Kevin Lund - CTO at Authentic8

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Kevin Lund, the CTO at Authentic8, and we discuss using previous experience to set yourself up for success, the differences between inward and outward facing CTOs, and how being passionate about the business first will help the product deliver more value. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Kevin Lund at 00:00:35) Good morning, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:37) How you doing, my friend?

(Kevin Lund at 00:00:39) All right. How are you? You're on the East Coast, sorry. I should have said good afternoon.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:43) Good afternoon. Yes, yes. I'm excited today. It's a good day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:48) I get to talk to Kevin, so I'm very happy about this. So we just record and hang out and talk. So is that cool with you?

(Kevin Lund at 00:00:54) That is cool with me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:56) Okay. So I was doing some research, right, on you, and I've got to understand what is computational psycholinguistics. What is that?

(Kevin Lund at 00:01:07) That is essentially doing computational models of what's going on in the brain as it processes language. So it is not linguistics. Linguistics is the actual study of language. This is how the brain processes language and using computers to build models to help maybe better understand how that happens. That makes sense?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:26) Yeah. What did you learn? Like, what was the result of studying that for a couple years?

(Kevin Lund at 00:01:30) Oh, well, there's a whole story of what was the result of this particular bit of education. The specific psycholinguistics, what we were studying specifically is how do people acquire meaning? How do you learn what things mean? So that unsupervised acquisition of semantics is where we were at. So we built systems that would just freeform accept text, freeform language input, and sort of learn the meanings of words from that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:01) Wow. That's pretty brilliant.

(Kevin Lund at 00:02:05) Well, I didn't say how well it worked.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:08) How well did it work?

(Kevin Lund at 00:02:09) It worked pretty well. Are you familiar with Usenet?

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:13) Yeah.

(Kevin Lund at 00:02:13) Yeah. So typically, when people do these kinds of things, they would use dictionaries or encyclopedias, very formal speech. But instead of that, we pulled Usenet text, hundreds of millions of words of Usenet text, which is actually people interacting as they really interact. We got all kinds of interesting results aside from, you know, saying this model can or cannot acquire semantics. We got such different results than you do out of a dictionary because we got real world speech.

(Kevin Lund at 00:02:41) And of course, a lot of it I can't even discuss here in a public forum because it's foul, because that's how people are. But instead of learning, you know, what's a table and a chair, it would come up with things like, oh, Leno is the same thing as this Letterman. So we got a lot of interesting things. We had this fascinating taxonomy of dirty words that it came up with, and it was very successful in sorting them into, you know, these are female oriented and male oriented, and these are pure insults versus things that we use conversationally. So we were able to tease out all this kind of stuff, both because of technique and the data source. And it was an interesting time in my life. I'll certainly say that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:21) When was that? When were you doing that research?

(Kevin Lund at 00:03:23) I was doing that probably between '95 and 2000 thereabouts.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:27) Have you been following the advancements in those areas?

(Kevin Lund at 00:03:31) Not really, no.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:32) It's probably gotten way crazier.

(Kevin Lund at 00:03:34) I'm sure it has. No, I left graduate school for a career in tech, and I've never really gone back and investigated what's happened.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:44) Maybe that's like a Friday night hole to climb down.

(Kevin Lund at 00:03:49) Yeah, maybe. You know, it's almost like cyberstalking an ex, you know, going back with what's my research lab doing these days? I don't do either.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:59) You don't do? Man. So like, how did you go from that computational psycholinguistics to Authentic8?

(Kevin Lund at 00:04:11) Well, so I always did computer stuff from an early age. I wound up in the psychology program for reasons we didn't go into if you want, but not really relevant to your immediate question.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:23) Stalking the ex?

(Kevin Lund at 00:04:25) Told you, I don't do that. I wound up in this computational psycholinguistics lab. I was an undergraduate, end of my time as an undergraduate. They don't let you stay forever. And there was a new professor unpacking his lab in the basement of the psychology building, and he had all these computers and I got to talking with him.

(Kevin Lund at 00:04:43) Actually, an ex got to talking with him, told me, clued me in, and he was setting up to do this. So I needed a few more credits, so I took some time doing research with him, and I liked what he was doing in there so well that I decided this is what I want to do. And I decided I'm going to go to graduate school now and I'm going to do this. So I got to work in there.

(Kevin Lund at 00:05:02) And there are times that you come into a situation, you have a different skill set than most people in that area do. And sometimes it gives you a big leg up. And in this case, coming into a psychology program as somebody who really knew how to do computer programming was big because that's not really a common skill there. So we were able to do a lot, do big things, get a lot of publications, presentations, because we were able to build these more elaborate simulations than you would usually see. So that was all fine.

(Kevin Lund at 00:05:30) But again, you reach the end of the road there. They don't let you stay there forever. Some people try, and the results can be pretty grim. But at some point I needed a job. And a friend of mine knew this outfit up in Redwood City called Postini, brand new company.

(Kevin Lund at 00:05:45) And he said, you know what? You need them, and they need you, so give them a call. And I gave them a call, and two weeks later I was interviewing, and two weeks after that I had moved. So picked up stakes, moved up here, they were in Redwood City, so Bay Area. Worked at Postini for seven years, and I'm sure we'll talk about that some more.

(Kevin Lund at 00:06:06) Postini eventually was acquired by Google. After a few years there, some of the Postini principals and founders left to form Authentic8, and I came along. So here I am.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:17) Glad you said the name, because the way I was reading it in my head was post INI. So that makes more sense. I thought it was like some, you know, alluding to like after initialization or something. I was just being too nerdy with it.

(Kevin Lund at 00:06:33) Email processing platform, and I guess that's post. And as for the rest of it, I wasn't around when it was named.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:38) So what type of work did you do there?

(Kevin Lund at 00:06:40) So I came in and this is another case of walking into a situation with a sort of different bag of tools. And that's probably what we're talking about right there. We talk about how psychology graduate school prepared me for a career in software engineering and the pathway to the CTO because there's a lot of meat on that bone. But I walked into this company which was doing email processing and primarily spam and virus filtering. And the state of spam filtering at the time was pretty dire.

(Kevin Lund at 00:07:08) The statistical models underpinning the detection of spam, classification of the email were not very sophisticated, to say the least. And I had come out of this graduate program that was very heavy on quantitative analysis. So I came out with these years of working on doing data classification and data analysis. And this was perfectly suited to working with anti-spam and classifying emails, definitely different spin on what I had learned, the same techniques. So I pretty quickly became the anti-spam guy at Postini and maintained that.

(Kevin Lund at 00:07:42) And for quite a while, ran the entire anti-spam group as the company grew, eventually became the principal architect at Postini, but still with a heavy foot in the anti-spam. So the time at Postini was pretty much characterized by the email classification.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:58) And then they got bought by Google?

(Kevin Lund at 00:08:01) Bought by Google.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:03) And what did you end up doing there? Did you just run anti-spam, or did you get a new role?

(Kevin Lund at 00:08:06) No. I didn't do a whole lot of anti-spam at Google. There was the running of the Postini properties and the integration of that into Google, and I was more focused on that. Google didn't really buy Postini for the anti-spam. There are different ways of approaching spam filtering, there are a lot of really competent ways to do it.

(Kevin Lund at 00:08:23) And at the time that Postini was acquired, we were starting to get to the point where competent anti-spam was no longer the exception, but it was almost a commodity. There was a time when nobody really knew how to block spam, and there was a lot of work going on there. And now spam is, I think for all intents and purposes, a solved problem. You don't get a lot of spam in your inbox anymore. And we were sort of on the cusp of that.

(Kevin Lund at 00:08:44) We had a great anti-spam engine that could block whatever, 99 plus percent of the spam. So did Google. They weren't buying us for that. What Google was acquiring us for was really our enterprise portfolio and our enterprise experience. At the time of acquisition, Postini had a really sizable chunk of the Fortune 500 as customers.

(Kevin Lund at 00:09:05) We had tons of enterprise customers, banking customers. We had a lot of the Swiss banking systems as customers. And Google was trying to push into the enterprise. I don't recall, I don't know if you recall, they had Google Apps, Google Apps for Your Domain. They were trying to move from consumer email into selling these applications. They didn't have the whole Google suite yet.

(Kevin Lund at 00:09:25) That was all internal. But the Google Sheets and documents, that was all starting to come out and they wanted to be able to sell that into the enterprise. And I believe that one of the big reasons they bought us was because we had experience selling into the enterprise and we had enterprise customers. How much they were buying us for our Rolodex, I don't know.

(Kevin Lund at 00:09:42) But for our knowledge of how to deal with enterprise customers and sell to the enterprise customers and how they like to manage their business, I think that that was what they were really after. Yeah. That's what they got.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:51) And then so you joined. You helped migrate some properties. What did you end up doing there? Did you stay there a long time, or?

(Kevin Lund at 00:09:58) I stayed for just over three years. And at that point, you know, I had a decision to make. I can stay and make a career at Google, and that's a fine choice. I would never look down on that. And I've got no gripe with Google.

(Kevin Lund at 00:10:11) I was happy there. Nice place to work. Came out of Postini, we made a little bit of money on the exit. It wasn't retire now money, but it was I'm safe now money, a good cushion. And I had this sort of gut feeling at the time, this is great. Got some money in the bank.

(Kevin Lund at 00:10:30) I've got a nice stable job at Google. You know, this is nice. Midway through this or late in this three-year period, I was having dinner with one of the founders of Postini, and we were chatting about things. And in general, you have this relationship between risk and reward. The bigger risk you take, as long as it's not crazy risk, the bigger reward you're going to get.

(Kevin Lund at 00:10:54) And it seems to me that the rewards grow outsize to the risk. If you double your risk, you're probably even more than doubling your reward. In this framework, this fellow I was talking to put it to me that this is not the time to play it safe. You know, don't say I'm good now, all I have to do is exist. He basically said, you have such an increased appetite for risk now that you should be out there, you should step away from the safe position, you should get out there and swing for the fence.

(Kevin Lund at 00:11:21) And as he said that I realized, oh yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense in the world. I don't know what I was thinking. And this was about the time I was sort of evaluating, am I going to stay at Google or not? And this is about the time that Scott Petry and Ramesh Rocha Gopal, two people from, one of the co-founders of Postini had left and were starting this new company. And they were sort of asking, hey, do you want to come work with us?

(Kevin Lund at 00:11:44) And so it was about that point that I said, yeah, let's do that. My wife was still at Google, so she could hold down a lot of the stability and the nice benefits you get from working there while I could go out and pursue the high risk, high reward end of the thing at a new startup. So that's how that happened.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:01) And was that startup Authentic8?

(Kevin Lund at 00:12:03) That startup was Authentic8.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:05) So help me wrap my mind around the problems you're solving here.

(Kevin Lund at 00:12:10) Well, so the first thing that you usually talk about if you talk about Authentic8 is browser isolation. We put a browser in the cloud, you access that from your desktop, and it's like you're interacting with the browser. So that's a remote desktop kind of thing. We're remoting the browser. So you immediately get some isolation benefits there, and that's the immediate surface thing you're getting is if there are any threats coming down to the browser.

(Kevin Lund at 00:12:32) And the browser is, you know, the threat vector of choice, generally. They're going to terminate in our isolated cloud environment, not down on the desktop. But like Postini, that's sort of the beginning that we're blocking these threats. Now that we sort of own the browser and the execution environment, we can put policies around it. We can say, you as an administrator get to define how you want people to interact with the browser.

(Kevin Lund at 00:12:57) Where you can go, where you can't go. Can you transfer data down to your local system or not? Should the clipboard work? You can pre-provision web applications and credentials. And then on the other side of that, you get the monitoring around it.

(Kevin Lund at 00:13:12) You know, we can record everything that users are doing so that if there's a problem, you can go back and review all that. So we give the oversight, the monitoring, the control over the browsing experience. And that, I think, is in some ways even a bigger deal than the isolation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:30) That's pretty cool. I was at RSA like a year or two ago, and I saw a couple different variations of this. How do you guys do it? Is it like in, like, Chrome and it's like a special looking tab? Like, how does it actually look?

(Kevin Lund at 00:13:46) Yeah. So you're right. There are a lot of variations on that, and how that's evolved is an interesting thing to talk about. How we present ourselves, there are a couple options. There's the completely something off to the side.

(Kevin Lund at 00:13:59) And this is how it was originally pitched. Your secure browser, you double click this, you're going to get a secure browser. You can go and do your high value, high security things in that. And that's great for a lot of applications, where you want somebody to know I'm stepping out of my usual activities, I'm going to go do something special. Totally a good use case still.

(Kevin Lund at 00:14:19) What we found is a lot of people don't want to do that. A lot of employers don't want to ask their employees, if you're going to go do this, use a different browser. So we've developed, in more recent years, the ability to render straight into a tab in the browser. So instead of clearly launching a separate browser, we can just do per-page rendering and remote that down into a browser tab. So a user who's not really paying too much attention or doesn't know what to look for might not even notice that this particular tab in the browser has been pushed off for a remote render.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:50) That's actually pretty cool because then it becomes this seamless interaction.

(Kevin Lund at 00:14:55) It is pretty cool. So it becomes this transition. A transition, it's not really moved from one to the other, but it's in addition to being able to say, hey, we're a secure remote browser. More recently, we're talking about in addition to that, we are an API for doing browser isolation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:10) I was talking with the CTO of PayPal yesterday, and he was talking about payments. And he gave this example of this concept. You take a Lyft or an Uber, right? And at what point do you pay? You don't.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:27) There's not like, it's like you get the ride's over and at no point are you specifically paying. It just kind of happens. And so he was referring to some of these concepts in the payments world and the future of payments as ambient payments. And so I was like, oh, it's kind of cool. It's almost similar concepts like ambient browsing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:46) It's like you're browsing, but it's not exactly on your machine, and it's got all these additional security benefits. That's pretty cool.

(Kevin Lund at 00:15:53) Yeah. Maybe it's on your machine, maybe it's not. There's this whole set of use cases where you don't want people to know and you don't want people to have to care either, right? It just kind of takes care of itself.

(Kevin Lund at 00:16:04) The administrator gets set up how they want it to be, and then the users just go about their business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:08) So are you happy? Did the risk reward pay off?

(Kevin Lund at 00:16:12) Yeah. That is a great question. The first part of it, yeah, I'm happy. This is a great place to work. It's great.

(Kevin Lund at 00:16:19) It's the same people I worked with at Postini. There are people I've worked with for twenty years. I work with people I went to college with for that matter. It's really nice. Risk reward payoff?

(Kevin Lund at 00:16:30) Not yet. But it's coming. It's coming. You know, they say the best predictor—I don't know if this is true—they say the best predictor of whether a startup company is going to be successful is whether the people who started it have been successful at this in the past. If that's true, we're in good shape. We have been here for quite a while. Something that happened at Postini which is relevant to this is I got to Postini in the year 2000. And I walked in and here we are, we're doing cloud email processing.

(Kevin Lund at 00:17:01) And there were two problems with this. First is nobody knew really what this cloud data processing was about, explaining what you're doing, justifying why it's a good idea. We have policy and we filter all this stuff. And if you have like three minutes to make your impression, you spent two and a half of it just getting to where you can talk about product, just establishing the basis for it. And then that last bit, and you say companies are going to do this, and people say, no.

(Kevin Lund at 00:17:30) No. No company's ever going to run their data through a cloud service. They're never going to use a cloud service. Everything's going to have to be on premise. Over the next few years, two things changed.

(Kevin Lund at 00:17:40) One is the idea of putting things through cloud services became kind of mainstream, and second is businesses started to do it. So the conversation now was we offer a cloud service that does this thing. Great. Tell me about that service. You just saved two and a half minutes off of the conversation, and now people were accepting of the idea that an enterprise might put their data out in the cloud.

(Kevin Lund at 00:18:01) So we spent quite a while sort of fighting this, and then the market finally, you know, we pulled the market and the market came to meet us. And finally, we were in a place to really start moving. I spent a similar experience with Authentic8, maybe a slower burn. The idea of talking about browser isolation, we spent years where the conversation is just explaining what browser isolation is. And that can take a while.

(Kevin Lund at 00:18:23) Justify what it is, why you might want to do it, remotely how it works, and then the idea that somebody might actually buy this. And we pulled the market along in our small way, and so have others, and the market awareness has also come to meet us. And now we can walk in and have conversations saying we do browser isolation. People say great. They might say, what's your methodology?

(Kevin Lund at 00:18:45) What's your feature set? But we don't have to explain what browser isolation is and why you might want to do it. What was the question?

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:52) I don't know. We're just—I forget. That's the beauty of it.

(Kevin Lund at 00:18:55) I started off on that tangent. No, it's good. Oh, has it paid off? No.

(Kevin Lund at 00:19:00) It hasn't paid off. We're going to get there. We spent a long time, longer than we did at Postini, getting to where the market was finally there. And like at Postini, when the market was finally there, we landed there with a fairly mature product. And the last couple years, things are burning good for us, really picking up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:19) So because you had the enterprise sales team at Postini, is it an enterprise sales team now at Authentic8?

(Kevin Lund at 00:19:26) Are you asking, is it the same sales team?

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:28) Oh, well, is it the same model? Like, are you going after enterprises still?

(Kevin Lund at 00:19:31) Yeah. It was. When I arrived at the company, there was some thought that we were going to make our money $10 at a time on swipe your credit card and protect your browser. I never really believed that, but that's fine. Certainly love to support things like that.

(Kevin Lund at 00:19:45) We gave it a try. Selling to end users $10 at a time is a rough business model. It's especially a rough support model. So much nicer to sell into an enterprise and have a single point of support and sell 100 or 500 or 1,000 seats at a time. So, yeah, we're on that model, enterprise sales.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:03) It was like an eight month sales cycle. How long does it take?

(Kevin Lund at 00:20:06) Yeah. It depends. It's shortening. Again, as the market's become more aware of what we're doing, it's not as radical an idea. I don't actually know what the typical sales cycle is.

(Kevin Lund at 00:20:17) It's not eight months for a typical enterprise, I would say. We do a fair bit of sales into government, and that's, man, that's a long sales cycle. That too is shortening, but those people move at a different speed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:31) They move at the speed that they want to move at.

(Kevin Lund at 00:20:34) But that's alright too. We can do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:36) Yeah. But it pays off though because they typically don't change things. Like, they'll keep something and once if you're in there, you're in there for a little bit.

(Kevin Lund at 00:20:45) That's right. You know? Harder to get in, but a little more stable once you get there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:48) Yeah. Just like that risk reward, everything kind of balances out.

(Kevin Lund at 00:20:52) That's right. And it's been great to have that into the business, given the current times. That's a stable paycheck.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:00) Do you get into any of the TED Talks?

(Kevin Lund at 00:21:02) I've never really gotten into TED Talks that much. Sometimes I feel like maybe I should, and then I watch one and they comment. No. Maybe not.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:11) No? You don't like them?

(Kevin Lund at 00:21:14) Look. This might be an unpopular opinion.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:17) I often find—it's okay.

(Kevin Lund at 00:21:18) When I see a bit of one or I hear a bit of one on the radio, I feel like there's a little bit of a lot of sort of self-satisfied smugness going on in the TED Talks. Maybe I've just heard the wrong ones.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:29) Yeah. I'd say that I go through phases where I'll watch some TED Talks. I guess at first, when I first found the TED Talks, I was very excited because I don't watch a lot—I don't consume that much TV media type stuff. Like, I don't watch a lot of shows or anything. So I was like, oh, this is great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:49) And then so I binged on them for a while and watched them, and then I was like, okay. And then I noticed that there's the really great ones, and then there's like, you can host local TEDx events, and they kind of all get blended together. So then I just have some friends that watch the TED Talks, and I just wait for a really, really great one to come through. And so I just kind of built a network of people that relay the best content to me.

(Kevin Lund at 00:22:16) That's probably exactly what I should be doing. There's too many of them. It's fire hose and a lot of them I haven't cared for, but I'm positive given the nature of them, there's some excellent ones out there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:28) So are you more of an outward facing CTO or inward facing?

(Kevin Lund at 00:22:33) Well, sort of both. And this is, you know, if you want to talk about how you move from sort of more engineering centric thing, it's more of CTO executive position. I think a lot of that is to transition from being inward facing to get more outward facing. So I don't go out and do publicity events very much. So that's sort of outward facing.

(Kevin Lund at 00:22:54) I don't give talks. I don't go to conferences and give presentations. I did a lot of that in graduate school, but I don't do it now. Outward facing though in the sense of going out, flying out to talk with customers, being on calls with customers. I do that kind of thing.

(Kevin Lund at 00:23:09) Well, I don't fly very much anymore. But I'm on calls with customers, going out doing product demonstrations or gathering requirements. We're just sitting and watching while sales does a thing. Do that all the time. Go to business with partners, work on integration.

(Kevin Lund at 00:23:26) So from that point of view, I'm externally facing. I'm not sure which one you had in mind with the question or if you had either in mind.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:34) Yeah. Just kind of curious. So like, how do you spend your days today? Like, what's the average day for you?

(Kevin Lund at 00:23:40) Yeah. Well, I have my calendar up here, and typically from probably nine to three, at least, I'm pretty solidly in meetings. Outside of that I spent, I spend a lot of time talking with people, not as much as I used to again. I really miss the office, not because I love going to the office, but I get to talk to people and I get to stand in front of a whiteboard and talk about what's going on. Don't get to do that as much. I spend a lot of time supporting bits and pieces.

(Kevin Lund at 00:24:06) Somebody's having a problem with something, somebody needs a design reviewed, somebody wants to send a communication out to a customer and wants to check it out. Somebody who has a slip sheet they want to put out about a product and how it works. I might be reviewing those sorts of things. I might catch a support case every now and then, not a personal support case, but we're having this problem. What do you think is going on?

(Kevin Lund at 00:24:29) Keep an eye on what operations is doing, what the release cycle is there, and what sort of problems they're having. So in addition to just the structured meetings, you know, go to the daily status on this or that, a lot of kind of keeping an eye on things and what I call turning over turtles. Yeah. There's inevitably, with a bunch of turtles, some are going to wind up on their back, and you go over and you turn them back over and get things back alley again.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:53) I've heard that before, but it's a very understandable visual.

(Kevin Lund at 00:24:58) Yeah. So I do that a lot all through the day. I'll hear that little popping noise of Slack, and I know that somewhere, somebody needs me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:06) There's a turtle on its back.

(Kevin Lund at 00:25:08) That's right. I'm going to go flip it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:12) That should be your management book. After twenty years, yeah. Flipping turtles.

(Kevin Lund at 00:25:21) My life as a turtle flipper. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:24) So you've got some kids. Have you ever gotten into the 3D printing or any of the digital design electronics with them at all or no?

(Kevin Lund at 00:25:33) So I made sure they know how to solder. Yeah. Well, yes. Pick up the kits that blink LEDs around, and we'll sit down and pick the components and look at the resistor codes and make sure everything's in the right place and solder it together.

(Kevin Lund at 00:25:47) And if something's not working, we'll get out the meter and tap it out. We'll do that kind of stuff. Do a little electronic kits here and there, million and one electronic kits to make a radio out of it kind of thing. Oh, cool. But never gotten a 3D printer.

(Kevin Lund at 00:26:04) That seems to me that's a substantial time and effort investment. I know they've gotten better. They're a little more plug and play with at least—my feeling is you get one, you have to set it up and spend a lot of time jiggering it around to make sure you got the right materials and you try to print something that turns into a pile of spaghetti and eventually you get good at it and you can do stuff. At that point, so I'm not averse to putting that kind of effort into learning how to do that if I had some idea of what I wanted to do with it once I got there. I don't want to do that and then sit around all day printing out stock files.

(Kevin Lund at 00:26:43) Look, I made a bust of Napoleon again. Yeah. I don't have something really. Like, I really want to make these machines. I need to make parts for them or something like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:53) Yeah. I haven't had a need for it other than I've run the purchase through my head similar to how you did. And I said, okay. Probably spend $3,000 to get a good one, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:03) And then you get it. You're going to unbox it. You're going to fiddle with it. Print out some default models. Find a good site that has good models.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:11) Play with it. And maybe do your name or something for your kid, like a little unicorn or something. And then yeah. But I, then when I think of things like quantum computing and spending some time trying to understand that, for some reason, I don't know, I just really think that that is going to be an important factor in the future.

(Kevin Lund at 00:27:32) It may be. A lot of the stuff, the 3D printing or you understand quantum computing, unless you have a real end goal, something like the printing or the computing, it becomes like technology for technology's sake or challenge for challenge's sake. And that's fine. And that's great. I have a lot of sympathy for people who do that.

(Kevin Lund at 00:27:50) And I used to, you know, I used to do computers, computer programming for a hobby recreationally. These days, setting myself challenges for challenge's sake and investing tech for tech's sake is not something that I find that appealing. I do it all day long. And when I'm done, I don't think, oh, man. What am I going to do now?

(Kevin Lund at 00:28:12) That might be kind of difficult. So how do you unwind? You know, I exercise at the end of the day, cook myself dinner, read a book, watch some TV. I don't really do a lot of substance. I just—I do things of substance all day long.

(Kevin Lund at 00:28:29) I'm in meetings, I'm solving problems, taking care of things, creating new things. And at the end of the day, I don't have a whole lot of appetite left to do more of that. So I don't do a whole lot, and it feels good. It feels good to not do—to be able to say, I'm not going to do much this evening because I can. And someday, I may get bored of that.

(Kevin Lund at 00:28:50) I may decide I'm going to take up a new challenge, start doing things. But right now, I'm real happy. I take on just a good chunk of downtime in the evening, and then we get up early the next morning and start it again. Of course, on the weekends, the kids are over, and there's no time to do nothing. And that's fantastic as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:07) Yeah. I like how you describe that because, you know, you go through different seasons of life, and then you get to know yourself better. And what I've found is that for me, it's more about knowing myself and what I need right now and then having the discipline to give that space to myself, whether it's I'm accomplishing something very difficult or I'm taking a rest period because, you know, we're not designed to go 110 miles an hour all the time, right?

(Kevin Lund at 00:29:39) Yeah. Some people do that. Some people do it. I suppose I probably did that when I was younger. Like, great.

(Kevin Lund at 00:29:44) Been there, done that. I don't feel like I have something to prove to myself at this point, so I don't go after something just on that basis. But I—

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:51) I still think you do a lot. I mean, working out, making yourself dinner—they're activities. You're still doing things. They're just not mentally stressful activities once you get them down.

(Kevin Lund at 00:30:04) Yeah, that's right. I've got no appetite for additional mental stress. I mean, I'm fine with it. That's the job, and I'm good with it, and I'm good at it.

(Kevin Lund at 00:30:12) But I don't seek out extra drama in my life at this point.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:16) Yeah. When I get done with the workday, I go home, and I've got right now a one-and-a-half-year-old son, Lachlan, and then a three-year-old baby girl, Aria. And I get these big hugs from them, right? And then they want to run around and want me to chase them, and I'm like, oh, I'm old.

(Kevin Lund at 00:30:37) How old are you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:39) I'm 32.

(Kevin Lund at 00:30:40) You're not old. Jeez.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:42) But when you—I can remember being eight years old and my dad coming home and him playing with us and being, okay, playing with us for fifteen, twenty minutes, and then, "I need to sit down and rest." And so now I kind of get it, right? Because you just have unlimited energy when you're a kid.

(Kevin Lund at 00:31:02) Yeah. As a kid, I had no idea my parents had all this other stuff going on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:06) I know.

(Kevin Lund at 00:31:07) Yeah. I couldn't understand that maybe they would just want a weekend where we weren't doing anything. Why would you want that? Oh, man. I get it now. That's for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:14) Yeah. You also don't realize you're poor if you're poor. I grew up poor, but I didn't realize it. And, actually, it was two days ago, I was talking to my wife and I said, "You know, one of my favorite things when I was a kid was my dad putting my feet on the ceiling and being, 'Stop walking on the ceiling.'" And I realized, we were poor. We had really low ceilings at our house. And I was, I'm about six foot, and I'm actually probably four or five inches taller than my dad. And I'm like, why can't I put my kids' feet on the ceiling? And I realized, oh, we must have really small ceilings. You got them rich person ceilings now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:50) I think they just started building the houses differently too. I think they really did. Most of the modern houses have slightly taller ceilings. Houses in the seventies and the eighties, you know, when they had the pits you could step down into and—

(Kevin Lund at 00:32:02) Oh, the crippler.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:04) Yeah. Yeah, that's a word for it. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:07) Yep. Yeah, with the shag carpeting and, oh, man.

(Kevin Lund at 00:32:11) Yeah. So there must have been a time when you realized, oh, I grew up, you know, and we didn't have much money. And then there must have been a time where you realized, and I'm over that now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:19) Oh, yeah. I didn't hold on to it. If anything, I leveraged it.

(Kevin Lund at 00:32:23) I mean, a time where you realized, oh, and I'm not poor anymore. Now I've got some money.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:26) Oh, yeah.

(Kevin Lund at 00:32:27) What put you over that edge? Was there a point where you realized, I'm alright now?

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:32) Yeah. Yeah. When I was 18, I sold a software I'd been working on. And I mean, I'd been making money from when I was—so I started programming around age eight. My dad would give me tasks. He was an electrical engineer, software engineer too, and specialized in GPS and embedded systems. And so he would give me small programming tasks. So I got to get my feet wet when I was young, and then I got hit by a car when I was about 12, and I was in a wheelchair for almost two years. And so I got to come out of school, and I just spent a lot of time writing code and doing projects online, because what was happening then was the ScriptLances and the stuff where you could write some code for a thousand bucks, right? And so I'd just do all these projects and write this code and started making money. And I was like, oh, this is very useful. And then my parents one day saw, I think, my PayPal statement. And they're like, "What are you doing? How are you generating this money?" Because I didn't know then, but I know now as an adult, it was more money than what they were making. And so I was like, "You know, I'm doing projects online." And then, you know, I just kept doing that. And at the time, it was actually really frustrating. I remember sitting in my vice principal's office because he's like, "You know, you're not doing well in school." And we happened to know him because he had lived a couple streets over when I was in elementary school. And so I was in high school now, but it was the same person—small town, right? And he's like, "You're not doing well." I'm like, "Well, I'm just spending all my time programming and making money." And he said, "Well, that's not a real job," type deal. And my parents, you know, even though my dad was an engineer, they were divorced. So it was my mom and her new husband, and they were like, "This is not a real thing." And so I ended up going around, and they told me they said, "If you can go show that you can get a job—a real job at an office," as we're on the Zoom call, Kevin, "if you can go get a real job at an office, if you can go get me a letter saying that a software firm would hire you, then, you know, we'll back off and not push you as hard with college and grades and all of that." And so I did. I went around and got three different companies to agree to hire me after I was 18 years old, because I was younger at the time. And then they all backed off, and they're just like, "Do what you want with school." They put me in a special program in school where I basically had not much work to do, right? And so I could spend all my time engineering, writing code, and building stuff. And so that actually really positioned me well. So I would have half days at school, and then I'd go to my parents' real estate office. And I'd sit there, and I'd solve problems using code for the real estate agents. And then that's a collection of tools I built over a couple years and ended up selling them.

(Kevin Lund at 00:35:36) That sounds fantastic. No, I also took half days at school. Yeah. But school didn't know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:46) Free technology.

(Kevin Lund at 00:35:47) They knew full well. My parents didn't know it, I should say.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:50) So, yeah. You know what? What was happening in my high school around that time, they connected the system—and this is pretty advanced for a school at the time—they connected the attendance system at the school with the DMV. So if the kids would skip too many classes, your license got suspended.

(Kevin Lund at 00:36:11) Oh. Right? No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:13) Yeah. So what I did when my license got suspended was I started volunteering in the tech department. I'll let your mind finish the rest of that one. But if you volunteer at the school's tech department, well, then your job is going around and maintaining all the computers and all the different areas of the school whenever there's a problem. And so you obviously get access to all the computers, and I got my license back somehow, because I guess the attendance—I was better at attendance.

(Kevin Lund at 00:36:42) Very nice. Yeah. Our attendance system wasn't that complicated or that advanced, but it was a different age too. But what it would do is you would get an automatic call in the evening if you had missed a class. And I got real good at picking up the phone on the first ring. To this day, the sound of an actual ringing phone freaks me out. I've got a—it's time to sprint, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:07) Oh, man. That's good. That's good. Yeah. It's interesting. I find people that get to know who they are and what they want and what drives them. I mean, I think, you know, I honestly think we expect way too much from school. I think we do. I think, you know, I actually, one of the most interesting TED Talks I have ever seen was about the origins of school. It's, why does school exist? And the summary of that whole talk was to do four or five basic things when the English were colonizing, and so they had to be able to write to the colony, right? And they'd have to do math, and they had to, you know, read, write, and speak and do these basic four or five things. And so they created a school, and the school would teach them to read, write, math, arithmetic, basic English. And so that way they could go colonize new places, put up a school, start educating the people, have taxes. You know, it was the colonization. So the school system's origins, their roots are to do these four or five basic things, and they actually do it fantastically. Basic mathematics, reading and writing and communication at its core level—enough for society to function—the school system does that pretty well.

(Kevin Lund at 00:38:23) Yeah, it does. And that's all grand. Education becomes an interesting thing, though, when we get into the tech field. Obviously, I didn't go to school in computer science, and I find a ton of us—I'm sure you have as well—ton of people out there who are really good at doing software did not go into computer science programs. And of course, a lot of them did. I'm by no means trying to run down the computer science programs. I just feel like you find so many people in this field who didn't do that and do just fine. I've never been entirely sure what to make of that. I think in some cases, I guess, you sort of wander into it because the money's there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:01) Well, drive and desire, curiosity.

(Kevin Lund at 00:39:03) I think it's drive and desire.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:05) Yeah. There were computers around me, and, you know, my dad could have given me that first programming task, and I could have just been like, "No, I'm going to go kick a ball around in the parking lot," you know, while he was working. But there was just something magical about, you know, me typing instructions into the computer and it returning a result. And then my mind goes, well, what else could I do? And what else could I do? And then it just became this cycle of, you know, what can it do and how do these things work? And then it gives—if you're a creative person—it gives you an outlet to be creative in a very, very unique structured way. I like it.

(Kevin Lund at 00:39:45) Yeah. I was kind of the same way. From a very early age, I knew I wanted to do this thing. I couldn't say what it was. I was a five-year-old now. But I had books with rockets and robots and computers in them, and I just knew that was what I wanted to do. My mother had been a computer programmer back in the early sixties, and she had still rows of mainframe manuals down in the basement. And, of course, I couldn't make any sense of them, but I knew that those somehow held the knowledge.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:12) Did she do anything with NASA?

(Kevin Lund at 00:40:15) No. She worked for IBM, systems analyst. She actually worked in San Francisco. You know, she could tell me—I can't remember. She knew there were nine computers in the Bay Area at the time. You know? That's the way it used to be. You know, there's one in City Hall and there was one over in Marin. She knew where all the computers were. Strangely, interestingly, it sounds like your mother, to some degree, discouraged you from this career path.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:38) Oh, well, I don't know. Yeah, a little bit. I think it was more the relationship with her and her—I think they were just trying to do the right thing. I think they just wanted—my brother was a doctor, so his whole thing from—and I shared a room with him, and so that kid wanted to be a doctor from the day I met him. And he's a doctor, and he's actually one of the best doctors in the area now. I found him online. I did some research. He's one of the highest-rated physicians in the county. I was like, "Whoa." And I sent him a text about that, and I was like, "Did you know this?" He goes, "No." I was like, "Oh, cool." So he just knew exactly what he wanted to do. And, you know, my parents—and they were doing that with me, but they were saying, "I'm going to be a lawyer." And for some reason, it's not working on me. It worked really well for my brother, and he was getting straight A's and going right through the system. My sister, it was working really well through her. She was a little bit younger than me, going through the system, getting straight A's. And, you know, the school system is really good at teaching you to follow instructions. And so they both go through these systems. My brother ends up, you know, being a great physician. My sister is an educator—physics and science. And then, you know, I ended up being entrepreneurial. So I think what it was with them is the frustration of the same system isn't working for the second kid. What's wrong with this kid? There's three of them, and it's not working for one. Let's just—he's spending all of his time over here in the computer programming stuff. At the time, while my dad was an engineer, he wasn't making a killing. Like I told you, we were poor. He was doing a lot of freelance stuff. He ended up when I was about 12, 15, he ended up becoming a part of this company, an early hire, and it ended up, you know, getting very large and going public. So he ultimately did well. But at the time, the computers were just a nerd thing. There wasn't a ton of money there, and they were just like, "Stop messing with that." And they would call it playing video games. They would call my programming "playing video games."

(Kevin Lund at 00:42:45) Yeah. I guess, in a sense.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:48) Right? So, yeah. That's kind of what happened. So I think that they were just, you know, looking back on it, I think that they were just trying to do their best with the information they had, and they just wanted me to be successful and become the lawyer and do that. And I never planned on being the engineer. I just really, really enjoyed it. And I was like, "Okay. Well, the people who get to do this all the time are engineers, so that's what I'll be."

(Kevin Lund at 00:43:11) That's a familiar story. I'm sure my parents could go on at length about the anguish of raising me. My sister, my older sister, was the straight-A student who, incidentally, is now a physician.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:23) Oh, really? Yeah.

(Kevin Lund at 00:43:24) And then I was anything but—I've already intimated that I wasn't the most studious student. And, again, you know, like you said, all I wanted to do with my spare time was program computers. I learned to do things with computers, and this was a source of some friction. But, I guess all is probably forgiven now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:45) Do you collect or have any old technology?

(Kevin Lund at 00:43:49) Yeah. I've got a bunch, but they all sit in the basement. I don't have them out on shelves, and I haven't for a long time. In fact, when I moved up here from college, you know, I had to move quick. I abandoned a bunch of stuff, and I regretted it. What I regret most bitterly is I had two nice MITS Altair units. You know, I'm talking about the old S-100. Like, you see in War Games with the paddle switches on them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:11) Mm-hmm.

(Kevin Lund at 00:44:12) Just gave them away. And I should have kept them. That was my lesson. I accumulated too much stuff. You have to haul this stuff around with you.

(Kevin Lund at 00:44:19) So I stopped trying to collect all the computers, but I still have quite a few. I still have my old Apple II Plus. I still have my Mac Cube. I've got a Lisa down in the basement. But I don't really go out and try and acquire this stuff anymore because, again, you can set yourself the challenge of maintaining and operating all these old computers.

(Kevin Lund at 00:44:38) And I know people who do, who have their whole stable of everything, and they can make them all work. I just don't have the energy to do that. And so if I buy something like that, it's going in a box, and that's not doing anybody any good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:50) Yeah. I haven't really collected a whole lot, but I keep having these calls with CTOs. And in the background, they'll have this rare technology and I'm starting to get excited and a little bit interested in exploring it. But if I keep my iPhone long enough, my kids and their parents will be like, look at that relic.

(Kevin Lund at 00:45:11) Down on my desk, I've got an iPhone 1, and it still works. There you go. But it's interesting. There's this new art to developing of what is in your background. Right? It's something that wasn't a big deal until the last few months. You're on video calls all day, often outside the company. And what are you putting behind you for people to look at? And I've seen the collection of vintage technology as well.

(Kevin Lund at 00:45:38) I've seen the strategically placed Peloton bike and a couple of musical instruments. So I don't think these things are accidental. People are going out of their way to say something about themselves.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:49) Yeah. That's what this whole wall is here.

(Kevin Lund at 00:45:52) I can't tell what you're trying to say.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:54) Yeah. Well, I've got a little unicorn. My daughter wanted that to be in my office. And I got an ampersand because I'm a fan of Ruby, and that's one of the blocks concepts. And I just saw it, and I was like, I like blocks. I like that gold ampersand.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:13) So I grabbed that, got some family stuff, some children's books. I've got a charity, and so I've written some children's books. That one right there is called The Princess Physicist. It's a princess who gets stuck in a tower, but instead of a guy coming to save her, she finds a book on physics and saves herself.

(Kevin Lund at 00:46:31) Nice. Yeah. But is this a deliberate display? Like, did you set that up so that people on Zoom calls with you would say, wow, what a cool guy?

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:41) Yes, I guess so. Yeah. I didn't have that exact thought. What I thought was, this is how it came about. So this is our second office because we outgrew our first one. And I came in here, and I said, okay. Well, we had kind of just the office as the background before, but now I'm in a room because we just had a giant open room at our first office. And so I said, let's put some stuff up on the walls.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:11) What would be good conversation pieces? You know, what are things that I'm interested in or that I like? And, of course, books on Bezos. Some different books I like, Simon Sinek. A little elephant and a little Tesla model car, just some things that I like and I like to look at. I guess that's how I did it. I was like, yeah, we need a background. It needs to be interesting. It needs to be fun. And then we're actually considering redoing the entire background right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:40) Just waiting to figure out what's going to be the office space. If we're going to go to a larger warehouse-type deal or if we're going to stay here. We're just trying to figure that out. But, yeah, I didn't sit down and think, what would make me look like a cool guy?

(Kevin Lund at 00:47:59) Well, as you can see, I have couches.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:01) You have couches? And the windows are very nice. Yeah. It looks like a very nice house. Very nice room.

(Kevin Lund at 00:48:08) It's just my living room. You know, when it was early March, of course, the word came down, everybody go home. And I guess everybody's had to set up. Some people had nice home offices, some impromptu. I literally sit down all day in my living room.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:23) And in all fairness, this has been this way for a couple years because we've just done the podcast like this.

(Kevin Lund at 00:48:29) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:30) Yeah. And these chairs right here? We were doing some, right before, I think we set this up in January, February. We started to do in-person stuff where people would fly in, and we would set up cameras and do it in here. And then we thought we were going to do more and more of that, and then we got to use it once.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:49) So I look forward to the far future where we can start doing in-person interviews again.

(Kevin Lund at 00:48:56) Yeah. Looks very good. It looks like it's all ready for a tea party.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:59) It is. Yeah. I wouldn't use those words, but it's ready for a party.

(Kevin Lund at 00:49:05) Ready for a party. All right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:07) So what are you really excited about? Like, what's the thing that gets you pumped up right now in life?

(Kevin Lund at 00:49:14) You know, it's going to sound stereotypical or like I've just made up the nice answer. What gets me excited is solving customer problems. Finding out what problems they're having and then really designing the product to hit that. We have a lot of interesting customers with some really interesting problems and we're going new places with this and trying to crack into those issues. I get excited solving their problems. I get excited showing our solutions.

(Kevin Lund at 00:49:42) I like to go do demos. I like to go do roadmap presentations. I like to hear what the customers are doing, and I like delivering the products and going to give a presentation and say, this is what you said you wanted and here you go. And it's even better than what you asked for.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:57) Yeah. You like delivering value.

(Kevin Lund at 00:49:59) You like delivering value. Well, that's what it's all about. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:02) That's what gets me excited too. It's like, where can I be useful, and how can I deliver value? Because, you know, people love it when you're able to do that. When you can solve people's problems, they're very excited about that.

(Kevin Lund at 00:50:15) Yeah. So I guess, you know, what am I passionate about? Just the business. Passionate about the business. And a lot of people will say, you know, I'm really passionate about the product. And that's fine. And that's great. I feel like you need to be passionate about the business first and the product follows. If you're all about the product itself, then you're in a weird situation if the business pivots. If the climate changes, you could find yourself so out there.

(Kevin Lund at 00:50:40) So business and then product, kind of, to me. And I'm really excited about the business. And then we happen to have an exciting product on top of that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:48) So what's a common customer story or an ideal customer profile? People come and they say, hey, we're having a problem with this or we need you guys for this. What is that thing?

(Kevin Lund at 00:51:00) It's a variety of things. The most obvious one is, hey, we don't want to get threats on our network. When people browse off our network, we're going to terminate all our web browser sessions with you, and we're not going to have a virus anymore. That's sort of meat and potatoes right there. But we have products that go beyond that and do what we call attribution management. And so we can do things like redirect your traffic to other areas of the world and kind of, you know, make it not obvious who you are, sort of anonymization. And where that comes in is with security research. A bank might have an anti-fraud division or anti-money laundering. It turns out everybody has these anti-fraud divisions.

(Kevin Lund at 00:51:38) You wouldn't maybe guess it. Your biotech company will come and they've got security researchers. Social media companies have security researchers. And these could be some really fascinating use cases of how they need to go about doing investigations and how we can support that by putting their browser in the cloud and playing games with how their traffic's being routed and things like that. That's pretty cool. That stuff is super cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:06) Like cybersecurity.

(Kevin Lund at 00:52:07) Sitting and listening to what their problems are, what's their problem statement, what are they trying to do, what are they trying to avoid. It's just fantastic stuff. And then we get to go off and build the products to do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:19) And your website?

(Kevin Lund at 00:52:22) Authentic8.com. That's authentic. Here's the problem. One of the problems with naming businesses these days is you've got to have the domain. Yeah.

(Kevin Lund at 00:52:30) And then you've got to be able to say it and so many domains are taken. So you wind up with things like Authentic8, which is, how do you even tell somebody what that is? It's authentic with an eight. Yeah. That works.

(Kevin Lund at 00:52:42) It kind of works, but people get it funny. But it's authentic with a numeral eight at the end. That's our website.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:49) Yeah. It's definitely, I understand the challenge because whenever I'm picking names for things, I try to tell them out loud because that's gotten me in trouble in the past where it's clear when you can see it, and then you try to go describe it. And you're like, oh, man, there's too many vowels or this word's hard to describe over the phone. But, yeah, it's just the word authentic with the letter eight. Right?

(Kevin Lund at 00:53:12) That's it. That's it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:13) Yeah. It's good. I like it. And it's a pretty cool-looking brand too. So I think it came out nice.

(Kevin Lund at 00:53:21) Well, we have some great designers on staff. They make us look good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:26) Yeah. I'm fairly critical of brands. I don't know why. I just really appreciate good design, and so when I see it, I'm like, hey, I like it. Yeah. What's the rest of your day look like today?

(Kevin Lund at 00:53:40) So, if you're wrapping up, we can wrap up. My next big meeting is with a new hire. And this is a very technical hire. He's picking up some of my development work that I've done for years. Just training up a new person into a complicated technical system was hard enough when you could be with them every day and sit in front of a whiteboard and draw boxes and circles and arrows and point and discuss and then sit down at a computer and work through things. The challenges of the events of the last few months just make it so much harder. It's so hard to train up somebody new in something like this. It takes a lot of effort.

(Kevin Lund at 00:54:22) It's hard for them. So, in this case, I've hired somebody. I have a standing one-hour meeting every day to work through this stuff. So I'll be doing that up next, and we'll be walking through the product and the directions we're taking with it and troubleshooting, and I take them along on all my troubleshooting. When I've got a flip-a-turtle on this particular product, I ring them up and say, hey, let's go. We're going to screen share. We're going to run this problem down. We're going to fix it together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:49) That's a good job title, assistant turtle flipper.

(Kevin Lund at 00:54:52) Yeah, I guess. I'm setting him up to be turtle flipper in chief someday.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:58) There you go. That's like, I like when I hear that too because that's what it's all about. Right? Passing it on to the next generation, solving the new problem.

(Kevin Lund at 00:55:09) Yeah. And you've got to let go. Especially, I think, as a transition from engineer, software developer to CTO, you've got to let go of engineering. Not only do you not have the time to mess with that, but it's such a cross-functional position, and you have to have trust and good faith with everybody. You can't really be seen as a creature of engineering anymore. So you've got to be able to step out of that. Fine. My roots are there. But I can't be the envoy of engineering coming to give bad news.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:37) So is there anything else we want to get out there into the world today?

(Kevin Lund at 00:55:41) I didn't have an agenda. I could talk about stuff all day, but I know we're on a schedule. I can tell humorous anecdotes of technical challenges gone awry.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:51) Okay. Give me one of those. Let's end with something funny.

(Kevin Lund at 00:55:55) Okay. Here's one. And this one actually has a little bit of a moral. This is a story about how too much focus on the product and the purity of a product may not serve the business too well. I came to Postini, and of course, we did anti-spam and I kind of got assigned, you're doing anti-spam.

(Kevin Lund at 00:56:14) And back then, spam filtering wasn't that good and so you needed a lot of knobs and dials to dial it in the way you wanted it. So we had mainline filtering, we had category filtering, you could say I'm especially sensitive to adult content or get-rich-quick schemes or racist spam. And I looked at this and it was like the needle across the record. Yeah. Racist spam. You ever seen racist spam? No. There's no such thing. But we had this, and so in fairly short order, I just made it do nothing because there's nothing to catch. So by making this category do nothing, you're never going to get a false positive and you're never going to get a miss and everybody's happy, right?

(Kevin Lund at 00:56:55) So years go by and we acquire more customers and we start to get this trickle of reports in, people saying, hey, I got this racist email. What's with this? I have my filtering turned on. And we'd look at it and say, that's not spam. And they'd maybe go away, and then they'd come back and say, hey, I got this racist email. I have my filtering turned on. And again, we'd say, that's not spam. And this went on for a while until eventually we just said to support, you know that knob does nothing, right? And they just about hit the roof. What do you mean it does nothing?

(Kevin Lund at 00:57:26) There's no racist spam. And this is becoming an increasing problem with customers who are expecting racist email to be filtered out even if it wasn't spam. So this was a period of product versus utility to customer thing, and it was starting to cause real friction. So eventually what we wound up doing is saying, okay, fine. This was sort of a realization by me that this product is not all, it's not about filtering spam. And what I would tell the team in the future is we are not in the business of filtering spam, we're in the business of selling spam filtering. And by going to this great purity of product, we were making the product more difficult to sell. So we ended up throwing in just a bunch of keywords. And if any of those were in there, spam or not, we would block it if people had this knob turned up. And that turned out to be even worse because it turns out that almost every racist term you can come up with, almost everyone has completely legit uses elsewhere.

(Kevin Lund at 00:58:19) So this turned into a false positive factory. So when the dust settled, the entirety of our racist spam filtering was an absolute block on one word, and that's all it was. And everybody was happy. There was never another complaint. I have no doubt that every time this filter activated, it was a false positive. But given the nature of the false positives, nobody ever complained. So as you can imagine, they're not going to come back and say, why didn't I get this mail? So by sort of violating the purity of the product and making it a worse spam filter, we made it a more saleable product, and the problem evaporated. So that was a lesson for me. Are you about the product or are you about the business?

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:04) And the interesting thing is, in what is the business but delivering value to the customers?

(Kevin Lund at 00:59:09) That's right. Yeah. And that doesn't mean the customer is not always right. At some point, there are chances to educate the customers. Our attempts to educate them on this one fell on deaf ears, so they accommodated on the product end.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:23) Yeah. Well, I mean, it's a highly emotional one. You know, it's hard enough just processing logic with humans. When you get into emotional areas...

(Kevin Lund at 00:59:32) The rational approach did not get any traction here. And it's happy ending. Everybody happy in the end.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:38) That's cool, though. I like it. The whole feature came down to just one block on one word.

(Kevin Lund at 00:59:43) One block on one word.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:44) And everyone's happy.

(Kevin Lund at 00:59:46) Everybody was happy. Never heard a thing, never heard a thing about it anymore.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:50) I love it. Well, Kevin, this is absolutely fantastic. I really appreciate you taking some time in your scheduled day to come and hang out with me, man.

(Kevin Lund at 00:59:58) I'm happy to do it. I had a good time.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:00) Nice. And the next time I'm out in San Francisco area or California, Northern, Southern California, I bounce around between all of those areas, by the way, because tech is where everyone in tech is. So I'll let you know. Stop by, say hello after all this time.

(Kevin Lund at 01:00:19) By all means. Yeah. We'll see. There may be no office to stop by, but I might be able to wave out my window.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:26) Oh, man. That sounds good. All right. Well, until then, my friend. See you, buddy.

(Kevin Lund at 01:00:31) All right. Have a great day.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:34) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.