Transcript
Narrator:
Welcome to Cyber 909, your source for wit and wisdom and cybersecurity and beyond. On this podcast, your host, veteran chief security officer and cyber aficionado, Den Jones taps his vast network to bring you guests, stories, opinions, predictions, and analysis you won't get anywhere else. Join us for Cyber 909, soon to become 909 exec. New name, same podcast.
Den:
Hey everybody. Welcome to another Ask us anything myself, Den Jones, the founder and CEO of 909 Cyber. And we've got Advisory CISO, master of Ceremonies extraordinaire, Mr. Aaron Wurthmann. Thanks Aaron for partnering on this one. And why don't you introduce the format for today?
Aaron:
Yeah, so today we're going to do things a little different. We're going to do ask us anything, but we're going to do ask us anything. We are going to ask each other anything. And by that I mean we're going to use the spinning wheel as a weapon against ourself. So for those unfamiliar in this podcast, what we do is we use a spinning wheel to cycle through questions that folks have submitted to us. So the spinning wheel, we'll pick them at random. And in this case, we're going to cycle through some of the questions that are commonly asked some of the guests that come onto this podcast. And we're going to ask ourselves these questions. Are you ready, Dan?
Den:
Perfect. Yeah. And as a reminder for the audience, we are watching the chat on LinkedIn as well. This is part of LinkedIn live. Feel free to submit some questions. If you feel the need, I guess go for it.
Aaron:
I mean, maybe if we get through all spinning wheel questions, we'll get to some of those. If not, we'll add them on to the next, ask us anything.
Den:
Sounds good.
Aaron:
All right, here we go. Spin that wheel. Okay. And this is your first time watching, just so I'm putting it out there. I always mess up spinning wheel. Always, always. There will be some sort of flubber on, I forgot to delete a question or an ad will pop up and we'll have to sit through that. Just technology. Bear with us. We
Den:
Go, it is a free spinning wheel.
Aaron:
It's true. You can get what you pay for at spinning wheel. All right, spinning wheel. How do you personally define personal growth? And what are some key indicators that signal growth in one's life? Man, we're going deep, just deep right out the bat here. Love it.
Den:
Fuck. Fuck. The first question, we'll have
Aaron:
To break this one down.
Den:
Personally defined personal growth. So there's two personals in there, so that's a little personal. Two personals and lots of growth in this question. Yeah, a lot of growth. So interesting, right? And there is two personals actually. There's your personal life and your professional life, and I think they go hand in hand quite a lot over the years as you grow. So for me, in my professional life, I look at it, I want to be providing a legacy. And by legacy in leadership, I look at it as being the advice I give to my direct reports. Somewhere in their career, they give that advice to their direct reports and then they give that advice to theirs. So ultimately, you're really impacting a broader number of people, not just your one direct report. In my personal life, I look at it as I grow my career, how do I grow my career but not lose sight of what I think is important, which is family, friends and experiences and your emotional wellness. So a lot of the time in my career, I totally lost sight of all of that. And I think one part of my personal growth was recognizing I lost sight of that. And then the next part of personal growth is doing something about it. What about you, Aaron? How's
Aaron:
I don't know that I would add or I don't know how much more I would add to that because you nailed it. I think I've doubled down on legacy though, doubling down on that because I mean, you hit the nail on the head there that we aren't just what we say to our direct reports at the time that we say it, but our legacy beyond that. So for me, and as well as for you, we have direct reports that are now in leadership positions at some unicorn companies or some companies that are in the Fortune 1000 or whatever. And knowing that and knowing that they're still carrying forward some of the lessons that we taught them or some of the lessons that we taught each other at with our time each other, with each other is powerful. We're not just the experience that we had that one time where we are, the experiences that we've had in the lifetime that we have. So for me, I'd say that how I define personal growth is just that. It's this ever changing, ever evolving, not becoming stagnant. And when you do, maybe it's time to think about retirement or think about hanging up. Not for me, not for you, but maybe for someone,
Den:
Hey, I think about it a lot. We're just not there yet. One of the things in personal growth, I've been fortunate over the years to have a brand coach work with my teams at Adobe and Cisco, so personal brand and team brand and trying to understand that in every interaction you have with people, your brand is on show, whether you're conscious of it or not. So I think that's a huge thing. And then yeah, shout out, we're going to have Victoria who was that person on the podcast in a couple of weeks. So I'm looking forward to that episode.
Aaron:
Yeah, crucially important. You know what I will add to that though, I think one of the things that I haven't, and maybe this question will come up, maybe it won't. One of the things that I needed to learn along the way was if you want people to like you need to people, and I had to learn that along my career path because many that watch this and many and many others, I started as a cis admin in a closet somewhere and really took to heart that I'm in a dark closet. I don't really want want to talk to people sort of mentality. And in order to break myself of that, I had to start to people. And that meant getting out of that closet and talking
Den:
To folks. And as you mentioned, I think one of my biggest struggles, I mean shit, I've got a lot of struggles, but one of the biggest ones was empathy. And I had an old mentor of mine tell me for years in the early two thousands, it's like then show more empathy, learn empathy. And I had such a big ego, I moved from Scotland to the US and I'd go to work and pretty much sometimes soccer shorts and bloody flip flops. I didn't give a shit. I just thought, fuck it, I know what I can do. And as you grow through your career, the recognition that some of your personality traits, they're just never going to serve you well as you grow your career. So you've got to figuring that out and the empathy thing like, oh man, even to this day, sometimes that's heel for me. I have to work at it.
Aaron:
I don't see that in you, but of course I'm biased. Curiosity, what do they call flip flops in Scotland? Do they call 'em flip flops?
Den:
Yeah, they call 'em flip flops. Do you know why when you're walking, the noisy make goes flip, flop, flip, flip, flip, flip. But some people here call them sandals, and I could never get on board with that one. The other thing that I can't get on board with in a fashion sense is people wearing bloody socks with their flip flops or sanders. I'm like, what the fuck
Aaron:
Are you doing? Who you are? You know who are, stop
Den:
It. It's not me. It's not me. By the way, I have many other fashion full PAs that I've met or seen since I moved to the US white socks. When you're wearing dark shoes and dark trousers. Oh yeah, we don't call them pants, by the way. Pants is what you wear under the trousers.
Aaron:
Right? Right. All right, ready for another
Den:
One? Okay, keep going with the serious questions.
Aaron:
Alright, spinning wheel. Here we go. Oh, by the way, I forgot to delete that question. Classic. All right. What strategies can mentors employ to provide value guidance without stifling the mentees independence and growth within their career? So this is mentors providing guidance, not stifling the mentee's independence.
Den:
I had a conversation that I think speaks a little to this a couple of days back, and the conversation went along the lines of their boss asked them a question and it was almost like before saying, what do you think? They shared their opinion. So as a leader, when you share your opinion of the question, you're almost coerced in your subordinate to go along with your answer. If you do it the other way around and you pose the question and say, Hey, I'm curious to know your thoughts and then let them share their thoughts, you don't need to share your thoughts. Now after they share their thoughts, you might decide that sharing your thoughts or probing and asking further follow-on questions, that's a better way to empower your employee. Again, something which has taken me a bit to learn over the years.
Aaron:
You know what I'd add to that or
Den:
Subtract
Aaron:
By saying, some of the folks that I advise, I would also call them mentees in a certain regard
In their CEOs, CTOs, et cetera, that are starting companies and they're looking for advice from me. And this is usually a prolonged period over a year or two, get them to a certain stage and then send them along their merry way. And what I'd say is, especially when they're folks that are your peers, there's a lot of listening to your point. It is me listening to them on what it's that they need help with, want help with, and letting them sort of work through the problem themselves, which just brings me back to those psychology courses that I once took once upon a time or in a previous and a previous life, thought that those classes were going to be of some value to me and going through that training. And it definitely holds true. So you want folks to sort of come to their own conclusions through their own thought patterns and give advice where they need it. I don't want to say better, but I want to say it sticks more. It allows that independent thought because that's what you want. You want them to be self-sufficient in their thought process.
Den:
And the one thing that's critical is don't just give unsolicited advice. A lot of people in life struggle with this one personally and professionally, it's a struggle. So your friend has a problem and you instantly want to jump in and solve the problem, which I'm guilty of myself. And I think the one thing to have a clear brain and to avoid conflict and also build stronger relationships is ask them if they're open to advice or ask them. And it's not even advice sometimes. Are you open to a different perspective?
Aaron:
Yeah,
Den:
You might hear now in our professional capacity, like you say, we deal with clients who contact us founders, CEOs, and they're quite often asking our opinion on how they sell to people, how they go to market, because we've been practitioners for decades. So they want to get that understanding. And it just so happens, you and I were talking before we went live about a sales kickoff keynote that I'm working with a client on, and it's 800 people in their organization. It's a big opportunity to get in front of 800 sales professionals and tell them to stop killing us.
There are brilliant salespeople out there, but there's also salespeople that from a communication or brand perspective or their honesty, their disingenuine nature, there's a blend. And I'm not saying they're all like that, so Don don't kill us on LinkedIn and shit, but the reality is that is a good opportunity for us to advise other people, other industries or other professions on how you can engage with us. It's a great thing for us, likewise, to advise our team or other people we're mentoring. So I look at it, the biggest thing for me is honesty. Genuine authenticity is more important than most other things in the world.
Aaron:
You know what? I think we should double back to that word authenticity too. I think there's definitely some room to let people know when you can't help them. Look, I don't think I can help you on that particular topic. I think this other person might be able to help you on that topic, or whatever the case is, right? Don't be afraid to do that too. If you're mentoring someone,
Den:
And I think it's fine for people in their capacity, so whether you're a salesperson or a professional trying to work with your internal teams to be honest about either, I don't know, something, I'll go figure it out, or really, this is not the right way to solve your problem. Have you thought of it this way? Sometimes changing that question and twisting the question around will take you down a whole different path. I think
Aaron:
If you do, however, if you are someone who says, I don't know the answer to that, let me go figure that out, you now of carrying the ball, the expectation of whoever it's talking to is going to be that you reach back out. Just be aware that you've made a commitment and that the other personally they're in, especially if they're a buyer, is going to be expecting you to do that
Den:
Same
Aaron:
Ratio.
Den:
Yeah. Well, as you and I both know, because we've worked together a few times, is talk is cheap. Your words need the action to go along with the action. And we've both built a reputation up in the valley of actually getting shit done and following through. We do what we say we will do. And for me, that goes back to the brand, the reputation, the authenticity and trust. You can trust that if we say we'll do something, we're going to do it because our reputation and brand is more important to us than that one client or that one person we're helping. There's no point in saying something. We can do it, and then we turn up and we can't deliver.
Aaron:
That
Den:
For me is the worst.
Aaron:
And speaking of shameless plug for that sourdough article, yeah,
Den:
Exactly.
Aaron:
On some podcast on a previous one, a year and a half ago, two years ago, almost two years ago at this point, then I made that promise of writing a sourdough article that was going to relate to my career on one of our podcasts, and I recently did it. Why? Because I said I was I, I would, right? For no other reason than I said I would. And it was, yeah, it was jokey, it was quirky, it was sort of meant in jest when I said it, but I said I would. And so I did.
Den:
And now funnily enough, funnily enough, that article got us some of the best feedback. And from a marketing perspective, it was, let's call it, it was marketing sourdough gold because it actually, it got a lot of those impression things, which I'm learning in this role that those things apparently matter.
Aaron:
Yep. All right, next question. Getting deep and personal again, I like this. Can you share a journey and what inspired you to pursue your current career path? Second part of that question is what were some pivotal moments along the way? I think let's take the first part of that, share a journey and what inspired you to pursue your current career path then?
Den:
Yeah, so I've actually blogged about this before when we were at Banyan, which was I was a 16-year-old kid, a postman in the shitty miserable weather of Scotland, walking the streets. And I was also a musician. You see, I have a music studio, I love music, I love to write it, it's great therapy. But I went to a friend's house and he had all this music gear, more gear than I could imagine ever having, and I asked him what he'd done, and I'm like, how can you afford all this? And he went, oh, I work at Sun Microsystems, you should look into something like this as a career. And then I'm like, how do I do that? He's like, go to college, and blah, blah, blah. So literally I enrolled in college, I resigned my job, I went to college. And all these years later, I have music here. Now, funnily enough though, Bruce Percy's, this guy's name, he's a photographer now. He's got great work. So shout out to him for getting me on this path, but he still has more gear than me. I'm like, fuck. And I have no desire to be a photographer, but I admire his drive and enthusiasm for both the creative of photography and music. And he got out of tech probably two decades ago or longer.
Aaron:
There's some interesting parallels there with the Harry who also music
Den:
Photographer. Yeah, I've got a few photographer friends. And actually working at Adobe, you were quite quickly to gather a few more,
Aaron:
You think? Alright. Yeah. We've talked about this before on what led me, but we'll cover it briefly. I went to local tech school here in San Jose at the time, it was Master's Institute. I went for graphic design. I was a Photoshop user. In fact, when the now headquarters was built, the Photoshop user groups used to happen there. And I would go to those, and originally I was going to be a graphic designer, but I also was working, my day job was working at startups as either sort of clerical work, but also like everything because a startup, so you're preparing the computers for people, you're doing everything you can for people. And at some point somebody asked me, do you want to just do the IT work? And I told them, no, of course not, because I'm the office manager and why would I do that? I have autonomy as the office manager. And then they told me how much it paid and I said, nevermind anything that I just said, I would like to be the IT person. And so I became the IT person. Unfortunately, what happened with Master's Institute during that time period was that they closed the doors and I never finished my graphic design degree, darn it. But it led me into a career of being an IT professional. That's all right. So what are some of the pivotal moments along the way? Since I have the mic, I'll talk.
I've been at a number of startups that didn't make it. I would say that those are pivotal moments. They teach you. They teach lessons that you didn't think that you needed to learn. They teach you a lack of a better term failure. I'm not one to shy away from that word failure. I don't mask it by calling them challenges. I don't mask it by saying lessons learned. There were some lessons learned, of course, but I think failure is sometimes failure and we should own the word. So I worked at a number of startups with mixed red flags along the way, and I've had some successes along the way too. NewStar, of course, Marketo, which is what led me to Adobe and meeting Dan. So those pivotal moments of both failing and success I hold near and dear.
Den:
Yeah. Now you used the word failure a few times there, so I jotted a little note down there. So I want to talk a little bit about the perception. So I done one of those I love doing. I find quotes every week that resonate with me, and I'll drop them out on LinkedIn and hopefully inspires some people. And one of the ones was, I'll learn this a long time ago, is someone who makes no mistakes isn't working. The other thing was it's not necessarily failure if you learn something from it, and that lesson is something that helps build you stronger, harder, faster, whatever. So I use that word really lightly these days because I think personally and professionally, we're all on a journey of learning. So for someone to become a master of their craft, really good at something, you have to fail many times as part of the growth journey.
So I do remember some epic fuckups though. I mean, I dunno if I'd call them failures, but there was a time where my team shut down all of Adobe's network as we were on our zero trust journey. And that was a mistake. That was not a good day. But I wouldn't say it was a failure. It wasn't brilliant though. The good thing in our career, nobody dies when we make a mistake, generally speaking, but you do get in trouble. So I think that word is a word that people should use with a little caution and think of how the recipient is going to take it. But then B, are you motivating them or are you demoralizing them? Absolutely. I think about that. I think of that a bit more now than I've ever done.
Aaron:
Yeah. Yeah. I like what you said there. I would never ever tell somebody else that they failed at something that would demoralize them. For me, I just own it because I think there's power in saying to somebody, I did a thing, I made a mistake, and I learned from it. And not calling it a lesson learned or a challenge or anything beyond that. I hear a lot of folks at our level try to find another word besides the word failure. And I get it, I get it. It's a branding thing. It's a way of switching up the narrative. I'm not taking anything away from them. I think just for me, it's more authentic to say I failed at something.
Den:
I
Aaron:
Brushed myself up, I reflected on it, and I thought, this is how I'm going to do it better the next time.
Den:
I think your internal narrative is a good way to use it. Right.
Aaron:
So with that, there is a failure question in here, and I'm wondering if spinning wheel is going to give it to us. So we're going to spin spinning wheels pretty good at this every now and then. Nope, not this time. All right. As technology evolves, what key skills should emerging leaders focus on developing to stay relevant and lead their organizations effectively in the coming years? We talked about it already. It's empathy, it
Den:
You're
Aaron:
A leader, you're leading people.
Den:
I think that curiosity, Aaron, right?
Aaron:
Yeah. Empathy and curiosity. That's good.
Den:
Yeah. I mean, you got to remain curious. And like you said earlier, Hey man, if that shit stops, then maybe retire. Because the reality is it is not also about learning technology as a leader, I think it's important to learn about technology in general as a leader, but I think it's important to be really curious and understand why or how that technology may benefit or curious the more you grow in your career, then ideally there's people in your organization who are really looking at the details and the technology. So it is now a case of being curious to ask them why they're looking at one thing versus another, and have they drawn the parallels to how that will help your business scale or be more profitable or s risk.
Aaron:
Yeah, I like that too, because it allows them to be experts in their field and you are not the expert, and that's what you want. You want your folks to be experts in something. You want to teach you in it too. So if you are the one being curious, asking them those questions, that's going to allow for that. In an era of AI and data privacy concerns, what ethical responsibilities do tech leaders have and how can they ensure their company's prioritize ethical practices in product development?
Den:
I mean, I think there's a couple of things. One is what data they share with AI platforms I think is vitally important. I've said this before and I'm still subscribing to it, and maybe a recent AI platform that's been under some scrutiny kind of demonstrates this. I still believe there's going to be some AI platforms that get breached. And the data that's in there, there's two things that will either happen. One is the data will be exfil and then shared in the dark web. So if you've been put in personal information or proprietary information up there, you're running that risk. But the second thing is they might inject something into that platform without that vendor knowing that that's happened. So poisoning bit of a different scale.
Aaron:
I would add to that by saying I think people are forgetting that the intent with all of this is that this is an artificial intelligence. It's literally there in the name of it. And so if you are treating the artificial intelligence as if it were another human, we might be better served. So I wouldn't give Den, for example, my social security number. I trust him. He's great, but he doesn't need
Den:
To know. Not with that nonsense, not with that. I'd probably tweet that out. Actually, that sounds like good information to share with the public.
Aaron:
That's absolutely true. So why are we treating artificial intelligence as if it were another huge database? It's not, right? It's artificial intelligence. So treat it like it's another entity, treat it, it's another human, and put rules around it as such rule-based access around it as such, treat put least, least privileges around it as such. Scrub the data out of it as such. Treat privacy concerns around it, just like that, so on and so on. So I think just putting you yourself in that mindset and putting your company in that mindset better serves us all. So just think about it like that slight plug for Steve Wilson and his book, but in it, he talks about Hal from the Kubrick movie 2001, the Space Odyssey.
Den:
Space Odyssey, yeah.
Aaron:
And how Hal had too many privileges and spoiler alert, killed almost all the crew. Well, how was Hal able to do that? Right? He had too many privileges. He was given a set of instructions, which was success of the mission at all costs. And so he did what he needed to do. Maybe don't do that.
Den:
Yeah, not at all. I think that at all costs was the few words there.
Aaron:
Yep, yep. Alright, so here's a fun one. And again, while we did write these questions, we didn't write them for today, just how can hobbies serve as a platform for networking and relationship building amongst peers in the tech field? And what examples can you share from your own experience? Shall I start?
Den:
Yeah.
Aaron:
Is this question written for me, or did you know this question for me,
Den:
Dan? It's funny because on the pod we've got such a diverse group of people. So we're slamming together and I, I'm using chat GPT for a lot of these, and then I'm massaging them and then I'm like, okay, this is a good one. Or it makes you think of other things. So my use of AI sometime is a seed of inspiration that I can then play around with and talking about seeds of inspiration. I mean, my musical journey, it's amazing how many people in music are also in tech. So when I go to music events or whether it's concerts or whether it's meetups or other things like that, the number of people in my network that I hang out with, it does, it goes from everything from CTOs to CIOs to other engineers and stuff like that. So I look at it like my personality type. Also, I'm a little bit more of an extrovert. I'm certainly not an introvert. So the reality for me is I can easily go to an event, I can start to have conversations with people. I look up and dig up interesting people. I try to learn from a diverse group. And I think in the music business, I find a lot of diversity there, which is great. So yeah, it has served me very well and continues to serve me very well.
Aaron:
Yeah, what I'd add to that is call back to what I said earlier, if you want to be liked, you have to people. And a great way of doing that is finding common interests. So whether it's music, whether it's art, whether it's whatever, baking, pickleball, whatever it is, going to find people with similar interests or while you're networking at an event, asking people, Hey, what interesting projects are you working on something beyond, what is the weather like? We all know what the weather's like. We were just outside, right? Stop asking that. Please.
Or how's the weather? Or whatever variation of that that you like, right? So ask interesting questions, get interesting comments, start to learn to people, and you can do that through understanding beyond the surface of people. What advice would you give someone? Just actually, you know what? I'm going to put a different spin on this just because we're live, and if you went back, I don't know how long you been doing 30 years, it's called 30 years. If you went back 30 years and you gave yourself advice that you would actually take, what advice would you give yourself?
Narrator:
Oh fuck.
Aaron:
The trick here is it's got to be advice that you would actually take, because we both know we probably wouldn't listen, but what advice would you give yourself that you think you could have taken back then
Den:
30 years ago?
Aaron:
Yeah,
Den:
Buy Apple stock as quick as you can. Nice. That's good one. Yeah, buy as much of it and don't sell it for love nor money until it hits a thousand dollars a share. But that sounds more like time traveler advice. So I think career advice, I would certainly say the brand, I would say recognize you have a brand, it's either unconscious or conscious and start working on that now, because for so many years I didn't. And I think if someone gave me that advice 20, 30 years ago, I might have listened to that.
Aaron:
I really like the brand and the impressions that other people have of us expanding inner circle. So not just the right, these days, we call it networking, but maybe 30 years ago we didn't, 30 years ago, we were such a sort of tight bunch. Maybe beyond that. I think other things I would probably tell myself would be something like a, you're going to have some career choices to just make sure that you collect all the facts before you make them or make decisions with eyes wide open. Just sort of things like that. I think I would've taken that advice
Den:
Versus
Aaron:
Advice, don't join this company, join this company, or whatever. I don't think even from future self, even if I appeared time travel, I'd been like, whatever, dude, that's your problem. You have lots of gray hair. I'm not listening to you or whatever, right?
Den:
Yeah. Now let's twist that question another way. What advice have you been given over the years that you ignored that you wish you hadn't?
Aaron:
Yeah. So you and I talked about this off podcast a couple of weeks ago. Great. I might make another commitment here. I'm thinking about a book. I'm not going to commit to it, but I am thinking about a book and there will be some chapters on this in the book, so I don't want to give too much away, but there have several times been advice that I've been given that I wasn't ready for. And some of that was tactical. For example, I was at a company and the CTO made the suggestion that I start to equate my spend to queries that our business was based on, number of queries a customer would do based my spend to number of queries, ignored. It, didn't understand, it, didn't care. Later, as I became more business focused, I understood the value in that. There's been times where people have tried to help me with problem solving earlier in my career. I think the exact advice given was, Erin, you need to anticipate the roadblocks that are going to be headed your way and then avoid them completely not ready for that advice. Didn't understand it. I do understand it now, I'll say that I think it was phrased badly, but I do understand it now and I appreciate it now, but 20 years ago it fell flat.
Den:
I like how you say about not being ready for it. I think there is a timing thing and a motivation thing. People get feedback or advice, and let's just say it's called feedback. People get feedback, but sometimes they're not open to it. And I think the one thing is you don't make a change in your life unless you're motivated to make the change. And for me on that one, oh God, people could still say this today, actually, they should be like, listen more, talk less. Right? And fuck, it's my Achilles. I'm a born storyteller. Sometimes it's bullshit, but that's just my DNA. So for someone to say, you need to talk less, that's not a helpful piece of feedback. There's nothing in there now for someone to tell me that in order for my team to be more successful, it's vital that they get given the microphone or the bat on sometimes. And I just sit in the background and don't open my mouth. There's other ways, there's other ways to get to that goal, but I look at it, I've always been curious, but I think I've spent too much time trying to prove to people that I've got an ounce of intelligence. And the only mechanism to do that was me speaking about it. Absolutely. These days I'm like, I don't care if anyone thinks I'm smart or not,
I don't need to prove it. So yeah,
Aaron:
Right.
Den:
Next question. I'm sorry.
Aaron:
What's funny about the listen talk less thing is who advice? Who are you giving that advice to? Because if you give that advice to everybody, then nobody would talk, right? So we'd all just be staring at each other into our monitors or our conference rooms. So somebody has to talk.
Den:
Yeah, somebody does. And by the way, oh, sorry. And we
Aaron:
Can't all communicate in questions. We can't be like, oh, how would you solve that? I don't know. How would you solve it? I don't know. How would you solve it? That's not going to work either, everybody.
Den:
Yeah, that's not going to work. And as I was interrupting you there, I apologize, but it reminds me of something I found on social media years ago, and I printed it off and I put it on my office door before you'd walk in the door, and it basically said, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. I just got enthusiastic about my thought. And literally that kind of describes me as a personality type. I'm like, man, I was just too excited to get that thought out. Yeah, right. Next question.
Aaron:
Interesting. See, every now and then, spinning wheel does weird things. I just pulled up another hobby question. All right. In what ways do your hobbies encourage creative thinking and problem solving abilities that are crucial for effective leadership and tech in the tech industry?
Den:
I dunno if they're crucial. I mean, so let me bounce away from my love for music just now, because there's too many parallels there. That'd be easy. I have got into mushroom growing.
Aaron:
What kind of mushrooms? What's
Den:
Going on here? Well, not the good ones yet, actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You'll be the first to know. You'll be the first or maybe the second. But in that process, it's really technical. There's a little chemistry involved. There's a lot of research that has to happen. There's a lot of trial and error. I could use the word failure fuckups, but there's a lot of trial and error as I go down that path. And I am also a foodie, and I love, I'm kind of like the farm to table. I like to know where my stuff's coming from. So for me, growing my own vegetables or mushrooms and stuff like that, I think it's fun because I didn't realize is not how easy, but how accessible drawing mushrooms were. And then the health benefits of many of these mushrooms. So I look at it, it forces me to do more research.
It forces me to understand. I watch a lot of videos, read up a lot of stuff. And any endeavor in leadership is about learning something new, staying abreast of technology, understanding what levers you pull in order to be more successful or less successful, what things might you need to change in order to get some better productivity or better growth? And in this case, better growth in my mushrooms. Yeah. And then, yeah, at some point there might be alternative paths to check. Maybe there's other strains of mushrooms I want to try and grow in the future. How complicated are those to grow and how may I proceed? And there might be a legal ramification to some of that shit too. So you need to be thoughtful.
Aaron:
Yeah. Another shameless plug for this sourdough article, not going to cover that again, what I'll add is the other hobby of mine, which is pickleball. So I play pickleball at least twice a week.
Den:
So you and all other failed tennis players, I mean, is that it
Aaron:
There? Or tennis players that just want people to play with Everybody's playing pickleball. That's
Den:
Funny. Yeah.
Aaron:
So I play with a partner who is my partner. And so one of my friends will occasionally ask me this question as a joke, but it's a very serious question, which is, or I think it's a serious question, which is what has playing pickleball taught you about B2B sales? Alright. He has it jokingly, but in all seriousness, you lose, we lose, and you got to pick yourself back up after you lose. You have to pick your partner back up after they lose. There can be, especially when you're playing with someone that you have a relationship with outside of a team, outside of your pickleball team, there can be a bit of blame that happens back and forth. And so you need to figure those sort of things out just like you would in the corporate atmosphere. You need to figure out who's at fault, no pun intended, who's at fault for something without blame, right? Because blame does not help the team at all whatsoever. But you do need to learn from the mistakes that are made. And when you lose or fail to hit on that again, although I'd say losing isn't failing in pickleball, I would just say losing is losing.
You need to figure out how you're going to get better, how you're going to progress. So those sort of things have taught me a lot. Joking aside on the B2B sales thing, hopefully you aren't losing way more than you're winning in pickleball. But I imagine, I know I was in sales once upon a time that you're going to lose more than you're going to win in sales, right?
Den:
I mean, there is a great parallel to that because the reality is there's one prospect and there's four or five vendors on a pickleball tournament. I dunno how many teams that are, but the reality is there is only one winner. There you go. Everybody else didn't win. So then everybody else internally says, okay, what do we need to do? So we win next time? Or our win ratio is better. So I think there's some great parallels there.
Aaron:
Speaking of parallels, spinning wheel knows best. How do you define success for yourself and what role does personal fulfillment play in that definition?
Den:
Well, we recently launched a company, so I think my personal and professional success and how things transpire for me is more case of, I look at it in two ways. One is my role in promoting the brand of the company, how well people get to understand who we are, why we exist, and how we can help. I think that's vitally important. And personally, there's pride, right? There's pride in how we approach and how we behave and how we act and how we serve. I think the reality is we didn't start this because we thought we were ever going to fail at it. We started it because we knew there was a market. We knew people struggle to protect themselves at what I'll call a reasonable cost. We know there's companies out there that spend way too much money buying shit that they never take advantage of fully.
And we also know that we bring expertise to this market and we truly can help people be more successful in their roles. So I take pride in that. I take pride in the fact that when we do speak to people, whether, and sometimes we'll speak to people and we will give free advice. We're just jumping on a call. We're building a relationship. It's part of growing the awareness of our brand and who we are. And then other times we will charge for the advice and we have subscription models and all sorts for that very purpose. So for me, it's a case of I love where we are in the journey. The one thing a lot of founders have said to me is patience. Patience is absolutely critical because you're never building the business fast enough. You never will build your business fast enough because every quarter, every year, all you're going to talk about is how do we generate more and build more? But for me, being patient, especially in the early days, that's vital.
Aaron:
Yeah. My personal professional life is so blended, it's hard not to separate success in either one of those two. I don't want to go down the, how do you separate the two work-life balance look like? Because honestly for me personally, I've made the choice to blend the two so much that there is no separation between the two. Right? There is no work-life balance because they are the same who you see here, me here on the podcast, that's who I am out on the street. I may not be wearing a nice shirt, I might be wearing a t-shirt and it might say Lincoln Park on it, or Pink Floyd or something else that you could try to use.
Den:
It could say, I love Dan Jones on it.
Aaron:
It definitely says I love Dan Jones on it, but that's underneath my Lincoln Parker Pink Floyd
Den:
Shirt. Okay.
Aaron:
Yeah, yeah. It's an underground it. It's on my pants. Am I using that word right now?
Den:
Yeah. No, no. Let's keep going.
Aaron:
You're having a good podcast when you can make den blush. These are
Den:
Success when you make me the same color as my cup.
Aaron:
Hold on real quick. Just going to make sure check done.
Den:
Success.
Aaron:
Alright. Okay. So anyway, so my life is so blended that success of my career or this, the work that we do here very much blends into my personal life. In my personal life. I've had some great successes and I consider my personal life to be very fulfilling that That's good. I'm able to say that.
Den:
You talk about work-life balance, right? So I think the concept of work-life balance is evolving. And I mentioned this early on at the start of the show, which is I look at it like it's about experiences, it's about personal connections. We work to live, we don't live to work. So I believe in that. I also loved my concept in Adobe where I was like, no meeting Friday. And I tried to push that at Cisco and I'll be pushing that here. And it's really about no standing meetings really sometime to do some work, sometime to get ready for the weekend and chill. Now the reality is, I think the way, especially after the pandemic, the way a lot of people have evolved is I'm no longer a Monday to Friday, nine till five, I'll do my job, but I'll maybe take an hour out to do lunch with my wife or partner.
I maybe go take the kids to the dentist office, I'll maybe come back and I'll do an hour after dinner. And when people want to work, I think is evolving. And so that balance is just important to understand that you still have to think about a balance in your life where you get your personal time and your experiences. If it's all work, you burn out and you're no good to anybody. If you're working 60 hours in that week, all of a sudden we need you to burst. You don't have it in the tank. So I think there's got to be, I really believe there's got to be a happy medium somewhere where we don't kill our employees and we don't kill our team.
Aaron:
Absolutely. Got time for one more?
Den:
Yeah, let's do one more before we wrap up This shit show.
Aaron:
Alright, so this was the failure one that I alluded to earlier. Can you share a story about failure that led to significant personal growth and what lessons did you take away from that experience? If you need me to start, I can, I've read this question before I put it into a spinning wheel on
Den:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Send
Aaron:
Me down a path.
Den:
Go ahead. You can go first. Yeah, yeah.
Aaron:
Alright. So won't say the name of the company. I consider this to be a failure, but again, I just use the word as a way of owning a lesson learned or a challenge or what have you, right? I learned some lessons when I made this quote mistake, but I joined a company won't say the name of the company where there were a lot of red flags. So mission wasn't there, vision wasn't there. No assemblance of culture. I took those all to be challenges that I could solve. I joined at a leadership position and I felt like I could do all of those things.
So I saw that as a challenge. In retrospect, if you are joining a company and you are not the CEO, it's debate on whether or not you own culture for the greater part of the company, right? Culture should come from CEO O and with a agreement between the ceo, EO and their staff. But the CEO needs to drive it. If the CEO EO is not driving it, the CEO is not interested in culture, the CEO EO is probably not sticking around for long and that's the reason why they're not interested in it. And that should have been maybe the final red flag. I was not in a mindset to listen to any of my red flags. I ignored all red flags and then joined this company. I consider that to be a failure, although obviously I've learned lots of lessons along the way. I'm glad that I did it because like all humans, we learn more from our failures than we do from our successes. And for me, that was huge growth. Huge, huge, huge growth learning from that singular experience than not having done it.
Den:
And I think there's many times in your career you're going to look back with regret. And I always say to people, try to let go of the bags. Don't carry those bags, that baggage of all the things you regret over the years gets so big after a while it just weighs you down and slows you down and you stop. So I look back, there's things in my career, there's moves I should have made or could have made, and at the end of it, it's in the past
I got to be grateful and show gratitude for everything that's happened in my career. Got me to this point here. And I look at this point here as being probably the best opportunity for me personally and for the team if I think of this. So one of my old mentors gave me feedback. We had a project at Adobe and it never went well and, and this was very early in my leadership position at Adobe. I was a lead of director services and pretty much the project went to, excuse me, went to shit. And my boss turned around to me and he was like, well, the person you put in to lead the project isn't that kind of personality doesn't have those kind of skills. It wasn't really the right person to drive the bus. And that was a huge lesson for me on having the right people on the right seat in your bus.
So if you use the analogy that your team is the boss, the services you're delivering is the bus and you're going along your path to deliver your services, the right driver matters. The right copilot matters, the right mechanic might matter if it's a service, the right pr, the right marketing, you're not going to ask a seasoned architect to be the person who's going to run your communications for you. This is maybe not their interest. So you got to be really thoughtful about that. And back in those days, that was just such a pivotal lesson for the young den Johns.
Aaron:
See if only you could time travel and talk to that den Jones. We still,
Den:
I would tell him to put, yeah, I'd tell him how to invest his spare dollars into what companies and stock and buy gold and some shit like that. It would be
Aaron:
And Nvidia buddy.
Den:
Yeah, I'd be like, buy Apple Stock and sell it after it hits this. And then Nvidia stock, oh, buy Adobe stock in 2001 and don't sell any of it until like 2020 to do that. I think this is our third ask us anything, right? Third or fourth. I mean, who
Aaron:
Tracks these things? Not
Den:
Us.
Aaron:
We just have fun. We just come on here and talk.
Den:
Actually, I track it after the fact because we do the whole publishing and the releasing and all that business. But yeah, this is just a way for us to shoot the shit live on LinkedIn. It's going to be recorded and published on our both websites. Our podcast, which is cyber nine oh nine.com, and our consultancy, which is 9 0 9 cyber.com. If you like these things, if you like what we're doing on the pod, we'd love you to subscribe. And more importantly, if you think it's useful, please share it with your friends, your family, your sourdough friends, your pickleball friends, your music friends, your photography friends. So yeah, thank you very much everybody. And Aaron, as always, thanks for your partnership. Thanks for being involved. Thanks for helping pushing us forward. And we love your spinny wheel.
Aaron:
Spinny wheel. Spinny wheel loves us by the way. We are out of questions. Please people submit us questions for next time.
Den:
Excellent. Thanks man.
Narrator:
Cyber 9 0 9 will soon become 9 0 9 exec. New name, same podcast, and love. Look for the new name soon, wherever you get your podcasts.
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