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Transcript
Narrator:
Welcome to 9 0 9 Exec, your source for wit and wisdom in cybersecurity and beyond. On this podcast, your host, veteran chief security officer at Cyber Aficionado, Dan Jones taps his vast network to bring you guests, stories, opinions, predictions, and analysis you won't get anywhere else. Join us for this special episode disrupting the Cyber Talent Gap one student at a time.
Aaron:
Good morning everybody. I'm Aaron Wurthmann, advisory CISO at 9 0 9 Cyber and your host today. Switching things up, I told you the format was going to be different and I have a very special guest here with us, friend of the show, Den Jones, founder and CEO of 9 0 9 Cyber 9 0 9 Exec and 9 0 9 ic. Den, why don't you introduce yourself to our audience?
Den:
Hey Aaron. Thank you very much for having me on the show. So yeah, Den Jones, the founder and CEO of 9 0 9 Cyber, and it's great to be here. Thank you for inviting me. This topic, I think is one which is near and dear to my heart, so maybe and hopefully to others as well.
Aaron:
Yeah, all joking aside, if you do have any questions, please feel free to drop them in chat. I'll grill den as we go here. We are obviously flipping the script here today. Normally this is shoes on the other Foot and den is grilling me, keeping me on the spot, asking me questions about how it is that we interact with our customers. Today's topic is on our other platform, intern Connect, and so we're going to talk about that. So then why don't we jump right into that. Tell us about Intern Connect. What is it?
Den:
Yeah, so basically we launched Intern Connect about two months ago now, and the goal of this is simply connect students, so students who are studying cyber and connect them with employers pretty straightforward. Think of it like match.com, but for employers without the ability to swipe left or right, though we haven't added that yet, but maybe that's a future feature.
Aaron:
Okay. What match.com,
Den:
It's some website for people who want to meet significant others matching.
Aaron:
Yeah. Gotcha. Okay.
Den:
Yeah, it says the name.
Aaron:
So you've had a successful career at security companies at companies in security, Adobe, Cisco. What made you want to shift your focus towards helping students in early talent?
Den:
This was an easy one where nine to nine Cyber was at Future Con in LA in March, and I was presenting on strategies for CSOs and one of the things that I mentioned, there was two things. I mean I actually talked about five key strategies, but one of them was about leveraging students. So over my career at Adobe and Cisco, we had leveraged students a lot, so we would bring them in. You think of it like intern, but the reality is is you bring them in summer, they work with you pretty much full-time for six or eight weeks and then they'll go back to school. But the good ones, when they went back to school, I would actually keep them as employees. Maybe they're working 10 hours a week and they would stay with us until the break for holiday again, and then they'd ramp up and then they would ramp down when they go back into their semester.
But they'd still work with us about 10 hours a week and you're paying them part-time money. So the reality for us was you're paying someone part-time money, they're working with you for a number of years. By the time they graduated, then they would join the company if you had a position. So I was explaining this on stage and then afterwards people would come up to me and they said, well, where do you go for this? How do you do this? And companies like Adobe and Cisco, they've got great, great relationships with schools and they'll do career fairs and all that stuff, but there's two things. One is that's them tied to five or six schools and maybe they're not all the best skills for cyber, but they'll find good talent still. Then there's smaller companies that don't have that relationship, so where do they go?
So after having conversation with people at the conference, then after the conference, I just kind of figured, wait a minute, there's a great opportunity here for us to get involved and help emergent talent break into the industry. And that also helps employers find some amazing talent that could be local, that are flexible, that are lower cost and they're hungry, enthusiastic. So this kind of matchmaking service really is for me, a way to give back to the industry and help bring new talent into the industry. It's also a way for us to build our brand at 9 0 9 because hey, everybody that gets their first job remembers where they got their first job.
Aaron:
You said two things there that I want to come back to. One is that some of those relationships with those schools aren't with cybersecurity known schools. I would absolutely agree on that. Who would you say that those relationships are primarily with? What type of schools those primarily?
Den:
So definitely, well, it definitely depends. So if you're a company like Adobe, you're focused on a lot of tech forward skills for sure. And within those skills, they likely have decent cyber programs or decent IT programs or computer science or something of that nature. So from that perspective they're pretty decent. But I think there's, if you go around, so let's exclude the top 10 schools in the us. So let's talk about diversity now. If you go to low income regions, low income cities around the country where the schools are maybe lower income students, there's different diversity. I'm not going to say there's more, but there's different, I look at it like our ability to bring in all of these skills. Anybody who does cyber, we've also opened it up to coding as well. So if you do coding and other adjacent kind of studies, then we can bring you in.
I also look at it like if you're a skill that's private, but you focus on bringing in veterans back into the industry, rescaling people, well, we can be part of that because intern connect and at some point maybe the name's not right, but the reality for us was it's about students regardless of their age, regardless of their demographic, their financial background, their means. So the top schools where you pay more, not everybody can afford a top skill. So I look at it like we want to have this one central database of students that are learning cyber regardless of all of those other things.
Aaron:
Okay. And you said something else, going back to your comment that really resonates with me. You said emerging talent. So I've heard you say that intern Connect just isn't about internships, but about emerging talent and changing access. What do you mean by that?
Den:
Yeah, let's peel that back because the reality is I'll actually, I'll roll it back to little Scottish kid, left the post office, went to college, paid his own way through college and had to work part-time while I'm paying my way through college. So my experience working, I worked in kitchens, washing dishes, made my way up to salad prep. I was getting very excited with my restaurant career. I worked night shift in a grocery store, stacking shelves. I worked in a sports shop, selling trainers and shit like that. None of those things really helped my cyber skills or my IT skills along the journey. Some of them certainly helped my leadership and management skills, but the reality, none of them had anything to do with my job. And almost all of them were shitty wage, like minimum wage in some cases, minimum wage, some cases a little better.
But the reality is, is there was the ability, and what I see here is the ability for students while they're at college to come work with employers, part-time gain, real world experience. So if I think about why does it benefit students, it benefits them because they're going to get real world experience, they're going to be able to network, they're going to be able to add stuff to their resume by the time they graduate, they either have an employer or they have other employers looking at them. They certainly will have some good references. If I look at the employer side of the equation now, we're going to host a whole panel on this one soon about the employers and the cyber talent gap and stuff. But I look at it like most employers would be willing to help a student start their career. They can pay them. Go ahead. I was sorry. I was just going to say pay them less money per hour than a full-time employee, but still more than they would get at Starbucks, help them do jobs and stuff and build it up. Do real work. Sorry, on you go. I got too excited
Aaron:
There. Yeah, great. Lead into our next question, but before we get there, just want to say, just want to give a shout out to Terry, long time friend and listener here today. So thank you Terry. Thank you Terry for listening to us today and for watching the live. So we talk about how this is something that employers and companies should do, but a lot of companies say that they invest in early talent, but few do. What's the difference about the intern connect model in your opinion, in your very biased
Den:
Opinion? My very biased opinion. So I look at it like all we've done is we're creating the ability to connect students with employers. Once they make the connection, then hey, that's on them like normal. So I look at it like all we're doing is we're facilitating something which I've done successfully for 20 years and I've got countless far more student stroke interns, stroke part-time people who have now gone off to other companies, their directors, their senior engineers, their people having successful careers, and they started their journey working with us doing something like this. This was the model, the experience you get by the time you graduate. If you can turn around and say, I've worked for company X for two years and company Y for three years or whatever your duration is and these are the activities and the roles we've done and I've got a good reference, or hell, you don't need that because the company that you've been working with for two years didn't want to let you go.
They're the ones being saying, Hey, let's bring you in full time. So I think there's a tremendous opportunity for employers to really step up. Couple of things, a couple of things I'll say here. One is employers could stop offshoring work. They could have local talent, a low cost still rather than offshoring work to other countries in the world. And by the way, we've focused a launch of 90 to nine IC within the US because that's the market we are personally in. I do want to expand that in the future, but for right now we're US based. So if we talk about just us and the economy of the United States, we talk about the ability to grow talent within the us but let's grow some of our own talent and shame on new companies. If you're pushing your talent offshore and you're ignoring the students that are coming through, I mean I think if you are choosing to offshore talent rather than try and groom and bring in and grow our local talent pool or try and give veterans or other people trying to rescale an opportunity, then shame on you guys. Great.
Aaron:
What I'm hearing here is that free labor isn't the goal, upscaling is the goal. So how do you make sure that intern connect is fair, ethical and actually benefits the intern?
Den:
So I think it's great, right? And I use the word intern quite sparingly these days. And it's funny because when you go on the website, you'll notice where it's called intern Connect, but all the verbiage really talks about cyber students because intern makes someone think of summer work and they don't necessarily think of all year round. So I've been trying to work with the team on that, but I think the reality is look, we want students to be able to say, and in the app when they log in and create their profile on the app, they have the ability to go straight into this and say, this is the disciplines I'm interested in, this is my availability. Here's a little bit about my bio and then my working style. And then when an employer posts a job or searches, they're going to see the list of students that meet or match that criteria.
So I kind of look at it like we have the ability to connect these employers. All they're going to do is hit the connect button and then the intern gets a message to say, Hey, notification, you've got an employer that'd like to connect with you. Do you want to connect with them? They get to go into the app and see who the employer is and learn more about the employer or the post the job that they've posted. Hey, yes. And then we connect them in the background and there's no charge for the student for this. The way we're planning to monetize this is that the employers, they will pay a small monthly or annual fee to have access to the platform and therefore get access to connect to students. And really we're not looking to become billionaires on this one. Aren are we? I don't think so. So if I had to think, you said to me at one point, I don't know how this is going to make any money, and I said, me neither, but let's try.
So it's an investment. I mean for 909 cyber, look, this is not a free thing we're building here. It is costing us money to build it and it's a bit of a passion project and I really believe it's something that's going to help the industry on the student persona side when they log into the app. We're also adding a lot of resources. So we are reaching out and if you're listening and you want to help us, we are reaching out to companies and other bodies for them to give, not give us content, but make us aware of content that they may already have for students and we'll link to it. So our goal is not to really build the content. We know a lot of people have done a lot of magical work here. I'd rather just link to the existing content that's out there.
Aaron:
Yeah, you've simplified a lot of the design for my benefit and I appreciate that. But you've also built this with scale in mind to be not just a single success story. What were some of the design principles that guided you on that or
Den:
Yeah, so a couple of things, right? If you forward five years from now, where could this be five years from now? This could be in a situation where first of all it's global. Secondly, we go beyond just cyber. We talk about cyber, we talk about tech, and it could be developers, it could be software engineers, it could be cyber. So we have the ability to really look at technology students in general and the global. And I think so as we build it, I see that scaling and it does, the platform will scale really easily globally numbers wise. But the original thing, look from a stay focused, you and I remembered a conversation at Black Cat with a certain founder and entrepreneur last year where he was giving me shit for not staying focused, I guess. And so in this one case stay focused will be us, will be cyber, let's build that and let's build that to be the biggest database of cyber students in the US and then figured it out from there.
Aaron:
You know what? Side note, I do feel like while we're at Black Hat besides def com this year, we probably should reengage for a quick conversation with him just to do a yearly catch up. I don't know, let's make a yearly thing with him just for fun.
Den:
Yeah, tell him 9 0 9 airlines has not begun yet. And then by the way, Terry, I noticed Terry's given a great comment. Apprenticeships. So we've been talking with some bodies that focus on apprenticeships. When I grew up in the uk, it's really funny because in the UK in the eighties, the seventies in the eighties, college was not the first thought for our university, wasn't the first thought for everybody. And we've got tech schools like colleges, and then you've got universities, but this concept of apprenticeships, which was where you're working with a company full time and then you go to college or university so many days a week or hours a week and you learn the book smarts with the trade. So for us, that was an apprenticeship. So we have been talking with some people and some companies here in the US about the concept of apprenticeships and them getting involved with us via the ISSA.
We met a guy the other month and we were having that conversation. I look at this as if it's a blend, I would love to say it's a bit apprenticeship. I would love to say it's a bit not, but there's nothing to stop a college student going through two years and via Intern Connect, they meet an employer, the employer brings them in, they want to then go full time and then they flip the rest of their studies so that the remainder of their studies is actually part-time college. So you have the ability here to leverage intern Connect in other ways than we necessarily intended at the start.
Aaron:
Speaking of intentions, what surprised you the most about launching Intern Connect? Either about the students or the companies involved or the work.
Den:
Yeah, the biggest surprise so far is how receptive everybody I've spoken to has been about it. I mean with any idea, you get the odd naysayer now and again in the respect of the ones that will bring challenges. Now I know who they are. I'm an optimist, so my glass is always half full. I always look at the best intent and I think of this platform, I have been so taken aback by how supportive people have been everybody I speak to, and yeah, you'll get some, be careful, what about this? Have you thought of that? So I don't say it's pessimistic, I just say it's, Hey, be mindful. You can't walk blindly into stuff, which aren't, I sometimes do, right? So having you and others guide me and help is invaluable, but that general support has just been insane. I mean, it is crazy.
Aaron:
Yeah, I mean I have many positive things to say about you most days of the week. And one of those things is you allow your team space to say those things all allowed. I do. Now you referenced it already, right? Which is like I said, Hey, I don't know how this makes any money whatsoever. Are you aware of that? Right. I'm on board, I see the value of it, but I don't know how this makes money. Dan, are you sure this is something we want to invest in? Are you sure?
Den:
Yeah.
Aaron:
Yes. Alright, let's go. Right? Yeah. To the founder who hopefully we'll run into again at Black Hat Defcon V, B-Sides, hopefully we'll run into 'em again. We can have that story of we do things, but we do 'em with our eyes wide open, right?
Den:
Sometimes, I mean, look, and a couple of things. One, in leadership, right? 10 years ago, 15 years ago, if you got Den as a boss, you were probably in for the world to hurt. I didn't give that space. My maturity level just wasn't good enough. I was too self-centered, too out. My empathy was shit. As I continually grew my career, my ability to let go and really trust others and all those things just continually matured. And I would say the Den now is way different from before. The reality though, when people give you feedback, you're trying to take in context where they're coming from, their history, their prejudices or whatever. But the thing that is really cool about what we've been building at 9 0 9, and I'll even say back to the nine, nine cyber. We've got the podcast, we've now got ic. And when I look at what we've been building, I've surrounded myself with people like you and from the start had the ability, I remember even starting nine to nine cyber and you're like, Den, do you know how saturated this market is?
Aaron:
I did. I
Den:
Said that and you said that. And I was like, Uhuh, no, I don't. But I have great confidence in the pedigree of the team that we've been putting together as part of what we've been building with the clients that we have engaged with so far. We've had great feedback. We've had re-engagement. So it's not as if you've just done a one and done and walk away, like clients come back. So that retention rate just comes back and proves to me that we are building something right for the future. And I see as being as part of that because one of the things 99 cyber will need in the future actually in the near future is we're going to want to pull in some students ourselves. So as part of what we're building, this is valuable for us too.
Aaron:
All right. So you said the magic cords, so I'll open it up now, 9 0 9 Cyber. You've been building 9 0 9 IC while running 9 0 9 Cyber. How do you balance the two businesses of the security consultancy with the mission driven initiative?
Den:
What oh 909 ic. Somebody asked me this, they were like, are you spreading yourself too thin? And I said, I used to run a team of 300 people with 60 million a year budget at Cisco.
We
Had the customer identity platform. We were rebuilding IT security or what you call enterprise security now doing about 16 hours a day, 12 meetings a day, juggling a lot of balls. I look at this, we're not even close to tapping the extent of my little brain. So I can push nine to nine cyber and nine to nine IC and do the podcast and in the background still do some music with some collaborators we're working together on, which is highly exciting. Run a family, have a couple of chickens, have a dog, grow some fruits and vegetables in the background and still find time to take my son fishing and do some fun stuff. So I think the reality, it is a time juggle, but the focus for us is nine to nine cyber, build a business, build a business. If you look at Steve Jobs famously said, when you're not spending time on your core thing, your core business, spend it on things that support your core business.
9 0 9 exec, which is targeted for executives. It's a podcast that we target executives in support of careers for executives and tech. So all the guests we bring in, all the great conversations we have, there are all in support of that, which is in support of nine to nine cyber. When we think of nine to nine ic, we are in the cyber industry. We are trying to bring in talent that is great from a marketing and a brand perspective, and it's great to give back to the community and it's great to help build the consultancy. So I'll look at these three things as they're not a distraction, they're complimentary. The two sidelines here and anything else that we build with the 9 0 9 brand is all brand awareness. So you've got brand awareness, then product awareness. So I look at what we're building here. There's a lot of brand awareness and the core product is consultancy and staff augmentation and other stuff like that.
Aaron:
So back to 9 0 9 ic, what are the other areas beyond cybersecurity that you think the model will hold that we can expand into?
Den:
So first of all, engineering and coding. So when we build teams and cyber programs, a lot of the teams we build include engineers who code a lot of automation, a lot of coding. So I definitely think, and we've already added this, which is coding disciplines. The other thing will be then IT disciplines. So we'll get to a position where we start talking about more general technologists. So cyber focused, then engineering focused, then it focused. It doesn't mean at some point we don't just go into full on other areas and disciplines because the model works. I mean, the important thing for us is as you build out from different disciplines and then you get or to different countries, what we then need to do is we need to take into account the fact that we've got a list of colleges and universities that you can search and pull from, because we don't want anybody to write any old crap in there. So as we start to build all that out, we've got to think of, well, okay, well how would that expand? How would we add that list of non-US schools if we were going to the UK next? Or if we go to Latin America, then how are we adding these skills?
But those are simple challenges. The reality is the architecture behind this is really scalable, and the principles behind it is really scalable. So it's now about us making it more valuable for students beyond just getting a job. So in our resources section, we're doing housing, we're doing funding, we're doing networking groups. So there's a whole bunch of resources there that we can add in that I think makes it more valuable for the students. And then the other thing for us is how one of the biggest challenges employers has or tell us is onboarding. Hey, onboarding a student takes them some time. So one of the things that we're going to end up doing to counter that is we'll offer onboarding bootcamps. So we'll start to have students sign up to go through an onboarding bootcamp, and then once they go through certain things like that, then that raises them in the elevation of the search results because they're going to get more points.
If you think of it like what's a student spotlight going to look like? Well, if you've onboarded, if you're a member of more associations, if you're further along in your studies, maybe that's more points. So we're going to build that out. We haven't yet. The other thing we're building out is we're going to do gamification on schools. So when you look on the website or the student or employer persona, you're going to see the schools listed the top five schools by number of registrants. So we're not saying they're the top five in the quality of skill, we're just saying the number of people in our platform, and that helps us try and gamify this a little bit.
Aaron:
We're a little past time, but I think it's important to have this ending message. So what's one thing you wish every security leader or hiring manager understood about early talent?
Den:
I had certainly think patience as you bring them into your company and you onboard them. I think that's the first one. You've just got to recognize that this might be their first job in tech, and if it's their first job in tech, while they might know a lot of stuff about tech, it is a little bit different when you go from doing it at home and doing it in school to coming into the workforce. So I think of it like that, and I just want everybody to recognize now, be patient. We all started somewhere, but the other thing is they've got a hunger and an enthusiasm and a curiosity that a lot of people in your team are not going to have. And I went through, at one of my companies, I had a senior engineer who had been seasoned 10 years and every day was complaining about the stuff that he was having to do because it was a generalist position. So he was doing some stuff that just he thought was beneath him. And then all of a sudden I got this young college kid joined. He was the intern, he was working, and then when he graduated, he rolled into a full-time position and he took on all that work and never complained, always enthusiastic. It was all new to him and it was all a learning that he was hungry for.
So I think if people think about this, right, they will realize there's a huge opportunity not just for them to, as an employer, to rethink their cost structure on how they resource getting work done, but also the dynamic, the enthusiasm, the energy that students are going to bring.
Aaron:
Absolutely. Yeah. And you can't train drive.
Den:
You can. Yeah. Yeah. It has to come passion and enthusiasm, that hunger, that curiosity. At some point you've got people in your organization that are doing work that doesn't apply. They might have all those things for other work they're going to do, but there's a whole bunch of work that you'd ask them to do that they don't want to do and they don't give a shit about.
Aaron:
Alright. Any other closing thoughts as we wrap here?
Den:
No, I think, look, we'd love people to jump onto the platform right now. If you know students, if you are a student, please encourage all students to register. The more students we have in the platform, the more attractive it is for employers. If we turn around to employers and say, we've got 500 students, they might say, well, whatever. If we tell them we'll get 5,000 students. That's a compelling reason for them to jump in and take a look around. We are going to open it up for employers about mid August. So at the moment, we are still not open for employers, we're open for students and anybody can create a student account and have a little look around. And then everybody has the ability. There's a unique referral link and right now for students, if you refer other students, you're actually going to get a dollar per student that signs up based on your referral. You could take that link, you can put it in your social medias and push it out there. So we'd love everyone's support to get the word out.
Aaron:
Awesome. Well, with that, I'm Aaron Wurthmann. Who knows whether or not I'll be hosting our next one and when I will be hosting our next one, but there'll be another time where I'm hosting and grilling Den on questions.
Den:
Hey, thanks Aaron. Thanks for having me on your show. Really appreciate being here.
Aaron:
No worries, no worries. Really appreciate you making the time to join us here today. Den, from your house in sunny San Jose, appreciate it
Den:
From the studio. Thank you very much.
Aaron:
Thank you everybody for
Den:
Thanks, everybody listening here today.
Narrator:
Thanks for listening to 9 0 9 exec. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and don't miss an episode of your source for wit and Wisdom in cybersecurity and beyond.
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