Craig Lurey - Advanced Password Security Tooling & Delegating as a Leader

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today, Joel is talking to Craig, the co-founder and CTO at Keeper Security, and they discuss how cybersecurity starts with password security, Keeper Security's advanced password security tooling, and how learning to delegate has been Craig's key to success as a leader. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:38) So I'm just curious what you're learning right now as a leader.

(Craig at 00:00:41) Yeah, I mean, I think what I'm learning is really, you know, as we've grown, right, so you've gone from one developer with just me developing it to a small team, and I've kind of delegated. And then now it's teams and teams of, you know, teams of teams and all that and bringing in management. What's, you know, just learning how to delegate and how to identify gaps, you know, is really where a lot of learning that I'm doing, that I have to do, that I have to be better at is to identify the gaps and to empower people to fill in those gaps, whether it's hiring or building new products or defining specs or talking to customers or chasing down issues. You know, so I've brought in people because I identified one of my gaps is I've got to have people that can really interface between, let's say, QA and the customer.

(Craig at 00:01:37) And so people that are really aggressive about chasing down problems or chasing down a customer issue, right? Because I used to do that a lot. And so for me, it's really about learning to find the gaps, fill the gaps, and grow everybody and learning to develop everybody. I mean, that's new for me. It's not something I've done before, not at this scale.

(Craig at 00:02:11) And so taking it from a company that's a few people to now we're over, I think, over 250 people, you know, so that's a huge change. And I want to make sure that we grow and the culture remains and the process remains and we build process and we build redundancy. You know, so learning how to do that is really what's key for me. As a CTO, and I've been a CTO, I've been a co-founder of the company obviously and the original developer of the product, and I've kind of over the years looked at, okay, what what is actually a CTO and what does that mean, right? And so it seems like there's different types, you know? And I think I fall into the camp of very customer-focused, you know, dialed into the customer, very concerned about the product, obsessed with the product. And so, yeah, I'm always on customer calls, and it could be some huge enterprise customer or it could be some older gentleman that's having an issue with the app and has been a customer for eleven years and is frustrated. And for some reason, people find my mobile number, and especially a customer, somehow—well, maybe I gave it to them ten years ago—and they just come out of the woodwork.

(Craig at 00:03:34) And they're like, "I need help," you know? And so I jump in and help. And I think that's really important, you know, to kind of, you have to be dialed into the product. And we have this benefit in our company, you know, we have the benefit of being a user of the product that we created. And, you know, it's a huge thing. I can't even imagine having to develop a product that I don't personally use would be really difficult. Like, if you only had to, if you only were concerned about, you know, what are the requirements of the customer and what are, you know, and digging in. And of course, you could do really great work, but it's a huge, huge thing to be able to use your own product and design it the way you want to use it. And, you know, if somebody's like, "God, this drives me crazy," and you're like, "Yeah, this drives me crazy too. We better fix this," you know, and so to be able to do that. And so I just think, so yeah, I'm on a ton of customer calls. People always have the ability to jump on with me and go through something because it's just, you know, just to have that background, it gives me perspective. It helps me solve problems.

(Craig at 00:04:49) It helps me come up with, you know, what's important. With us, we get so much input because when you have millions of users and you have thousands of enterprises that are using it every day, there's no shortage of input. It's all about filtering and understanding what's the most valuable input and what affects the most people and what's frustrating people. And so you really get a good perspective of that when you just get on the call and just listen or collect their feedback. And they enjoy it because they're talking to, you know, the co-founder, and they like to feel like their voice is important, which it is.

(Craig at 00:05:35) And it's just hearing it as well. You know, hearing it directly from someone is a lot different than hearing it through product management or hearing it from support or, things bubble up. Issues bubble up, and that's fine and that's okay. But if you're just looking at a list of stuff, like, this is the list of things that people care about or this is the list of things that we have to fix, it's a lot different when you get home and, you know, your mom calls you and is complaining about some feature. It's classic for me to walk in the house and then my wife will come up and show me some bug or, you know, family members, friends, whatever. Just people are always showing me stuff. So it's like how often do you have a product that all your friends and family use, you know, just so many people? And so you feel it, and that's why, actually, so one of the things I always do is I, you know, some of the team members that are building out content, videos and things like that, I actually make them, like, "Hey, go find the least technical person you know, and just give them the app, and just watch them do it. Just watch them go through it, see what happens," you know, because that's the way you learn.

(Craig at 00:06:52) And that's what I do when I get on the call with people is I just let them show me, you know, what were you doing and how are you expecting it to work and what was confusing? And you just listen to it, and then a lot of that kind of gets then filtered into what we're building. You know, so if we're working on a feature or something was planned for next quarter, but it's starting to kind of surface and more people are asking about it, then sometimes things get reprioritized. Anyway, yeah, just being co-founder, CTO, I think that there's some CTOs that are just maybe they're writing a lot of code and they're still, their head's straight in the code, you know, or they're just really focused on technology and the methods of development or the process and things like that.

(Craig at 00:07:41) I'm very much more customer-focused, you know, security-focused. I'm also, instead of, I don't do a ton of coding. I don't do a bunch of development of features and things like that. That wouldn't serve people well. I am involved in security very much so, and more so, I would guess, I would say on the DevOps side of things, and then on the customer side of things.

(Craig at 00:08:08) So that's where I can really contribute, you know, because those days of me being able to pull up the iPhone SDK and start developing features, that doesn't serve anybody. That's not going to follow the process. You know, we have to have, as we've grown the company and we've added so many developers, we've got something like, you know, 50 developers here that are across different products.

(Craig at 00:08:37) You can't do that. The CTO shouldn't be writing code. It's not going to go well. You know, so as you grow, you know, in the beginning, I wrote the version for iOS, then I wrote version one for Android, and then the back end, and then all the different components. So it was okay writing version one, version two, maybe version three, you know, for the first year or two. But then after that, you know, and you hire people, they have to add more structure. And they're better developers. You know, they're more focused on the platform. If someone, especially, let's say, iOS or Android, there's very few people that can jump around between platforms and develop and be really great at different platforms.

(Craig at 00:09:22) So a lot of developers are focusing just on one platform. They're just becoming an expert in iOS or Android or web or back end or whatever. But a person who can do all and jump around, that's pretty rare. And that's great for a startup, but I think as you grow, you know, you can't really scale that way. And so, you know, it went from the days of Craig writing everything to, you know, over time, just, you know, one person at a time, replacing different functions, having it, you know, building a team that does all back end, building a team that does iOS and Android and web and browser extensions and Active Directory bridge and enterprise console and all these components of the product.

(Craig at 00:10:10) And it's just, you know, building redundancy, building all that into the team is really important. So as CTO, I don't think writing code is a really good idea. I think it's being in tune and being in touch with what the customer needs are and fulfilling those needs. It's sort of like product management, but it kind of touches all areas of security and architecture.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:38) I find that, you know, because as I get to talk to so many different types of CTOs, right, that as long as you have self-awareness of where, you know, your strengths are and where you want to spend your time, that's fine too. Because I've seen some people that they don't want to give up coding, and what they'll do—and okay, so it's okay not to give up coding if here's the caveat. Here's the if. If you've hired some sort of VP of Engineering that's fulfilling the leadership role in technology, and typically, they're off into an office of the CTO where they're developing skunkworks-type projects or pie-in-the-sky-type things with a small group of six, ten people. And maybe they're solving a problem or a challenge internally for the organization or something externally for the industry that's a moonshot. And they're over there playing in that bucket.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:31) But if you're in the weeds programming as a CTO and you haven't sort of pushed off that human tribal responsibility to someone else who's fulfilling that leadership purpose, then that's where you can get in a real big problem because people are looking for the leadership. And if they don't have it, things won't run smoothly.

(Craig at 00:11:52) Yeah. If I just disconnected, and I mean, because that's the funny thing about writing code and people don't necessarily understand that you have to disconnect. You can't just write a few things. You can't just, oh, yeah, an hour here, an hour there. There's no way. You need to, there's like the ball has to get rolling. It's probably similar to writing a novel. The there's like this huge brick wall you're looking at. To get past that and to actually start being productive takes hours and days of uninterrupted progress.

(Craig at 00:12:28) And then you get over that hump, and then, okay. Now you're coding, and now you're in the groove. You can't do that if you're responsible for the, you know, the company and responsible for the operations and hiring and, you know, making sure that the customers are happy and that we're releasing on time and all that stuff. And, yeah, even with a VP Engineering, which we have, we have an amazing VP Engineering who manages the process, but, you know, even even with that role, you have to have someone that's got their hands into what the customer is really facing and tie it all together.

(Craig at 00:13:07) So someone like me can tie in all the way down to some random user on some random device, you know, in the world encountering something, dealing with that, and then also dealing with hiring an engineer or how does the system scale or all this kind of stuff. You know, so having that full perspective is, you've got to do it, and a VP Engineering might not have that. You know, they're also so embedded into day-to-day tasks of engineers that you have to, you have to cross customers. You have to touch customers. You have to talk to them and understand what their needs are. You have to also work with engineers to communicate that. Because it also, it's a rare thing for an engineer to talk to a customer. They typically don't want to do it, and they'll avoid it at all costs.

(Craig at 00:13:55) So you have to, so what a lot of times what I do is I kind of force them into the calls. You know, so if they don't understand what's the pain point or they need to collect information or whatever, that's one of the things that I do is I'll talk to the customer. I'll get a good idea of what's going on, and then I'll pull in an engineer if I need to. And I know exactly who to talk to, and I know exactly where to look and things like that.

(Craig at 00:14:23) So I can also shortcut and save a lot of time. But, yeah, I agree. Writing code, it would just be so unproductive because I'd be ignoring, you know, employees and customers and not addressing what they really need me for. And, you know, honestly, developers now, if you can focus, you can keep them focused and they can accomplish so much more, be so much better at developing, and it's much better to help guide them on what the customer is looking for and what are the requirements and how best to develop it. But, yeah, things are changing so fast. I mean, it's really crazy, especially iOS and Android. It seems like iOS is an evolution. Android seems like they just change everything every year. You know, all these new APIs, new SDKs that come out every single year. And so you always have to be chasing this stuff.

(Craig at 00:15:19) You always have to be on top of all the changes that are happening,

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:22) and you have to be

(Craig at 00:15:23) able to react to it. You know, if Apple changes a policy or they change some, they deprecate some API or something, you have to be on top of that, and you have to really study it. You can't just develop something and be like, "Yeah, here you go. It's good," and just kind of move on. So I'm happy that we have more process, and I'm happy that, you know, everybody's not waiting on Craig to develop some feature or to write some code change because I know that in three minutes, I'm going to get interrupted, you know, to help solve a customer problem or help close, you know, an enterprise deal or solve some other issue, but that's kind of, that's how it's evolved.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:04) Yeah. For me, with the growth of the podcast, you know, having been full-time engineering lead before, I found myself on podcast days, I couldn't write code because my brain would be so deep into that. It's the best analogy I can come up with is it's like a computer and it's like RAM, and you have to build this massive mental image to begin working. So you have to just spend all of this time building this mental image and then start changing things in the mental. And so someone can come in and interrupt you and just clear that cache, you know, and you've got to start back over and it's so frustrating.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:37) So I would separate my days. I'd be like, "All right, these days I'm coding. These days I'm doing the show." And then eventually, we built up a team enough and coding became less of a requirement. And then for the past, I don't know, two years or so, I haven't been programming at all, but I do manage an engineering team.

(Craig at 00:16:54) Yeah. But you feel like sometimes you feel like you're missing out on some stuff, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:59) Always.

(Craig at 00:16:59) And it's, yeah, oh yeah, there's a lot of that. But then you have to remind yourself, okay, this is how it evolves. This is how it builds.

(Craig at 00:17:08) This is how you grow, and you have to grow. The days of just jumping in code and making a change and pushing it through, those are over. Those can't happen in this process. There's a very tight process, and that's great.

(Craig at 00:17:26) You have to do that. And if you don't follow the process, like you think, "Ah, no problem. I can do this. I'm gonna go in there and just do this thing."

(Craig at 00:17:36) Yeah, right. That's gonna blow up, right? So you have to let people do their work and follow their process and stay focused.

(Craig at 00:17:49) And yeah, like, that's great that you can do a day of this and a day of that, or at least you did for some time. But that's hard. Even a day is hard because sometimes you can spend an entire day just tracking down one line of code. Like, that's the reality of it. So to think that you could actually build something in a day is just kind of unrealistic, even if you're doing 24 hours straight.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:19) It is tough, but the rules at level 39 are not the same at level 27. So you can't play with 27 rules at 39. As you go through these different stages of life, you have to learn new things and adjust and adapt in order to get to the next stage and bring the most amount of value to people.

(Craig at 00:18:36) Yeah. The most productive day I've ever had is the day that we created the first version of Keeper. And all the moons and the stars had to align perfectly for that to happen. You know, to have those sorts of moments of, like, total focus, it's hard. I don't know how developers—they have to shut things out, right?

(Craig at 00:19:05) You have to really shut the world out in order to—and I get that. And so I try to leave people alone. But the day that—so I had planned, I was planning, okay, we're taking this plane trip. It's gonna be going to China. I didn't even want to look at the itinerary.

(Craig at 00:19:21) I was like, okay, it's gonna be the longest flight ever. So this is 2008 or something. So it's like, okay, I gotta pack my laptop and all these extra batteries and all this stuff. I don't know where I'm going. And so I planned it out. Like, okay, this is gonna be the trip where I create version one of this app. And so it was already planned out.

(Craig at 00:19:46) But to be able to completely disconnect like that—and this was 2008. The App Store had just come out or was about to come out. Yeah, so the App Store just came out on iOS. And Objective-C, for example, wasn't even—there wasn't even anything online.

(Craig at 00:20:06) It was just, like, some PDFs that Apple had created. So I was able to print it out and then take it with me. I don't even know if there was a textbook on it at the time. There may have been, but I don't think so. And then I packed it all with me, got on the plane, and just was absolutely completely offline, completely focused for an entire 24 hours.

(Craig at 00:20:31) But that was, like, jumping between airports. That was sitting in the terminals. That was just completely disconnected. No phone, no internet, no nothing. And having all of my stuff with me—my little Objective-C manual and my SDK and just having just enough to do it.

(Craig at 00:20:50) But those moments don't come very often. That was absolutely the most productive day of my life, and just nonstop craziness. In fact, I was so deeply in it that I didn't realize that our itinerary had a typo in it. So I was supposed to go to Nanjing with a J, Nanjing. But the typo—I don't know how it got booked, but it had the typo with Nanning.

(Craig at 00:21:20) And it also had some other layovers. I had, like, five layovers. I was in, like, Vietnam, South Korea. I was everywhere. And then eventually I looked up after, like, 20 hours of coding.

(Craig at 00:21:35) And I look out the window. I'm like, "Where am I?" I look out, and I'm like, "This is not Nanjing." So I look out, "Oh my God, I'm in Nanning. Where is that?" Like, I didn't realize it. I got off the plane and I was—because I'd been coding for all this time, I just didn't even know where I was. And luckily, some random person in this Nanning airport—I don't even know why or how—they just grabbed me.

(Craig at 00:22:03) They're like, "You shouldn't be here." They just grabbed me and threw me back on the plane and sent me to Nanjing. I don't even know how it happened, but my brain was so focused on coding that day. It was just, like, crazy amount of focus. And came out of it, landed there, and then first version was done. That kind of progress, that kind of focus—I don't think that kind of focus has happened since.

(Craig at 00:22:32) Like, no, there's no way. It's just, it's been an evolution from there. But yeah, so developers need that kind of absolute focus. And if you're being interrupted a hundred times a day—it's all good and everything, it's awesome. Like, building a company, marketing, sales, engineering, everything—it's awesome. But, yeah, no coding's getting done.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:55) Tell me about before that trip. Like, what made you want to build this?

(Craig at 00:22:59) You know, people ask me that a lot about coming up with ideas. Coming up with an idea for a product or an app—it doesn't—it's not like you just lay down and relax and think about it. It doesn't happen that way. It's all about solving a problem. You know, my background is actually not in computer science.

(Craig at 00:23:20) I was electrical engineering, Iowa State, and I did electrical engineering, designing, like, firmware and circuits and stuff like that. It was not software, okay? And so I've always been a problem solver. That's just kind of my thing.

(Craig at 00:23:37) And I've always enjoyed coming up with solutions for things, and I've just had a knack for it. But it's not just, like, sitting around thinking—you know, idea comes, "Oh, let's do this Keeper thing." It was really more like, "Man, there's no way to do this. Like, this is frustrating. There's no way to store anything securely on my mobile device, and I'm constantly having to mess around with, like, notes and stuff like that."

(Craig at 00:24:03) And so it was originally just from my own personal frustration, right? And we just saw the opportunity that it didn't exist. And honestly, didn't even look at much competition. It's not about being worried about competitors.

(Craig at 00:24:19) Like, that's the last thing you should really worry about when you're creating a product or solving a problem. It's not about, "Oh, wow, there's all these people out there that are trying to solve a similar problem." That could be overwhelming. I can't even imagine doing it that way.

(Craig at 00:24:32) If you want to solve a problem, you just do it. You just start. And if you think you can do it—you have a great idea that can solve the problem and it does—you look and a cursory look looks like that doesn't exist, that's a great opportunity to build something. And that's kind of how it started, really. There was nothing on iOS at the time.

(Craig at 00:24:55) Android hadn't come out yet. So it was really just iOS version one or two, right? And nothing existed on mobile. Just saw that as an opportunity. But it was really just solving a frustration and a pain point.

(Craig at 00:25:09) So the first version was really, really simple. It was just a place to securely store information. And to get something out into people's hands is the most important thing. And putting it out there and letting people play with it and letting people use it—it just started gaining traction. And then it was like, "Okay, yeah. The use case here is passwords. This is what it's all about." Like, it wasn't at first—it was a little more generic and more broad around, you know, like a secure spot to store confidential data. So the original product name was Keeper Password and Data Vault.

(Craig at 00:25:47) The password thing was important, but it didn't—I thought it would be more generic. But no, it immediately became apparent that that was solving a huge issue, and it just started to take off. But, yeah, coming up with the idea is really just about solving a problem and watching other people suffer through something. It's a really good way. You know, I can say, "Okay, I can solve that. I can fix that. I can do something about that." And being realistic about what problem you're trying to solve too. Like, a lot of people are coming up with ideas, and they're like, "Hey, what do you think about this idea?"

(Craig at 00:26:24) And it involves a million people to do this, and it also involves the other side, a million people to do this. And then once these two million people come together, then you have something. I'm like, "Uh, I'm not into that." I'm more interested in something that solves a problem, makes people's lives easier than coming up with something that requires buy-in from the entire world. That's not something that interests me. So we've always thought about this as, like, the anti-social media. It's like the complete opposite, right? The complete opposite of social media and Facebook and all this stuff would be an absolute secure private place to store your passwords and your most sensitive information.

(Craig at 00:27:09) And so I've always thought about making sure this product is the absolute most secure place to store anything of value to you, confidentially for yourself or for your business. But yeah, complete opposite of what, like, you know, ideas around social media or around sharing with the public. The anti-social media system. Yeah.

(Craig at 00:27:33) So I think about solving problems. And so there's usually no shortage of ideas from things like that. And I don't sit around and dream up things that are not solving a real issue. I think a lot of people make that mistake of making sure that you're solving a problem before you create a product. Like, otherwise, it's just a science experiment.

(Craig at 00:27:56) If you're creating a solution for something that isn't a problem, then probably no one's gonna use it. That's what I've seen. And it's easy to fall into that trap because sometimes it's fun to create something that's just cool or you just think it would be useful. But especially if you don't use it for yourself, then it's probably not that useful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:20) You can also solve problems that people aren't willing to pay for.

(Craig at 00:28:23) Yeah. You can chase products that are paid products and make them free or make a better product that's a paid product based on something that's free.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:31) Because it's validating the problem in the market, right?

(Craig at 00:28:34) Yeah. You know, Darren and I have always been a fan of creating paid products because you're investing this time. We believe in having a profitable business too. So when we started this, Darren had seed funded the company with, you know, just 250K to—and that's, it's not a lot of money, it's not a little amount, but it's just a small amount, right? It's just to get things going. But he seed funded that, and we were immediately profitable once we created the paid version of the product. And just in terms of just reducing brain damage and all that stuff—just to build a product that has a free component, but it's more so like a trial of the paid product. So it's a, you know, kind of a free-to-pay conversion flow. But creating a paid product—and users value paid products. Users who pay for a product, they're gonna use it, they're gonna invest their time into it, they're gonna tell their friends and their family about it.

(Craig at 00:29:49) And that's what we see. Like, over the years, talk to so many customers. And it's always—if you look at the demographic of the customer and if they're free or paid, you know, the paid user is more valuable in terms of their feedback. They're more engaged in the product, we see right away. Like, I talk to people all the time and they're like, "Oh yeah, I'm a paid user of Keeper. And I tell all my friends about it.

(Craig at 00:30:12) I got my parents hooked up with it." Or someone says, "I got my kids to use it," and all this stuff. Like, being invested in the product—you know, only for what is it, $35 a year for the individual plan. But it's a small amount. It's less than the cost of, like, a case to protect your iPhone, right?

(Craig at 00:30:34) And it's protecting all of your most sensitive data. So having a paid user was always most important to us, not from a product standpoint, because then you're not dealing with ads, which I hate that kind of stuff. And we've never considered, like, running ads for a free product. And I just hate that model.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:55) That would erode trust.

(Craig at 00:30:56) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:57) If my password manager is showing me ads?

(Craig at 00:30:59) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:01) I don't want you sharing any of my data.

(Craig at 00:31:04) Yeah. Or any product. Yeah. So I mean, there's a lot of reasons why Keeper is growing, but the fact that we focused on making a really great paid product is key to that because, you know, word of mouth was how we grew for the first, I don't know, like eight years or six years, whatever. We didn't really heavily start marketing until just a couple years ago.

(Craig at 00:31:31) And so before that, it was all word of mouth. And word of mouth comes from having a paid user who's invested in the product that uses it daily, that's telling all their friends and family about it. And so we just learned early on that paid users are just better—a better model. You know, the sooner you can encourage someone to convert to paid version, the more they're invested into the product and it becomes more valuable to them.

(Craig at 00:32:07) And it's just better for everybody. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:10) How do I get it? I got my phone right here.

(Craig at 00:32:12) Yeah. You just install Keeper from the—you just search for Keeper in the App Store.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:16) Just K-E-E-P-E-R?

(Craig at 00:32:18) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:19) Let me see if this comes up. There it is, man. It looks beautiful. Dude, you have a 158,000 five-star rating. That's crazy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:28) That's crazy.

(Craig at 00:32:30) That's because of the paid version, right? That's because when you have a paid version and the users are paid, they're invested in it. They give higher reviews. They tell their friends.

(Craig at 00:32:45) It all kind of feeds itself. If you just have a lot of free users on a product, you just gonna have people that spend three seconds and then maybe blow it off, maybe write a bad review or whatever. It's just—we just don't focus on that. So there's a free version, so you can use it on one device for free. But it's gonna highly encourage you to go to the paid version.

(Craig at 00:33:10) You know, the model actually, the way that the paid model came out, which is kind of like, not a lot of people know this. Like, in the very beginning, it was just free for iOS, and it was, you know, because we were building what would be the paid platform. And even on, especially on iOS at the time and Android, you know, the data is encrypted locally in the device. Like, all of your passwords and the stuff you store in the vault was encrypted and stored locally. Okay, fine.

(Craig at 00:33:40) Well, what happens when you lose your device or you switch devices? You know, Apple, even after all this time, they still don't do a good job of retaining data when you lose your device. It's like you're at risk of losing data, unless you are really diligent about doing the iCloud backups. And even with that, even with that, I would say it's not a guarantee that you have actually protected all your data on your device, you know.

(Craig at 00:34:11) So the original business model came out of the fact that users were losing data because they were losing their device and they were just, you know, upgrading their device. And of course, you know, Apple didn't recover data at the time, and so data was lost. And so our first, the first, you know, basically variation of the business model was backup your vault. And so we had encrypted backup. And so that's why the first SKU is actually called Keeper Backup.

(Craig at 00:34:39) But, so backing up your vault to the cloud was really the business model at the time. And then it became, like, that still is actually a really critical piece of it, is that you want your data backed up. You want it available on your other devices. You want to be able to sync your password securely. You know, so having unlimited devices, having unlimited cloud backups, having it instantly accessible on all your different devices is still the business and the paid version, but it came out of frustration.

(Craig at 00:35:12) So the paid model came out of frustration from users that were losing their data. So I remember, you know, like the day we, the day we launched the business model on iOS, we were the first to do in-app purchases. We were the first to do in-app subscriptions. We were first to do a lot of things on mobile and on desktop. But mobile in the beginning, we were always the first to adopt like the latest capabilities of the platform. And so I remember, we were, it was the free version. We had like a desktop app, and you could sync and you could pay on our website. But the day that the day that Apple unleashed in-app payments, we were the first in our category to add that. And so we made it really easy for users to upgrade on the mobile device. And, you know, everyone's used to doing it today. But when it first came out, I remember, you know, I was watching the App Store rankings.

(Craig at 00:36:04) Right? And we turned on in-app purchase, and, you know, users started upgrading. And I was just watching the App Store, and I was like, I saw, I just loaded it up just to check it out, and I see, you know, number one Keeper. And then, you know, I went on from there. I'm like, I'm like, what, what is, I just was looking at it. Like, what am I looking at? Like, is this my view? Is this just what I'm seeing? You know? No.

(Craig at 00:36:27) It was actually like number one in the world in revenue, like, the first day. And it stayed that way. Yeah. I mean, it stayed that way for years. You know? So we're still in the top ten revenue in productivity. But like, for the first few years, it was number one, like, globally, and that was it. It was just number one Keeper. It was crazy to watch that. But, you know, it's important to make it really easy for, obviously, for people to purchase. It's important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:59) I just purchased it.

(Craig at 00:37:00) Did you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:01) Yeah, man. While you were talking, I was like...

(Craig at 00:37:02) I did that. Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:03) I did. I wanted to see how easy it was. Like, I like to use stuff. I, man, I host the Modern CTO podcast. I love technology. And if I can support someone that I like, yeah.

(Craig at 00:37:14) You didn't have to do it, but I appreciate that. No. There's a, so we've got a desktop app, so you can load up and transfer all your passwords over. If you're using something right now, you can, we have this import tool, so you can import from anything. And that's...

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:26) What can I import from LastPass?

(Craig at 00:37:27) There's an automatic LastPass transfer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:30) Thank you.

(Craig at 00:37:31) So you just install the desktop app, and then go to the settings screen, and you can import directly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:38) The LastPass CTO is listening. You just lost a customer. I am on team Keeper now.

(Craig at 00:37:44) You know, and it's, and but, you know, we developed that out of frustration. Right? Because a lot of people wanted to transfer, and you don't want to export things in plain text.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:53) I just want it to work. I just want to press the button. So it's made it...

(Craig at 00:37:55) So you just press the button, and it just...

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:57) Thank you, Craig.

(Craig at 00:37:59) But, but, you know what? It's like, we have APIs. We have a, like, you know, we're very open. Like, there's APIs. There's SDKs. We have an open source SDK for people to program to us and, you know. So it's just, it is what it is, but yeah. So we make it really easy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:16) Hey, before, before I like, legitimately switch, there's only one feature that like is a must requirement. I want to know if you have it instead of like ignoring you and looking for it. When I'm on iOS and like I load a website, it will fill it in. Right?

(Craig at 00:38:30) It fills it in on, yeah, on Safari and on the native app.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:33) Yeah. So it, okay. Because for the longest time, they didn't work like that, and I would have to go over to the password app and copy and paste it.

(Craig at 00:38:40) Yeah. Oh, no. No. So in iOS 12, Apple released an autofill SDK based on, you know, everything that we were doing and LastPass and whatever. And so they created this SDK that allows the customer to choose where your passwords come from. So you can select Keeper as your default password manager. So you just go into the, if you go into your settings screen and search for autofill, then you just pull up Keeper and select that up. And so once you select Keeper as the default password manager, then it'll present this every time you click on passwords.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:15) You guys have yellow as one of your primary colors, your number one. They sound a lot like us. Right? We got the yellow. We're number one. See, I like you guys. And you know what? To be honest with you, I liked it and I was already going to, like, I was already signing up for it. Right? And then when I double clicked to like make the purchase, it said Callpod.

(Craig at 00:39:35) And I...

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:35) Was like, oh, man. You guys sponsored the podcast because I don't know you as a Keeper. Callpod's what came up in our sales meeting. So I was like, I, I, thank you. Thank you for sponsoring the podcast, man.

(Craig at 00:39:46) That's awesome. Yeah. Callpod. Well, do you want to know the story of Callpod?

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:50) Please. Please.

(Craig at 00:39:51) Yeah. I mean, so this is all about solving problems. Right? And so one of the things you hear a lot with startups is the pivot. Like, there's always a pivot, like how you went from A to B. And we started off, so Callpod, that was, you know, Darren and I, we had sold our first company to CNET back in 2000, June 2000, at the height of the, you know, all the internet craziness. And so we sold our company to CNET. It was called, it was called Apollo Solutions. It became CNET Channel Online, which became something else, but they're still actually operating that service today.

(Craig at 00:40:32) But at the closing of that deal, we were sitting around and like jumping around between cell phones. Why, you know, why can't we talk to the people at the same time? We were like struggling to get people on the call. And so long story short, like right then and there, he came up with the idea for Callpod. Darren jumped all over that. He filed patents and basically he ran with that as a business and I joined him. So fast forward five years later, he calls me up. He says, hey Craig, we got the patents for Callpod. Let's do it. And so we started Callpod.

(Craig at 00:41:12) And Callpod was, we made hardware. So this was before, remember, this is the times of the, you know, I had the flip phones and all that stuff, so there was no smartphones, there was nothing happening on mobile. But we developed Bluetooth technology for mobile conferencing. So we have a bunch of patents around Bluetooth mobile conferencing. So you can patch in up to five people on a real-time call. So I can basically call you, and we can all be wearing Bluetooth headsets, five of us, and running around the building talking on a phone. So that's like one of the one of the things that we built. And so we built a device that could multiplex, you know, multiplex calls, and we built Bluetooth headsets. And we built all this technology, and we're flying to China nonstop. That's one of the, that's the reason. Right? So that's the reason I was on a plane to China. So we've been going to our manufacturing facilities in China, you know, over and over. So we were in the hardware business. It's hard to believe.

(Craig at 00:42:13) But that's the reason that it's Callpod. So Callpod, out of Callpod basically came Keeper, and we developed Keeper in those, you know, like I said, the first version around 2008, 2009 when it started getting released, and then 2010 is kind of when we started building the paid model. But we pivoted from hardware to software because of Keeper.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:38) Nice. Nice. The pivots are important, man.

(Craig at 00:42:41) It is. It is. And so I keep some of these devices around, like, they're crazy to look at, but they're actually pretty useful devices. So our most popular product was a device charger called the Chargepod. And so the Chargepod was sold in Best Buy and Verizon stores and stuff like that. So we sold a lot of units. But but as soon as Keeper started taking off and the financial crisis hit and, you know, manufacturing problems and dealing with all that and funding all of that. We just decided, you know, that's it. We're done with hardware. We're pivoting to software and, you know, refocused 100% on Keeper, and that's when it started.

(Craig at 00:43:20) So the name, the name that appears on the app store is still Callpod. I wish that they offered a very simple way to just go and change that app. Apple has some funny rules around changing the names that appear in the app stores. I wish I could explain that better. But, you know, for the purpose of that. So it's Callpod is a holding company, basically. But yeah. Anyway, that's the reason for the name. But Keeper is 100% all we do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:48) Do you know the origin story of this podcast? Do you want me to give you the quick overview? All right. So my dad, he was in the Air Force. And when I was like really young at age eight, he would like teach me a little programming things because he did electronics design and software programming there. And he'd take me to work with him at like nights and weekends when he would do some freelancing. And so I got to learn, you know, technology super young. My brother and sister had to stay home, but I got to go out with him. And fast forward to age 12, I get hit by a car and then I was in a wheelchair for a year, had to go through the whole process of learning how to walk again. I think that's where I get a lot of my resilience from as an entrepreneur.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:29) But the cool thing was is I got to find sites like ScriptLance and stuff where I could just write code. People didn't care that it was a 12-year-old and I could make money with my PayPal account. And then, fast forward to 18 and my mom's a real estate agent. So after, you know, school and such, I'm at the real estate office and I'm watching these people have these problems. And I have all this software experience. Like at that time, like almost a decade of software experience. Right? So I was like, I'll just build some stuff so they'll quit complaining because the person I was sitting next to was like complaining. And so I built like a little utility and that expanded into a second utility. Fast forward a year, I had like a suite of real estate tools and then other agents heard about it and were like, oh, can we buy it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:09) And then a company, like one of the larger real estate brokerages in the United States heard about it. And they came down and they said, hey, we want to buy this from you. And I was like, nope. But I will partner with you as a, you can inject some capital into it and we can grow a business together. And they're like, okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:25) So I became a business partner, built that up, and then built a company. Had about 30 plus engineers after that, and then just grew. And then I started, for about a decade, I just did app development as like an agency with a small team of friends just from like the relationships I made during, you know, because, you know, when you sell a business, you get all these people are involved in the transactions, you get to meet lawyers and financiers and all. So I met those people selling my first company, and then they were like, hey, we're investing in this other company. Can you rebuild their systems and build a team?

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:58) And I said, yes. And then that translate, and so that just came ten years. And I was having my first kid, and I said, you know, do I want to just keep rebuilding, you know, apps that are getting capital injections for the next 20 years? It's like, no. So I saw people out there that were doing really well and were growing, you know, doing bigger sales and like a million dollars.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:16) Yeah. They were growing like $50, $100 million dollar companies. I was like, how are they doing this? And relationships was it. So I started like writing and doing a podcast. And then for the first two years, not much. But after that, man, it exploded and grew. And then as of today, it's like my full-time thing. We've got a team of about 15 people. And we just get to talk to awesome leaders like you. And it's just, I live the dream. And so I'm so grateful that I get to spend my time talking with people like you.

(Craig at 00:46:45) That's awesome. I mean, and, and but, and, you know, but people that are young and they're like trying to jump start from one to the other, like, you probably hear that a lot. Like, how did you get to your, you know, where you're at? And they're thinking that it's like, they just got to do one thing. Right? They're like, what's that one thing? You know? But you can't, you can't explain the, you know, those 15 years of pain you went through. Right? It's hard to, they just don't get it.

(Craig at 00:47:10) Right? So especially with something like you've built, it there wasn't an idea that just came in. There was, it was so many different things. There was so many twists and turns. And but it was because you kept pushing, and it's all about solving the problem. That's that's how you sold that first company. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:28) Yeah. And you have to just keep going and every time you make a mistake or fail or fall down, you just have to keep going into your every work day with like a sense of optimism. Like, it's going to work out this time. It's going to go. And then I made a really big decision in my early twenties when like I hadn't had as much success as I thought I'd have. Right? Because I'm 13 watching these guys become like 100 millionaires and stuff. And I'm like, why am I not there yet? I'm 13. I'm 14.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:54) I'm 15. I'm like so frustrated with myself. And finally, after I sold my first company and when I was in my early twenties and I sort of like went through a lot of the money because I didn't have good financial sense. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:08) And but then I made a decision. I said, I'm going to never give up. I'm going to die doing this. And if I, if I don't succeed and I'm 80 years old and I'm not as successful as I want to be and I die, I'll be okay with myself as long as I get up every day and try. And so that became the new bar.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:26) As I have to get up every day and try really hard, and then if I die and I'm not successful, I'm okay. But if I do anything less than that, if I screw around, if I mess up, I'm not going to make those mistakes of the things I can control.

(Craig at 00:48:40) That's really cool. And I hear you about selling your company in your twenties. That's the recipe for making very bad decisions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:49) Amen. Yes, it is, my friend.

(Craig at 00:48:53) But I feel the same way. Yeah. For us, we sold in 2000, and it took a good twenty years to build something back up that was really meaningful. You know? Fifteen, yeah, fifteen to twenty. That long. Long time. And it's you have to stay focused and not—the ultimate is to try not to do too much. You know, the ultimate distraction, trying to do too many things, trying to take on too much. And so you've stayed focused, and that's what's key. People ask me all the time, "Can you help me with this or that?" Or, "I got this." No. I can't. No. I can't. My brain can only handle so much. I've made that mistake. I'm not gonna help you with your pet project or, you know, I'm not gonna go fix this. No. I have to stay focused. You know, any spare time, whatever it is, it's on this. It's on this. It's not on doing other things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:54) I had to come up with my three R's for myself, which is reduce, refine, repeat. So I'm constantly looking at myself. How can I reduce this? How can I refine this? And then let's do that again.

(Craig at 00:50:05) Yes. Yeah. And it takes so much control to not do that, and you have to really screw up many times to realize.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:14) That's the game, man. The game is just reducing the distance between you doing that again.

(Craig at 00:50:20) It's easy to fall in that trap. So I'm glad you figured it out, and I'm still figuring it out. But that's—

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:27) No, I have not figured it out. I figured out that you just—I figured out that you're never perfect at it. The game is just trying not to screw up on that.

(Craig at 00:50:36) Well, it's like when you're running something, every day is there's, you know, highs and lows, but you just have to keep, like you said, you have to stay positive and keep pushing forward and not get distracted and not go on tangents, you know, because that is the wrong way to go. That's why it's like hobbies and stuff like that—there's fun things to do, but anything that's gonna be really great, that's gonna be amazing, takes, well, you know, almost 100% of your time. You know? The percentages that are available for other things, they can't be things, at least for me, they can't be things that require so much brainpower or tons of planning and huge projects. There's none of that in the personal life either. It's just it's fun and, you know, hang out with family, it's sports or whatever, but it's not building something or taking on something that's gonna take away or distract. You know, that's just—you have to be willing to accept. There's a lot of people that can do that. They can maybe go home after work and just build a deck or whatever it is that they can do, you know, in their spare time, but that's not me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:44) They don't have kids.

(Craig at 00:51:49) Yeah. Well, my kids are—they're actually going to college now. They're just about—one of them is in college and one of them is gonna go next year.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:58) Dude, you look young. That's awesome.

(Craig at 00:52:00) Yeah. Well, I met my—and that's another thing that's helped me stay focused, I think, too. I met my wife in first year of college. And so we've been, you know, attached ever since. Got married right after school. But I also didn't have the distraction of dating, which is, you know, which would be hard to—that'd be hard to do. But yeah, so she's been just really supportive of me over all these years. Just, you know, all the ups and downs of being entrepreneur and all the chaos. You know? So it's to have someone support you on that. And the kids too. They think I'm crazy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:39) Of course.

(Craig at 00:52:40) But going through startups and building this all and having kids and now they're going to college, it's crazy. It's crazy how time goes by, but it's crazy to think that the best time to start something, to build a product, to do that stuff is definitely when you have the least amount of distractions. And you have supportive people that are okay with it. So if you screw up or you fail, whatever, they're okay with it. You know? I was lucky to have that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:06) Yeah. Yeah. And we just keep, you know, trying to be useful to people and move the industry forward. Right?

(Craig at 00:53:14) It's really cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:15) Dude, this is great. I really enjoyed this. Your leadership advice and insight and perspective is pretty fantastic.

(Craig at 00:53:22) I appreciate it. This is cool for me. I've never done a podcast like this. I think I have talks like this with individuals sometimes, but it's really nice to get asked this stuff. Not many people ask.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:35) Yeah. Well, I'm curious, man. That's who I am. This show is—I built this show around me as a human. This is my favorite thing to do in the world.

(Craig at 00:53:42) Yeah. No, it's a great opportunity for anybody that wants to work for these companies. Right? I mean, it's one of the things I'm always telling to people, you know, young people in college or I've helped a lot of people go from this high school, don't know what the hell they wanna do to choosing a path and getting through college. I've got a history of kinda helping people with that. And one of the things that I've always told them is, there's something you wanna chase after, there's a person you wanna work for or a company or whatever, you just gotta just go to the top, you know? Find the people you wanna go work with or work for and learn about them and reach out. And you'd be surprised how few people do that, how few people reach out to the CEO or the CTO and say hi and introduce themselves and whatever, you know, as opposed to just submitting your resume to HR. It's just not the same effect, you know? So it seems like your platform would be great for that too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:46) Yeah. People find that. They listen to leaders all the time. I've got to go and tour around, you know, before COVID, and people were saying, "Oh, I listened to this guest, and I went and tracked them down, and I ended up moving across the world and working for them." So I'm curious, where do they learn more about your company and your culture and things of that nature?

(Craig at 00:55:03) Well, that's a great question. I think, you know, we have keepersecurity.com. There's a jobs section there, and there's also LinkedIn. But, you know, we do a ton of stuff on LinkedIn. But, you know, if anybody's interested, especially working for the company, I mean, Darren and I are always available. We—people reach out to us on LinkedIn, and we always respond. You know, we can pretty quickly identify if, you know, where someone would be great, hook them up with the right person to talk to. I think that's awesome. You know, very—like I said, I mean, yeah, recruiters ping us all the time and I have to, you know, like, that's not the kind of traffic I want. But, you know, individuals like engineers or product or sales or marketing, whatever, very few people just ping us and say, "Hey, I read about the company and I want in." Like, it's okay to do that. You can do that, you can reach out, you know. And that's what I would do, and that's what I have done. When I was looking for a job or, you know, during college or whatever, I would—whoever I wanted to work for, I would go reach out. I would just send that email directly to that person. Right? And that's what I think you gotta do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:13) And it works.

(Craig at 00:56:14) Yeah. Totally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:15) I've got some of my best interviews that way. Yeah. I just email people and they're like, "Yeah."

(Craig at 00:56:20) That's right. That's right. Because no one does it. Everyone's afraid to do it. Why? Why are you afraid to just reach out? Why do you think you have to go, you know, be so formal or go through, you know—yeah, you could submit your resume online. That's cool. But you're gonna get a much higher response rate if you just go and send it to the person who leads it. Right? So but people don't realize it. I tell everybody that. Hopefully, people listen.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:45) Yeah. And you know what, though? The way I started this podcast, the guy I was listening to, Gary Vaynerchuk, he was giving this information for free out there of how to grow a brand and how to do this and how to meet people. And he goes, "The reason why I'm giving it for free"—and he owned, at the time, it was an $800 million marketing agency. He goes, "The reason I'm doing this for free is because 99.9 percent of you won't do anything with it. Because you guys don't have discipline, and you're lazy." And I said, you know what I said? I said, "I have discipline. I'm gonna be that point 0 1%." And then I did it. And I'm here, and it worked. Yeah. It just took four years and several hundred episodes and a lot of work.

(Craig at 00:57:18) Yeah. That's awesome. You're right. And I don't understand why, you know, it's so easy to just find a person and reach out and say, "Hey, you know, I love what you do, or I read all about you, and here's how I think I contribute or whatever." You know? But very few people just do that. It's easy and it works.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:39) Well, now everyone listening has the information. So they have to overcome any self-doubt and just take action.

(Craig at 00:57:44) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:44) That's right. I wanna do a call to action to wrap up. How can people download the application? How can they learn more? How can they become a customer?

(Craig at 00:57:53) Yeah. So downloading is really easy. Just search for Keeper on the App Store. So you can search for it on Apple, Mac, iOS, Android, or just Google it, keepersecurity.com. So you can just install it for free in all your devices. So it's free for one device. During the first thirty days, we give all the features so you can kinda try everything. And then after thirty days, you can keep using it on one device for free, or you can just upgrade to the paid version. So the paid version gives you unlimited devices, all the features, syncing, all the advanced capabilities of the platform. And then there's a family plan, so if you wanna bring in your family members, you can have up to five family members on the plan as well. And so you can share passwords among each other. You can also, you know, manage and control things a bit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:42) Nice. And then your PR person, Kate, she just messaged us. She said keeper.io/moderncto, a demo of Keeper for business and receive a three-year personal plan. But you did leave something out, Craig. If you don't wanna wait, you can click the button and upgrade because I upgraded instantly. I haven't even added one password yet.

(Craig at 00:58:59) No. That's awesome. And that's, you know, that's the nice thing about that is now you're definitely gonna get—you're gonna get your stuff moved over. Right? So you already paid for it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:08) Yeah, man.

(Craig at 00:59:08) That's why the paid model is great. But, yeah, so we also have the business version. So we have the consumer version for personal individual, like what you just signed up for. And there's the family version, which is, you know, five users, unlimited devices, all that. And then we have a business version, an enterprise version. So we sell from very small individual user all the way up to users with over 200,000 employees. So we have very, very large—some of the largest in the world that are using our product. So we have to build for all that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:45) That sounds fun.

(Craig at 00:59:47) It's all one platform. So but, yeah, so it's easy just to—keepersecurity.com.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:54) 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.