88. How Illumio Stops Hackers When the “Front Door” Fails (with Andrew Rubin)

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Security Podcast of Silicon Valley. I am your host, John McLaughlin. And today we have an amazing, very special guest, Andrew Rubin, who is the founder and CEO of Illumio. Welcome to the show, Andrew.

Thank you so much for having me, John. It's great to be here. Looking at your LinkedIn, you've been with Illumio for, wow, like almost 13 years now. That's incredible.

And congratulations on all the success. I appreciate it. And that congratulations really goes to the team of which I'm one member. But I will definitely start off by saying that the expression that a number of my mentors have reminded me of, which is the overnight success story, a decade or more in the making, there's no doubt about it that we're living that journey.

I love it. So do you think of yourself as a security person? Yeah, I definitely do. And there's really not one but two reasons why.

The obvious one is because I get up every day and that's sort of the day job. As I said, I'm one member of an 800 or so person team, but we are a cybersecurity company and we build cybersecurity software and we bring it to our customers to help them and protect them and make them more resilient. So that's sort of the obvious answer.

I think there's a second order answer, though, that's kind of important, which is there aren't a lot of folks who decide to spend their career in cybersecurity who don't have some part of that decision be driven by more of a mission driven attitude where it's not just the job itself, but it's a desire to try and actually participate in what is definitely a very real war nowadays and be on the good side, you know, very much like people who decide to go into security in the physical world a lot of times or join the military. There is a mission driven element to deciding to do this.

I will say, I can't tell you growing up that I knew that I was passionate about it, but I definitely got passionate about it. And actually, I'm more passionate about it today than I ever have been. The mission piece of the story is more important to me now than it ever has been. Yeah, that's inspirational.

You know, so those internal drivers that really can push us to sink our teeth so deeply into a problem and appreciate the problem and all of the nuances that are in there. But it's interesting to see, you know, how life unfolds and how we end up. And now you're an entrepreneur. And for all of our listeners out there, Lumio reduces the surface area of attack by up to 80 percent for data centers and cloud traffic missed by the perimeter security, just so everyone is on the same page on that one.

Sounds like you've had an incredible entrepreneurial journey. What inspired your initial jump into the entrepreneurial space? I have to tell you, I don't really think about it as what inspired the entrepreneurial jump. I actually think that's just sort of a derivative consequence.

I really believe that companies are typically born and founders who are around that table when the company is born, they're born out of recognizing that there's a problem that large incumbent vendors aren't solving. And that problem is either because the incumbent vendors have become the legacy incumbent vendors. In other words, they got big, they didn't innovate quite as aggressively as they did in the early days. And as the world changed, their solutions became less relevant or less of a fit.

So that's one example of where the problem suddenly crops up. Or the other one is more of the Illumio story, which is the perimeter in cybersecurity has been the default and de facto standard for 40 or 50 years. Cyber had one job, sort of one mission, which was keep the bad folks out. And that's why the perimeter was so important.

The problem is that if you look at the data, and I don't mean if you study a pivot table in Excel, I mean, if you pick up a newspaper or watch the news, the last 10 plus years our track record of stopping the bad folks from getting in, not only has been pretty far away from perfect, but it's actually gotten a lot worse, and it's getting worse faster. We're missing more often. When we miss, the breaches are bigger. They're happening in more important and more systemically critical places.

And the data and the information getting stolen is getting more valuable. Another way to say all that is we're spending more on cyber every year and our track record seems to be getting worse, not better. And I don't think that that's an indictment of any vendor or any technology or any security control. I think it's actually just proof that the world is changing.

The infrastructure and the things that we run our lives on are changing. And those changes are coming a lot more aggressively and a heck of a lot faster than they ever did in the past. And the attackers are taking advantage of that. And so in Illuio's case, we were sort of born out of recognizing that the security that we've relied on, which worked pretty well for a long time, was not going to work as well going forward.

And that created a new problem. In our case, the problem was very simple. It's what you said, which is the perimeter serves a purpose, but what happens when the perimeter misses? How do we prevent these things from going from small problems to catastrophes every time?

That's sort of a problem that we saw, we recognized. We were probably pretty early in recognizing it. Some would actually argue that maybe we were a few years too early. But we believed in the problem very deeply.

And we thought that it was presenting an opportunity to sort of rethink and build something very different and brand new. So I didn't wake up one day and say, I want to be an entrepreneur. I woke up and said, I'm passionate about this. I see the world changing.

I think it's a problem that needs to be solved. And that led me to my entrepreneurial journey. But that was what I was passionate about. Not necessarily being a CEO or being an entrepreneur.

Amazing. You just fell in love with the problem and no one else had solved it yet. And it was an open problem and you're like, we can build a better future. Hopefully a safer one.

I count a safer future as a better future for sure. I would argue that they're highly correlated. So if you had to pick a superpower and describe one of your strengths as maybe your strongest or one of your most amazing superpowers, what would that be? Where did it come from?

So I know everybody likes to say that they have one superpower. I think a lot of times it's probably an overstatement to say it's a superpower. You probably have one thing that you're best at. I'm not so sure it's a superpower.

But in my case, I'm going to use the word selling. But I don't mean sales. To me, selling is about becoming deeply passionate about something, becoming competent in understanding it and the domain that it operates in. So having a competency in something is important if you want to be passionate and you want to be able to tell others about why they should be passionate.

As a CEO, if I look at my day job, selling is woven through every single aspect. Arguably the most important sales job I have is not selling the software to customers. It's selling when I'm recruiting people to join the team, because without those people, there is no Illumio. And without those people, there's nothing to build.

There's nothing to sell. So recruiting is all about selling. It's selling the company. It's selling the mission.

It's selling the journey. I certainly love and everybody at Illumio knows that one of my happiest places is in front of customers and partners. I'll call that the traditional selling. Early in the company's life, we had to raise money.

When you're out raising money, you're selling the story, the company, the team, the vision. You're obviously selling what you hope will be an economic success. So I think for me, the thing that I love most is selling, if I had to put a word on it. But it's really about being super passionate, becoming hopefully a domain expert in what it is that you're out there talking about, and then getting out there and asking questions, listening to answers, taking criticism, and using all that to become better at selling whatever it is that you're out there selling every day.

Feel like the passion and the energy, and it's contagious. And I think like all of that wrapped together maybe has a side effect that looks like selling when you put it in a spreadsheet. It's just that drive and the focus coupled with the expertise can be very powerful and can be very moving. So I appreciate that.

And that really resonates really well, actually. Yeah. I'm curious. We have a lot of entrepreneurs who listen to this show, and a lot of times like building something in tech, you have a technical background, you get to become an absolute expert in all of these tech stacks and how systems are operated and how to scale distributed systems and staying on top of the latest and greatest.

And selling is just something that we've had guests on the show that describe it as something they're, quote unquote, forced to do, or, oh, we got to learn it now. Sometimes it's just a little bit more organic, a little bit more natural. You just get so passionate about something and really sink your teeth into it. But for those who are still on the learning side, I feel like a lot of your superpower, it could almost be described as everything is selling, which is a title of a Daniel Pink book, which I've read.

It helped me move from being a technical founder myself to more of a outgoing, more sales oriented, focusing on people, focusing on relationships, focusing on that passion, the problem itself. And then selling just kind of happens. But what about you? Would you recommend a book or maybe a mentor in your life that really helped ground you in that journey towards tuning yourself?

Skills? Well, I know in our industry, and not just cyber, but in tech in general, we have that term that you use, technical founder, and you either are one or you're not. I guess by definition, I'm not a technical founder, because when you use that term, certainly when I've heard the term used, most of the time it means that you came up, you have your BS degree, you coded, you were an architect, you were an engineer and likely still are, and therefore you are a technical founder. By that definition, I am not a technical founder.

What I would say is that I think for people who come up from that true deep technical background, I think you're right that when you are on the founding team or the early team of a company, you do have that moment pretty early on where you realize you have to start talking to people. You have to go out and be able to explain not just how the product works, but the value proposition of the product. I don't think it's about becoming a salesperson per se. I think it's about just rounding out the skill set to get comfortable having both sides of the conversation.

For me, I didn't really have that journey because I didn't come up through the engineering background. I came up more on what I would think of as the sales engineering or the product management side of the house, where we were talking technology. We just weren't building the technology, but there is no doubt about it that very early on in the company's life, we realized that we were all going to have to be able to get in front of a customer, certainly the early team, and have conversations about both sides, how we built it and how to use it and the value that comes from using it.

Best advice I give you is, you nailed it, John, which is talk to people who have been there before. Surround yourself with mentors, and in particular, ones who bring skill sets to the conversation that don't reinforce the ones you already have, but are the skill sets that you don't have that you can actually talk to them and learn, and don't be embarrassed or shy about asking for help. Yeah, there's no point in suffering alone. Always asking for help is welcome, no matter where we're trying to learn or grow.

That growth mindset will lead us to amazing places. You just have to stick with it. It's not a failure until you give up, right? I mean, look, everybody knows that the expression's been around for a long time about, you learn very little from your wins, and you learn a ton from your losses.

There's various ways to say it, but the punchline is always the same. You learn when you make mistakes. You learn when you fail. You learn when things don't go as expected, and in particular, in the bad direction, not the good one.

You have to be open to it, and you have to treat it as a learning experience and not treat it as a failure. You have to have a mindset that accepts that you're going to screw things up. Every company and every team, we say the same thing, which is, we're going to make mistake after mistake. The only two requirements are, one, learn from every one you make, and two, try not to make the same one again.

Even that is going to be a mistake that you make because you will make the same mistake again inevitably, but you have to have a mindset and an aperture that's open to the fact that that's how you get better over time. That's it. That's the secret formula right there. Yeah.

And it's not a secret. That's the good news. You talk to anybody who's been a part of building anything, and they're going to tell you that it's going to be mistake after mistake. It's going to be tough day after tough day, and that's where you learn, and that's where you get stronger, and you have to start by having the mindset open to accepting that and not beating yourself or the team up as if the mistake itself is the problem.

Get comfortable being uncomfortable. Yeah. For sure. Just a little bit.

That serves very well. What's been your proudest day so far in your journey? I got to tell you, that may be one of the toughest questions to answer if you try to chronologically pick a single day. I think what I can tell you is this, there have been a ton of days where I have been really super proud of what we've done, of a deal that we closed, of a hire that we made.

There are all these moments, and there isn't one that stands out. I will tell you an inflection point that's definitely the proudest one. Do share. Do share.

Without a doubt. It's not a day that it happened, but I do actually remember what it felt like before, and I know what it felt like after. The difference was something that I remember saying, wow, I can't believe this. You know that you talk to founders all the time, and you know that they always talk about when you started, did you imagine the company would become this?

Did you imagine you'd have 100 employees one day, 500 team members one day? Did you ever imagine $100 million in revenue? There's all these very easy numbers that we pick because they're big and they're round, and you always ask the question, did you ever imagine? I have never once thought about a number and said, wow, when we cross that mark, something will be different.

To me, it's just a journey, and the goal is to get up every day and try and make it a little bit bigger, a little more successful, make the products a little bit better, etc. The inflection moment, though, was when we woke up, and I say we, it's my moment, but I know I'm not alone in it. Shared with the whole company.

Yeah, and in particular with those of us that were there very early on, there definitely was a moment where we woke up and realized the company was bigger than any of us, where if, for whatever reason, I was not at work tomorrow, Illumio is Illumia, and the board will do its job and find the next CEO, and sure, that next CEO won't be the founder CEO, but the company, because of what we've built, because of what we've done for our customers, because of the value that it delivers, the company became bigger than anybody and everybody, and although it hurts when we lose a team member that has been with us for a long time, or it hurts when we lose a team member that's very valuable or in a particularly important role at a particularly important moment in time, even though it hurts, it isn't going to change the trajectory of the company's ability to be successful over the long run, and just to be honest, in the early days, it's hard to make that comment, because in the early days, the team is small, the company is more fragile, there's less stability and foundation built, and so in the early days, we always had that feeling like, wow, we really hope so-and-so doesn't leave, because we don't know what we would do, and so there was sort of an inflection moment where we started to look around and realize, wow, this is really bigger than any and all of us, and I got to tell you, it's not a founder comment, it's having been there early on, getting to that place where you realize that you've been a part of building something that's bigger than any and all of you, that will go on and grow and be successful if we do our job and execute, that moment to me was something that I was insanely proud to simply be around the table and then see what came out of it, and it's really special.

It's a journey that very few people are lucky enough to go on in their career, and it's not a comment about the value of the work you do or is it right or wrong to be in a startup versus a big company, it's just a special thing to be in something very small and very fragile early on, and then wake up one day and realize that the foundation has been built to potentially build something very big and very scalable and very long-term successful on top, and to be there and see that happen is just a really remarkable thing. It takes a lot of effort to get to that place too, a lot of dedication, a lot of focus.

I have to say no to a lot of things that are just distractions, so congratulations, that sounds awesome. A mark of a certain type of success. If machinery is working and it's not a fragile, very delicate thing and it has armor that's built around it that can withstand the weather, you're like, okay, let's take this boat out to sea. Let's see how far it will go.

John, I've never heard it described that way, but I actually love that metaphor because it is sort of like, is it a fragile rowboat or is it a big sturdy ship? It's a great picture. I haven't thought about or I ever heard it described that way, but that's exactly what it feels like. So to see the boat get built around you and to be a part of building that boat, it's just a really special feeling.

Amazing. About how long did it take to get to the ocean liner stage where you could take that ship out to sea? I'm not so sure I would describe it as an ocean liner just yet. I definitely feel like we're not a rowboat anymore.

That's definitely not rowboat stage. Yeah, definitely not a rowboat, but I'm a very big believer in waking up every day and literally looking forward. I spend very, very little time looking backwards unless there's something we're going to learn from it. But the reality is that inflection moment that I described, I would say in our journey, it probably took somewhere probably around seven or eight years.

If I had to try and put chronology around it, we started the company and spent the first couple of years pre-revenue. Back then, everybody called it stealth mode. We were building what became the MVP of the product. And so it took at least five or six years of selling in market, maybe even a little more.

As I mentioned, when we started Illumio, zero trust. Nobody used the term segmentation. If it's possible to have even fewer people than nobody using the term, that would be an accurate statement. We didn't have a category.

We didn't have a market. Forrester and Gardner had never written anything about these things. We were super, super, super early. Some would argue maybe a little too early.

Fortunately, we weren't so early that we missed all together. Ever, because sometimes that happens in our space, not cyber, but in tech. We've all seen those stories where a group of founders have a brilliant idea. And unfortunately they have it 10 years too early.

And it's the next group of founders, a handful of years later, that actually end up building what becomes the category defining or the category winning company. I mean, those stories are plentiful for decades. They are. We're we're here.

And so we weren't too early, but we were very, very early. And those first few years were really tough as a result. And so it was probably seven or eight years before we woke up and started to say, I think we're onto something. And it feels like the boat's getting bigger and sturdier.

Yeah. Timing is so important with these things. And actually what's funny is everybody always says, oh, well, it's luck and timing. I actually think those two words, when you use them in this context are totally interchangeable.

Your luck is your timing. It's not luck in the sense of traditional luck, like walking into a casino and hoping that you get lucky. This is really all about if you do have the right idea and if you are willing to persevere and work hard and get beat up and do all the things that we all know are table stakes for building a company, the luck comes in the form of the timing and it's table stakes to show up, work hard, not give up. Those are all requirements of being part of an early team, building something from the ground up.

So that's not luck. The luck is actually having that right idea, doing all the hard work and then getting the timing right. The part that you don't control, the market, making sure that you are able to take advantage of shifts in technology landscapes that you don't control, but recognizing them and then being in that right place. And so to me, it's just, it's so important that the timing element is recognized.

And yes, part of our job is obviously to watch how the world is changing and where things are going. And there's no doubt that that is part of the job as well, but there is an element of timing that you literally have absolutely no control over. That's a hundred percent true. And it reminds me actually of that quote that I've heard a couple of times is like, Oh, if you make it, they'll buy it.

It just drives me crazy because we're like innovation without adoption. Is that really innovation? Is that going to change the world? It might be a nice side project.

When you ask your new thing, your new technology, your new solution, your new product to be adopted by a market, the timing matters a great deal because what you're actually doing is you're actually asking other people to change their behavior. The technology is the easy part. These computers, they only do what we tell them to do, but humans were intricate, were complex, were interesting. And when you ask someone else to change their behavior, when you ask someone to adopt your product, that's a very heavy ask.

And so it has to be very compelling. How compelling it is based on the context that everyone else is in. It's based on when, right? So I love that.

I absolutely love that. I'm a huge fan and definitely more of a fan now than ever before of Moore's adoption curve. I certainly knew what it was pre-Illumio. I never really understood how critically important it is.

The reason that we have early innovators and early adopters before the chasm is because by definition, what you just described, there's only a very small portion of the population where their mindset and their aperture is so wide and so open that they're willing to be the early innovator and early adopter. If the whole world all woke up and decided to adopt something at the same time, number one, you don't need Moore's curve. And number two, there is no chasm. By definition, there's going to be a small part of the population, five, 10, 15%, whatever number we want to decide it is that is going to go before everybody else.

And then the only question is whether or not you're solving a problem that it turns out most everybody has. And eventually most everybody will adopt something in order to solve it, because that's the difference between something where those first five or 10% will adopt. And then you get to that chasm and you fall straight into it and never come out. And that's the end of the solution, the company and the opportunity, or is it just that that early adopter mindset is there as the innovative startup, you find those folks, you prove to them that this is novel and it really does solve either a new problem or an old problem, a new way.

And then eventually the rest of the world shows up. And if you build something where the rest of the world doesn't show up, there's only so far you're ever going to get. And so for us, that curve, that very, very simple picture became so powerful because the debate that we were always having was without a garden and magic quadrant, without a Forrester wave, without any of these things that we all look to to sort of validate that this is a broad problem across the majority of organizations, we didn't have those things. And so the debate that we had to have was, yes, we're finding these early innovators.

These were our early adopters. They were our customers out of the gate, but it was a very small subset of the entire world. And the question was, are we going to get to the chasm and fall in and never come out? Or is it just a timing issue?

And obviously that's where having domain expertise, watching how the world's evolving, all those things that I described that I believe are table stakes, that's where doing your job and obviously being very, very, very much willing to persevere, including through some tough times and lots of doubt, you have to make up your mind. How much do you really believe that you're going to get across that chasm and the rest of the world will eventually show up. But that, that in of itself is a unique journey that not a lot of early stage companies go on. It's a privilege.

You get to, you get to grapple with that problem, right? It's a privilege in hindsight. If you cross the chasm, I'm not sure it feels that way. If you fall in, it's a challenging moment crossing that.

I'm, I'm super curious to hear your opinion. Did you cross it when you had that realization that actually like, this is not just a rowboat anymore, but there's something bigger here. Was that the chasm? I think they were highly correlated.

Obviously that wasn't a light switch moment, but as we saw more data and more indication and more anecdote that that was happening, we saw our customer base become more diversified instead of only selling to a couple of industries that are always security, early adopters, financial services, certain areas within tech, all of a sudden we saw airlines and transportation and logistics and things that showed up. We were always selling to very large global enterprise. Suddenly we were selling to commercial enterprise.

And again, it wasn't a day or even a quarter in which this happened, but yes, there was a period of time where all of a sudden, as we were looking at the quarters and we were looking at last quarter and then this quarter and the next quarter, we were starting to say, it really does feel like this is starting to become more mainstream. And I think that that builds confidence. So yes, I think that those two things were highly correlated and that gave us confidence that we were going in the right direction.

The years and the work and the investment that we made was building a real foundation and that it was possible that we could build a skyscraper on top of it. I'm super curious if there was a most difficult moment in your journey. So in our journey, and it turned out like many of the toughest moments that you have, that in hindsight, it ended up actually being a great thing that happened all the way around, but I will never, ever forget, you know, I started Illumia with PJ Kerner, he is and always will be the genius behind the idea. He was the technical founder and always will be.

And, you know, when PJ decided that after a long time, he was ready to be done and he wanted to sort of go back to a room with a couple of folks in true startup mode and start another journey from a whiteboard all over again, that first conversation was definitely one of, if not the toughest conversations. And of course at that moment in time had been, you know, brothers tied at the hip for a long time, had been through every aspect and every moment of the journey together. So just confronting the reality that like, wait a minute, there's going to be a world where we're not doing this together.

And that first conversation was incredibly difficult and obviously incredibly poignant. It turns out like a lot of things that his gut and intuition, first of all, was wildly ahead of mine. And second of all, it was like incredible how well it worked out all the way around. And by the way, he's in that room with a small group with a whiteboard building what I'm sure is going to be the next great company and doing what he loves most.

And so, you know, that is a moment that it's impossible not to remember it. And at that moment, not feel the kick in the stomach. So that, that, that's an easy one. I will tell you that the more generic one though, and the one that I don't hear if you're a CEO of the company or you're a manager with three people on your team, anybody who has ever led any group of people ever is going to tell you that having to let somebody go never gets easier and is always going to be at a human level, the hardest part of the job.

And even if you know you are doing it for all of the right reasons for, for the team, for the company, and even if it's the right reasons for that individual, it is still a human task. And as awesome as it feels when you recruit somebody incredible and you have that win of, oh my gosh, we just got this incredible person to say yes and jump in the boat and join the team. It's hard as a person not to have the equally antithetical reaction when you realize you have to have this incredibly tough conversation.

And the only thing you can hope for is that you're doing the right thing because hindsight is 2020, but that's, that's the toughest part of the job. Yeah. Yeah, it can be, it can be difficult. A short term pain that that never gets easier.

Never. I'm very curious. You described yourself a little bit earlier as a very forward looking person. It's important.

I think that we learned from the history, but that most of your focus is forward. And when you look into that future, what do you think will be the most difficult challenges that we face as a security community in the next five years, maybe? I mean, look, it's obvious that, and I'm not going to say the stunningly obvious version about how it's changing everything and then go down that road. Cause we already know, and it's obvious in cyber.

I think there's a particular sharp edge to the AI conversation, which is like everything we have to remember that the defenders and the attackers equally, and sometimes not equally have access to tools, meaning the attackers are going to have access to AI no differently than the defenders we've always described cyber as a bit of a race, and we talk about who's ahead in the race, the attacker, the defender, if AI, and I think it's also universally agreed and obvious is moving faster than anything that any of us have ever seen or contemplated, then that means that the race that we're in is going to speed up a lot.

And that means that the consequences of getting things right. We'll be dramatic. And the consequences of getting things wrong will be equally dramatic. There is no doubt about it, that AI is at the center of a lot of conversations that I'm having with customers in terms of what it is going to enable attackers to do.

It's certainly a conversation inside of the Illumio building, both in terms of how we're going to use it and how it's going to make its way into our products. Both statements are already true and will continue to become more true. But in our world, I think the answer is it is a tool that potentially allows attackers to become much more sophisticated, much more efficient, and to move much more quickly. And that's very, very scary if the game that you're playing is trying to make sure that you're always staying ahead.

And so I'm not saying that it is gloom and doom, end of world. It might be, and we don't know it yet, but I'm not going there or stating that that is the only outcome. I'm simply saying that the stakes of the game that we all play, which is trying to stay ahead of people who really, number one, want to do bad things. Number two, operate without the rule of law.

And number three, operate without the morals and ethics that the defenders, by definition, operate within. It's a very, very scary landscape when you think about it in that context. And so I think the next couple of years, we put a timeframe on it, right? It's happening today, but I think over the next couple of years, we're going to see a set of attack criteria.

We're going to see a set of attack motions. We're going to see, by the way, a new group of attackers that we've never seen in the past. And we're going to have to figure out how to deal with that. And by the way, doing all of that, where data center capacity, network, bandwidth and traffic, compute and application, all of these layers are growing parabolically and exponentially faster than they've ever grown.

It's more traffic flowing over networks globally. And in our world, you know what that all equals? More attack surface. That's more stuff for the attackers to go after.

And so right now we're in the cycle of being super, super excited about what all these things are enabling. But then there are those of us that are realizing as all this new stuff is getting built, all it's doing is creating more stuff that we have to protect. Or another way to say it is a lot more places for the attackers to go and try and be right. And I think the next couple of years we've got we've got a big job on our hands.

Yep, there's a huge bullseye on all of that new attack surface is going to play itself out, right? So so one of the things that I think is really important to point out is that all crime and really it's been true for hundreds of years, maybe thousands of years. But all crime, if you really generalize it, it stems from one of two places, economic crime. You're stealing something for economic value.

The other crime and quite honestly, the one that is a lot scarier is crime that comes from what I'll describe as political or belief based motivation. And by the way, that crime in the real world is the scarier version. And in the cyber world, it's the scarier version. Nation states don't generally commit cyber crime to get paid in Bitcoin.

Nation states commit cyber crime to spy on their enemies, to figure out how to use the information for real economic sabotage, potentially to do harm. And some of that harm may be in cyberspace, but some of that harm may be cyber crime in order to eventually use it in the kinetic world. And so when you think about it, it is easy to talk about things like, well, maybe people will get better at stealing Bitcoin. And I'm not belittling the economic driven crime problem because ransomware is a huge problem, especially when it hits a local school district or a hospital in a small community.

The but is a nation state threat actor that operates at a level of sophistication that goes way beyond a typical criminal who decides that they're going to use the cyber attack surface to do things that are truly operating out of either political or belief based motivation. That is a very, very, very scary landscape. And it's real. We've seen those attacks, some of which we've read about publicly, some of which we haven't.

But the point is, AI is going to enable every one of these things to happen probably faster and more effectively. And so it's the next couple of years. Like I said, we've got a very big job in front of us and one that I would argue we have not been tasked with in the past. This is new territory.

It is. It's uncharted highway. I think as a community, as a security community, we get this opportunity to build the future that we want and hopefully it's more secure. Without a doubt.

But I'm filled with gratitude and optimism that really smart people are just tackling like difficult problems, like how do you protect your infrastructure like beyond the perimeter? So all the gratitude in the world for tackling and just sinking your teeth into that particular problem. And everyone that's been with you on that journey with Lumion, so it's moments like that that give me hope. Same here.

And it is in every sense of the word, a team sport and the team shows up every day. Like I said, there's a mission driven element to this. There's obviously very much a desire to build a big, important company that does big, important things and has the success that goes with that. So we're certainly not shy about making sure that we're doing our job, which is to build the company.

And the best path to getting there is build really great software that solves a big, important problem because customers will adopt, they'll give you their voice and their direction. So that becomes your roadmap. I certainly know the space we're operating in is going to do nothing but become more important over time. So we're in the right place to solve an important problem.

We just got to show up every day and work really hard to do it. It's really, you know, the work may be very hard and very complicated and very technical, but the actual description of what we do shouldn't be. That's right. I couldn't agree more.

Maybe one last question on lessons learned from the past, if maybe you wouldn't mind sharing. If you had an opportunity to go back in time, meet your younger self, would you take that opportunity? And if you would, like, would you have any advice for yourself? Yes, I would.

Tons of advice. I'll pick out what I think would be at the top of the list, but I'll also answer what I think is the other part of that question, which is, would you change what you did or the path that you were on? And the way that I always describe it, and I believe it in your personal life and your professional life both. I don't think that this is just a career comment.

There is a difference in would you go back, teach yourself things earlier, give yourself advice? And would that probably change certain things about what you do or how you think about the world? Sure. That is very different than having regret about what you did.

So I have an impossible time getting up in the morning, being this excited about what we do, being this in awe, and I am, I say it very openly, I'm totally in awe of what I've been a part of, of the team that I get to work with. Even the worst days, being on a journey like this, there are really great days and there were some really tough days. Even the worst days, I'm still amazed that I get to do this every day. And I'm definitely more excited now than I've ever been.

And so I wouldn't change anything in terms of regret and saying, wow, I really wish I had made a left turn instead of a right, because if I had, I don't know if this is what would have happened. And I remind myself of that every day. Having said that, like, yeah, looking back, there's a thousand things that I would have done differently. I think the one at the top of the list would be, I really wish that I wasn't early on in my career, so concerned about the path that my career would take.

I was more focused on the, I want to say, a combination of the road and the outcome than I was about figuring out what do I love, what am I passionate about, and just go find. A venue to participate in doing that in, and the road will pave itself and the outcome will likely be good or great. And don't worry about that, because once you're on that road, then you can start to figure out what it looks like. Certainly, I think if your goal is to go to a large organization and climb more of a traditional corporate path or ladder, it's actually pretty important.

But I was always a little off that beaten path. And again, I didn't know I wanted to be an entrepreneur and I didn't sit there and say, I have to be a founder, but I wasn't gravitating towards that path, so I shouldn't have been as worried about the road. And I would have given myself that advice. I don't know what it would have changed.

I have no idea. And I don't spend a lot of time looking backwards thinking about it, but I just, I know where my head was and I know where my head needed to be, and it did take longer to change than I wish it had. Now, that's a really elegant answer. It's almost like, you know, we all have these journeys that we're on.

There's these paths, and it's led to exactly where we are today, and that's an incredible human being, and that's imperfect how we got here, but that's just perfect, right? Yeah, and again, you know, we asked about superpowers earlier on. I'll tell you one power, forget about superpower, one power that I know I don't have, and I am working on it and encouraging it in myself and as CEO is, I am so forward-looking that sometimes I don't take a beat, take a breath, and sort of say, wow, look at what just happened, and as a leader, I'm better at it than I am in terms of myself.

As a leader, I want the team to take a beat and to, you know, when we release something really important or close a really important new customer, I want people to celebrate that. I'm not as good at that myself as I want to be, and so that's a perfect example of something where you're never done working on this, and it's not about perfect. It's not even about close to perfect. It's just figuring out how you can move the needle a little bit forward every single day.

It's a journey. Yeah, you've hit it. You've hit it exactly. It's the growth mindset.

It's a journey, and as founders, we're never satisfied. Have you ever met a founder that's like, yep, we're done? Yeah, we're there. I don't know where it is, but I know that there is still there.

Well, on that note, thank you so much, Andrew. This has been a really incredible, really special conversation, so thanks for sharing vulnerable moments and your full authentic self with all of us here. This has been a YSecurity production. I'm one of the hosts, John McLaughlin.

All the gratitude in the world, Andrew. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. And thank you to all of our listeners.

If you feel so compelled, please like the podcast, share it with your friends, post on social media if you think it was worth the listen, and stay tuned for the next episode. Thank you.