Bryson Koehler - CTO at Equifax

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. I'm curious to know how many of you have a leadership pipeline. We know that great leaders grow companies because we talk to them here on the show every day. But what are you doing to create great leaders within yours? If you're a CTO, it is 100% your responsibility to grow and improve your people beyond just their coding abilities.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:20) We've built a tool that improves your people in their craft and in leadership. Visit leaderbits.io to learn more. Today, we are talking to Bryson Koehler, the CTO at Equifax, and we discuss how you can become more valuable professionally, the unique advantage of inquisitive engineers, and the culture of security being built in versus bolted on. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:49) This is the Modern CTO Podcast. Yeah, and it's an interesting topic from a higher perspective about, you know, I come from SaaS software business world where we can ship software kind of loosey-goosey. Right? And if we get some error reports, some notifications, we go write a patch and deploy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:18) But when I started talking to people from NASA and they were building satellites, and you get one shot to put the satellite. And so I started putting it out there and asking people, if you come across resources, like books or things of that nature, for people that worked in those, not necessarily just high availability environments, but high reliability testing for the things that have really high stakes. I get requests from that quite a bit. People saying, oh, is there development books? Are there engineers writing about developing these types of applications and their heuristics or the methodologies they use? I haven't come across a whole lot. So I'm putting feelers out there.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:01:58) No, it's medical device manufacturers have always been a place where I always have looked at teams and partners that work in that type of environment because, you know, you start thinking about a heart monitor. Just a simple thing. You know? There's no period of time where a Java garbage collection process is okay. Right? There's no window where this is okay. So brings a whole different level of testing that your average kind of SaaS team just doesn't think about. But, you know, I think, look, if you think about the consumer experience, if you think about the expectations that we have on devices in our own lives, the bar continues to get raised.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:02:50) And so, you know, the level of testing that a heart monitor probably went through ten years ago is probably the level of testing that your average mobile application developer is going through in this day and age around battery life, you know, network chattiness, and these things that impact stuff behind the scene. The bar just continues to rise, which is good. But certainly, we're always having to look and learn. And that's the best part about being in technology is that you never stop learning. And with the bar constantly being pushed forward, you know, we're always having to learn new ways of working, learn new tools, meet new people, try to find ways and tricks and processes and ways of working that have worked for them. So it's just a fascinating and fun time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:46) Yeah. We share. We collaborate. We get a little edge. We improve. Then we turn around and share, and it starts the cycle all over. But I am really excited to ask you about your first experience with technology growing up. What was your first thing? When did you fall in love with technology?

(Bryson Koehler at 00:04:04) So I fell in love with technology in late, very late 1982, when my dad, who was a CFO at the time at a Fortune 100 company, he somehow had gotten his hands on a preproduction Apple IIe. And I think they were trying to figure out whether or not it made any sense to bring that into their workplace for spreadsheets or doing financial stuff. And he brought it home for the weekend. And I don't think I slept that whole weekend. And I just, I'll never forget, you know, from that moment, I just have been a geek.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:04:51) I just, you know, I taught myself the hardware side of it, the operating side of it, how to code. And just, you know, whether it was an Apple IIe or a VIC-20 or an Amiga or, you know, all the way through my kind of formative years of growing up, I was fortunate enough. I ran my own BBS. Nice. And somehow convinced my parents to put four phone lines into the house so I could run four simultaneous concurrent users, which was awesome. And so, you know, running a BBS at a young age was kind of also the combination of probably some entrepreneurialism, because I remember I got an ad from the local computer store that would come up on the welcome script. You know, I think they probably gave me a packet of floppy disks as my payment. But nonetheless, it was like my first deal. And so I've just been a geek since I was a little kid, and I just love the physics behind it, I think, probably more than anything. Understanding really how the electrons are flowing through the system and...

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:08) Yeah. How...

(Bryson Koehler at 00:06:08) That's what really excites me. And, you know, so I just have enjoyed the process of watching it grow. And now, you know, as software eats the world, you know, figuring out how we continue to make software work better so that the electrons continue to become more efficient.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:31) That's amazing. So one day I'm sitting around and I'm looking at the pixels on the screen. I was writing code for ten, twelve years at the time. And I was like, what happens if the power goes out? I would not know as a human how to get the power back on because I don't even understand what it is. And then I sit here staring at the screen my whole life and I don't even understand how the electron gets here. And then I start thinking and I'm like, well, they say energy is not created or destroyed. And then I'm like, so then what does a power station do? How does it manufacture energy? This doesn't make sense. Right? And so these issues started arising in my head. And so I started doing research. I found MIT and all their course information about introduction to electronics. And, ultimately, I found out how it gets generated down at the power station, steps down through all our transformers, ultimately does a series of additional step downs inside the actual chips and transistors and all that stuff.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:07:26) Awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:27) Yeah. And so I was like, now I know how an electron flows from the power station down through into my house and emits a photon essentially out of the screen. Right? And so that was really exciting.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:07:39) Stations aren't really generating power. They're just converting power and energy from one form to another. And so, you know, and I think what's so fascinating about your comment around, hey, I just didn't know how that came out of the wall. You know what? What I think is so great about where we are with technology today, if you think about 120 volts at 60 hertz, which is the power cycle here in the United States, it's different around the world. But within a country, you can pretty much guarantee that every wall socket in the US is 120 volts at 60 hertz. You can plug in and it just works. And if we think about technology going from infrastructure as a service and, you know, platforms as a service, software as a service, we're making more and more of infrastructure as a simple example. Work like power.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:08:32) You know? How does that VM get spun up? Well, I don't know. It just got spun up. And then if you were to go and do the same research you did on power, but if you did that on, say, cloud computing, it's almost the same level of fascination around what all goes behind the scenes to make all of that work. I guess that's probably why I, you know, have been a geek and I'm still a geek at heart is that I just get enthralled with understanding how things work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:00) Yes. That curiosity spark when your brain finds the conflict.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:09:04) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:05) Now have you written an article on that? Power of cloud computing infrastructure?

(Bryson Koehler at 00:09:11) No. I mean, sometimes when I'm out speaking, I do a little riff on that and do a little riff on, you know, innovation and pushing the envelope and how we need to continue to have that spark of curiosity as engineers and as software developers or hardware engineers. You know, but also as we were talking earlier about being a QA engineer, half of being a great test engineer is the curiosity. Don't just follow the script. I mean, follow the script, but also, you know, think about other paths that may not have been well defined. Being curious is the best part of being an engineer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:55) And that balance about being professional is being able to follow the script, but not letting it box you in. Get what needs to be done done, but don't let them be like, yeah. Do more. Do more. Because it feels good. It's like our bodies are programmed for. I don't know about you, but after I work hard, I feel good.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:10:16) Absolutely. And that is a great way to kind of end the day with a feeling of great accomplishment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:22) Yeah. By the way, when you're talking about you hooked up four users with your 56k cards?

(Bryson Koehler at 00:10:29) They weren't 56k. They were, we started off at 600, then we went to, I got to 1,400. And then I think by the time I shut it down, I had 14.4k modems. So but in yeah, anyway.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:47) Well, so for me, 56k was the intro. Right? And I'm 31...

(Bryson Koehler at 00:10:52) Lucky. Lucky dog.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:54) But I remember being about, I don't know, eight years old, and we had these 56k's. And my dad comes home from work, and we get a pizza and we install, he's like, you want to have some fun? I'm like, yeah. I want to have some fun. So we installed two 56k's and we uploaded and downloaded at the same time.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:11:12) Wow. Yeah. Wow. Duplexing your modems together, that is stroke of genius.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:15) Yep. Yep. That's great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:22) Yep. It was quite the night. It was like you're just partying, being nerds. And that's one of my favorite. And then, oh, I can't forget the day that they got T1 at the office.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:11:35) That was...

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:36) Those were insane days.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:11:38) Between ISDN and then T1s and, you know, now I've got, you know, a gigabit fiber line running to my house and my kids just, you know, do not at all understand that getting a thousand down and a thousand up is just not normal. Unless you were talking about bits of info they just don't get it. They don't get it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:05) But they'll still be in ten years talking and having a conversation about how slow it was.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:12:13) Oh, absolutely. Dad, it's not working. Dad, why is this taking so long? Well, dad, why is this congested? So oh, anyway...

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:21) Here's a curious question, and we can remove it from the interview if you don't like it. But I'm just, my brain sparked curiosity. Because of your high level of executiveness, I guess we'll say, because you're at a publicly traded company that the world knows. Right?

(Bryson Koehler at 00:12:38) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:38) Does that have any sort of impact on your family security with the Internet and usage?

(Bryson Koehler at 00:12:44) You know, I think that's a great question. Honestly, no. I mean, I run, you know, we're constantly making sure we're secure. My kids use two-factor authentication, you know, even on their own little personal account, because I think it's important that we all take security very seriously. And whether you're a public figure, whether you're not, you know, I think if hackers are scanning and looking for an unpatched, you know, Asus router somewhere, they're just scanning. They're going to find it, and then they just, you know, we're going to see what happens. So could somebody be more targeted? Sure. But I'm not quite sure that there's anything more that a more targeted person should do than a non-targeted person. And we always have to keep pushing the envelope, you know, as we move past two-factor and all other things.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:13:42) But, you know, thinking about having encryption turned on, thinking about having the right password protection, understanding, it's good for your kids to understand that because that's the world they grow up in. And, you know, it, what was great was a couple of my kids already had done really good practices before I even had started to talk to them about it years ago.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:09) Oh, nice.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:14:09) So that was actually, you know, as a dad, that was rewarding. It was like...

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:14) Right.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:14:14) You know, way to go, son. So it's good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:19) And then he locks you out of his account because he's got 2FA on.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:14:22) Yeah. Yeah. Well, it does make it more difficult as a parent to snoop on your kids. But, you know, what do you do?

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:31) That's awesome. Because, you know, for me, this is a thing that I will face eventually when they start getting online because they're so young. And it's like you have to sit down and talk with your kids about two-factor authentication.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:14:44) Oh, absolutely. And, you know, I think at first, if I look at my sample size of five, a few just didn't understand why this was important and why it mattered. And, you know, but as they watch even in social media, you know, things happen. Rumors are out there. People's photos get released. Stuff occurs to folks that kind of are in their social circles. All of a sudden, it all clicks for them. Right? So maybe it's not their bank account, but, you know, nobody wants to see their Instagram chat feed publicly posted either. So, you know, to them, that's probably worth more clearly than their bank account is.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:15:28) But, you know, I think it's really good to see security now being at the forefront of dinner table conversations and boardroom conversation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:41) I knew we were going to be best friends the moment you referred to your collection of kids as a sample size.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:15:47) Hey, I told you I'm a self-proclaimed geek. I can't...

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:51) Dude, I love it. I love it. So, yeah, I'm very happy security is becoming a larger part of the conversation. Now, I'm curious when with companies of your size, how do you handle security? Do you just hire the brightest people internally? Do you partner with companies like Symantec? How do you approach security, like talent, getting security talent?

(Bryson Koehler at 00:16:15) So I would say first, here at Equifax, we approach security as job one. And the pivot that we're going through with our technology transformation is making sure that security, you know, as I always say, is built in, not bolted on. And, you know, I think for many companies that have a legacy environment that was built many moons ago, they've been going through a period of time of bolting security on, adding agents or adding additional firewalls or adding more network segments or, you know, whatever. Right? And so that bolting on is a certain type of security skill set.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:16:57) And that's a certain type of certification. That's a certain type of skill set. But here at Equifax, the transformation we're going through is a rebuild into a cloud-native world where security is baked in, where we're thinking about it at a much deeper, lower-level engineering perspective. And now that takes a totally different security mindset. And so we have been going through a pretty rapid reskill within our security team, and I think we have flipped from 30% of our security team being engineers a year ago to today, 70% of our security team are engineers.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:17:40) And we've inverted the team to be a much more engineering-focused team because we know that when we build the capabilities and we build what we're designing and how we're going to deploy it and how we manage data and we think about data governance, that security has to be a part of the code. It has to be a part of the architecture. And it's not something where in today's world you can just bolt something on at the end and think you're going to be okay. So when you think about getting talent in today's world, I think going back to the conversation, inquisitive engineers are really good. And if you think about building out, say, a red team in security to go work at doing some sort of white knight hacking-type activities, you want people who are inquisitive.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:18:30) You want people who are—if you understand how the electrons are flowing, it makes it easier for you to protect them. It makes it easier for you to go find ways to break them. And those are all good characteristics. And so it's a different skill set when you're hiring security engineers for building security in at the ground level versus bolting agents on at the end of the day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:00) I almost had an entry into security for a while in between some of my projects there, because I was so interested. My question I would ask myself was, how lazy was this developer?

(Bryson Koehler at 00:19:14) I actually have a joke about that. I say I love lazy engineers, and so I'm always looking to hire lazy engineers because those engineers want to automate. Those engineers want to find ways to not have to go perform those duplicative tasks. Now, clearly, in your example, there could be a downside of that.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:19:39) But my tongue-in-cheek—because I actually think automation is the key to the best security. Right? Getting into a highly repeatable way of working, deploying software, managing and running your systems. When that's automated and you remove the human element, the more I can remove the human element, the more secure I believe that those systems would be. And so, there's certainly a pro and a con.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:20:04) But whether you're a security engineer or a test engineer, we probably all have those moments where you're like, what in the world was Bryson thinking? Like, what was he thinking? And those are always fun moments.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:22) No, I get what you mean though by lazy engineers. I'll say undisciplined engineers, right? The people who aren't checking the right boxes. But I like your concept of using automation because for those repeatable, consistent events, automation is where it's at.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:20:38) Well, and it's why I actually think the cloud is more secure than anything anybody can do on-prem. And that's such a shift from where I think the industry mindset has been for a period of time. But to me, the cloud is light years ahead of what people can achieve in an on-prem environment. And I would say there's many reasons why I think that's true. Things like an evergreen environment—as you're constantly able to move to the most current version of software, current version of hardware, current version of security tools—that promotes a good security posture.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:21:18) If you're in an on-prem environment and you buy something and now you've got a—you capitalize it and you write it off over a five-year period, well, that tool was out of date six months after you bought it, but yet it's still on the books and so you're still running it. In the cloud, you can just keep moving. And that's good. But I would say one of the most critical aspects of cloud security is automation, treating infrastructure as code. Every time I do a deploy, I'm pulling my OS image. I'm including the latest library. I'm always patched. The entire build process is always clean, and it's always done every time. It's not layer on layer on layer on layer of systems that you can't even backtrack how you got where you were. The cloud just promotes really good hygiene.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:13) Yeah. Reminds me of—I don't know. While you're talking, the imagery popping into my head is from a project I worked on for high-frequency trading in the stock market. The time arbitrage has become so small to exploit the flaw now because of how fast you can move. Right? And so that window closes.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:22:32) Totally agree. I mean, if you think—well, you're dealing with microseconds at that point, and that makes it very difficult. I think the same thing's probably true with identity. Right? If we think about how do we continue to raise the bar on our own personal identity and making sure that the attributes about us are protected and that we continue as a society to raise the bar on identity protection.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:22:57) I think there's an element to identity protection that we're working on here at Equifax that is tied to making sure that the data elements that can be used to identify a person are transient enough that they become meaningless, and they expire so quickly that they're not useful. And we've got to continue to move in that direction. Right? If you live in the same state, you've had the same driver's license number since you got your driver's license at 16. And so if somebody has your driver's license number, it's the same one. It never changes. So I think there's millions of examples of that. But as a society, we have to start thinking about how we evolve these forms of identification so that that time horizon that you were talking about from high-frequency trading gets baked into other things we're trying to solve as a group.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:01) Now, as the United States—and you're a U.S. citizen, right? Like, you're from the United States? Okay. I talk to people all over the world. So as the United States, I've experienced other governments, and we are not as far ahead as other governments are with their security and identification. Do you know how that happens? Like, is that something that we talk with the government? Like, who drives that? Do you know?

(Bryson Koehler at 00:24:31) You know, we're certainly not as progressive. And I think there's many reasons, from Bryson's perspective, why that is. And we'll see if that changes over time. I mean, I think fundamentally, you're talking about freedom, and you are talking about the concept of a more rigorous national identification system. And there's pros and cons when you think about the constitutionality of individual freedom and not having the big brother tracking you and all of these things. And so the risk in being too progressive, I totally understand that argument. I understand that point of view, that that could be a slippery slope, and it could be used in ways that are not helpful. And so as a society, I think we've been probably the most deliberate. And in this case, that probably means slow to transition to a more digital way of thinking about identity.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:25:37) But I would even say, if you look at the U.S., whose job is it to do identity? Like, which federal branch—

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:45) That's why I'm asking. Like, who drives it?

(Bryson Koehler at 00:25:47) Whose job is it? It's not—today, it's not. If you go ask the Social Security Administration, they'll say it's not our job. Our job is to make sure that you were born where you said you were born and give you an identification number to track where you were born. They never intended for Social Security number to be an identifying factor of a person. Right? That wasn't why that was created. That's not their mandate. And I think that's an insightful piece of information. So then you look at, well, whose job is it? Is it Homeland Security? Is it—right? And so I think it's been easier for it to be a local-level decision with things like the Department of Motor Vehicles. You could say maybe the State Department with passports as an identification mechanism. But I'm not sure that the folks at the State Department are waking up every day trying to figure out how to—that's not—they got other problems to solve.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:26:47) And so we've been hardening physical documents, making it harder to fake a passport, making it harder to fake your driver's license, and creating all kinds of digital holographic things within the paper. Whether or not those are hackable, I would assume they are. I haven't tried. But—

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:10) We all went to high school.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:27:13) But I think back in the day, it was certainly easier to do that than it is today. But how do we apply the same level of rigor that we have done for a secure ID in a physical form from a government agency to whose job is it to do that in a digital world? I think that's a question that, as a society, we are wrestling with.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:37) Yeah. And you know what? I don't actually think it's the worst thing that we're not the first on everything. And I'll tell you why. It's because I see some other countries, and we were the first on a lot of things—or some other countries. And they will make improvements, and their version's way better. And so I'm thinking, alright, let's let some other countries hash out this digital identity stuff. And then once they've had some trial and success with it and figured out the pain points and had the issues, then we can come in and create our version.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:28:08) But I think that's right. And the thoughtfulness as a society that we've had around the civil liberties impact and the freedom and big brother and all of that. I think, look, that's why we have a democracy—that debate is supposed to occur, and we're not supposed to just rush into something. And so this one, I think there is a thoughtful debate occurring. I would suggest that, as I always tell my team, if you're going to have a meeting, make sure you know who actually owns the decision in the meeting so that you can actually get to a decision and move forward. If you go to a meeting and you're not really sure who's in charge of making a decision, I'm not really sure—it sounds like we're just going to have a great conversation then. And if you think about identity, and you think about how does that get digitized, I think you have to start with who makes that decision.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:03) Oh, I like it. That's some leadership stuff right there. So yeah, I'm excited because when we do end up getting that, I think if we ask the right questions, we'll get really good results. We'll get better results. So for example, as we're talking, we imagine—or at least I feel like the subtext is—that we imagine that you can't have both. Like, you can't have both your privacy and the omni-security concept. And I think that there's a way that we could.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:29:36) Yeah, I agree.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:37) There's some—I don't know how it looks.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:29:39) Well, I think blockchain raises an interesting concept. Right? If you think about a secure ledger that you can control or that you had more visibility into the attributes that are being put and pulled from it—how does that type of technology innovation change the way we were maybe thinking about being boxed in in the past? Right? So maybe you get to a place where, to your point, you can have both. I think you have to continue to push until you invent a way that you do have both. Right? And because identity is really—it's my identity. It's not the government's identity. It's mine. I should protect my identity. I should understand my attributes about me, and I should play a more active role in that. And how do we leverage technology, and the fact that we're all walking around with a small glass supercomputer in our pocket?

(Bryson Koehler at 00:30:46) How do we leverage that ecosystem to play a part in something truly transformative? I think it's a very exciting time, and I know here at Equifax, we are incredibly eager to be a part of the improvement of that entire mission.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:04) I like you, Bryson. I think you're pretty awesome.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:31:09) Well, thanks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:12) Yeah. We get some questions from the show—people will write in and ask us. So I've got a couple questions about change management. Have you heard of this hot topic now? It seems to be popular in the HR world.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:31:24) Are we talking about people change management or technical change management?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:28) Right. And that was my first question too. We're talking right now—this question comes about reluctance, resistance to change. Like, if you've got something that you want to push or something that you see happening, you see coming, you've got to—let's say, your team happens to be resistant. What are your thoughts? Like, how do you deal with that?

(Bryson Koehler at 00:31:52) So when I think about the technology transformation that we're doing here at Equifax, the number one priority I have is our own cultural transformation as a company. Right? That fixing culture, improving culture, helping people and their skill sets adapt and all of that, I have to do that well before I can actually ever achieve a technology transformation. So I spend a lot of time on this topic. And I think the number one thing you have to realize in change management is that not everybody is eager for change. And I always have to check myself because for me, I love change. I get bored in about four minutes, and so I'm always looking for something new, something different, a different way to think about something, a different perspective. But not everybody's built like that. And so I think the first thing that we have to recognize is that changing people—you've got to first help them understand why. Why is this good for me? Why would I want to change? What was wrong, and what has now become outdated in the way I was working in the past? And what's in it for me as I go through this technology transformation, or what's in it for me as I go through any sort of change—a change in process, a change in my job, a change in the building I work in, the change in my commute, whatever it is. It's mostly dealing with the sense of insecurity tied to the unknown. And I always find that really just trying to surface the natural elephants that exist in the unknown and get them all out on the table and just say, look, here are the things I know you're thinking about. Here are the things that I know that are on your mind. Here are the things that I believe that if I were you, I'd be worried about. So let me just put them out there, and then let's talk about them. And then we can certainly talk about why we think the change we are going to go through is useful because I think that's the second piece.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:34:04) Right? So the first piece is that kind of uncertainty and insecurity of the unknown. The second piece is the disbelief that whatever I'm going to do is actually going to make a difference. Right? If this is just, "Oh, and this too will pass, and I'll just keep doing it the old way, and we'll eventually just realize the old way was fine," I think you've got to create and change a sense of belief in the mission as to, "If I really change this, it really will be better."

(Bryson Koehler at 00:34:33) It really will be different. We can accomplish an outcome that was different, because I certainly see in a lot of cases in my career where there's a lot of folks that just, "If I keep my head down, this will pass, and I'll just be able to keep getting away with whatever I was doing in the past." And I've found that getting people excited that that may be true, but here's why we don't want the past way of doing something to continue, and why it's in all of our best interest to move forward. Do you really want to have a 2G phone? Isn't your 4G experience better than 2G?

(Bryson Koehler at 00:35:14) And, you know, 99% of people will say yes. There's going to be the one guy or gal that pulls out a flip phone and says, "No, SMS is just fine." And you know what? Great. Good for you. That may just not be what we need here. There's probably plenty of places where you'll fit in just fine, but it's not here. And you can't be, as a leader, bashful about that being a part of the change management process.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:38) That was like pure gold. I love—when are you writing a book?

(Bryson Koehler at 00:35:45) You know, honestly, if I did a better job at note taking, I could probably do a really good movie script. But...

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:53) So here's what we'll do. I'm going to—we have this book that we're putting together.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:35:58) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:58) We don't have the title solidified yet, but the idea is that from all these conversations that I'm having with all these great technology leaders like yourself, we pull little tidbits of their best insight and thoughts, and we're going to put it into this book and just put it out into the world and say, "Here you go, world. Here's the best collective knowledge that we have."

(Bryson Koehler at 00:36:21) That's great. Happy to be a part of it and have totally enjoyed our conversation. I just love the fact that you totally get it, and the fact that you went and studied how the power plant works—you're a member of—you're just awesome. And so, happy to get together anytime and chat about topics that are on your mind, because these are fun. And, look, you only live once, so you've got to love what you do. And I really encourage people—you know, my job is to help people become more employable. I really mean that, and I really want people to love what they do and be curious and have conversations and explore the world, and explore what's going on. And you can't be a great CTO or a great CIO if you're not doing that in your own walk of life.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:07) It's such truth. Right? Because you have to actually care about the people and what's best for them, even when it's not what's best for you. And when I see that in leaders, I really enjoy those people.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:37:19) Oh, so true. So true.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:21) So I'm curious to know, as we begin to wrap up here, you went from, you know, The Weather Channel, IBM, Equifax. Like, everybody loves the sound of that. Right? But it's through vision, discipline, and a lot of hard work in order for you to traverse that, and it takes a lifetime to have an awesome lifetime. Right? Like, it takes a career to do something really cool. You can't just do it overnight. And so a lot of our audience is 30-something, 40-something technologists, whether they're team leads, first-time leaders, or VPs, or maybe CTOs as well. Well, not maybe—definitely CTOs as well. But they're in that position. They're somewhere in that gradient of their career. And the biggest question I get is, "How do I level up? How do I get to that next level? How do I become more valuable?" So I'm curious, in your path, how you did it, and then what you look for in people who are replicating that.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:38:20) So, you know, to me, it's about constantly pushing yourself. It's about not getting complacent or comfortable, constantly pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone. And, you know, I have, by moving around and changing jobs—you want to be somewhere long enough where you've completed a mission. I don't like leaving stuff undone. I like getting through a really bold agenda over a period of time, and then finding that next agenda. And as you move around from industry to industry, you learn a lot of different things. I also think being on the different sides of the proverbial table—you know, being on the vendor provider partner side, being on the consumption buyer side—bouncing on those over your career at least once, I think, is really healthy. I think that's a really healthy way to learn the perspective, whether you're in negotiations, whether you are thinking about product management or development. Knowing both sides of that equation is really important. But it really comes down to purpose. You have to be passionate about what you're doing.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:39:36) You know, I love to travel and see the world, so I spent 10 years at InterContinental Hotels Group. I love helping people make smarter decisions. I love the weather, so I spent time at The Weather Company. So when you pick something and you go through the process of your career journey, be thoughtful about it. You know, make those things really be decisions that you've made versus decisions that were put on you, and then do things that you love. Right? You've got to get up every morning and work hard, put in the hours. That's all true. But you also need to do it with excitement and energy and passion and drive. And I have certainly found that doing things that I'm personally passionate about—and here at Equifax, you know, helping people live their financial best—you know, that's a really moving purpose, to help people around the world make a smarter decision in their own life every day in terms of their financial state.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:40:45) And not all of us had great training and education and experience that helps us know how to manage that well. And so those things, you know, that purpose, that passion, that's a really important part. Because if you're passionate about something, you're going to be much more successful. Joel, I would love to continue this anytime. This was awesome, and look forward to our next chat.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:08) Fantastic, Bryson. You have a wonderful afternoon.

(Bryson Koehler at 00:41:10) Talk soon. Okay. Bye-bye.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:18) Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to help, please take a moment right now to open up the iTunes app and leave a review of the podcast. If you take a screenshot of the review and text it or email it to a friend who needs to listen to the podcast, and then cc me, [email protected]—if you cc me on the email, I'll send you a copy of the Modern CTO book or give you a shout-out on the podcast, whichever you prefer.