super people. So I raised all this money, high hopes, dot-com boom.

Everything was crazy. High fives all around. Everyone's read about it. In 2001, I'm out trying to raise again.

And you literally couldn't meet with anybody. Your description of your business included an acronym. And because it was B2B, B2C, ASP, blah, blah, blah. So after enduring endless rejections, you accept the reality that you have to shut down your startup, lay people off.

But the worst day was really having to break that news to my team. And then simultaneously talk to investors who are saying things like, how are you going to make us whole? How are you going to get us our money back? And I'm like, I can sell.

So what I did was I sold all the office furniture and I gave them like $7, 000. I thought that was pretty awesome. And a couple of laptops or whatever computer crap we had. And that was a bummer.

That was when I was 29. And so, no, I was 31. I don't know. I was somewhere around like the early 30s or something.

But it was just anticlimactic. It sounds like you were between a rock and a hard place. I had two little kids. I just had another baby two years before.

My wife was an aunt. I was the only source of income. Oh, yeah. We were like, we had just graduated from being so broke.

Like we were still rolling coins. Like it was crazy. It's expensive to have a child. So that was this comeuppance where you're also have value on paper.

That's like a fantasy, right? And this is what people are living through right now, today, this year, last year. These startups imploding this kind of, I don't know. It felt there was a little bit of a mirage in 2020.

The volume of crazy. And as it dissipates and you see what's sustainable and real, it's not a lot. A lot of companies were really never, it wasn't just they weren't built to last. They just should have never been built.

They should have never, it should have never even happened. Sure. That's how I needed everything, right? When it comes to a lot of this sort of thing.

And speaking, pass forward to modern time, I've heard a lot about this quiet quitting movement, the existential crisis, almost the people are revisiting their values and asking themselves things like, oh, and that's really like what I want to be doing for the rest of my life is this life fulfilling or, and I've heard that people are up and moving after reevaluating themselves in certain positions. What's your take on all of that? Yeah, I think it's, I think a lot about it because I talked to a lot of people about it because it's a pretty polarizing issue. I am the camp, I am in the camp that believes most of the quiet quitting stuff you're reading is, is by and large, it's a lot of bullshit.

It's a lot of corporate control narrative designed in a, like this last bastion of hope for capitalism. I don't know what it is where we have to keep these large populations of people under manageable control. Keep them focused on a goal in which they're productive units of labor and participants in this kind of willful participants in this system we've created. And which is capitalism writ large.

We took Calvinism and we went, like decadence. So now you get these young people who are basically saying, all right, the things that I see frustrating young people are the same things that have bothered them for, I don't know, the last 500 to 5, 000 years, right? You're, I don't know about 5, 000, but I picture somebody who's 26 years old in the 70s being just as disapremitized, the same kind of zeitgeist, right? These attitudes, these feelings of antipathy towards capitalism and structure and power controls.

So these tropes, you know, they're trying to out, right? Nobody wants to work. Young people don't want to work. And that's where it always goes.

There are two ways to look at it. One way is what are we doing wrong? How are we failing people with this promise of work and career and all this stuff? The other is to just ignore all of that call incense issue addressment and just focus on how everyone sucks.

Everyone's quiet. They're like, nobody wants to work. Nobody. I think what's happening is, and this is anecdotal.

I just thought my son is in his late 20s. And he's, or he like much of his generation. Okay. So take this with a grain of salt.

Look, I'm looking at this through a lens of what I would call privilege, not privileged by money, but I'm privileged by education and opportunity. So a lot of people in tech and your listeners know this on average and wonderful personalities, but on average, the education level and income level in the tech industry is significantly higher than the U. S. average.

So he's an enterprise software. The people he knows, they did the right things, right? They went to college. They got good grades.

They got these jobs. Now they got a part range. Some of them have no debt and some of them have minimal debt. They're doing it right.

And they're all sitting there looking forward in their 20s saying, what I get from them is that nobody knows what comes next. And this is not uncommon for young people to be like, what comes, like who, not who am I in this world? Like these existential purpose questions, just literally what comes next? I, my son, we live in Boston, right?

So my son lives downtown with these other young people. All of them hang out. They look at the Boston market and they say, how does this work? We think we have good salaries, but a one bedroom condo in the North end is like 1.

2 million. So how am I going, how am I going to get that? And then simultaneously save the now estimated $3 million I need after tax retirement. These are the new sort of Gen Z projections.

So where are you going to get that four to 5 million net liquid, like after tax money, right? Enough in life to live the life that you imagine you're going to live like a home in your thirties or whatever. And so I think that is just seeing things as they are. That is reality.

Things are exorbitantly expensive. Homeownership is consistently moving out of reach further and further. And the cost of growing old is hitting inescapable highs, not to mention compounded with Medicare and social security. So for young people, I don't think it's quite quitting.

I think what they're doing is they're just looking at what's happening the way young people always looked at what's happening and said, hey, I'm worried about the future. This, there are chinks in the armor of this American dream, right? That is the story. Now it's evolved.

The story is a little more serious. It's like the sequel where now we know a lot more about Darth Vader's identity. We understand the familiar relations, but he's still an evil dude. There's still bad shit happening.

It's just now worse. It's bigger. It's easier to see. The Death Star is almost finished, right?

This thing is like, is so big. This machine we built, this version of capitalism that we're having problems, obviously with scalability and like we could see it all over the world, not just here. So for young people, again, quite quitting to me, it's just young people being like, you know what, dudes, you want me to grind? You want me to give you a hundred hours a week for what?

The contract that society made with me is broken. Not just the company that hired me, the contract, Rick Large. The central contract. Yeah.

It's all screwed up because I'm kicking ass. I'm busting my ass at this startup. I'm doing a hundred hour weeks. I don't know if I'm getting money to exercise my options, but if I do and it's worth a lot, is it going to be enough to even buy like a one bedroom in Boston?

Because I wanted to get married and have a baby or I wanted a dog or whatever. I need an extra room for the home office. So now I need a two bedroom and those are 1. 6 million.

And so I think they're just being realist. The negative attitude though is what I think people are focusing, you know, when people say You're making the case that it's not a new thing. I don't feel new at all. Yeah.

The mechanics have been going on. You make reference to the seventies. I, I, I. Oh, so it's social media, right?

Like we just put a label on it. And so it's been around, like people have, yeah, I think young people have always wondered what comes out, what they become. These things are not like new paradigms for growing up and living. It's more like we have this incredible hype cycle in the news, especially in this country, more so than elsewhere, where as soon as we see something, we put a label on it.

We call it something and then we debunk people and we make it an issue. We, we live to polarize. So if we can take you these law of small numbers and break up the camps, quiet quitting is a good polarizing. Do you, or do you not fundamentally believe we're offering young people a sort of the upside that they imagined they would get in companies instead of talking about the issue?

This is what I'm saying. Instead of even talking about what they're saying is listening, you bunch of lazy shits, get back to work. We stopped quitting, quiet quitting. Nobody wants to work.

No, they don't. They just don't want to stay till 7 PM and kill themselves because they realize now there aren't as many prizes maybe at the end. They're not sure what it is they're working for. But the difference now is at least in the nineties.

Okay. You could have that quiet quitting attitude. You could be down on whatever, but if you wanted to, it was okay. You could quit.

You get a job at coffee connection in Boston would have been like an early predecessor to Starbucks and you could live with your friends and you could pay rent and you could pay rent and you could pay for your car and you could afford the bus and you maybe owned a bicycle and you did things with your friends on weekends because you could afford to go out to a bar at a restaurant. All of gone, all of that's gone. The cost of living is so high that you just work from your studio that you might share with one other person. So you try to keep quiet and then you finish your work day and then you wait until the next day arrives.

And I think that's young people are in that. It's almost like a spinning, like monotonous cage. Keep being. Yeah.

No, I was going to say young people, you know what they should do? They should like, I feel like there's a time where if you're in your twenties, I'm just talking to the sort of people like two to five years on a college, not the really recent college grads. I know they could change their mind about anything, but you're in, you think, you know, what you want to do. You got a job.

It has like an IC2 on a team as an engine, a cool security product. And are who's going to be right? I think the questions people ask about like career and other, I think what I encourage people I know to do, like in my own family, young people, what I do like career coaching and that kind of thing that I take very seriously is to zoom back out and stop thinking about your career and start to think about just the way you want to live your life. Because this is really what this, what these people are asking themselves with quiet quitting.

Is work what I do to live or is work and career, the focus and the fabric of my identity? Is it who I am? Is it what defines me? And so I think that's a really basic question people make in their twenties or thirties at any age, people enter, reenter these intense periods of work and career.

I just think when you couple it with the frustration about like just cost of living, economy. Yeah. Getting the things you want life. And then at the same time, you're like, do I even want to live this life?

I think that's the question. Young people, the quiet quitting movement. That's the question people aren't asked is this model for living, this model for living in which you invest your life in career growth and development in return for seemingly infinite rewards that we know are not everyone's disposable. Everybody just saw the layoffs for three years.

We're seeing them again this year. So you're a disposable unit of labor. Get over it, man, as special as you think you are. This is what you are.

You are either the owner or you're not the owner. If you're not the owner of that company, you're an employee. You're a unit of labor. The goal is to maximize your value, what you can produce for this entity.

So if you want to live that life, many people do, you can do incredibly well. But if you reject that notion, that model, that I think there are a lot of young people who are, that's actually the question that I see them asking themselves. It's literally like my son has friends in these professional careers who are all like, you know what? Maybe we should quit our jobs, live in a sprinter van and go work out of the van.

See if we still like working while we're traveling. And then a couple of them are talking about taking off, move the earth, go live a different life. That's what I'm talking about. I feel young people get, they're so busy.

They're so career focused. Stop, man. Go look at what people did in the sixties, the seventies. They got out of college, like in the graduate and somebody did plastics.

And the father said, this is a great career. Put on your jacket and tie. And you just graduate from college. You go to work and do that for 40 years until you die from a heart attack or suddenly retire.

And you're just so old and burned out. You forgot what you even enjoyed doing. And so I think that's what people are trying to avoid, but they don't call it that. Instead, somebody else hijacked the issue and call it quiet quitting and made a carnival out of the topic.

No, I think it's, I think it's important to be intentional and deliberate with our choices, just with life in general and to lead a life that's aligned with. What are values that you have? And that's, that's the tough question, right? You have to figure out like, what are your values?

Exactly. Like, why do we do the things that we do? And then once you have that figured out, it's easy to align life decision than what we're doing in terms of our career and, and all of that with those values, right? You could be a pretty little deliberate, but you have to think about that.

Takes it to sit down. And the tough part of thinking about that is to think about it. I don't say with a selfish, that thought, but you have to think about what's right for you. And it might be a little bit different than what's right for your peers, your friends, your family, your expectations that are put on us.

So they do influence us like quite a bit. But I also think that in some non-trivial sense, like value and meaning often can be derived from, comes from. Absolutely. Like people that we know, people in our lives.

Absolutely. So I think for another great example is I think there are a lot of young people or of any age, or to be honest, who landed an organization. And to just a counterpoint to everything, I am equally in support of people embracing careers. That is quite literally what I've done.

And granted, I am flaking out very rapidly in real time. Now that I'm older, like it's happening before my eyes, I'm just getting flakier. But I'll tell you, when I was younger, I was like running through brick walls to make shit happen. And I think there are a lot of young people who have that drive and ambition.

Do it, man. Give yourself overture. If you really believe that identity and those accomplishments are absolutely critical to you, then do it. You might not do it forever.

That's totally fine. I know tons of people who run, this is also another issue that I see constantly with founders, specifically a lot of younger founders. They're running like a million miles an hour doing everything and they're making everything happen and they turn around, they have success, right? They have, and this is the valley.

These are outsized outcomes. These are people I know. This isn't like they have money, like they have five or $10 million. These people have like fantasy money, right?

And this is not for bros. These are just other people with successful exits. What I see a lot is that they get to the other side of it. They have some awesome outcome.

And all of a sudden, like, I don't know, they're in their thirties or early forties. And so they did that. They already did that thing and were wildly successful. And it's almost like they aren't, now they got all this time.

They got all that like infinite choice. And it's now what? What do I do with myself? I've been goddamn busy and distracted.

I totally forgot what I actually like to explore myself. I don't even know what I'm into. And so they fall into a predictable pattern. They believe that their calling is to build and to build startups and to build products because they're so good at it.

And when I talk to them, I encourage them, struggle, to stop, take a break from tech. And how's that set up for advice? So I have a lot of these conversations with people. And then people are like, why would you redirect people away from this awesome, high-paying opportunity of this industry?

For these people, if they've done really well, they, as far as I'm concerned, just get off the playing field and room for somebody else. I guess that's one way to see it. There's another way to see it. Just like leading that intentional and deliberate life that you get a great deal of happiness for making it.

Absolutely. And you're in a wonderful position where you can engage that activity or even build something around it. Like you're still building something at the end of the day. I'm sorry to interrupt, but something that deeply worries me, deeply worries me, is the idea that people have hobbies and interests and then feel compelled to monetize them or somehow convert them into a source of income.

That is also a broken way to live because young people right now are dealing with insurmountable costs of living, like the seemingly insurmountable rising costs. And so they're all encouraged that everyone needs a side hustle. Do it. When do they have time to live?

If all they do is photograph their food and now they got to do that nonstop because they are that and then they go to work all day for this company and then Saturday for laundry. I like I'm not sure when they live and that will just break you. Do that for long enough and you'll. That's called burnout.

It's kind of. That's burnout right there. It's funny that you mentioned this. I was listening to a podcast with Mark Cuban on and he said something along the lines of don't do what you're passionate about, do what you're good at.

And the whole point of that comment was if he had followed what he was passionate at, he'd still be trying to play basketball. Yeah. That's just not what he's the best at. So.

Then I would say, then I would say to somebody like him, that's one way to see it. One way to also say what he just said is do what you're good at. If you're not good at it, quit. Don't even try.

Okay. So now I say to you, you're John McLaughlin in 10 years. You tell me you're done. You're done with security.

You're done with podcasting. We're still talking. Some of these guys I know. I've known some of these guys from my life with Microsoft for decades.

I have followed them through their careers. We talked about what they've become, what they want to do, if they should even do another show. Where do they belong? Like we have like deep discussions.

And so I would say to somebody like that, like if you are at that point and you've never tried it, you've never tried it, but you think your calling is fly fishing. And making custom fly or flies, the little things you stitch or throw in the water. Or your calling is making furniture. Or maybe you're supposed to be doing special education with children.

Maybe you're supposed to be teaching math in high school. Like whatever, being a e-gah, buying some liturgical vestments and appearing in churches or something. I have no idea. But if that's what you think your calling is, even though you're good at it, you might have, you might be horrible.

You don't know how to use a power tool. I would encourage strongly to go try it. Do not only do the things you're good at, or you'll never learn anything else. Work.

Master. Right. Master your craft. I mean, look, like Michael Jordan, master your craft, but he's also really good at baseball and golf.

There were famous painters who were also phenomenal writers. And like it goes on. It's on. I know software engineers who are phenomenal musicians, like tons of them.

Maybe they should be in bands. Maybe they shouldn't be at Facebook or Meta, Meta or whatever. Yeah. I think, I don't know.

I'm not exactly sure what grabbed my interest into security. And I've always been fortunate enough to find like that intersection between passionate and skill set. But, you know, when I look back and I think about things like the best way that I describe my interest in security is an irrational excitement about security. And maybe that's driven.

I think a lot of people get sucked into security because, not sucked into security, but then to focus on security. Just like, it's a very easy way. If you just glance at what's happening in the world and notice that there's something like terribly wrong with how we handle data, with how we handle like security, these ideas of what did that even mean to be secure? And you're right.

As far as I see, security is like a calling. It's honest to God, if we're going to let software run the world, the security of that software is not just paramount. It is literally the fabric of like all society or something. If it doesn't, everything is a false story about the security of banks, healthcare, everything we're trying to do this way is if somebody's just going to call shenanigans on it and they're going to say, I'm not moving like online, you're young.

So there was a big thing when online banking came around with security. I have been banking for over 2, 000. I was consulting a lot. I was spending a long time with Microsoft.

I spent a lot of time on security. And so these are now, this was like partner level of the box. So these are like legends of security that your listeners will all know. These were like the Bruce Schneiers, the Mudge Zatko's.

So I spent time inching on the people like Barb Fox. And you have to look at it when you're that big, right? What was always interesting was I remember talking, I want to say it was Barb Fox in 2005 or something. Something would come up that was like an impossible to solve thing.

This was the kind of stuff I did in the old CTO's office. Like figure out who did what in the history of security because something was coming up. They needed a new architect, but a DE level architect to rethink security architecture for all of integrated collaborative environments, all of exchanging the whole suite. These are like the super jobs.

They direct the activities of hundreds of other architects and so on. So generally speaking, let's say there are like three to seven people in the world who can do each of these jobs, right? But you talk to them at that level, what I thought was really interesting. And don't misquote me.

I want to say it was like, oh, it might've been Hillary Orman in Boston. She was, some of your listeners might know her. She's, she's long retired, but, and some other people she was connected with through purple street software. I think anyways, my mind is, I remember like weird stuff.

So anyways, one of them made a comment to me that all the work in security was actually done, that everything had already been solved. And really what was left to solve was administration and policy. That's where all of the problems of the future were. They were actually in like consensus and agreement and standards that the technology was actually increasingly easy to solve.

I don't, I'm not a security guy. So I can't tell you that we've gone as far as we can go with crypto code optimization algorithms or something. But generally speaking, I understood what she was saying. We innovate on passwords and key fobs, like all these things.

But generally speaking, we've accepted that we require this, this type of login for financial applications. Or if you work on wall street, you have to have this level of security on your messaging applications. And so we've gotten there on the admin side with a lot of stuff, but not everything. We're still fighting about these international data holds with all these big tech companies.

I forgot how we got on that subject, but. No, it's all good. Something to do with something. Yeah.

No. Okay. So one of the things that I missed early in my career was networking. Yeah.

But I sound like you're a little, you're very good at networking and maybe you can help our listeners. Maybe even some of our younger listeners understand like, what is networking and how's that different from just socializing? Absolutely. I was just talking to my wife about this because I was telling her I was doing your podcast because context, she's a floral designer.

She like literally doesn't get a shit about anything that has anything to do with the people I interact with every day. If I talk about a SignalFire portfolio company that I think is awesome, like Insecurity, Saeed, Angkor, or any one of a number of companies, it's just the eyes glaze over. It's so exciting. It's this like shornable clustered storage system.

It's like stuff that like 11 other people are really excited about. So I was telling her, I was talking about net, like this is stuff that is common topic, right? It's easy to understand. When you're young, how do you build a network so that you can parlay it into, let's say, conduits to connect you to opportunity in the future?

And so there are a number of ways to think about it. And I think first and foremost, people have to think about their identity in their network. Okay. So the easiest way to think of this is you can be a giver or you can be a taker.

And it's that simple. I am a giver. And what I mean by that is quite literally, not only do I network and I know a lot of people, I literally separate from the searches I charge a bunch of money for or whatever. I do an incredible amount of search work for free.

I just introduced, so I'm friendly with some really big CPOs at some big internet companies. So I made some introductions this morning. Yesterday, I introduced somebody else I know to one of our founders in the port, like in our signal fire portfolio. But across networks, I helped find CTOs for startups in my part-time because they're friends of mine.

I've helped friends who are founders make critical founding team hires, no fees because I know people. But what I'm really doing is I just am trying to help the people I know who I know are looking for these kinds of opportunities. So I'm doing it with real empathy toward I'm focused on the candidate. It's an authentic give.

It's an authentic give. And then I'll go into the people I know who need help. And I'm just connected to them. I have no expectations.

I do not expect money, gifts, or anything. I just am trying to help these people because I'm a big believer in karma and goodwill. And it does. I'll tell you something.

The way it pays back is over time. Right. And I need help or I need assistance or I need an answer to a question or whatever. I'm trying to literally have 12 hours.

I'm trying to connect a certain kind of product executive with a certain founder I know because they have an absolutely weird question. And I know this person knows the answer. That's when I can text that person and say, can you do me a small favor? And I get a reply an hour or two.

And it's just, again, helping somebody else. They're giving again. It's like giving, but it's like this conflict. And so you become a connector in your own network.

You're always a connector within your own network. That's always important because the more you connect your network, the more value you provide to your network, the bigger your network grows by virtue of the hat on introductions and people remember you as not always wanting something. You know, those people who call you and they like always want something. Yes.

Yes. I do remember. Yeah. Yeah.

It's funny. I, growing up, I watched a lot of Will and Grace. One of the episodes, they were talking about like the different roles that you can play in a relationship and the way that they had put it in the show, Will and Grace were having a discussion and they broke it into two, two types of people. You have gardeners and you have flowers.

You have givers and you have takers, you know? Yeah. So, and I think that's how a lot of people see it because even if they don't call it that, they think about the people they know and they live just like your friends in your personal life growing up during high school and you're, I didn't grow up with cell phones. That's how old I am.

We like, after high school, we got on our horses. We rode down these dirt roads and we went behind like Mr. Willowby's farm and we talked, but it was like, it literally, I had, I had to help your listeners. I had ColecoVision and I had games like Sernery.

And if you've read Chuck Klosterman's novels and stuff, when it talks about that generation of 80s console games, it was just hysterical. Story-based narratives, all that stuff. So anyways, I think the other thing with networking that's important to point out to young people is if I had like time to hit on some key things. Sure.

One thing that you and I were actually discussing was that there's a really calming problem. And again, talking about tech. So we're talking about- Talking about tech. Yep.

And once you're talking about a lot of above average academic performance, by and large, what I see on the engineering side and the product side of just the builders I know, they come through this, the whole university system, the cognitive filter. They're coming through these highly ranked or top ranked universities. So we already know that they were competitive in high school. Not necessarily athletic, but they were competitive academically.

They were high performance. So all the way through that manifestation of that identity to get into their 20s, they've been competing for top jobs, right? So they get this top job on a security team at some hot company or some hot product. Again, they've done everything right.

They've landed in the right place. They've got like this A to A plus look at resume. And now what I see them tend to do wrong is they're a couple of years out of school or three, four or five years. It's like they're so focused on their Herculean task.

It's like some big technical accomplishment, like wowing a boss, wowing a team. That's awesome. That's awesome. If you could solve like, what was that dude's name who invented BitTor?

He had PDD. Oh, yeah. So you solve a really hard problem, right? Everyone's like, oh, what do you mean?

That's awesome. What they tend not to spend enough time doing is literally getting to know every single person they work with. And that I do not, your engineering squad or your manager, literally, you don't have to go to conferences and events to network. You don't have to go to Zoom hours and all that crap.

You can just reach out to the people at your company who work in sales, marketing, product, finance, HR, get to know other functions in your company and get to know the people involved ideally in leadership spheres in those roles. Because I'm telling you, in the next two to four years, about 80% of those people are going to change jobs at the non-insteaded level and below the marzipan layer. So those people are going to all change jobs. And now you're going to all.

So in four years, when you say, you know what? I want to work on security in the entertainment industry, your old marketing manager who you met before they became a director or a VP four years later, who answered some questions for you about the product package, some product literature, whatever you want to know. Now they're your content. That's who you reach out to.

Hey, remember me. And a lot of people do this correctly. A surprising number of people don't. They're so busy working.

And with remote work and work trip home, it's even harder to have these serendipitous hallway interactions with the marketing team or a member of the executive team or an investor is visiting and you meet them. And that doesn't happen anymore. So now the rub is that you have to make this stuff happen. That is what drives me crazy about these giant Zoom events where there's like a hundred people in a Zoom and there's an all hand and you're all listening to one person talk and you're not interacting with each other.

And who are all of these people and what are they bringing to the table and who are they? It's hard. It's hard. So you can network.

Yeah. You're not going to go to a Zoominar or whatever Zoom, 140 attendees. And then I'm going to see John McLaughlin's little box on screen page three, upper left, three from right, second row down. And go, that dude looks really interesting.

Let me click on the three dots on the box and send him a chat and see nobody's doing that. Exactly. Right. The one that I've seen some that are very well run.

We did a bunch, Eugene and Kalachi and their network team at SignalFire had a whole, still do. There are a lot of people, not just funds, doing smaller events where you have a facilitator. Or there's, you have like maybe 20 people or 15 people. So you can directly engage everyone.

So everyone gets to meet you, hear your voice, know what you do. Those events do well. People do network. They do connect.

When you think about the roadblockers, the networking, do you think like being a taker or being perceived as a taker is like a roadblocker? Absolutely. Well, do those people, is there a place where you can do that from? Or is there other roadblockers that get in the way of?

Maybe just to speak on behalf of maybe someone new to this. If I don't feel like I have a give, what do I do? How do I approach that? I would argue that you always have a give.

You always have a give. There's always something to give. Yeah. So if you're, if you're reaching out randomly, you're, you're like IC2 on an engineering team.

You're basically buried in the bowels of a product-developed team. You're on a feature team somewhere. Who knows? Maybe I'm not even doing that yet.

I'm just fixing bugs. Nobody, basically just assume nobody knows you exist. The company has like a thousand, thousand people. You're like one of a, like some handful of people buried away and you want to network.

And so what I would say is think of something in, just think of something in your company, ideally something that's of interest to you that you just don't really understand. An example of that might be a really good example is if I just literally threw a dart. If I went to down where our offices were on second and bride or something and right around the corner where like slack is, if I just threw darts at like young engineers coming out of a building or something, probably ask them in nine out of 10, wouldn't be able to explain to me the go-to-market motion of their, of the company they work for.

Average price, average transaction times, how the business actually makes money and writes the paychecks they keep clear. They probably have no idea how that company finds customers, generates leads. All these things are like things you should understand about, again, if you're interested in a career and you think, for example, whether it's a big company or a startup or how you want to live your life. If you think you want to invest in your career, it doesn't matter if you're an engineer, a product manager or whatever you do, you really need to understand how a business works.

And to understand how a business works, networking is the only way to get there when you're young because you, unless you're a recruiter like me, that's another really good way to get really close to senior level people very early in your career. Right. When I was in my twenties, what other CTO talked to me? I was on the phone.

There was no zoo back then. So as far as they know, I could have been like 38. I could have been 46, but I wasn't 26. And I just, I don't know.

I had a high verbal quotient. I was just a bullshitter. Right. So if you're young and you want to get your handle on that, you always have something to give.

Because you can reach out to marketing or you could reach out to sales and say something like, Hey, I'm over here working on the product and I'm pretty sure we're building what all of our customers want. Can I talk to you about what I think I'm building? Because I'm really curious to hear how you're selling it, what you're selling or how you're looking. Make sure that user experience that's going to be sold is like a nice, smooth, like your products, nothing get good.

You're not fudging it. It's not like you have you, what you have to offer is like your perspective inside the company. You are a colleague. You actually work on product development.

You're working on the build. You're building the thing that you think they want. All you want to know is like, you have something to offer, which is your definition of what you think the company sells and builds. And what we want to talk about is what they actually think the company sells or builds.

That's literally what you're offering is perspective. And so that's a really raw example. But as you move along in your career, you discover there's a lot that you have to offer. It might be your identity.

It might be the universe you're attending. So a multitude of affiliations you have, both professional and professional. You don't even know it yet until you start to talk to people or evidence in their background that they came from a certain geography or something. I think so I think- Speak a certain language, perhaps?

Right. Right. Or you do something. Like you're really, you're like an IC2, but you're also like pretty good at bass guitar or you're really good at needlepoint or cooking Indian foods.

Or I have no idea. But there's always something. There's always something that you can do and that you can offer people. The challenge is doing that cold outreach, connecting with people, establishing rapport and through that rapport, discovering what affinities, what you might share in common.

That assumes you'd like to develop some functional chemistry and dialogue. And I think any young person who's interviewed knows how to participate in a conversation. If they're socially awkward, that's a different thing to address. Literally like the way you broach a conversation, but I have hard.

There's immense value and that's how you get to meet people outside your company. Just to close the gap on like the social awkwardness thing. That's something that, you know, I went through myself. It was always like very anxious with new people and didn't know how to start conversations.

There's actually a lot of structure to that and it's really simple. And there's a book out there. It's called How to Talk to Anyone About Anything. Yeah.

Do you know this book? I know that I've not read it, but I know what you're talking about. Yeah. It's a very good book.

And just, it encourages you to think about here's the structure of like small talk and here's how to not sound like a creep. And then you go practice it and you practice it with low risk people. It is whatever on the sidewalk and in a cafe. Or pick off a job.

Or jobs for people that are paid to be nice. People in the hospitality industry are nice to you. So they're not going to be me. It's a very safe space to practice that.

Okay. Tell me, David, what's the strangest place that you've ever networked with somebody? I've got some weird connections on plane flights. Trying to pick up some weird.

I just come back. Are you one of those people where if I sit next to you on a plane, like we can share like our life story and we'll get to know each other super well? Yeah, it depends. So I used to do a lot of conferences and it's funny.

So I like what you're talking about. I got out of college and it was, I would go talk to people and I would turn beat red. I was so nervous. I was so smart.

I didn't feel it all. I remember when I was Fidelity, I was still doing art and there was like a corporate, I don't know, some kind of corporate art show. And I got a drawing in from our team. I was like the representative.

I had this nice drawing or something. Ned Johnson came to the art show. Now, if you know, Johnson was the founder of Fidelity. So as far as I knew in my twenties, he was definitely like one of the wealthiest men in the world, if not like the wealthiest on the East coast.

He was like this type of industry. So when you're that young, I was like, I was so nervous. I was already a red sweaty guy when I met people. Right.

Then I'm Johnson and I'm like stuttering. It's like, it's so awkward. Yeah. And then I, at some point, I don't know when there was some kind of metamorphosis and I think it comes with age.

I was, I like dramatically, I was a very self-confident. Person outside of like public speaking stuff. And then suddenly I was like, oh no, I can do this. I was, I don't know.

I can't explain. I was like framing it along to my mind. I started doing conferences, speaking in front of hundreds of people. All of a sudden I could talk to anyone.

I could cold call anybody. I could approach anybody in a room, work a room, go to a bar, go to whatever. And I love doing that because I'm a relentless bullshitter. And a huge concern while I wound up in this career is that I realized what I enjoy most wasn't like MBA in finance or building a project at a startup.

It was this like endless connectivity, this like tissue that connects everybody. It's just living people. And so you can get really good at that. You can do really interesting things with it.

You don't have to be a recruiter. You could be an operator. You could be a sales guy. You could be a security person with that.

Right. You could do anything with a network. I just chose to do something that was network intensive. But I think when you get into speaking, like there are all sorts of like tips, tricks, books that help people facilitate that.

Facilitate. Yeah. Because there's structure to it and then you go practice and then it becomes second nature. You don't even think about it.

So you know what it reminds me of? There's some movie with Steve Martin and I don't know, some of some, one of his many bad movies, but there was a scene I remember where he was at this dinner party and it was like LA, right? So it was all these like LA people. And it was this woman who looked very LA with her big LA here and she was sitting quietly at her, with her fourth and ninth at her table.

And he went over and he said, oh, I have this, whatever, and he would Carol, I heard you're taking a course in conversation, the art of conversation. And she turned to him. She said, yes. What was like, and that was like a joke, but I feel like if people do it wrong, that's where the conversation's going.

They ask close ended questions. Yes. No questions. You like, you always want to avoid that stuff early in a schmoo chatty kind of dialogue.

But yes. Yeah. Yeah. But it was, that's what it makes me think of.

But I think young people, I think they underestimate their appeal sometimes to older people. That's another whole thing. So if you're like a 20 something, I'm telling you network with some 40 year olds, not like 20 and 30 year olds and reach out to the line executives at your company. You know, the VP of marketing, if you can.

Yeah. The VP of sales, not the director, not the manager. Trust me. If you're even remotely intimidated by it, just put that out of your mind.

These are just people. I talk to them every day. They're your neighbors. They're, or maybe they're your parents, friends, if they're that much older than you.

But they're all, we're all sentient beings. Everybody, unless they're evil, is generally out for people's. And you already got something in common. It's, you're in the same cult working together towards the same vision.

Right. Yeah. And honestly, yeah. And I think for young people too, if they, when you get somebody who does what you want to do, this is just too much to get into in a short time.

But if you bump into somebody, you get an introduction or a connection or something to something who literally does something that you think you want to do. Like you are an early career software engineer, but you're pretty sure now you're five years in, you're really drawn to product. You think you want to move into product management. You're not even sure yet how to get there, but you know that you bump into, or in your own company, there's like a, like a group PM who looks like somebody like who also came from engineering and whatever.

Literally just send that person a note. Just say to them, Hey, I was looking at your background on LinkedIn. We work together. Can we talk?

Because I think a lot about moving into product and I just don't understand how you do it. I guarantee you that person will carve out like an hour or two hours. They will probably start mentoring you. You'll probably start meeting once a month.

And now you have this like amazing connection and connection. That one connection also is a conduit to that person's entire network of recruiters who call for product roles of industry connections, grad school friends, whatever it is like every connection, any of your readers who've looked at social network analysis and they've looked at, you look at like between this and degree centrality and you start to look at how a network works and you realize you can, you can be that home. Like you don't have to be a distal point. Like you actually always are the home.

The only thing you have to do to make that work is believe, like you have to believe that you're the home. And I don't mean, don't go tell people that you're the universe. No, no, no. Just remember that your network revolves around you.

You're the sector of your network. You overlap. So what you're always thinking about as a giver is wearing your network. Is there something that's complimentary to the one that you're scratching at or touching?

And it starts, you get older, it just takes time. You get older, you do it more and it just becomes. It's a long-term investment. Right.

But then you're in your thirties and it becomes just so easy to see who should know who. Like you meet somebody, you're like, oh, you got to meet my friend. So-and-so. Oh, you live there.

Like the same things you do in your personal life. You just improve that professionally. Yep. David, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Yeah. Thanks for having me. Would you like to leave our listeners with any final words of wisdom? Maybe advice for your younger self that you never received, but you wish you, you had heard.

Yes. One quote. Timothy Leary. The electric, you know, if your readers are familiar with Timothy Leary, they can Google.

If you don't know who he is, go Google. He said, never forget your transcendental aspirations. And that is my message to y'all people. Focus on your career.

If you're in tech, like if you seriously, you want to plug into a startup, like a hot start, reach out to me. If you put my website or my email or something, we'll get all your contact. And if I, if it's, I'm inundated, I'll figure it out. But if it's like a handful of people, I'll talk to them to give them advice one-to-one.

But I'm telling you, if your career is of interest, focus on that. But I will tell you that you're doing that. While you're focused on building your career, doing these things and giving yourself over, even if it means a hundred hour weeks at your own startup for five years and you burn out and whatever, just don't lose sight of the things that fascinated you and held your imagination when you were a teenager, when you were in college or whatever it was. Like if you are, if you didn't take that woman's dance class off for a year, but you thought it would have been interesting.

I'm making this up because my friend took woman's dance and then studied anthropology, but she really wanted to do woman's dance. So she took those classes. So if you think you want to do it, but you didn't do it, it's like, it's never too late. It's never to go explore these things because if you go, you're going to turn around like these people I know who do everything right.

And then they're like decades later, it's like, they're having this existential crisis. They don't know exactly what to do with the bell. They're just like 20 years old. Except the 50 and they're 45 and they have money to infinite choice.

It's even worse. They're blinded by, or they're crippled by, by inability to realize what motivates them. All they know is that they could do anything and they fall into a predictable pattern. You know what they do?

They become angel investors. They become limited partners in venture funds and they become interim executives or operators. Yeah. And a number of angels that I've met trying to like, just participate in that journey.

But the rush for the high, like his incredibly high number. Right. So I'll tell you what, you want to be an angel investor and you're not sure, you're not sure what to do. Why don't you just for one investment, for one investment, instead of investing in a startup, why don't you go do some philanthropic?

If you have a lot of money, maybe go, maybe go, my friend built a well in Burkina Faso. And he actually went there. His wife is from Burkina. This is my best friend.

So they went there to build this well and spent time there, but that's something that actually didn't cost a lot, but for them, it's a lot of money, but it's a way I'm just, this is an outlandish example, but I'm saying there's something that's full church interest. Like, and it's a humanitarian cause or it's a hobby, but it has nothing to do with a software company or it has nothing to do. I'm just encouraging people. I couldn't agree more.

Philanthropy is very important to me. Firstly, I'll be doing, I'm actually the team captain of an AIDS life cycle ride where we're going to ride from San Francisco down to LA at 545 miles. And we've got four of us doing it. Yep.

And then all of the money that we're raising for this ride and all it's going to go into ending AIDS and HIV research. It's huge. You can also do it other ways. So for example, and this is a shameless promotion, but I've been involved here in with U.

S. Digital Response for quite a while. And that's like U. S.

Digital Service is a volunteer based organization, pandemic response. Some really incredible people come to us because you're basically just responded to federal, state and local needs. So think about the pandemic. Think about the state of Louisiana and do the best engineers, you know, from college apply to the state of Louisiana to work on payroll systems or unemployment election claims processing.

So this is what these people are struggling with. There's armies of volunteers who are doing what they love. They work in tech and they're taking their know-how, their project management skills, their build experience, and they're helping at a civic. They're doing civic tech.

And so they're doing things that are actually improving society with their competencies. I'm not rich enough to do philanthropy, but I do what I can at small scale. Yeah. I like what you can do is, but I also do it in the form of services and helping out organizations like volunteer teaching, things like that.

You can do that too. If you love engineering, but you want to take a break, go teach kids to code, man. You could probably throw a, you could probably throw a baseball that hit one or two schools within a couple of miles of your house or apartment. They could desperately use a young, scalable engineer to work with some junior high kids or grade school kids and just introduce them to computing, introduce them to languages, get them on bubble, do some no code development, something cool.

Yeah. I don't know. But David, thank you so much. This has been amazing.

Yeah. Nothing to ride. Oh, thank you. Yeah.

We have some time to train so that this is good. Yeah. All right. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in to another episode of the security podcast in Silicon Valley.

Yeah. I will talk to you soon. Thanks everyone.