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 Den Jones taps his vast network to bring you guests, stories, opinions, predictions and analysis you won't get anywhere else. Join us for 9 0 9 exec, episode 38 with Pieter Vaniperen.
Den:
Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of 99 Exec, your podcast for executives in tech. And we are trying to help your journey. We want to elevate and all rise together and every episode I have someone that I would consider a bit of a leader of the pac, someone that I think we can all learn from, including me, which is great. So let me introduce, Hey Peter, right? So Pieter, I'm going to try not but your last name, but Pieter Vaniperen. I'm assuming the L is silent, but you're the CISO Alpha Sense, right? And that's a new gig for you. So why don't you introduce yourself to the audience and then we'll jump into the fun stuff.
Pieter:
Correct. So really quick, it's Vaniperen. It's a silent, it's not silent, it's an i and the world taking on San Serif really screwed me there because everyone thinks it's an L now.
Den:
Well that was the sticky part, just right there.
Pieter:
Yeah, so I'm a CISO over at AlphaSense. I'm also the CIO. I do think the CISO's a bit more of an important role these days. For those of you who dunno what AlphaSense does. AlphaSense is the technology that's behind some of the most important influential decisions that businesses make. Can definitely talk more about that. It's an AI first company. In my previous roles, I've also been the CISO at a company called Own Company that was acquired by Salesforce. I was also the deputy CISO at Clear. If you've been through US airports, you probably see them. I also was deputy CISO at Fox and Disney and ran as the managing partner, a boutique consultancy of 80 folks for a couple years. My company is still around, so I've had quite a bit of experience and around the executive suite came up through tech and the engineering side of the house as a developer and some IT in there as well. And yeah, started coding when I was very young, was passionate about that, but also very passionate about music, very passionate about a couple other things. Kind of had an unusual path to get here. And yeah, I think that's a pretty good intro
Den:
And here we are now you're based in New York, so your name might not suggest you're a New York or whatever they're called over there, but yeah, what's the origin? I think when we met, I fumbled that one too and suggested you may be Dutch, but I don't think that's the case.
Pieter:
I am half Dutch, so I'm actually first generation. I don't look at it. I live in New York, but my father immigrated here when he was 26. My mother was a post-war victory baby, born in liberated Germany, a Ukrainian origin, and she immigrated here when she was three. And so I'm half Dutch, half Ukrainian, there's a lot of other stuff mixed into those things, but lived most of my life, pretty much all of it on the east coast, in and around New York City and love it here. I have gone back to the Netherlands quite a few times. One day I would like to go to the Ukraine. It was on my bucket list. It's not exactly a vacation territory right now
Den:
At the moment, sadly. Yeah.
Pieter:
But yeah, it is. It's interesting because I would say although I don't look at, I actually quite often bond with other employees and other colleagues kind over that first generation slash immigrant mentality. There is a distinct difference in how the thought process of prioritization, what's important that comes into play there. And I always find it interesting the view people have coming from that lens.
Den:
And for me, obviously I'm an immigrant, born and bred in Scotland and then kind of like my family's got a bit of Scottish, a bit of Welsh, a bit of German there. There's a whole blend in there. But I tend to find people born in Europe, we don't necessarily try and chase our roots and figure out where we really all came from, especially not Scottish people, but when I came to the US and my kids, so both my kids are born in the US and I try and say to them, it's like, yeah, you're first generation us immigrant, but you're a US person with Scottish heritage. So I always play the whole thing. And it was funny when I first moved here, so about 2001 I met a kid, he was the waiter at a restaurant that I was at with my wife at the time, and he heard the accent and he said he's half Scottish, but then he listed off five other halves and I took him, I said, well, you're half not good at math. He's like, what do you mean? I'm like six halves, don't make a hole. I just keep drinking my beer thinking I'm the smartest shit in the world at that point I guess.
Pieter:
Yeah, go ahead.
Den:
I was going to say, so growing up, I mean because there is a little bit of a difference and I also think your parents, my parents, they're not all necessarily technologists and my parents being Scottish Welsh blend, they grew up where police, plumbers, gas guys, the jobs you were doing were more manual labor jobs and going to college, I mean I was the second person in my family to go to college or to finish college I would say. So for me, even back in the seventies going to college and university, it wasn't the majority of the people. Whereas now it seems to be like everybody has to do that. So what was it like growing up for you here, having your parents immigrated and how did you navigate your way into the technology space?
Pieter:
It's interesting to me on my mom's side, my uncle, they all immigrated here. My one uncle was born here. He was the youngest uncle. The rest, the other two, my mom and my other uncle immigrated, but my oldest uncle was in the air force. He was, because of that exposure, he was very much into technology. He's the uncle who sent me a Nintendo when I was a kid, sent me my first Tandy computer. And so I didn't see that he was in the Air force, he was moving around and stuff. I didn't see him or my cousins very often, but every once in a while, two Christmas and two birthdays and then a big box would appear and there'd be something in it. And that was really to your point, the unlock to the technology.
And ironically, I come from in some ways precisely your point of the technical but not technical background. My dad and most of his siblings and brothers are in that semi-technical range. And my dad was an electric and mechanical engineer, but again, he went to school in the sixties, so electrical engineering was like bride boards. And so it was a very different kind of perspective. And later in his career he got into some biomedical stuff but nothing on the technology side. My dad is as good at could computer as my mom is, which is to say not particularly clearly, but that early exposure to technology I think is what kind of engendered it. And in a really weird way, I remember, I think we've talked in the past about how I feel like creativity is really important in our kind of line of work and I find that most people who are creative kind of feel that kind of do really well in this side of the office or whatever you want to call it. And I remember always having this kind of creative motion as a kid and I ended up in a class, I want to say in second or third grade, I had the tan at home, I played some games on it, I messed around at the command line a little bit and stuff. And then I ended up in a class where I had an Apple two E, I'm dating myself here. So anyone who,
Den:
Hey, you dated yourself with a Tandy.
Pieter:
I'm like anyone who's lost at this point, these are very old plasticy looking computers that hooked into a television and stuff. But basically in that class there was a program we were taught called Logo Writer. And this is again, I'm very much dating myself. The intent of it was to create logos and I remember using it to, I created some whole little animated sequence of a dude landing on the moon and stuff and everything else. And I just remember being like, this is a creative outlet for me. And that's what really started to get me into tech more and coding. And it was a way to create and it kind of fell in that kind of mix of I was very into music when I was a kid. I was a very musical kid and got into film and theater. It just fell into that I can create something in the world. And again, I think that goes to the immigrant mentality was like it was a combo of if you're going to create something in the world, it better be really big and spectacular.
And if you want to go that way, you better also have a real job because that doesn't work out very well. So it kind of played into that and I think that's probably a big part of how I ended up where I am. But it's also I think a big to the point of I were saying earlier kind of a differentiator. I think a lot of the people who have great success in this kind of career field, it takes a lot of out of the box problem solving for something that seems very rote with rules and in the box, the real work happens out of that box. And I think that having that creative lens is what really makes people excel at that.
Den:
I was just about to say that, I mean there's parallels between people who are creative thinkers and people who make good executives that can lead teams through problem solving. I mean I think the less creatives, there's those that can do it certainly too, but I think it comes naturally for me as a problem solver to think about. I don't always think about solving the problem. Sometimes I think about how can we change the problem or the question. And I actually start there. I'm like, I hear your question, but does that have to be the question? Can we screw around with that first
Pieter:
A hundred percent going back to first principles, are we even looking at this the right way? And I think that I've been asked before, how did you make the transition from coder to executive? And I'm like, I made the transition from
Den:
I'm sitting here thinking you're looking at my screen of my questions. That was literally my next question. Geez man, you're watching my screen here.
Pieter:
I'm insecurity everyone. Don't worry about it. No, I didn't. I went from kind of coder and builder and creative to architect. I started looking at how do I build things? How do I build things in a systematic fashion? How do I make things repeatable? I think the other thing that makes this is going to sound really ironic and probably frustrating to some people, but the thing that makes really good leaders and executives is a healthy sense of laziness. A sense of doing the same thing twice drives me nuts. I want to do it once and not have to do it again and I want a system so it's not my problem. And so it kind of drove me towards the architecture side and that really opened up the creative outlet because now I'm figuring out how to build things at scale, how to really solve big problems.
And that is what drove me into an executive. So if you look at this is, this may sound kind of silly to people, but it's like if I'm building a network or I'm building a large scale SaaS program, I'm looking at building individual components, I'm looking at how they connect together, I'm looking at how things flow through them and I'm looking at how the sum of those components create something that's greater as a whole than those individual components. That's not much different than organizing a program within a company and hiring the right people and building the right tools and putting them together and allowing processes to flow. It's not that different. I think that often people just, again, if you don't have that kind of creative mindset and you don't take the leap to go there, that kind of out of the box translation of experience gets lost with people and they get locked into this way of thinking only applies to this one way.
And I think one of the great talents of creatives is the ability to take in essentially input experiences, things they learn in the world and then abstract them and then apply them in other places that are unexpected, which is what we think of as creativity, but is really just them generalizing their experiences to something else. And I think that's core to your point of problem solving. I ended up being an executive. I often look to your point, when people bring me problems and I look at first principles and is this even the right problem we're looking at? One of the first questions I ask myself in my mind is, okay, in my 25 years, what is the closest thing like this that I've experienced and what can I draw from there? And that happens very quickly, but that is where my mind is going. And then I start kind of poking in that direction. And a lot of times it's like, well, when we finally got to this point 10 years ago when I dealt with something like this, it was actually this other thing, how we looked at this other thing. And that's my first question to ask
Den:
And I totally get that. And actually you've mentioned a couple of things there. One is the new lazy leader. So I want to talk a little bit about that, but along that journey, you went from coder to executive, so what would be the top tip you'd give to somebody following your footsteps that are on that journey? Because being a new leader is pretty tricky, but being a coder, becoming a leader of other coders and stuff, that's a different thing. So what tips would you have for any of the guys or gals in that path?
Pieter:
I think you have to care about the system and the context. I think get start now asking questions. If you're building a single component in a large SaaS company, say you're working at AlphaSense, we definitely have a lot of coders and we definitely have a lot of different components. Worry about what the other teams are doing. You have to do your job but get interested in what they're doing, worry about what the other components are doing, how they interact, understand the product, understand the system. Really what being an executive is, and often I've worked in my 25 years, I've seen both coders and security people and IT folks and everyone else and all they care about is the three things in front of them. I've literally worked with people who could not tell you how the company that they're working for makes money to pay their salary.
And I'm like, that is the real starting place and the best pieces of advice I can give you is be hungry to understand and learn about the system that you're within or that you're working on. You're going to learn things from it. Even if you don't think you will, you're going to. And I think going out and trying to find that information is how you begin as an executive. Because I think the other thing people don't understand is that there's a very stark difference as you move up in being a leader where at a certain point there is no one telling you what you should do or what the next thing is. What you're being delivered is problems and it's like here's a problem. Go and it's like, so you need to be able to know how to take that problem and turn it into a system. And so you should be hungry to study systems, whether it's the things you're working on in coding and everything around it, the products you're interacting with, the organization that you're part of. All of that kind of thinking through systems is going to help you understand how to problem solve at scale and be an executive.
Den:
Hey folks, just want to take a minute to say thanks for listening to the show, watching the show, however you engage with us. If you're liking the conversations, if you think we're adding some value, we'd love you to subscribe and share the show with your friends. If you know of anyone else that would benefit ideally for us that will help us be able to grow the show, invest more in the quality, get some more exciting guests and keep bringing you some executive goodness. Thanks everybody. Take it easy and enjoy the rest of the discussion. A lot of people get promoted, they're great engineers and then they get promoted, but their people skills, their business skills are shit. So they're really good at building stuff and they're really good at solving, building stuff problems.
Narrator:
But
Den:
The thing is, when you get into the leadership, if you lead a small team and you start to grow, you're like a glorified babysitter. You are given these business problems to solve, not technical problems, business problems, you get the escalations and you deal with the drama that nobody really wants to deal with. When things go right, your team should get the credit. When things go wrong, you take the hit.
So this leadership thing, that journey for me, I'm like, okay, providing and the way I explained to people that I mentor, I was like, well, provided that, that's the job. If those things, if helping people's careers, if solving nebulous business problems, if those things excite you, this is the path. If technology problems excite you, and even though you can corral a group of technologists, that's not the same. But if those things excite you, then maybe architecture is the path for you or something like that. But you've actually done both. Then you've also been a co-founder and you've been a CTO and title as well. So you've got the CIO, the CSO, the CTO, the co-founder, quite a few titles under your belt. So when you are thinking of the difference between the technologist and the people business exec, why did you decide to make that pivotal move and continue down this journey? Bounced back and forth a few times, right?
Pieter:
Yep. So I think a couple things to unpack there. I think one, I don't generally like to use sports metaphors, I think they get lost, but I'll use this kind of very general sports metaphor, puck ball, whatever game you like, American, European, think of the person who is both one of the most valuable players, but also touches the ball often, but for the least amount of time. So in American football, the quarterback in soccer, it's your midfielder who's the facilitator in the midfield and usually takes corner kicks in hockey usually one of your wings. These are who executives are. The first thing you do is you facilitate, you have a problem, you figure out the strategy and you hand it off If you want to hold the ball and run with it and score the goal, you're a technologist. And I always kind talk to people about that because I think that people have different motivations in life.
I also think that what brings people joy, I think that if people like to solve big problems and that's their motivation, they're often more going to fall to the side of an executive. I think that if people really like building things and making things elegant and working through kind of unsolvable puzzles on their own, that kind of, you're more on the technology side. I think there's value to both. I think that that's a huge thing and it's a leverage point, right? I always look at it too. If you're at the peak of your career, are you more likely the person who wants to help make 20 other people better? Or are you someone who wants to give 20 other people a tool that makes them better? If you want to give them the tool because you built it, you're the technologist. If you want to go on the other side, then you're a manager and you're an exec. And I think the other thing I'll say, and the spicy controversial comment here coming then, so brace for the comment,
Den:
We're ready.
Pieter:
But look, if you are a cso, if you're a CTO, if you have a C in your title and even something below a c an SVPA VP and you can't read and understand a balance sheet and you work at a private or public company, you don't really belong there. You are there. You might be effective, but you don't have the full picture of what you are doing to the business and what the business needs. And that's like being a doctor and not knowing what a patient's blood pressure and temperature mean, right?
There are vital skills here, and I think the idea that people want to be in these leadership roles but they don't want to do the full job, I think is something we need to get out of. And I think it has made things like, for instance, the CSO position or the CTO or some of the both technically and managerially skilled positions is kind of very squishy mess in companies. And I think we need to get out of that. And we're at a point where the tech that we're dealing with, first of all is accelerating rapidly, but also we're 25, 30, 35, 40, 50 years in which CI I just talked about and which kind of tech and role you're handling. And you are at a point where it's time to mature.
Everyone else in the C-suite will fully expect the CMO to know how to read a balance sheet. They will fully expect the CFO to know how to read a balance sheet. So we shouldn't be living in some exception land. And it's the same with people skills. This is expected and the people who succeed in those other roles have those skills and hone those skills. And so if you don't want to make that investment, then there's a ceiling that you have to acknowledge and that's totally fine too. And maybe that's not for you, but this idea that you can be successful in this kind of exception space. It's kind of like I liken it, again, I'm trying to get away from sports metaphors, but again, it's like in college in a lot of sports, you can have a few or lower leagues, you can have a few of the tools that make you great and you're still playing great and you're a star. When you get to the highest levels, you need to have the complete set of tools, even if some tools are weaker than the others or someone else is going to come and beat you. Right?
Den:
Sorry, I was going to suggest that the CSO at the executive board, CEO level, being at the big kids table, really that's a new thing in the sense of the CFO, the CTO, the CIO and the ccio OI would say 10 years ago, maybe 10 years ago, it was pretty rare, or 15 years ago it was rare for the C ccio to be at that table. And then you heard about that being that transition. Well, I think to your point for a ciso, it's table stakes that they know about the business, they know about the business strategy, they know about the levers, they know what is important to the board, to the CEO, and it's important that they balance the decisions that they're making about risk with the decisions that are being made about running the business and accelerating the business. Because I think one thing, a lot of CSOs, they'll go through the little book I always akin to when we were doing ITIL years and years ago, people would bring out that ILE Bible and they would follow it, but it would cripple the business, put in these over heavy overhanded processes. They would just grind us to shit. And I think a lot of security leaders do that as well. They just go straight for the, I went to my science class, I came back and I started implementing the top 20, and there we go.
Pieter:
That's
Den:
Bullshit.
Pieter:
I'll give him all the credit. Josh Copeland, a colleague of mine posted this and I stole it and I've used it for a few years now, but it's like if you come into my office and you say, well, we have to do this, it's best practices, my first question, which again I'm stealing from it, is whose best practices, how does it apply to our strategy as a business? Is this the right move for us? And I think, again, if you think about who a CEO EO is a ceo, EO is honestly, and again, spicy comments and my own CEO don't get mad at me, but the CEO is generally a subject matter expert in nothing, which is a weird thing to say, but that is precisely what a CEO is meant to be, right? A CEO is essentially, if you've ever seen crew as, or an old Viking ship or something like that, he's the guy at the front yelling row row, and he's driving in the right direction. All the rest of the C-suite and the domains within the company have to be rowing together. To your point, if someone just drops their order down or starts rowing the opposite direction, you're not going where you're meant to go if the boat's going at all. Right? And so there has to be a business understanding and a strategy understanding. And precisely that point, if you want to seat at the big table, you got to be able to pick up the ore and you got to be able to row in the same direction or Apple,
You're hurting the company.
Den:
And so your CEO will be mad at you for a second and then we'll start talking about, I want to learn a little bit more, but before we get there, two thoughts. You said earlier about the new leader, lazy, right? You said your words were lazy leader. And I totally resonate with that because when I first became a leader, it was very, very hard for me to let go of doing stuff and trust the people you're delegating and actually delegate. The ability to learn how to delegate in itself is a new leader skill. It's a rite of passage. And I think you might feel like you're being lazy shit, go to the gym, work out for an hour and think about other things that your team could be doing better and blah, blah, blah. But the reality is, is the minute you can start to delegate and enable and encourage, but give people the space to fail and in a way that you've given them the ability to also fail in a gracious way, that's critical. And then the other thing, you've done two roles at the same time, so your CIO and CIS. So it's a blended role. And I had a conversation with somebody yesterday just on this exact topic, which is I've done both at a small startup around IT and security. And I think the conflict and the tension that normally exists between IT and security disappears the minute it's under one leader with one accountability, one throat to choke. What's your take on that?
Pieter:
I agree with you. I think that from a team perspective, I have my IT folks talking about security. I'm a security folks talking about it. Everyone is kind of working together. And I think it streamlines a lot and it allows me down the line to streamline things somewhat even further and make processes simpler. I don't think the conflict entirely goes away, though. I think that I had another colleague who was in fact both, and they were talking about how they were having turmoil over decision. And sure enough, a week and a half in, and this is for all the roles I've held, this is my first kind of dual role, and I do think it is kind of the right move and possibly the right direction for the market having been in it now. But I do think days, seven or 10 days in, there was a decision I was making and I was having my own internal debate, and I'm like, well, that'd be less friction and easier, but that's actually slightly less secure, and what's the better choice here?
And so I think there is a certain kind of maturity that is necessary there. But I do think one of the things I talked about is at the rate that technology is moving, and with the volume of SaaS and the way that networking and especially desktop and computing and information storage has changed in the last 10 years, a lot of what is being done by a CIO, especially, unless you're at a tremendously large scale organization. So somewhere in the Fortune 2000, right, is probably 80% going to be related to security in what some way anyway.
And the other 20% is fairly commoditized where there isn't some new strategy that hasn't been explored before that we're doing. And I think there are certain companies where AI may fall into a CIO's domain, but I also think that that's more of a company choice than necessarily the place where that should land. I really think AI right now is much more of a data and CTO play than something different that A CIO is dealing with. It's definitely something different CSO is dealing with, right? There's different security there, but I think from, it's another SaaS tool, someone's using perspective for the CIO, many of the tools are being bought or being commoditized by some of the companies we're already working with. So it's like they already have your data. So it's like Google gives me Gemini or gives me another tool on top of it, and I already have G Suite. I don't know how much has changed
Den:
How the risk profile changes
Pieter:
And what's the additional work I need to do besides sign a contract and say, yeah, turn it on.
So I think there's an argument here to kind of look at what are the right roles in the future and consolidation. And I think that securities finance or legal, it's ubiquitous throughout the organization. It's going to touch everything that a company does in some way because risk touches everything a company does. I don't know, as information technology becomes more ubiquitous and how much that's going to play a role, right? It's interesting because keep in mind, you go back, the origin of some of the stuff was like when you had computers that filled the size of a room and you had terminal systems and data entry and all because of other stuff, and it's like most of that is, again, it's commoditized now. It doesn't exist within a company anymore.
Den:
Yeah. No, no, absolutely. And I know we're up in time, but I want to wrap up with a little bit about AlphaSense. I think the reality is, shit, I'm not even halfway through all these questions. So I'd love to have you back on the show, and we can dig more into the AI challenges and all these kind of things and more about leadership. But let's wrap up with what is AlphaSense, who's your clients, what's a typical client for AlphaSense? How do you help your clients and why should people take a look at you guys and why should they care?
Pieter:
So AlphaSense combines several pillars of intelligence and uses AI to produce that intelligence in a smart and meaningful way to you that also is very highly cited so that you can understand the origin of the inferences that are being made. So it combines market intelligence, financial research, basically m and a and other kinds of research that are out in the public market news, and then expert research. So we also own tegu, which is now an AlphaSense brand and being incorporated, as well as having our own product there. So we have a library of over 200,000 expert interviews about different markets and dynamics and things like that. And it allows you to do grid research, deep research, ask general questions. We have products coming out in beta that allow you to create workflows within the product.
It serves a large majority, I can't remember the exact statistic, and then someone's probably going to yell at me for that, but it's in the nineties percent of the banks within the world, the largest banks. We also serve a lot of Fortune 100 and a lot of large companies. And we help you kind of look at what are the next strategic moves you should make? Should you create that product in that new market? Should you purchase that company? Should you sell this? Should you buy this? Should you invest money in this? So again, some of the biggest, most influential decisions that companies make were kind of at the heart of, and it was a tool that was built with a lot of input and intersection with some of those largest users. So we also, using AlphaSense helps you kind of look at the same types of materials that someone who works at a, and you can insert your large investment bank in the world or something like that. I'm not going to name a specific brand, how they would look at what are the materials they would look at. So even when you ask it a question, everything that comes back with that answer is, here's all the stuff that someone there would be looking at. So you have the ability to look at it, and it's a huge game changer for vast majority of our clients.
Den:
So deep, deep, deep research.
Pieter:
That's
Den:
Really cool. Yeah, that's really cool. I was going to say chat, GPT, but even deeper,
Pieter:
Way, way deeper, way, way deeper
Den:
With the confidence because the answer and the data is better.
Pieter:
Yes, much better and curated and guaranteed. And one of the newest products that we're bringing to bear is the ability to bring in your own enterprise intelligence and then be able to work on that with filters and workflows. So there's some really exciting things coming with that where you might be able to just, I don't want to get too into things I can't say, but upload a bunch of data and then depending on what the data is, AlphaSense will just give you an answer. And here's all the research you need to look at based on that data that you uploaded from your company, which is something that it's not something that's out there right now in the market, and
Den:
It's a really exciting thing. That is excellent. Yeah, so well, congrats on that new gig. I know you're a few months in now and up on time. Peter, this has been excellent. I really appreciate your time everybody. Peter Vanny, Perrin from AlphaSense, an astounding cso, C-I-O-C-T-O, co-founder and shit, the list goes on, musician, inventor, author. I mean, I dunno. Anyway, Peter, hey. Hey man. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. I'd love to have you back because there's way more we could chat about. We didn't even get into the future of AI security. Geez. What would the show be without all that shit?
Pieter:
I am always glad to come back. I love talking to you. I'll happily come back and really appreciate it. I love any conversation with you public or private, but I mean,
Den:
Yeah, we didn't even
Pieter:
Get two more viewers.
Den:
I know we didn't even get any music. So yeah, next time. Thank you bud. Appreciate it. Be safe. Thank and we'll catch up soon. See you. Appreciate
Pieter:
It. Thanks.
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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