Preparing For A Hacker with Alex Harrington, Co-Founder and CEO of SecureCo

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today, Joel is talking to Alex, co-founder and CEO of SecureCo, and they discuss how tools are enabling hackers to find and exploit vulnerabilities more easily than ever before, tips for founders to shift their mindset to build successful sales organizations, and how to not let business decisions be driven by fear. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:32) Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast. I know we're going to talk about SecureCo and what they do, but I was really curious to know what's going on on the dark web. I know very little, and I was hoping you could tell me about it.

(Alex at 00:00:53) Yeah. So I think what's interesting now is the evolution of the hacker industrial complex that's kind of played out over the last, let's say, decade. It's really changed the game for how the security industry, how businesses respond to cybersecurity. And, you know, just the ways that people used to think about things like, oh, why would anyone target me? Right? I'm insignificant or, you know, I'm a small business. Maybe I'm like a solo practitioner doing my own thing. Like, why would anyone target me? And the reality is there's now like this division of labor of people that find vulnerabilities and then post them on the dark web, and then people who take that one step further in the value chain. And then, you know, there are people that build like ransomware software and just sell it. And then somebody else will buy that ransomware software and actually perpetrate the attacks.

(Alex at 00:01:59) And so there's this entire value chain that starts with, you know, stolen data and hacker tools. And then someone will actually buy those pieces and parts and put them together and do an attack. And it's become so automated that you don't really have to know, you don't really have to be this crazy, you know, black hat expert. You just have to kind of know one little vertical, and you can do some rather damaging things. And all of this is happening, you know, kind of in that sort of dark web domain, right, where you can shop around and move under a kind of cloak and dagger, anonymous way.

(Alex at 00:02:42) And you can pay with anonymous currency. I mean, Bitcoin isn't truly, truly anonymous, but it's really hard to track unless you have the resources of the FBI. So you can functionally, yeah, you can transact, you can shop, you can browse all anonymously, and then use that sort of stealth and obfuscation technologies to perpetrate these attacks so that no one can really trace it to you. And it's a scary environment to operate.

(Alex at 00:03:09) I'll give one more anecdote, which just blew my mind, and this is really the reason why nobody's safe. It used to be that, you know, hackers had to really target people or businesses based on, you know, some rationale because there were some amount of work that would go into kind of figuring out how to attack them. But now there's software you can download, and in 45 minutes, you can scan for open ports and vulnerabilities on the entire internet in 45 minutes. And you can gather that data. It'll just spit out a report for you, and suddenly, you know, some people just post that to the dark web.

(Alex at 00:03:55) But the point is that, you know, with that kind of information, you can just kind of be purely opportunistic and just go after whatever comes up in the report. And so those kinds of tools and that kind of information just makes the internet a very scary place for people and businesses to operate.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:16) Yeah. And so have you ever gotten to go on the dark web yourself?

(Alex at 00:04:21) I have. Yeah. The reality is that there's a lot of benign stuff there too, right? I mean, it's not, you know, some people just value privacy and they use the Tor browser, which is kind of the means to access these kind of onion sites, which is what they're called, that are built within that Tor network. And, you know, there's just some people that are just privacy-minded that like to operate there. And, indeed, like, I think Amazon and other businesses have set up storefronts in those places because they know that some consumers prefer to browse the internet anonymously and operate in that environment. So it's not all, you know, evil or bad. It just happens to kind of have this like adverse selection quality of attracting bad people, even though privacy in general is a good thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:16) And then do you do something to like fight this with SecureCo? How does that factor into the dark web?

(Alex at 00:05:21) Well, so what we do at SecureCo is we draw on some of the technologies that hackers use and that, you know, the bad guys on the dark web take advantage of, which is stealth and anonymity. And what we do is we make those tools available to corporate customers, government, industrial customers so that they can be armed in the same way that the bad guys are and be able to operate in a way that makes them less vulnerable. So I'll give you an example, right? So if I'm operating, let's say, a nuclear power plant and I have a monitoring channel that I need to monitor the temperature of that power plant's core, right? The information itself isn't particularly interesting. Right? It's like, you know, it's a temperature readout. But it's critically important that I'm able to trust that information and that that information is protective of it, right? Because all encryption does is just says, well, okay, no one can tell the fact that it's, you know, 200 degrees. Right? You know, the data is coming through, but no one can read it. And that's not really what's interesting about it. What's interesting about it is the ability to potentially disrupt it or inject false data or somehow interfere with that data feed. And that's what we protect against by making that transmission of data hard to discover and making the endpoints impossible to, or not impossible, but almost impossible to identify as the high value targets that they are, right?

(Alex at 00:07:04) So in other words, the hacker won't be able to find that communication flow, won't be able to identify the source and destination and the identity of those things. So they won't know what they're looking at, and you can't really target and disrupt what you can't find or identify. And so, you know, being able to use stealth to protect your network, to be able to use stealth and obfuscation, which just basically means confusing your adversaries, to be able to use those tools to protect your business or your organization, you know, why wouldn't you avail yourself of those capabilities if you could use them? And these are the things that the bad guys have been using forever, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:47) Well, like, let's take the nuclear power plant temperature readout. Let's say they don't have your service and then they get it. How intrusive is it or how much work is it to actually put it through your technology versus what it's at right now currently?

(Alex at 00:08:02) Well, it functions much the way a VPN does. So you just need to have software at both ends of that transmission, and it routes it through a network that we host, or we can work with the customer if they want to participate in that network hosting. But it really is just a rather quick and simple software implementation at both ends of that transmission flow. What that does is it gets routed in this evasive way that is randomized and continuously refreshing the circuits that it creates, which means that it's really hard for adversaries to be able to track it, identify it, or block it, or reroute it, or, you know, interfere with it in myriad other ways.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:52) And are you like the tech brains behind this? Are you like the business type part of the technology pair and you've got some really smart person behind the curtain?

(Alex at 00:09:02) Yeah. So we've got, the tech brains are my CTO and sort of the founding team that contributed to writing, you know, the first of what we expect to be many patents for this. I co-founded the business with Eric Zakowitz, who's been a kind of a technology leader for 25 years running sort of enterprise-scale networks and the security associated with them. And, you know, kind of, look, I understand the technology, but I'm not natively a technologist.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:31) Yeah. Well, it takes everybody. I mean, what good is an amazing piece of technology if you don't have the business side of things to take it to market and then grow it and then make it an even better product? So I used to look at it, being a software engineer, when I was early on and less mature in my career, I was just all about like, oh, you know, this is the most important thing. And then I had built some businesses where I was the tech side of things, and I had no idea what's going on the business side of things. And I thought my area was like so incredibly important. And then I saw them making more money than me, and I was like, all right. So now on this company, I'm like the CEO, and I've had to acquire these new skills, right, of sales and managing different people other than engineers and all of these other marketing concepts as well. I have a whole lot more respect now for the other side of things other than just the creation and improvement of the technology.

(Alex at 00:10:25) Yeah. Well, there's a saying that, you know, everything is sales, right? Even if you're doing technology, you have to convince other people of how important it is, right? So, you know, sales is just such an incredible thread. You've got to adapt yourself to a lot of rejection, and you have to be inured to that and be able to overcome it. And that's, you know, that's critically important in any kind of business success.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:49) Yeah. That actually is something I personally struggled with a lot when I started sales was the amount of rejection. And then through necessity, needing money, you sort of figure it out, right? And so I just found a way to justify it from my like nerd engineering perspective where I was like, oh, this is a statistics game, right? Like, I thought early on that I maybe needed to contact, you know, 25, 50 people, 100 people. And I wasn't getting anything. And I was just like, is this, am I just beating my head against the wall? And I realized I have to contact like tens of thousands of people and I get deals. And I'm completely okay with that. I am 100% okay with understanding the volume and the rate of response per person contacted. And so that helped me get over it. And then I got to the point where, okay, that's like step one. And then step two is once you get them on calls, then it's even a smaller, it's a small percentage of that, right? It's like 10 to 30% of those qualified calls like close. And so you just get comfortable with the fact that it's a process and you just go with it. But there's a positive and a negative thing that I picked up on. One of the positive things is that success and failure are like incredibly slow, right? So you start building this machine, and then it gets going and it's like big. It's like it's hard to stop once it's, you know, getting really big. And so that sort of allowed me to switch from sort of like a jumpy, anxious mindset to more of like a relaxed, okay, certain times of the year, we do more sales, certain times, you know, we do less, we go on these patterns, these ups and downs. And so that's currently where I'm at right now.

(Alex at 00:12:25) I think you just completely nailed it. The only thing I would add to what you just said was there's another factor, which is the volume blunts the effect of the rejection, right? In the sense that if you have two meetings a week and you get rejected, each of those meetings takes on this incredible amount of importance, right? Because it's like you have all this time to prepare and you're, you know, you're trying to get into the right headspace and, you know, it's like it's like a performance, right? But if you have like 20 meetings a week, then it's just like you can't be vested in any one of those meetings' success. You're just cranking through them. And you're not necessarily performing worse. In fact, you might be performing better because none of them have this level of anxiety associated to them. So, you know, you've removed that element, and you're getting a lot more practice. So it's like, you know, there are just so many reasons why that high volume approach that you just described works so much better.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:35) Yeah. Getting used to it and going for it. How did you get into all of this anyways? Like, you're at SecureCo now. You're one of the co-founders, technology security company. But where did you start?

(Alex at 00:13:48) So, yeah, I've been running growth technology companies for 20, 25 years. I actually started off on Wall Street, which is a great professional boot camp, but it's not for everyone. It's kind of 100-plus-hour weeks and there's a high burnout rate. And, you know, you really, really have to love the money to be able to put up with that kind of strain. So I went to business school. I was a Wharton MBA and then, you know, flirted with the media industry at the time. But the media industry, the jobs that I got were all about like the digital frontier, right? Like the interaction of media with digital and investing in startups that were sort of digital media startups. And so I ended up just going whole hog into running digital companies of one type or another. They were all focused generally on, you know, it transitioned from media to social media and social networking.

(Alex at 00:14:52) And the business that we were at right before SecureCo started was a company called PeerStream, which operated live video communications, a suite of applications that connected people around the world. In 180 countries, we had almost half a billion end users. And interestingly, we became a freedom of speech platform in places like the Middle East and Asia. What happened is that became a lightning rod for nation-state-sponsored attacks on our service. And they were trying to take down our network and identify our end users so they could do bad things to them, right? So we had to develop this military-grade cybersecurity to be able to defend that network, maintain uptime, preserve the anonymity of our end users, and be able to make our data connections look like something other than they were so they could penetrate through these nation-state firewalls because they were trying to block our servers. And so we developed this technology that, you know, all of these cybersecurity capabilities, and we realized, wait a minute, these would be valuable for lots of different companies. And so let's externalize this and, you know, sort of just the way AWS was created at Amazon out of just, you know, like, hey, look, we're creating these huge data centers. Why don't we lease out this capacity? We kind of externalized this capability from embedded within our product to be an enterprise software solution. We landed a big deal, but ultimately, it made more sense to separate the company out. So we bought out the IP, the assets, the team, and launched it as SecureCo in 2020. And, you know, we're a venture-backed company and really starting to get traction, particularly in government and critical infrastructure, and increasingly in finance and healthcare.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:55) Nice. Yeah. Shout out to Florida Funders. That's how we got connected and met each other.

(Alex at 00:16:59) Florida Funders has been very supportive. They're a great team and really helpful to our business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:05) And they're smart business people. I think I've been with them for like four years now, and they've just grown like crazy as far as being a venture business, and they're expanding. So I thought that was pretty cool because you have these people that you're giving money to that are making investments. And at the same time, they're growing their business. So you can tell that these people aren't just throwing money at stuff. They actually understand how to grow businesses, and I think that's pretty sweet.

(Alex at 00:17:32) Absolutely. Yeah. No. We've gotten a lot of great, not just capital, but great advice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:37) Oh, yeah. I want to talk about leadership stuff. So a lot of the reason why people listen to this podcast is because they're trying to grow and improve in their careers. You've managed large teams of technologists in all sorts of ways. Even, you said a lot of startups, so those are high pressure, difficult things. If I were to ask you what the most important aspect of leadership is, what would you say?

(Alex at 00:17:59) Well, I think you have to surround yourself with great people. Right? Because the art of management is being able to find people that can execute and scale what you would want done in a way that is at the level that you would have executed or better. And so, you know, you need to find people who—and, you know, that's not always hard in the sense that it's like, well, if I'm going to hire a developer, I know that they're going to be a better developer than I would be. Right? I'm not a developer. But, you know, you want the best people you can find. And, I mean, it sounds harsh, but there's a saying that I heard when I was in business school from a panel of these leaders of .com companies, as they were called back when I was in business school. And the saying was, no one's ever fired someone too soon. In other words, if they're going to be fired, everybody waits too long.

(Alex at 00:18:58) Right? Managers always wait too long to let people go. And it's unfair to those people that are bound to be let go because the second that thought enters your mind as a manager, that person is a dead man walking or dead woman walking, and they have no future at your company. If you think you're doing them a favor by giving them a stay of execution for a couple months—that's a couple months that they would have been investing in another career path or another company that is aligned with their future success.

(Alex at 00:19:36) And so, you know, not only is it unfair to them, it's unfair to your business. Right? And yet it's just, you know, the opportunity cost of having the right person in that role is very high. It's just, you know, conflict avoidance or inertia that keeps people from making the right decision on those important HR matters.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:00) Yeah. I think most of it's the conflict avoidance. I think people don't like that. I personally didn't like it, and I had avoided it. And then when you're a founder and it's your money or you're growing your team and there's just no opportunity—you have to have success. The outcome becomes so important that that allows you to get the confidence. This is what needs to happen. And after I got used to it, what I learned was it's actually really beneficial for the person you're letting go. And the reason is because, you know, typically if you're going to let somebody go, you've had some interactions with them. They have an idea that they're not stepping up and being where they need to be. But then when you actually do let them go, they have a moment of reflection. There was a time in my life when I was not great, and then I kept screwing up and making mistakes. I lost opportunities. I made big mistakes. And then I just said, I don't want to be that person anymore. And so there was just, you know, a moment in my life where I was just like, I'm going to just change, and I did. But if people would have strung me along, right, or used too much kid gloves with me, it wouldn't have been so obvious. It would have taken longer. I think if the first person—if the first time it happened, they would have come down like a hammer, I might have had that wake-up call on time one versus it being three or four times.

(Alex at 00:21:20) That's a great point. I mean, I think we tend to have a very kind of zoom lens approach to the way we look at our lives. In other words, we're focused on the here and now and the moment. Getting fired feels terrible and it's the worst thing that ever happened to you, whatever. And if you widen that aperture and you look at the arc of your life and your career, it is the moments of failure, if you want to call it that, where you learn the most and where you evolve as a person. You become more mature. You just understand how the world works in a more clear-eyed way. And, you know, it's actually—it doesn't feel like it's going to be a beneficial thing for you, but it may, in that arc of your life, net out to the positive in a quite significant way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:11) Absolutely. And we're speeding up in progress too. Right? Obviously, business has been around since people have been trading, but the fidelity of the information, you know, being able to have conversations like this with people all over the world, the amount of resources and educational material. We're learning what works better because nobody ever got fired for doing an excellent job, having a great personality and working well with their team members, and connecting the value of what they're doing to the value in the marketplace so that there's a sync between the market and what you're doing. No one got fired for doing those three things well.

(Alex at 00:22:46) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:47) You get fired for doing other stupid stuff, and then you realize what are the things I need to do? Who do I need to emulate? How do I need to act? And then you find out common traits. When I got really frustrated in that moment of my life, I bought three books. They were the biographies of three different billionaires. And I was like, I could take a business class. I could do all of that. They'll teach me how to do spreadsheets, but I need to understand how these successful people think. And there's lots of gurus and stuff, but I just went with the billionaires because I was like, that's a safe bet. And then I started to get into that and understand how they think, and I gleaned a lot from their life stories and their childhoods. And then I got into the whole sales training and Tony Robbins' life management. And Jim Rohn, he's one of my favorites. He's this motivational guy in the seventies, and he's just—they took all this content because he's not alive anymore, and they just put it all on YouTube for free. So you can go listen to this amazing content, but the examples are hilarious because he's talking about selling phone books and printers.

(Alex at 00:23:42) I got to check that out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:44) Yeah. Yeah.

(Alex at 00:23:46) I think the other thing is you have to think of getting fired in the same way that you think of when you're interviewing for a job. Are you the right person for that job? And there could be lots of reasons why you're an outstanding person, but just not a good fit. Right? And, you know, you can think about getting fired as being sort of reinterviewed for a job and being determined that you're no longer the right candidate for that job. Right? And that doesn't mean you're a bad professional. It just means you're not the right professional. And so I think people take it incredibly personally and get really bruised egos over it. But the reality is you have to think of it as, if I were interviewing for 10 jobs and I got rejected from nine of them, but I got that one, I wouldn't feel so bad. I'd be like, okay. I got the one job. That's what I need. Right? You know? Yet being rejected from the job that you're at feels really terrible. You know, some of it is about your attitude. I was involved in a merger, you know, when I was kind of more junior in my career where, you know, I felt like one group of people that I happened to be in were the second-class citizens, and I just had a terrible attitude. Right? You know? And it colored my work. And, you know, it's like, was I a bad professional? No. But I probably wasn't a great employee. I ended up leaving on my own accord, but if I hadn't, you know, maybe I would have gotten let go. Who knows? Right? It just, you know, there's just so many reasons other than you're not worthy that that kind of thing happens.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:21) Yeah. And going around and giving talks, to your point, I see a lot of people, I'd say most people. If you had to do the, you know, Pareto 80/20 thing, I'd say 80% of the people don't care enough when they're looking for a job. I mean, they want the job and they care if they want it, but they're not sitting around thinking, what am I really curious about? What sort of interest do I have? Am I really into video games? And should I go work at a video game company or learn skills there? Or, you know, what am I into? And then having this sort of interest and then working in areas of their interest. I feel a lot of people just click apply to every single—100 times a day on, you know, job searching sites versus, you know, saying, you know, what industry is growing really fast, and what am I interested in? And then let me write a letter to the CEO of the top 10 companies that I think—a personal letter, research each company. It sounds simple. It's like, oh, that's easy. You know, most people won't respond to you, but you'll probably get one or two because that stands out to them because most people won't do that. And often people say, you know, it sounds too good to be true or it's too easy. I've done things like this, and I had success with them. It's partly, you know, how I got people on my podcast early is one way I used it. But I think that people don't put enough effort into where they're actually going to spend half their lives, the work that they're going to be doing. And then people will stay places when they're unhappy. And I'm like, what are you doing?

(Alex at 00:26:49) Yeah. And they're making just the decisions that, again, on a very sort of short-term basis. You know, I'm going to take this job because it pays $5,000 or $10,000 more. You know, maybe it has a better title. And, again, if you're looking at the long view, those are factors in the decision, but shouldn't really drive the decision. You know, I, when I was in the investment banking world where you have many bosses, right, you're working for this partner, you're working for that partner. The crazy part was I found that some of these partners are incredibly smart and you learn technical things from them. And then there were some that were just kind of more relationship people. And I always felt like, oh, the smart technical people were the right people to work for. But they micromanage me, and it was a big deal if you, you know, made a punctuation error in a presentation. And then I worked for this one guy who I thought was kind of—you know, he was nontechnical. And so he brought me into a room with all of these gray hairs, you know, and I'm this 25-year-old kid. And he's like, Alex is the expert on all the technical stuff. Alex, take it away. Which never would have happened with the technical partners. And it was like, I was thrown into the deep end of the pool, and it was such an incredibly valuable experience to be presenting to the, you know, these board members of this big company that I just wouldn't have gotten that opportunity. So you have to look at it at the lens of, what's going to give you the right exposure? What's going to give you the right level of responsibility or the most responsibility that you can handle? And, you know, the $5,000—that'll come. Right? That gap, it shouldn't be the principal driver of your decision because what you're trying to do is get up a certain professional maturity curve.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:41) Yeah. Dude, you got a lot of leadership knowledge there.

(Alex at 00:28:44) Well, I made a lot of mistakes. And, you know, I mean, you know, in the course of a career, you step on some landmines and then, you know, you get a little bit of wisdom from it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:57) Any particular books or people that you follow that stand out?

(Alex at 00:29:02) Gosh. You know, there's some classics that I think are worth everyone's reading. I think Good to Great is one of my, you know, favorite business books because it really focuses on this notion that it's a team effort. That most businesses that succeed aren't because of one brilliant genius. Right? You know, there are those examples and everybody focuses on that, you know, Steve Jobs. But the businesses that have been most successful just have these certain practices that the author identifies that are systematic and common amongst great companies. And that's really inspiring because, you know, as a leader, you think, well, jeez. Maybe I'm not the next Steve Jobs. Can I create a great company? It's like, absolutely. Yes. You can. In fact, most great companies were really built by people who just put in place a bunch of really good practices and built teams and, you know, got a success flywheel going. And you can study those and learn from them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:08) Yes. I, early on, made a decision to base everything on the rules of the successful versus the exceptions. So as you mentioned, a lot of people are exception-based in life, and rightfully so. It's probably built into us biologically because we pay attention to the one that's out of line, right, the different one. But I made the decision to focus on, you know, what are the common traits of the people who've had success, and then how can I slowly get there and play it like a long game?

(Alex at 00:30:40) Yeah. That's critically important and a great observation. I mean, look. And I think the other thing is, you know, I'm a person who sort of tends to overanalyze and overthink things. And, you know, look, so many of our decisions—and if you've read the Tony Robbins of the world, so many of our decisions are sort of driven by fear. Right? You know, it's like I don't want to fall on my face. I don't want to be revealed to be an imposter. So I'm not going to stick my neck out and do that thing that has—what you're weighing is the benefits that can come from some public speaking thing that you're doing or giving an investor a pitch. The benefits that could come from that are really tangible and measurable and real. The downside of failure is hurt feelings. Right? You know? And it's like, why would you ever let the hurt feelings drive that decision? You've got to get over the hurt feelings. Right? You've got to just steel yourself against those things, and it just opens up a world of opportunity.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:46) Oh, yeah. The way I do that is I ask myself if it'll matter in 10 years. Will this event that's happening matter in 10 years? Nope. All right. Then I shouldn't be upset about it. If it can affect my life in a meaningful way in 10 years, then I should probably work through it a little bit more. You know?

(Alex at 00:32:02) That's a great filter. I should use that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:04) Yeah. It's untested. I haven't been doing it for 10 years, but it works. It helps me because I tend to be a little bit anxious too. Right? And I think it kind of comes with the job because people, their families rely on us having the business, and that's a lot. Right? There's so many little things that go right and so many little things that go wrong. The amount of volume that a company leader sees, whether it's a CTO, CMO, CEO, at that C-suite level, you're seeing an insane amount of things going wrong and right. And so I just had to come up with a framework of how to deal with it so that I could sleep at night. And I don't even know where I heard it. I heard somebody say it, if it'll matter in 10 years, and I just picked that up, and it's just stuck.

(Alex at 00:32:49) Yeah. Well, look, I think one of the things when you're at a small company or a startup—you know, there are a lot of clarifying things. Like you said, you have a limited single-digit number of employees or whatever. You can't have people on the team that aren't producing. Right? So it's like big companies can let that slide, little companies can't. Right? And, you know, there are other things that are just very clarifying, which is I have to be able to fail because it's just part of this enterprise that I'm pursuing. It's like, I can't do everything right. I'm taking on too much.

(Alex at 00:33:22) Things are gonna get left undone. Deadlines are gonna be missed. Opportunities are gonna be lost. It's part of the deal. And as long as you capture some of the opportunities and hit some of those deadlines, you can't be perfect.

(Alex at 00:33:38) Right? You can't go for perfection. It really is the enemy of the good when you're running a small business. And you have to develop a comfort with having a to-do list that is forever growing. You can never clear out your email inbox.

(Alex at 00:33:52) That's just the way it is. If you're OCD about those things, forget it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:57) Oh yeah. I've definitely gotten good at what is the most important thing that I have to do today. There's a hundred things I could do, but what's the thing that needs to be done today? And often for me, that goes back to improving the product or being in charge and building and hiring around making the product better, and then increasing sales. And it's just product sales, product sales, and just constantly spending my time in those areas.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:23) And it's awesome because when I'm in sales, when I'm doing that part, whether it's improving the sales deck or whatnot, I feel so comfortable with the fact that I'm spending my time there or on 20 sales calls a week or whatnot. I'm okay with that. It's okay. And then when I'm in production and making the product better, I just make sure I have great people there that want to make it better, and I sort of help organize it because I can't spend too much time there because I have to keep making sure that the sales happens until the company—we're only 15 people now. When the company gets bigger, you'll be able to hire dedicated people to focus on each one of those areas as a C-level type person, but we're getting there.

(Alex at 00:35:03) Yeah. You asked about authors or influencers that I'd recommend. So recently I heard on another podcast—I won't mention which one—an interview with a guy named Oliver Burkeman. And this guy had written a time management book which I thought was sort of really kind of turns traditional wisdom on its head, which is forget about trying to tackle everything on your list. If you're doing that, you're spending time on a lot of trivial things.

(Alex at 00:35:33) Right? It's the actual opposite of what you should try to do. You really need to apply this importance filter above all else and deliberately leave things undone. Because those things that don't hit the filter—it's satisfying to check them off. Right?

(Alex at 00:35:51) Maybe there's a squeaky wheel asking you for something unimportant. But if you're just kind of checking off little trivial administrative items at the expense of what's really important, then you are actively undermining yourself. And so it's—most time management is about how to get the most done, and this is really about what turns it on its head. It's like, actually, you should be deliberately not doing a lot of things and focus on just what's important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:28) Yes. Absolutely. Dude, I think that's a good mic drop moment. But we definitely need to let people know if they want to learn more about SecureCo and how they can improve their sensitive data flow, what would they do?

(Alex at 00:36:43) So come to secureco.com. Reach out to us at [email protected]. We'd love to talk to you. We serve enterprises of all scale and government and industrial clients as well.

(Alex at 00:37:02) It's really all about creating the most secure network connections possible. Way more advanced than typical VPN capabilities, way more secure, offering sort of privacy, confidentiality, and business continuity at a higher level. And we're working with some of the most demanding cybersecurity customers in the world, including U.S. military and intelligence customers who really sort of set the bar for cybersecurity. So in this environment where it's no longer a kid in their basement hacking your business, but it's actually China and they're intent on stealing your IP or trying to gain leverage one way or another or to try to dominate your industry—look, you can't just use basic off-the-shelf solutions or be complacent anymore about cybersecurity. The stakes are too high, and the cost of breach are frankly quantifiable and awful.

(Alex at 00:38:10) So what we can do is do a quick demo and then proof of concept and show that our performance is as good or better than what you're accustomed to, and the costs are not meaningfully higher than the market alternatives. Why wouldn't you go for the strongest security available if it doesn't cost you a whole lot more and you can sleep well at night?

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:34) Perfect. Awesome. So secureco.io.

(Alex at 00:38:37) Yes. Secureco.com, secureco.io. They can find us on the web and love to hear from your audience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:44) Well, thank you so much, Alex, for doing this. I had a fantastic time, and we made a podcast.

(Alex at 00:38:49) Awesome. Thank you, Joel. Enjoyed being a part of this, and great to chat.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:54) 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.