All right. Awesome. Wait, wait. Cyber. Cyber. All right. I'm ready.
We should just open like that. That'd be fun. Soft sticks. Kevin.
Pleasure to have you here.
Everybody probably does know you, but do they know what you do now?
You know, my role's changed. You know, when you have an operational role, you show up every day and you have one purpose: further that company's objectives. You know, when you're not operating at a single company and you're at Ballistic doing venture now, you champion many different things, not just companies. But for me personally, championing the individuals that we backed, the founders. That's the beautiful thing, Garrett, about being a founder, you know, your job should be different every three months. Like, it should feel different. If it doesn't, you're not going to keep that job for long. By the way, you have to keep learning. You have to keep growing. The job of a founder that is also a CEO, you know, just because you founded a company really doesn't give you the chops to be CEO. Yet, that's the title you're going to have. You may not have gone to Harvard Business School. You may not have run a profit and loss business line before, but you're founder and you're CEO. That means you have to lead people. You have to be really good at so many different things and you have to learn those things as you go. And so what I love about what I do now, which is invest in founders really, you know, that's I can't it's hard for me to say I'm a venture capitalist, you know, because I was operational and that had a connotation to me.
Um, that quite frankly I was like, "Oh, that's real impressive." That's sarcasm. Um, you know, to me, if you're a venture capitalist that has done the job and then you want to lend like your understanding of the road to those who are doing those things, I admire everyone who's a founder, everyone who starts a company and I love watching them grow. That simple. So, that's what I'm doing right now. And what I like about my seat as a as uh at Ballistic where we invested in in founders and their ideas is uh since I've been on the other side of the table, I'm not going to sit here and give you a ton of unsolicited advice. You know, I know how hard it is. I like to hear the questions and every founder has a different set of challenges, period. But, you know, no matter what. I don't believe in the, hey, I'm a four-time entrepreneur, so I must be better than the first time entrepreneur. I'm not sure that adds up. You know, you learn along the way, but sometime there's an advantage to being a first-time entrepreneur.
So, that didn't even answer your question. You know, what's kept Mandia doing today? I'm working with a lot of different founders, a lot of different companies. Um, really trying to get the maximum growth out of each person.
What do you How does that draw the parallel to just this tremendous amount of experience that you've had over decades? Yes. Quite literally in working with some of the best teams in the world in the worst situations.
You mean like instant response?
Yeah. The whole I mean I heard like almost as you built you built an entire private company to focus on a very painful problem that right in the worst case scenarios.
Well Mandia my company was a self-funded startup. So it's different than like you have board meetings Garrett already. I didn't even have a board meeting for seven years you know. So I always look at startups like why do you have a board meeting? You just started. You don't need 90-day interrupt. Um I I think uh one of the things along my journey I think I literally learned every lesson the hard way. It doesn't matter as I get older. Nothing trumps experience. And you can say something to an entrepreneur all day long. In reality they're going to learn it their own way at their at their own timing. And um what you're really looking for in an entrepreneur is the the ability to withstand the constant pressure, the constant curve balls. You know, we had a phrase at Mandia, it's always something. You'd never go home, I can have a beer, we're done. You're never even close to done. You're just I tagged three of the five very important things off my list and I got another two sitting there. It it's uh to me uh you know I I don't know how to offer my experience because in reality by the time I learned something I was already I felt three months behind the power curve. That being said, I love listening to an entrepreneur's problems and just thinking through it with them, you know. So
Kevin, let's switch gears to your past life and the organization you built and from the perspective of what we're seeing today in the threat landscape. Do you think it's more the same accelerated? Do you think we deal with different challenges because of the dynamics with AI and what's happening now? What's what's your general take on on where we are today?
Well, for whoever is watching this video, it's, you know, first, what did I do? We responded to security breaches, and I did that from really 1993 all the way till 2023, you know, and uh so that's what a 30-year run of responding to breaches. The reason my company Mandiant was successful in a lot of ways is because we had a premise security breaches are inevitable and that premise was right yet nobody else believed that. So we had a runway of being unfunded you know we started a company in 2004 we had no competition. But I can tell you this I've always felt if you're just a software company and that's all you do. I didn't think that put you with the right vantage point to defend networks and defend people. We I actually felt incident response was a critical skill set to build better software. And here here's how bad I missed the mark. Mandiant was actually an endpoint company. We never intended to be an incident response company. Uh I didn't realize how hard it was to build endpoint software as a self-funded startup. So kudos to those that have pulled that journey off. So um going back to your question though, it's uh has the threat landscape changed? It always will change. What's changed the most isn't isn't necessarily the threat landscape as much as the impact when a breach occurs. It's up and to the right every single year. So, we have two challenges in cyber security that are critical. One, we have no deterrence to the attacks. Literally none. Um, if you're a criminal in Russia, 10,000 miles away, you can just take shots on goal all day long. And when the shot gets in the net, you can make $10 million, $20 million. You have an anonymous currency now where people can leverage that. So you have a criminal element that's hard to deter if at all. And then you have cyber espionage which it's real hard to crack the code on how do you stop espionage. So so you know offense is coming no matter what with no risk or repercussions to it and then the impact when the breach occurs just continues to escalate. So cyber security has never been more important than today. That's probably the biggest thing that I've noticed throughout my career is uh it just keeps growing in importance to get cyber security right.
So you've probably been able to over three decades of responding to incidents and working to you've been probably able to pattern match some of the most common things that happened and certainly different than the APT groups that your organizations tracked to just traditional criminals. Um what are some of the common trends that you saw previously in that past life as well as now? Are you trying to find companies to invest in to solve some of those issues?
Well, yeah, absolutely. Looking to solve the issues and but uh you know there's been different shift changes. 1993 to 1998 all offense was Unix based publicly available exploits. A lot of times the folks who hacked into networks brought source code into the victim networks to compile it because they didn't have the OS they hacked into. That's how diverse the operating systems were. Fast forward, we ended up in a Mac, Linux, and Windows environment, right? And to some extent Android and iOS. So you have five platforms that are compromised that are the OS right then you have all the custom apps that can be compromised but what has changed most in 30 years is offense is professionalized it is a way of life. There are people that wake up every day and they either badge into a government building to compromise entities or there are criminal elements that wake up, you know, at noon and uh and just hack all day because it pays. Uh so the problem's never going away. And what how people break in has constantly changed. Like if you get better endpoint defense, then you see things like Scattered Spider will socially engineer to break in. You change your help desk to have great controls and it's hard to socially engineer your employees and the endpoint's good, people either move on or if you are the target, they'll target uh your executives off the network or they'll target your custom applications. Um, you know, there's there's no matter what you do on defense, I feel like you're building to some extent Maginot Line. And even if it's not Maginot Line, you have the full wall there, you constantly have to test it and make sure you're getting the most out of uh the security posture that you've implemented.
