Automatically transcribed, so names and technical terms may be misspelled. The audio is the record.

The Colorado Equals Security podcast is your local source for regional security news, local events, and interviews with key individuals in the region. Now here are your hosts, Robb Reck and Alex Wood. Welcome to Colorado Equals Security. This is episode 56 for the week of February 26th. Alex, what did the suspenders say to the pants?

Robb, I don't know. What did the suspenders say to the pants? What's up, bitches?

That's a good start. I got really good feedback about the comedy on the show in the last week, and I figured we needed to keep that going. Yes, you know, we are known for our comedy, me especially. So let's keep this rolling. Let's keep it rolling.

So good job last week with Drew. Thanks for having Drew come in and cover for me. Yeah, special thanks to Drew. We appreciate folks coming in to do guest hosting when one of us is out of town. Luckily, that's been, you know, fairly inoffensive, but it's always good to have a new voice in here.

So, Alex, you know, there's been a lot of news lately about the Mueller investigation into Russian interference with fraud in the election. Did you know that Colorado played a part in that? I did see that. So in the run-up to the elections, You know, there was, you know, maybe some talk that Russia was meddling. You know, I think we're seeing a little bit more of that now that it actually did happen.

And part of their disinformation campaign was to actually travel to the US. And one of the places they came was Colorado. We're a purple state, meaning there's roughly equivalent number of Democrats and Republicans. So kind of a swing state in an election. So I guess they came here, did some research to figure out if Colorado would be a good place for them to target their disinformation campaign.

I don't know if they ended up doing that or not, but part of the indictments do talk about their trip here to beautiful Colorado. So if anyone had interactions with some strange Russian folks that were pretending to not be Russian folks back in, I think it was 2014. Yeah. Let us know. We'd love to hear about it.

We'd love to hear the stories. Go ahead. Next, the Colorado Department of Transportation was hit with ransomware, so they had a SamSam infestation. Locked up a bunch of user machines and was demanding a bunch of Bitcoin. Yeah, I think it was as of Thursday that they had their— basically all their users were offline in 2 days, Thursday and Friday, I believe.

They were offline, unable to use most of their information systems. There's an article here that talks about a little bit about the impact and some background on it. The spokesperson for OIT, the Office of Information Technology, made it clear that they are not paying the ransom, that they will be restoring the systems themselves. We haven't heard much more about it than that, though. Yeah, I did pick out one sentence in there that was sort of interesting in the article.

They said, we did have one Mac in the office, but we weren't turning that on today because we're just not messing around.

Okay, that's, that's a funny one. Next, Google has announced and really opened up their new office in Boulder, which looks pretty amazing. Yeah, so a little piece of Silicon Valley here in Colorado. They've opened their new campus up in Boulder. I think it's at 30th and Pearl, approximately.

Yeah. You know, they've got a, a chef, they've got, you know, massage rooms, climbing walls inside, a gym with a personal trainer. Yeah. You know, all kinds of stuff. All the things that you hear about from Silicon Valley companies that they do to keep you at work and not doing other stuff, right?

So pretty cool stuff. They have about 1,500 jobs that'll be up there in the next couple years. So the, the Bay Area is coming here, not just the people but the, the job lifestyle as well. Yeah, also as part of introducing the new campus, they announced a grant that they're giving to, I think, the Boulder Valley Schools for $125,000 to help promote STEM and other things like that in the school district there. So that's cool.

So there's a new game, CryptoKitties, which is really paving the way and giving people an easy way to learn about blockchain and really other cryptocurrencies. Yeah. So if you want to— this reminds me of some of those, you know, sort of Japanese games where you buy, buy a creature and, you know, you feed it and things like that. But, but yeah, if you want to use blockchain to, you know, purchase one of these online cats, and learn about blockchain and cryptocurrencies in the interim, then you can do that. Also, part of this article was talking about the— there's an Ethereum meetup that they had here in Denver within the last week.

Pretty big deal there. Had a bunch of well-known folks in the cryptocurrency space talking about that. So, and one of the folks who's going to be on the show soon, right, was involved there. Yeah. So, Zooko Wilcox, who we interviewed recently, going to get on the show soon.

He's the founder of Zcash. He was down there at that and was nice enough to spend a little time with me to talk about Zcash. Very cool. So another piece of kind of cryptocurrency-type news, really interesting. There's a company down in Castle Rock formerly named Bioptics who changed their name to Riot Blockchain.

The strange thing is here, they were already a public company traded on the public stock markets and doing biopharma type stuff, right? And they, you know, saw an opportunity to move into blockchain. They changed their names to really pivot into a whole new industry. And then CNBC did some research on them and saw some what looks like really suspicious activities. So they, you know, had a bunch of sale of stock by the executives of the company at the same time that they were not willing to answer questions, and they delayed their shareholders meetings several times, right?

So, so really interesting stuff going on there. I don't know if you have any more insight to that. Yeah, not a whole lot, but, you know, it looked like they, they changed their name and their stock went up by 4 times. So I don't know if it was anything that they actually did, you know, in terms of any work, or if it was just that people saw, oh hey, there's a company with blockchain in the name, right? They're gonna be awesome, we better buy that stock.

So Bioptix turned into Riot Blockchain and became worth 4 times as much. And maybe there might be some questions about whether there's actual value behind that. Yeah. And, you know, you see startups pivot all the time. They find a concept, they go for it, it doesn't work, they pivot to something else.

I mean, the weird thing to me here is that this is a publicly traded company. In my experience, you don't see publicly traded companies just completely shift their business model. Yeah, that's very odd. Very odd for sure. So next, There was a story about Robert Smith.

So Robert Smith is the owner of Vista Equity. Vista, of course, is the owner of Ping Identity and several other startups. So just talking about how he's originally from Denver and how he's kind of made his way in the world. It says in here that he is the, I believe, the richest African-American in the country. He sure is.

Yep. And I think he was the, he was one of the first billionaire, maybe it might have, it was either him or Robert Johnson who founded BET. But I'd say a couple things about, about this and him. And, you know, Denver's his home, where he's from. He doesn't live here anymore.

But what he's really been moving a lot of economic value into Denver anyway. So over the last year or so, we've talked about numerous companies who've been moving either headquarters or jobs here. Some examples are GovDelivery, Granicus, Marketo, who's, we talked about a couple weeks ago. Zach Lee, Zach Lee, uh, uh, Navigant, and, uh, oh, the other one up from, from Seattle. I, I don't remember the name off top of my head, but a bunch of different companies who've been moving here that he's behind, right?

He's telling, uh, the leaders of his companies he wants to move out of these places that are too expensive, like the Bay Area, or don't have the talent, and trying to, you know, create the center of excellence here in Denver around SaaS software and, and really entrepreneurship. So it's been really cool. And I'll say, you know, from the inside, watching how he runs Vista Equity Partners, it's been, it's been great. He's, he's a high-integrity guy who does things the right way. He's not there to, to, you know, reduce expenses, i.e., you know, get rid of people and, you know, try and drag a system down.

He really wants to grow his companies and add as much value as he can across the board. Yeah, that's great. So some other local news. The National Cyber Patriot competition, sort of the lead-up to that has been going on, and 3 Highlands Ranch High School Cyber Patriot teams made it to the finals. That's 3 out of 12.

So, you know, we have, we have 3 teams from Highlands Ranch out of all of the 12 national teams going to be competing. So really huge accomplishment for them. Obviously, there's fantastic you know, leaders and coaches down there in Highlands Ranch High School that are, they're helping them be successful. But it's just, it's been an amazing accomplishment. Yeah.

And we, of course, we interviewed one of those teams last year. I think the team probably is a different makeup this year because kids do tend to graduate high school. But one of the new teams out of those 3 is an all-female team. So that's cool as well. Yeah.

And what the all-female team made the finals, right? So just a huge congratulations to all 3 teams. And we're looking forward to hearing how it goes. And if we have a winner, come out of Highlands Ranch, we'll certainly see if we can talk to them and tell their story a little bit better here on the podcast. Yep, for sure.

Another local piece of news, the B-Sides Denver call for papers is open. So there's a link in the show notes to go out and get your submission in there. There's no close date announced yet. The scuttlebutt is that they will keep it open until they have enough good submissions. So get in there as soon as you can.

You don't know how long you have. And of course, that is a fantastic show. I believe they're doing the same thing this year where we have RMISC on the Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and then BSides will be on the Friday and Saturday. Yeah, so you can have a whole week worth of security learning and start off the week in your dress clothes and end the week with a beer and some shorts and a t-shirt. And then you can have 2 or 3 weeks after that to try and catch up on all your work.

Yeah, well, there you go. Perfect. Next, Overwatch ID raised $3.2 million in funding. So that's awesome. Was it just— was it 2 weeks ago we had one of their— Yeah.

So we had Cam Williams on the show, I believe, 2, maybe 3 weeks ago. Yeah. So congratulations to those guys. Sounds like they're growing. Good stuff.

Operation Cyber Blanket. This is a really neat idea where some high school kids from Castle Rock— Castle Rock, right? Yep. Have put together a community service project where they'll go into a home and help people secure their devices, their electronic devices in the home. Yeah, so this is out of Castle View High School.

So congratulations to those kids down there, you know, really taking cybersecurity and trying to make things better. So I think that's great. That is really cool. Next, we have 2 stories that kind of go together. First, Managed Methods, they won a gold at the 2018 Cybersecurity Excellence Awards, and Ping Identity also won a gold at the Cybersecurity Excellence Awards.

So these are, you know, national or really global awards, and 2 local companies took home their respective categories. For managed methods, and of course IAM for Ping Identity. So very good work. Congrats. And then the final story we have this week was a blog from Secure64 called How to Stop Bots from Exploiting Social Media Sites.

Yeah, this is really talking about how you can use DNS to help, to help, you know, make sure only wanted users are at your site and get rid of those bots. This seems like, you know, it would be a partial solution, but it's, you know, it's something that is worth taking a look at. And certainly DNS is one of those areas that you, we're probably underutilizing in security to look for suspicious activities and really look to improve our security posture. And of course, Secure64 makes a secure DNS product. Well, if you have a— if you're a hammer manufacturer, you're gonna find some uses for hammers that the rest of us might not have thought of.

Exactly. Yeah. Moving on to trivia for this week. Once again, thanks to Andre Gaeta, who has been our sponsor for trivia for the last, well, since we started, right? Last several months.

So last week's question was, Colorado has the most secure vault in the world for which industry? And we had a hint that you might want to think about how we can survive an apocalypse. Yes. And so go ahead. So our winner was Justin Brenneman.

Congratulations, Justin. Yeah. And of course, the answer is, it's the seed vault. So this is a vault that we have in case of apocalypse that we can bring back all of the plants from everywhere. And I think that the seed vault is actually I don't remember.

I don't actually have the department in front of me. But we have a link in the show notes if you want to go read about it. It's here in Colorado. And it's got, you know, all the different seeds you'd need to bring back an agricultural society. Nice.

So moving on to the trivia for this week. So Andre obviously sponsors the trivia questions. Yeah. But the question for this week is name who the first overall podcast sponsor is. Interesting.

So who has sponsored the podcast overall? The first time. Yep. Yeah. Well, Anthony, send a note to us at info@colorado-security.com or reach out to us through the Slack channel, and we would be happy to get the first answer on that.

A couple of reminders about the podcast overall. We do have a Slack channel we just mentioned, but we have well over 300 people in there now. A good opportunity for you to connect with local folks, talk about, you know, fun things going on in the area, There's just a really good group of people in there and communication going on. And then also we ask you to go out and sign up for the podcast on iTunes or Google Play. Do a rate on it.

Let us know if you like it. We certainly would love to get some more positive feedback on that. And then also go to the website and sign up for our newsletter so you will get the show notes in email as well. Speaking of our website, we do have a calendar of events out there and it's actually filled up into June now. So half the year has something going on out on the podcast.

Or see me on the, on the website. And of course, we do have some great events coming up this week. Starting on the 27th, there's a GDPR meetup, really an overview of GDPR, and, and that's from the GDPR meetup group. So it should be a good time. SecureSet also on the 27th is having a Hacking 101 workshop on AppSec.

And the 27th— see, this is one of the reasons we do this calendar, so you guys will stop scheduling on top of each other. But also on the 27th, we have a Women in Security Colorado Springs event. So this is the first— it's the first I've heard of that they have a Women in Security meetup down there, an opportunity for any ladies in the Colorado Springs area or those who want to support women in security to come meet up together. Uh, DENSEC is doing their South meetup on the 5th of March. On the 6th of March, CTA has their Daybreak education series around the business of IoT.

So not all of the CTA stuff is especially relevant Um, to, to security, but this one certainly would be. And then finally on the 8th is SnowFrock. So that's OWASP's annual conference. Yeah. They got a couple of great keynote speakers.

I know Jim Manico is going to be out here speaking. Um, they have John Strand coming as a keynote. Uh, I know Laz is going to be out in town speaking. Looks like Dan Cornell is having a presentation. Dan Cornell.

Great. Um, yeah. Uh, Cody Cornell is also— Oh yeah. Cody from Swimlane. Awesome.

That no relation to Dan as far as I know. Well, you know, I'm sure a long time ago. Um, yeah, so that should be good. Yeah, very cool. And we're looking forward to hearing about that.

I, I don't know if they're still looking for sponsors, but it's a great opportunity to sponsor. Um, if we want to look a little bit further out into the future, um, May is just around the corner, right? Yeah, so we got Rocky Mountain Information Security Conference coming up. That is the May 8th through 10th. Do you want to talk a little bit about the pre-conference sessions, the trainings we have on that Tuesday?

Yeah, so we've got a few lined up. So we've got one which is an audit-focused track, which is auditing cybersecurity. So this is, I think, really going to be interesting. This very similar topic is being offered at the ISACA International Conference with the same presenter. So if you can't make it to the ISACA International Conference, we're going to have that same kind of content here.

We have one that is a cloud security topic. So Mohammed Malki from the state is going to be giving that. So it's sort of his own version of, of how to be secure in the cloud. We also have Ben Tomhave doing a practical DevSecOps workshop. And then Casey Smith, who I interviewed in the past week that we're gonna get on the show here pretty soon, Talking about the Atomic Red Team framework, essentially how you can go about sort of systematically testing your security controls.

Yeah, I'm actually excited about multiple of those, but we've talked about this Atomic Red Team multiple times on the show, and I'm really excited about, number one, that a local company's created this framework that, as far as I can tell, doesn't actually help their business other than, you know, helping the industry in general. I love that, that they're doing that kind of give back to the community. And number two, I think it's just a great way for us to validate that the things in our program do what they're supposed to do. So I'm excited about that training. Yep.

Another one that we don't have posted yet, uh, SecureSet is going to be giving a technical training, um, on security in the blockchain. Yeah. Uh, so that one should be really interesting. Um, and then finally, we are going to be doing a security leaders event. Um, Robb and I are organizing that, so, uh, we should have some content on that pretty soon.

Yep. Uh, and then looking at the actual conference itself, we have, you know, the 4 main keynotes all locked in. We've also locked in a great track of I guess it's really 8 tracks across the event. It's gonna be a lot of really good stuff. We're looking forward to all you guys coming out and being a part of that.

I would say opening keynote, don't miss it. It's gonna be really a how to do your job better from a non-technical perspective. Closing keynote on Thursday, don't miss that either. That's gonna be the local comic, really hilarious, been on Late Night. Last Comic Standing.

And then I also am really excited about Thursday morning. We have Daniel Meisler, who's really a futurist focused on security, who's going to talk to us, and he's going to have his book there and be able to do a book signing if you guys want to meet him. And Tuesday evening, the closing there is Dan Burns, the founder of Optiv, who I haven't actually had a chance to ever hear speak before. So I'm looking forward to that as well. Yeah, that should be great.

So attendee registration is open. So we've got early bird registration open for a few more weeks. So you should get out there and go register if you're— March 7th. March 7th is the last day for that, I think. All right.

Let's go ahead and jump over to jobs this week. These are, of course, in our show notes as well. If you hear a job you're interested in, go into the show notes, click the link, and you can go register or apply. Fast Enterprises is hiring an information security officer. Gates is looking for a senior security engineer.

You'd be working for Sam Asciello over there, and that would be an awful lot of fun, I'm very sure. The City and County of Denver is hiring an information security specialist. Ping Identity is looking for an SRE, site reliability engineer, for security operations. Yeah, so this would be a position that's integrated with our SaaS platform and helping make sure that that is secured across the board. Really fun position working within AWS with all the new technology that you may have heard of somewhere else.

We're looking for folks who have experience with AWS and want to help us secure that environment.

CHI, Catholic Health Initiatives, is hiring a Security Engineer 3 focused on antivirus and encryption. CoreSight is looking for an information— sorry, Senior Information Security Engineer. Cigna is hiring a Cyber Threat Responder and Malware Analysis Lead. Kind of fun, you get to lead that team. Nice.

Black Knight is looking for a Threat Intelligence Analyst 2. First Data is hiring a senior application analyst, and I included this even though it's not specifically security because it would be working on a number of security projects. And Netizen is hiring a cybersecurity engineer 3. So really, there's not a lot of, uh, 4s this week. No, no 5s at all, or 1s.

Really, you got to be a 2 or a 3 if you want to have a chance for any of these jobs. Well, I think that, uh, I think that's super important. All right, I think that's the end of the news this week, right? That is. Uh, we do have our feature interview coming up with— which is with the, uh, this founder and CEO for Conversant here in town, Patrick Quinlan.

That should be a lot of fun. So Robb, what did you guys talk about? Oh man, we had a lot of fun conversations. Uh, so he's a serial entrepreneur. Uh, he's— what he's found is that what he does really well is take a company from you know, kind of a struggling company that has, you know, 100 or so employees and help it really scale up.

He talks a little bit about when he's tried to start from scratch and how that hasn't worked as well and talked about, you know, Conversant's mission, which is, you know, it sounds the same as every other company, make the world a better place, but he starts to talk about specifically how they can do that by impacting the way that organizations treat their employees and it's a really compelling story. Well, that sounds really cool. Yeah. All right. Well, that's it.

We'll talk to you next week. Thanks, Robb. Thanks, everybody. This is Joshua Foltz, CISO at eFolder. This is Colorado Equals Security for Colorado security professionals by Colorado security professionals.

This is Robb with Colorado Equals Security. And today I am surrounded by dogs. Patrick, I'd love you to tell me, Before we get into what you do and why you're doing it, why am I surrounded by dogs? I guess the easiest way to answer that question is I like dogs more than many people I meet. And so I've just from day one have brought my dog to the office.

When we started down in the DTC, my dog who has since passed, Jasmine, came to the office every day. And it was never— the building didn't allow it. I just brought the dog to work every day. And over time other people said, well, I think I'm going to bring my dog to work. And since then I met my wife and got married.

She had a dog, so this is Paisley that's laying here behind us. And then we've since adopted another dog, Parma. So Paisley and Parma come to work every day, and I think we have probably on average 6 or 7 dogs in the office every day. There's probably a group of like 12 or 15 that kind of you know, they come a few days and not a few other days. And so there's literally never been a rule, it just kind of happened.

That's awesome. So by way of introduction, Patrick Quinlan, you're the CEO and founder for Conversant, is that right? Almost right. I am the CEO, I am a co-founder. I want to give a shout out to Philip Winterburn and Barclay Friesen and Chuck Boyle, who we all were together when we started the company.

And there's another person that's been very integral to the technology scene in Colorado, Steve Foster, who was the founder of the original company that's the underlying foundation of Conversant. So I'm one of 5, but I do put on the CEO hat every day when I come to work. Okay, well, I'd love to back up, you know, kind of before Conversant. Talk to me about, you know, you made— somewhere along the line you made a decision to, you know, go become an entrepreneur, start up a software company. Let's back up behind that.

You know, where'd you grow up? You mentioned earlier you're from Germany. I'd love to hear how you started in Germany and became a tech leader here in Denver. So I was born, I'll even throw out the year, I was born in 1970 in Germany. My mother is 100% German.

She moved to the States for the first time when she was 35 years old. She met my dad in the late '60s. He is a SoCal kid from San Diego that grew up on the beach, uh, joined the military during the Vietnam War, decided to enlist rather than get drafted, found himself in Germany, met my mom, they got married, I was born, and 4 days later he took off to Vietnam. And so he was gone for a year and change. So I met my dad when I was like 6 or 7 months old.

My mom is a pretty courageous woman. She spoke very little English. She did live on the U.S. military base in Germany, and at that time, Germans who married Americans were known as PX ladies because many— at that point, Germany was still kind of going through its economic recovery post-war period, and to have a U.S. military ID means you got to shop at the PX, the post exchange, so you could get fruits and vegetables and food and things in a way that still weren't widely available in Germany. And so there were many Germans kind of frowned upon their countrywomen who ran off and married Americans. You know, this is still only 25 years after the war.

And so my mom fell in love, took the leap, and, and, and was pretty courageous, especially that period when my dad was in the war. So you grew up in Germany, in a divided Germany. Right? I did. West Germany.

I did. And, you know, I'd love if you have any memories of that division and what that meant in day-to-day life, I'd love to hear it. That is an unbelievably poignant question. So my mom's family is actually originally from Dresden, which is in East Germany. She and her— so her father, my grandfather, my grandmother left East Germany due to some family reasons in the late '30s, so right prior to the beginning of the war.

So they came by themselves to Augsburg. And when the war ended, they were on the West Side, but the rest of my mother's extended family, other than her sister and her parents, were on the East Side. And so when we were— so when I was growing up from 1970 to 1982, we spent most of that time in Germany. And there was a train called the Freedom Train So if you remember, there was West Germany, East Germany, Berlin was inside East Germany, and Berlin was separated into East and West Berlin. And this is the 1970s when Berlin was literally like the center of the spy universe, and Berlin was where East met West, and Russian officers could come into West Berlin, and US and French and British officers could go into East Berlin freedom of movement.

So it really was like the espionage capital of the world. And, you know, the TV shows that have been made since then, I think, portrayed that pretty accurately. So the way that you got to Berlin was you either had to fly, or the way most people got there, there was a train that would leave from Heidelberg, Germany, and it would go through the border into East Germany, travel through East Germany, then go through the border into West Germany. How far into East Germany Berlin? Probably I call it 150 miles.

Okay. So, this was the several— The train would leave at night and you would arrive early in the morning. So, I think it was a 5 or 6-hour train ride. But so, imagine I'm 10 years old. This is actually the Super Bowl where the Eagles played the Raiders.

So then we could probably go back and figure out if that was like '79 or '80. Ron Jarkowski I think was the quarterback for the Eagles and I don't know who was for the Raiders. And so we took the train up, but when you get to the border, you know, a couple hours into the train ride, you get to the border into East Germany, and like, it's like straight out of the movies. All the bright lights, the train stops, the East German guards would get on, walk down the train, and make sure that everybody had a U.S. military ID card because there were no German nationals allowed on the train. But my mother was a German national who had an ID card.

Okay, so it was this kind of unusual— so you know, you're this 10-year-old kid and these, you know, East German Russian troops are on the train. So you go through, but where it gets really interesting is when you go into West Germany— sorry, into West Berlin— because what they want to make sure is that nobody's jumped on the train or is holding on to the train, right? Because you have to remember that if an East German went from East Germany into West Berlin, they were now free. Because if they tried to cross that border, they were killed. I mean, there were guards that landmines, the whole nine yards.

So as a 10-year-old kid, this idea of freedom, this idea of this line was this literally line with bright lights and guards. So we go into West Berlin, we stay at the US military hotel that's there, the whole family's together, and the next day we're gonna go into East Germany. And so my father's a huge fan of history, I love history, you know, I had read a bunch about Um, you know, Checkpoint Charlie and these moments where you go through. So I was super excited as a kid to do this. So we get to the border and we're going to go through Checkpoint Charlie, but my mom, because she's a national, can't go through Checkpoint Charlie because only uniformed military officers and their direct dependents can.

And my mother was not a U.S. citizen at the time. Um, and so we went through Checkpoint Charlie, but she had to go through this gate with the Germans went through. So like they couldn't touch us, they couldn't stop us. We just showed the ID, we walked right through Checkpoint Charlie. She had to wait in this like long line, and then we met her on the other side.

And so if you— and this was because it was Super Bowl, so this would have been January. Inevitably, the weather in Berlin in January is cool and cloudy and, you know, perfect for black and white movies, very black and white movie weather. And you're sitting on the East German side at the Brandenburg Gate, which is probably the most, one of the most famous places in Germany. You know, it's the heart of the country of Germany, it's where their capital is, this is where the whole Hitler became chancellor, it's, I mean, you're in the middle of this moment and you're on the East German side and you see the Berlin Wall and you can't get past thinking in your brain If you walk up to that wall, you get shot.

But I just came through the wall the other way and they couldn't touch me. And so you actually can smell freedom. You can actually taste freedom. You can actually taste democracy. And I'm so thankful for my parents that I got to have that experience as a kid because it really becomes tangible.

And then later that day, or maybe it was the next day, we went back to that exact same spot but on the West German side. Yeah. And you sit there and you look up and you see the East German guards, right? And I think to myself now, these are like 22-year-old kids, right? And they're really going to shoot their own countrymen.

But for 30 years they did. And, and hundreds and hundreds of people were killed trying to literally climb that wall where I was as a kid. And so we went over, you know, my mom that had some connection to her family when we we were there, but that trip has always been seared into my brain. And I think we went a couple of times, but there was something about— I remember the Super Bowl because of the time change. It was on at like 11 o'clock at night or something like that, so I got to stay up and watch it.

And it was this little black and white TV where everybody sat around because there was only the one military channel. And so— and I think the— I think— I don't even remember who won the game, but yeah. Um, but those moments are really critical, are really pivotal in my life. And if I can make a long answer longer, um, so that was when I was 10. 10 years later, in 1990, I found myself back at that exact same spot.

So, um, I ended up getting kicked out of CU at a 0.0, kind of long story, um, although it showed determination, consistency, And so I joined the military, mostly so my father wouldn't kill me, and ended up during Desert Storm getting deployed, found myself in Germany. And when I was in Germany, I, I was stationed in Friedberg, which happened to be where Elvis was stationed when he was there like 20 years earlier. But we took leave for a weekend, and I actually have a picture that sitting at home, it's still on my fireplace mantel, of myself and 2 of my fellow soldiers. So we were 19, 20-year-old kids. We rented a Mercedes from some car rental place, and we, at this point, the wall had fallen in 1989, so the wall was down, but the Russians were still in East Germany, the countries were still divided, it was still the Republic of East Germany, sorry, the Republic of West Germany and the Democratic Socialist East Germany.

So we drove the highway that ran along the train, and we get to Berlin, and, and, you know, we're 19-year-old, 20-year-old kids. We got a little bit of money in our pocket, not much, but enough to be dangerous. And we got a hotel room, and the wall was still up probably in half the spots. Now, there was freedom of movement, there was no more guards whatsoever, but you were going from one country to another country, but there was no passport or anything. So you could just walk through Checkpoint Charlie.

Yeah. So I walked through Checkpoint Charlie and all those memories kind of flooded back and thinking about my parents and the guards and, you know, those 22-year-old guards were only like 32 now. Yeah, right. They were people on the street. Yeah, the Stasi are people on the street.

And from Checkpoint Charlie, I walked— I don't know, it's probably a mile, mile and a half in East Germany to the Brandenburg Gate, which was up, the wall was down there, and this was literally Hitler's bunker that he died in was underneath the ground. And I remember sitting there and thinking this unbelievable awesome weight of history, of thinking of everything from 1940 to 1945 to 1970, and to feel as that I could smell freedom 10 years ago, and now you witness freedom, right? People were moving back and forth. And so those things have had huge impacts on my life, like unbelievable impacts on my life. Wow.

I, at some point we'll have to move on, but I would love to know what would be, what was the biggest impact they've had? How have they shaped the last, what's it been, 27 years, 28 years since then?

This will be a very direct answer, but I fucking hate rules. Yeah, I hate— I, I— and so interestingly, my father served in the military, I served in the military. I'm the 5th generation of my dad's side of the family to be deployed to combat, um, uh, going all the way back to the Spanish-American Civil War. So deep lineage of, of military in my family. But ironically, we've always kind of not been that great at it.

Um, my father was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel but never a Colonel or General, which, listen, being promoted to Lieutenant Colonel is no small thing, but he's never played by the rules, right? He pissed off more people than he ever, you know, didn't piss off. My grandfather got promoted to Captain, same rank equivalent in the Navy, but never made it further than that because even within a regulated system, they were the entrepreneurs. My grandfather was a CB in World War II, which was all about, you know, getting whatever equipment you needed wherever you needed, and screw the paperwork, we'll figure it out later. Yeah.

And so I come from a long line of rule breakers. Um, the German mother in me probably fought that ruthlessly for 20 years, but she lost in that regard. And so I hate rules. And I think as I look at those moments in Germany, as much as I said you could smell freedom, I think what you could also smell is that freedom is the ability to control your decisions. And that's at some level the absence— I mean, in East Germany at the time, I remember my parents explaining to me you couldn't move from one city to the next without the government's permission.

Permission. The government decided what you studied and if you did. The government decided. And the idea that the system controls who you are in life is just something that is the antithesis of everything I am. And I ironically, I love European culture.

I'm still there 4 or 5 times a year. I hope that my wife and my son and I will live in Germany and Europe for some periods of our lives. I love the focus on free time and the focus on travel. But, and although I'm German in my culture, I'm an American— the, the business side of me, if somehow you could take American business and combine it with European culture, it'd be the best of both. But it would never work because one is more of a system and the other is all about the freedom of risk and opportunity.

And that's— this is a combination of stories. I, I'm, I'm gonna— I'm trying not to jump ahead and get to, to how someone who doesn't like rules runs a compliance organization, but we'll, we'll, we'll get there slowly. Well, and for that, actually, I respectfully disagree. I actually don't even work at a compliance company. I work at an ethics company.

And ethics is actually— so we think about power. Power is where individuals believe that their decision framework supersedes anything around them. Ethics is where people make decisions which can have unbelievable latitude inside a societal norm. And, and I strongly believe in ethics. I fundamentally disagree with power.

And Conversant is singularly focused on driving ethics to the center of business so that people can make the widest range of decisions possible inside a framework of ethics. So I do not run a compliance company. Let's get there in just a little bit. I want to hear from, you know, 20 years old, 1990-ish, you're in the military. What's next?

How did you get from there to here? So that was the first of like 4 schools that I got kicked out of. So I— the deployment ends, I find myself back in States.

I had my best friend from high school and still a very dear friend of mine, Richard Wetzel, was at that point then a junior at the University of Kansas. When I got back, I went out and visited him for a weekend. There was still a lot of euphoria around returning soldiers. You know, this was right after Desert Storm, and so it was an amazing weekend. You know, I thought it was the greatest place in the world.

In fact, it was just Lawrence, Kansas, but it also smelled like freedom after a couple years in the military. A lot of America trying to make up for how we treated Vietnam— Vietnamese soldiers. 100%. Yeah. Um, and so I just applied to the University of Kansas, went, showed up, and promptly failed out of that in 2 quarters— in 2 semesters.

So, but, um, so I ended up back at the University of Kansas. Okay. And then talk me forward. Yep. So, um, uh, got kicked out of University of Kansas, went to Johnson County Community College, which is 20 miles down the road in the suburbs of Kansas City, and was inches away from being kicked out of a community college.

So you're, you're kind of down as low as you— there's really nothing left after that. And also one of those moments that I will remember, much like that experience at the Berlin Wall, is a 10-year-old. Um, so it was Morley Safer, of all people, was the next pivotal moment in my life. Um, so I was home for Christmas. This would have been my 3rd semester after having started at Kansas, 2 at KU, 1 at Johnson County.

The grades were coming. I knew what was coming. And, um, Morley Safer did an episode on adult ADD. It was a, you know, if you remember 60 Minutes is 3 20-minute segments. Okay.

Um, and Morley Safer did this thing on adult ADD and how it was the— this would be 1992 or '93, and they were just beginning to do research. There was an assumption at the time that ADD, ADHD now, um, was this hyperactivity inside kids and that you grew out of it. And in fact, research has shown that if you genuinely have ADHD, which I think is a huge asset, um, now in my life. Um, it does remain with you. You don't grow out of it.

It's something that you can learn to operate in a different mental space in. And so I watched this 20-minute show and I was like, that's me. Now I always thought I was dumb, right? Because grades dictated intelligence, at least in how I viewed the world. A meant you were smart, F meant you were dumb.

I had all Fs and I had no As. Well, there were Bs or Cs. And so I assumed I was dumb. And I'm watching this episode, and in the interview I see him interviewing people who have worked their way to the other side of this chasm. And I was like, that's how my brain works.

And so it was, you know, everybody's life is made up of moments of luck. And my moment of luck was I somehow saw that I don't know why I happened to be sitting on my parents' living room couch that Christmas. I saw it. I then went back to the University of Kansas, the school that I was no longer in, walked into the student assistance center and said, I have this thing, can you help? And they said, we can't, but down the road in Topeka, there's a place called the Menninger Clinic, which is a center of psychological research, a well-known one in the United States, and it was the leading center of adult ADHD research in the United States.

20 miles down the road. Wow, that's amazing. And so, I went down there and I said, hey, I need help. And being a former soldier, they were excited about that. They want to do some research.

So, I got learning therapy and it's the first time I ever meditated.

They helped put me on at that time Ritalin. And I went from never having got a 2.0 in my life. I got back into the University of Kansas. They allowed me to come back. And the following fall semester, which was my first full semester back, I took 18 hours and got a 3.2.

Wow. And since graduating, I got an MBA. And, you know, my brain is— now I just understand how it works. Yeah. And I have to— what the one thing I learned was, the only question I had to find out what determined if I got an A or F was one thing.

I asked the professor before the course started, do you teach on— do you test on what you lecture or do you test on the reading primarily? And if the answer was they test on what they lecture, all I had to do was show up, go to every single class. I never bought a textbook. Hmm. That's the only thing that mattered.

As long as they tested on what they lectured, I'd get an A. Yeah. And I would just sit there and the commitment I made was I would never miss class. You listen and you remember. Is that what it comes down to? 100% of it.

Yeah. And not only remember, but because ADD can actually be correlated, you can have a higher level of intelligence. I could not only hear, but I could correlate things together. Suddenly what I heard in one class, like I can play chess in my head. It's just a crazy, chaotic chess game.

But it's the same thing you do as a CEO, right? I sit in a meeting that's a legal meeting and then a finance meeting and then marketing meeting, sales meeting, a product meeting. In one day, I can have meetings across 8 different functions of the business, and all what I'm doing is putting the lines together in my head. It's just a big Connect Four, and ADD actually gives you the ability to look 3-dimensionally at those things, right? I don't think linear.

I think in just crazy clouds of chaos. Yeah, but in the chaos, you can find patterns. That's amazing. So, so now it's, it's now an asset for you and what you're currently doing and the way, the way you've understood your, your mind to work, right? Yeah.

So I've come to realize that it's in addition to ADD, it's also dyslexia. Anybody who's ever read an email of mine can fully speak to the fact that form and from are the exact same word to me. I actually have to physically to see the difference between F-O-R-M and F-R-O-M, I have to physically go to the second letter and read it out loud because I can't see the difference between the R and the O if you put the words next to each other. And then I have to remember that if the R is the second word, that's this word, right? It's literally that kind of a pattern.

Yeah, but dyslexia, probably even more than ADD— ADD gives me the ability to have high energy and move from one topic to the next very fast. That 3-dimensional view of things, that's actually dyslexia. And I've learned since then that a, you know, there's been some— it's not an uncommon trait in entrepreneurs. You know, Richard Branson has, which I by no means compare myself to Richard Branson, but, um, you know, Richard Branson has said that he has written, you know, less than— I think I saw once— 50 emails in his entire business career because that's not what he does, right? It's about people, culture, vision, strategy, and those are things that dyslexia can be a huge advantage for.

Huge advantage. That's great. So, you know, obviously you figured out how to be a student and successful student, and you, you got your bachelor's, and you said you got an MBA as well. I did, yeah. How did you turn— get into the professional world?

Obviously knowing what you knew about yourself, what's the right fit? Yeah, I got fired. Um, so I graduated from KU finally. So I was 26 years old, moved to Denver, um, had intended to go to the Peace Corps, got accepted, um, did some traveling, got sick, so couldn't go to the Peace Corps. Um, and so I had to get a job.

I got a job as what I now know is a BDR, or a, you know, a cold caller, uh, at a small company that sold voicemail systems. So press 1 for this, press 2 for that. Yeah, that, um, this was the beginning of that, so 1996. And it was my 3rd day on the job and I walked into the CEO's office, smaller company, maybe 60 people, and I said, I think how we do this is really dumb. Um, and apparently in retrospect, maybe doing that on the 3rd day of the job was probably not the best idea, so I got fired the next day.

Wow. Um, maybe not the best CEO either then. Yeah, well, right, but, uh, I, I probably didn't say it quite that elegantly. Um, and so I got fired the next day. I had a friend who, uh, from KU whose brother owned a translation company here in Denver.

So they did translation management. They didn't actually translate things, they translated operations manuals. So if you're, uh, Boeing and you're selling a 747 747 to Japan Airlines, they would translate the owner's manual. Okay. Which was thousands of pages.

Yeah. If you're selling a power plant, GE, the Argentinian government, you would hire a company like this to translate all that. If you're Nike and you have this new thing called a website and you want to have that website in 46 languages, you need somebody to translate that. So Delta Translation did that. They had about 60 employees here in Denver.

Tim and Mary Jenkins were the owners. So I got hired as a contractor to come in and count words. Doesn't sound ideal for you. No, no, no, no. So the way it worked is they didn't have an opening.

I showed up, I was like, I need a job. They're like, I'll pay you $15 an hour. I think it was $15 an hour. And we have this— all of these manuals that were this power plant. We need to know how many words are in them.

I was like, okay, cool, I'll do it. I'd never had an email address. I had never never used a computer for anything but like papers in college. And I said, what's the process? How do we do it?

And he's like, well, you count 1, 2, 3. I was like, that's the process? I'm like, wow, ADD dyslexia guy doing this. I somehow made it through. There were like 4 million words.

It took me 6 weeks. So at this point, it's like end of September. And the way they were going to translate this, they didn't know how many words so they could charge GE. Power. They then— so there were no translators that actually worked for Delta Translation.

Delta Translation's secret sauce was they knew translators all over the world who not only were native into the language it was being translated into, but they had to be able to read this, right? You and I— well, maybe you could, but I certainly couldn't read the owner's manual to a power plant. Yeah. So you had to be an engineer that studied in the United States that was native Yeah, to Argentinian Spanish. So their secret sauce was they knew where the people were.

So they hired this group, they put an office together in Rosario, Argentina, and, um, uh, they had the senior project manager, the person that— there were 4 people on this project. The senior guy had the MBA from like University of Denver or something, and he had worked for, uh, Andersen Consulting and had all the right stuff. And he went down to Argentina, and in a matter of a couple weeks, the thing was a disaster. They— we had paid him a bunch of money, then done any work, so he got fired. So I'm number 3 on the list.

So like in a course of 2 or 3 months, 1, 2, and 3 all got fired. So it's like next man up, and I'm the— and they had since hired me as an employee, $28,000 a was my first salary. And so it's now right before Christmas. I'm 4 months into my professional career. I've been fired once.

I've somehow managed to keep my mouth shut for 4 months, um, or the other 3 people above me were making such bad mistakes that they— I was hidden. Can't fire everybody. And so the owner of the company came to me and said, can you fix this? I was like, oh yeah, piece of cake, I got it. And what, you know, one of those fortuitous moments in life, the problem was in Argentina, not in the United States.

We had opened this office, the Argentinians were taking the Americans out back every day to the woodshed, getting more money, delivering no work. And so I get on the airplane and I fly down to Argentina. I don't speak a word of Spanish, I've never been to Argentina before, but I have traveled extensively throughout the world I grew up in a multicultural family. I'm good at breaking rules.

I don't need structure. I don't really sleep much. That's actually Argentina. So, I show up and it's like the country I should have been born in. They're just a bunch of crazy, awesome, fantastic people that really want to have a lot of fun.

And life's one one big story. And so I go in and I show up at the office the first day. I've got this. And I'm just the next— they're gonna spit me out the back end just like they have everybody else. So that first day I go to lunch, I sit down at lunch, and this is like Berlin Wall morally safer this next moment in life.

So I sit down, they hand me the menu. It's a little plastic menu. It's a sandwich shop. And I look at it and My Spanish is nonexistent. So the guy behind the counter says, uno momento.

And this guy comes out, Tito, and he's 10 years older than me, really handsome guy, really just Argentinian in all ways. And he says in almost perfect English, can I help you? I was like, oh yeah, I want to order something. So we start talking, and the story ends 30 minutes later, Turns out he had spent a bunch of time in the States. He was on the national rugby team of Argentina like 10 years earlier.

Uh, rugby is the second most popular sport in Argentina— soccer, rugby, kind of tennis. So he was like kind of a big deal, but this is 10 years later. Yeah, the glory has faded a little bit. But in that interim, he got a job coaching at the collegiate level in the United States. At the University of Kansas.

There you go. Nice. So, he worked as a bartender at a bar that I used to work at. It was just one of those moments. And he's like, why are you here?

And I tell him. He's like, you're going to get your ass handed to you. I was like, what are you talking about? They love me. He's like, they are going to crush you.

So, I suddenly had like my Yoda that he— like every day I would leave the office, walk a block to his little shop. Get a beer, and he would tell me— he would translate everything I had been told that day from what I thought was reality into the fiction that it was. Yeah. And then teach me how to come back. So over the course of the next month, I kind of leveled the project out.

I ended up living there for about a year. Um, we delivered the project on time, under budget, which never ever ever would have happened without that fortuitous lunch. I mean, I would have been the next guy fired. I wouldn't have made it to New Year's. So, Tito is your Yoda?

He's my Yoda. And so, I come back. So, I've now been employed at the company 18 months. While I was gone, some business hadn't gone well and the business was a little stuck. And the owner asked me to go for a run.

And so, we're out for a run and halfway through the run, he says, I'd like to make you president of the company. Oh my gosh. That sounds awesome. I was like, what does that mean? And I didn't know anything about business.

And so I got— the next day was promoted to president of company. Wow. Um, uh, I stood on top of a desk and announced to the sum total of like 10 employees that were there. And anybody that works at Conversant can probably picture this. So I'm standing on top of the desk and I grabbed spray paint and I wrote on the walls Um, I started spray painting on the walls and I wrote the word belief.

I don't know why belief, and there was a speech around belief and I talked about belief. And over the next 2 years, we turned the company around and we ended up selling it. And we had— when we sold it, we had, I think, nearly 100 employees. And we had an office in, I think, Barbados and one down in Argentina. Yeah.

So that's why I learned how to become an entrepreneur. It's an amazing story. It was so much fun. But to show how ignorant I was, so it was like the end of the first month, and again, there were only like 10 employees left. One of them was a controller.

I wish I could remember her name. And so it was the end of the month, and I had an office, which I'd never had before, right? It was cool, I had this office. And I was sitting in the office. I didn't know, I don't know what I did in the office, 'cause I had no, no idea what I was doing.

Like I had sales reporting to me and marketing. I had no idea what I was doing. I think I sat in the office a lot like on the internet. And so, she came in and she was like, here's the financial packet. I was like, excellent.

This is— I'm ready for this. And I said, can we do— Before we dive into this, can we do it tomorrow? Because I got other meetings. Very important meetings right now. Can we do this tomorrow?

So, I called my dad and I'm like, Dad, I got this thing. I know you don't know what it is. Do you know anybody who can help me? And he said, Yeah, one of my buddies is a guy named Jim Davis. He's a president of one of the first bank branches in Denver.

Why don't you call him? So I call the guy and he's like, come over, I'll tell you. So literally I go to his house, I have this financial packet, and he sits down and in the course of 4 hours he teaches me, this is a balance sheet, this is a P&L, this is— I remember he's like, well, this is like, you know, the revenue. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, what's the revenue? So he literally— we start on the P&L.

This is revenue. This is how it gets here. I had never heard the term cost of goods sold. Yeah. So in 4 hours I learned, you know, because I'd never taken a single business class.

So I'd never taken an accounting class, the business classes pre-MBA. Um, and so I learned enough that night to not look like a complete idiot when I walked in the door the next morning. And yeah, so we turned the company around and sold it, and then I went and got my MBA after that. What year did you sell the company? Uh, 1999.

So I started '96, about, about 16, 17 months in became president, and then did that for about 18 months. So '99 is a pretty good time to sell. It was a great time to sell. Yeah, it was a great time to sell. Um, and, um, I had a severance package, and so I took everything I made on that company and started another company which went out of business in like 6 months.

So you made the money and then you lost it all? Every single dollar of it is gone. It was a good 6 months. Was it? It was a good learning experience?

Yeah. What kind of company was that? Uh, it was a company called MindCamp, um, and it was going to be a company that automated the resume process. Um, so obviously, you know, if you build a super successful company in 18 months, all you got to do is show up and it'll be 10 times.

Yeah, lesson learned. Lesson learned. Yeah. So, so you tried MindCamp and that was 2000-ish then? Yeah, it was 2000, 2001.

Um, and when that failed, it was— that was not fun. Uh, so got a job, ended up the CEO of that company about a year later. Um, so I, I have been hired into, other than Conversant, I've been a CEO/president 4 times. In all of those, I was hired as an employee and then ended up in that position. Interesting.

So I clearly, you know, I'm only good at one thing. They know. Don't touch anything else.

So, so let's get to Conversant, right? We have another 20 minutes or so to talk. How did this come about? Where'd the idea come from? Um, so the original name, the original everything, was actually called Plan B. Um, so Philip Winterburn, Barclay Friesen, and I, uh, were, um, all at a company called Rivet Software.

Rivet. Rivet, R-I-V-E-T, which was one of the fastest growing companies in the United States. We, um, came into the company when it was doing sub-a-million dollars a year in 2009. In March of 2009. So that was the deep freeze of the deep freeze of the recession.

It was literally when the stock market was at 6,000. I think the NASDAQ was like 1,500. And got hired again as a consultant into a company that had 19 employees and less than $1 million in revenue. And 6— 4 months later, I was the CEO, and I brought Philip in as the Chief Operating Officer. Um, Philip joined shortly thereafter as our— I think his title was CIO.

And, um, it was— the company was owned by a wonderful man by the name of Mike Rowan, who has since passed. Uh, and he had had this vision. The company had been around for 10 years. It got to $1 million a year. And over the course of 2 years, we took it from $1 million to $60 million.

Wow. We grew from 20 employees to 700, um, in about 280 in the US and the rest were in India. I mean, it was an incredible ride. Like, you know, the rest of the world's trying to figure out if they're going to make it to tomorrow, and we were just a rocket ship. We were literally one of the fastest growing companies in the United States.

I think we were like number 4 on the Inc. list. Um, and so we realized though quickly a couple things. One is that we had one We had had an awesome victory in a very small market. So the market we were in, XBRL, the whole market was probably $120 million. And again, you don't realize that when you're in it.

We won it. We had 60% of all publicly traded companies in the United States were using Conversant— I mean, sorry, Rivet— to solve their problem. But it was just short of breaking out. You— we were stuck. And there was an offer to buy the company.

Thought it was an incredible offer. Um, Mike, it was his company, he got to make the final decisions, decided he didn't want to sell the company. And so we needed a Plan B. Okay. And so, uh, Philip, um, Barkley and I went to, um, uh, an awesome restaurant on, um, I'll think of it in a second, Bittersweet, sitting outside on the patio of Bittersweet, September of 2011, and decided that we were going to start something called Plan B.

And Plan B was going to look to come into a company that had several characteristics. Had to be SaaS, had to be sub— we wanted sub-million dollars in revenue. It had to have a very clean cap table, so there would be diverse, not a single owner. Yeah. Um, it had to be B2B software, and it had to be boring-ass software.

We really liked anything around regulatory compliance. We weren't going to try to go in and figure out how to be 5% better than Marketo, i.e., HubSpot, right? We were going to try to figure out how to go into something with a bunch of boring-ass software and kick a bunch of ass. And so we started looking around Denver, and we were looking for companies. We knew we weren't— we knew we weren't idea people.

We knew we were accelerators. If you look at my career, every one of those companies I came into— the only time I ever founded a company, it didn't even make 6 months, right? All the other ones actually did well and grew, and— but it's because there was already a core idea started. So know what you suck at. I suck at coming up— I can't write the recipe, but damn, I can open the restaurant, right?

So, um, we found— we met Steve Foster, who was, um, one of the founders and really the core heart of a company called Business Controls. Um, it had been in Denver for 12, 13 years. It was doing $1.2 million a year in SaaS revenue. It had a little SaaS product and it was in the compliance space. And so we walked in, we met, we came to an agreement with, with, with Steve and the company and, and one of the other co-founders of that organization.

We came in and took over the company from a leadership standpoint wholly and fully. I was the CEO and we installed an executive team, took over ownership inside the company, and then proceeded— that became— that was the fall of— that was May of 2012. So Plan B met business controls. Along the way, we ended up naming the Plan B company Nebiola Ventures after after a grape that comes from a very special place in Italy. And so Nebbiolo is still today a shareholder inside Conversant.

And we took the company over and we went out and raised in a matter of 7 months' time about $10 million on the heels of our success at Rivet. It was easy to walk in the room and kind of say, been there, done that, know how to do this. And then we proceeded to get the ever-living shit kicked out of us for 2 years. I mean, just crushed. Everything we tried, nothing worked.

But we believe in grit and curiosity. So every time we got our butts kicked, we figured out why, and we kept hiring really smart people. So when you, when you came in, how many, how many employees were there? What was revenue at, or whatever you're willing to share? Yeah, so it was, it was in SaaS revenue.

There was some PS side. SaaS revenue was, call it, $1 million. Okay. Um, there were 14 employees, including the awesome, incredible Autumn Sonelli, who still works here, and Emily Witt and Christy Liske. So 3 of our 140 team members are still from that original group, and I'm very grateful to them for sticking with the ride.

It was this little— and Steve, if you're listening, I apologize for this— but it was this crappy little office in the DTC, and it was a company that, you know, hadn't grown really at all, and it number of years, and they had really built a fascinating idea of using technology to make compliance easier. So all of that credit goes to the group of people that did that. All we did was accelerate it. And Boeing came in, we raised enough money to build a product. We did build a product from the ground up, so all the code in Conversant is new code.

And we found this office, we moved here, and we really started to build and grow the company. But what was interesting is at the time, is a very important part of the story, is we bought a house. If you think about what Conversant was, in our mind, it was a fix and flip. So we bought the house, we were very open and honest with everybody that we hired. We're gonna do this for 3 or 4 years, get it to $20 million in revenue, 'cause that's so easy.

And we're going to sell it. And then we're going to take this group of people and we're going to go do it again. Because the Nebbiolo concept was find these little nuggets and accelerate them. So it— if you think about how some people invest into their home, into houses, you buy the house, you move in, you make some— you fix some stuff, new cabinets, new paint, sell it, take the equity, move to the next one. And you just go up the chain.

It's like a private equity firm, right? A lot of companies. Yeah, a little mini tiny one. What's interesting is if you do that though, you make a certain set of decisions, right? If you're going to fix and flip a house, you buy the cabinets at Home Depot.

The ones everyone likes. Yeah. And the ones that are maybe not going to last 20 years. Sure. Right?

So, for the first 3 or 4 years of this company, very open and honestly, we— This was a fix and flip. And what's happened is we've actually deeply, deeply, deeply fallen in love with this company. And it went from buying a house as a single person to fix and flip it to, holy heck, I'm married, I have a kid, and I'm going to raise my family in this the rest of our life. And I can imagine my grandkids having Christmas here in 30 years, right? And it's literally from one extreme to the other that that's gone.

And, and I, you know, I realized looking back on it, some of it was probably subconsciously there because the values that I wrote on an airplane when we were 3 months old. Because I was like, oh, our company needs values. Let's write these. And those values have not changed in one— in any way whatsoever. And have been the guiding principle that have gotten us through all of the hell to where we are today.

So, clearly subconsciously even though I was buying the cheap cabinets at Home Depot, I must have known that, you know, maybe there could be a different end to the story. Because fortunately, some of the decisions that we made at the time have proven to be the foundation that's gotten us to where we are today. But now it has gone from build a compliance company that can do a better version of the crap everybody else is doing in the marketplace to we have a noble cause of driving ethics to the center of business for a better world. And this is really important. If we do our jobs at an A+ level, we can literally leave a mark on the world.

Because today, we have 150,000 voices inside Conversant. And when I say voices, I'm talking there are 5 million employees in the world that have a helpline that is run by Conversant. So our technology allows them to come in and communicate areas where they see ethical lapses inside their company. So this is very real stuff. These 155,000 voices that have communicated with us are factory workers in Bangladesh.

We have over 600 instances of child slavery inside our system. This is real stuff, right? I'm not— nothing against HubSpot. We use it, we love it. I'm not trying to make better marketing automation software.

Right? We have over 6,000 instances of sexual harassment inside Conversant. Now the MeToo movement this year is unbelievable. I think it is the beginning of the end of white male dominance. I think it's awesome.

I love it. But this is the journey we've been on for 5 years. And those 6,000 voices inside our system, they've been there. So we actually have the ability to take the 6,000 7 women that Time Magazine nominated as People of the Year from the Plaza Hotel in New York City who had voiced their concerns into the company but nothing ever happened. We create technology that allows that voice to come in from any country in the world but for North Korea, Cuba, 2 others.

I don't know them. I can't think about the top of my head. So, literally you can send a text message from Bangladesh into Conversant And we hear you. This is a big deal. Yeah.

And so, that's what I mean is gone from a fix-and-flip to like, we got to do this. Yeah. And we have— And the obligation we feel to those 150,000 voices which I believe in 3 or 4 years, we will be over a million voices. Like, that's why now I when we're fortunate enough to have job openings here at Conversant, which we have 7 or 8 at any given point. Please go to the website.

Take a look if you meet any of them. Is that when people are interviewing with us, your option is drive ethics to the center of business for a better world or something else. Yeah. And one of the things I'm super proud of is that the number of offer letters that we send out, our acceptance rate is like 90-plus percent. Because what are you going to do?

You're going to do this or you're going to do something else. It's a pretty awesome mission. It is an incredible mission. How has that changed over the last— was it 6 years you've been here? How's it changed?

You would have asked me 1 year ago right now, yeah, what does Conversant do? I would have said we help chief ethics and compliance officers integrate data together from blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. And listen, we believed it and we meant it. And but what we— we were caught in the weeds. We were caught in the features.

Yeah. Literally one year ago, I would have rattled off 22 features to you. I never would have said, oh, it's the woman in Bangladesh in the factory that sees a child. I would have said, so she has this cool dropdown menu, and when she selects from the dropdown menu, it goes into the field. That's awesome.

Right, right. That's that. And that happens to entrepreneurs where you get so caught up in what you're doing that you forget why you're doing it. And what's happened in this last year is we've gone from the what to the why. And the why is 1,000 times more important than the what.

Yeah. So, one of the challenges I can imagine with the vision which, you know, as you share it, it's compelling, right? Absolutely. Buy in that that's an amazing mission. Not a lot of people are googling for for that mission though, right?

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, I disagree. There are billions and billions of dollars of decisions made every single day right now based on the ethical transformation. So it's easy to look at our government and political system and say, how can there be an ethical transformation? I will give you absolute proof points. Wells Fargo is a 165-year-old institution.

If one year ago I would have said, tell me about Wells Fargo, The stagecoach. Security. Dependability. It's the bank that's been there. Oh, when all the Goldman guys were doing all the crazy things on Wall Street, what was Wells Fargo doing?

Protecting my money. Do you believe in them today? They had a bad year. No, no, no. Hold on.

If you're a 24-year-old person graduating from college or 26 like some people, would you open your first account there? It's a great question. I'm not going to answer. They obviously had a bad year with opening accounts. Actually, I've heard some statistics that their accounts, new accounts by people under 30 years old being opened.

And let's be honest here. That person is worth more money to Wells Fargo than me. I've already taken out 5 mortgages, right? I'm at the— I'm 47 years old. There may be more net worth But at the end of the day, I've already made so many financial decisions in my life.

Yeah. So, I may not switch. But let's think about this. The decisions that Wells Fargo made will impact that company for generations. Because if they're not getting the 20-year-olds, what are they going to do when those 20-year-olds take out the first mortgage, the second mortgage and the IRA and the whatever else comes from blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah?

Would you buy a Wells Fargo Would you buy a Volkswagen diesel right now? He keeps asking me. No, I don't think I would. I just bought an electric vehicle. Right.

Would you buy it from Volkswagen? No. Okay. So the ethical transformation has billions of dollars of voices behind it every day. But you know what people do buy?

TOMS Shoes. Sure. They love Patagonia. Yeah. I go to a Whole Foods.

Many people now go to Whole Foods because they want to understand where their food comes from. How is the animal treated? So, the Millennials are an incredible generation that actually— And I think because of the recession and everything else, they tie values. They want to know are the words and actions that a company— When a company spouts some stuff off through PR and marketing, do the actions of that company match those words? And I will argue deeply and passionately.

If the words and actions of a company do not match, they will be destroyed and crucified by by the court of public opinion. Yeah. Billions and billions and trillions of dollars. And leaders are figuring this out. Is that what you're seeing in the market?

Because that sounds true to me, but it doesn't seem to be like the business world has operated that way. I would argue that the business world is running as fast as they can that way. So if you go backwards and look at when prior to the digital transformation, and I think the digital transformation and the ethical transformation are intrinsically linked because the digital transformation broke down the barriers of communication. So prior to the digital transformation, company could have their PR department and the handlers and the fixers and the media relationships that even when things went wrong, you just called the crisis people, right? The crisis people would work with the media people and we'd massage the story as best we could.

Yeah. Today, Matt Lauer has been a scumbag for 20 years.

There were reports about his sexual harassment into NBC multiple times over the last 20 years. What happened is it got to the point that you couldn't control the message anymore. And the reason they didn't fire him for 20 years was because he was the cash cow, right, of the most important cash cow in television, morning TV. And he was the number one personality in the number one segment of television. But it got to the point that the cost of keeping him was greater than what he had done.

But that's not an ethical decision at that point. That's a, that's a financial decision that they made. It doesn't seem to me like there was an ethical transformation because, because it's financial equation changes. But see, the point behind this is, is that the court of public opinion will now hold these companies— right, look at Weinstein Company, is gonna sell for nothing. So we totally agree on that challenge.

What I'm asking is have they started to manage according to an ethical standard or is it still, hey, they're looking at the formula and you know, they're going to make the formula— So, that's a great question. That is a great question. Compliance is the act of not doing the wrong thing. Sure. Bunch of laws.

That's fair. Think of it as a ski slope. As the Olympics in the slalom ski. What you're trying to do is get to the bottom of the mountain without knocking any of the poles over. That's compliance.

By the way, it's why we started the company 5 years ago and we still help customers with that problem. Ethics is actually just doing the right thing.

Would my mentor, would the media, would my mother, and if you have one, your maker, agree in the every little decisions you make every day in life? That's ethics. And I absolutely believe that whether through a combination of trying to— because at some point, let's look at financial services. You have at Morgan Stanley right now the number of poles on the ski slalom slope of financial services are so many, it is literally impossible for them to operate as a company. And I mean this sympathetically.

They can't get to the bottom of the mountain without knocking poles over. It's impossible. So what finally Morgan Stanley did is they hired not a chief ethics officer but an ethicist. To come to the company and say, stop all of this. This is madness.

Let's teach people how to make the right decision. And if sometimes the right decision knocks over a pole, we're making the right decision. And so I fully believe that what you're seeing in CEOs is that if you did not authentically get onto the digital transformation, okay, if your idea at Macy's is I'm gonna get a website. Guess what? You're host.

Yeah, because you didn't actually really believe in the digital transformation. I fully believe the exact same thing. If you are doing the surface stuff, if you are doing the, oh, we have a code of conduct, oh, we have a helpline, oh, we say put posters up about sexual— oh, we're not going to sell booze at the Christmas party anymore. If that's your idea of doing the right thing, That means you don't authentically believe that having a company that is using ethics as a part of its driver to actually respond, even B2B companies, at the end of the day, there's a consumer. I sat in London in Rio Tinto's office, a mining company that made a decision as a company to never buy another Volkswagen because they could not be seen as a mining company, the irony of buying a polluting car in— they buy 10,000 cars a year.

Yeah, that's the ethical transformation of cars. That's a lot of cars. So you can start from a financial standpoint, but you'll never be able to get your company all the way there unless you honestly believe. Because let's look at United Airlines. When Dr. Dow got drug out of the airplane with the crap beat out of him, the court of public opinion, they had like— what was it?

It was like 100 million views in 24 hours. Yeah, you can't— there's no crisis team anymore. That business is gone. People were like, well, why would United Airlines beat the crap out of this guy? Ironically, it wasn't— it was a sub, everything else.

But they were held accountable for that. Yeah. And I believe that Southwest Airlines, a company that from day one, from the day they were founded in 1970, has always taken a different track— we've never laid off an employee in a downturn. They never have. You know that?

Not once. Well, guess what? When you get on a Southwest airplane, they're happy, right? They don't charge for bags. They're also the most profitable company airline out there, and they've consistently been for the last 20 years with the highest rate of return for shareholders.

So you can start it from a financial standpoint, but it's only if you honestly believe that running a company in this way and manner is the best way to run your company. That's where Convercent sits. So you've got me convinced that that's the right way to go. My challenge is how do you shift these massive companies to actually, you know, change the way they do business? And we don't— and filter that down.

How does society— we, okay, we being society, we being society. So let me answer the, the first, the micro question first, then I'll go to the macro, because I actually— at the macro, the good news is it's happening. So at the micro level, how do we conversely do that? We can't. If you're a web site company in 19— in 2003, and the guy from Macy's calls you up and says, I need a website.

You can build him a website, but you're not going to convince him that his business model is going to get destroyed in 20 years if he doesn't do everything differently. Okay, right. And people told Macy's that all the way along, and, you know, here they are right now going, oh, I think retail's screwed, right? And they're trying to play catch-up. So in the micro, conversant, we are not a leader in this movement whatsoever.

We are hopefully an accelerator inside the movement, but just like civil rights, there were no leaders. It was a movement, right? The MeToo doesn't have a leader. It's a movement. ConverSight is a part of that.

On the macro level, how do we make sure this continues? I would argue that happens every day with our dollars. And it started when— think about it— when you and I go back to our, to our youth, I remember that first moment where— because it always starts It's actually the younger generations that drive ethics. I remember I came home and I learned that nets killed dolphins. And so if we didn't get the tuna with the little thing on it, we were killing Flipper.

And so like my mom would come home, I'd be like, there's no— there's no Flipper on here. Do we kill Flipper? Yeah, right. So then my mom started buying. Well, now everybody, right?

It's because kids in school learn that. Where did recycling— where did you first recycle? It was school for sure. School. Yeah, for sure.

Right? Then you came home and you're like, Mom, you're killing the trees. Right? Is don't discount the power of the millennial generation and their— they can— you can make fun of them for that they don't know how to talk and it's all phones and it's texting. But at the end of the day, they do correspond values with— they don't follow the brand the way that my generation did, right?

They want there to be some level of authenticity. And I think, again, we can talk about how that happened— was it the Depression, whatever— but that's not going to change. And, and I believe that if you don't respond to that as an organization, we will have case studies about those who fell off of the ethical transformation the same way that we have case studies about Kodak. Yeah. And Xerox.

Books and insert line here for digital transformation. Borders. Borders. Yeah. So what kind of companies should use a solution like Conversant?

So customers come to us for 2 reasons, and this will somewhat fly in the face of everything I just said, and I think percentage-wise it's probably about half. Half of our customers are in desperate need of a life preserver. They're in the water, the ethical transformation wave is there, they didn't put on a wetsuit, get a surfboard beforehand, and now they need a life preserver, right? This is the Macy's guy calling the website guy saying, I need a website. And then the other half of our customers, and I certainly will not get into names back and forth, are customers who have, chief ethics officers who have been empowered by their companies, by their leadership, by their board of directors to go out and make sure that do we understand the ethical health of our organization so when we make business decisions, because that's where the Wells Fargo case is so fascinating, is it all started for the right reasons.

They said, hey, can't make money on interest rates, we have the largest customer base in the United States in any bank. Let's see if we can figure out a way to cross-sell, upsell products into our customer base. There is nothing unethical about that. It's actually a great strategy. And then they put compensation from the head of the division all the way down.

Banks have lots of layers. I think I heard it was like 15 layers down to the person in this branch where you walk in to open up an account. That person, the pressure because of the only way that everybody above them could make money is to hit these targets. Yeah, so they essentially told this person, if you don't open up 6 accounts a day, you're gonna get fired. Wow.

So then what happens is— and this has all been proven, it's all been published in the media— is that people started to figure out, oh well, you can open up an account without a signature. So vis-à-vis text messages, this layer of folks who were the people at the front lines figured out a way to jury-rig the system. They're not because they're bad people. It's because there was 1,000 pounds of pressure on their shoulders and they either got fired or they did it. Yeah.

So ironically, you could probably go back to the CEO of the company who said genuinely, I had no idea. Right. Well, they didn't. But what happened is at no point was the ethical foundation— the stagecoach had gotten forgotten— is that nobody stepped back and said, this is ridiculous. Yeah.

Well, it's not ridiculous at any given perspective, right? Every perspective makes a lot of sense in the situation. It's the big picture. It is. Unless you're truly challenging your organization.

We do this here. When we make decisions, even hard decisions, are we— are you for a second— does this make sense? And listen, other banks didn't do it. US Bank. Not a customer of ours, right?

US Bank is a bank that didn't have problems during the financial crisis. They weren't in the news. They also haven't done this with their customers. Yeah, right. One can argue they've had consistent leadership inside the bank for many years.

That CEO is retiring right now, who challenged his organization to always do the right thing. And as a leader, it's my job to make sure that when we make decisions, I challenge, are we doing the right thing? Yeah, tone from the top. And the tone from the top has to go to tone in the middle. And if that tone in the middle is absent, then the pressure of sales commissions, yeah, there's nothing to stop it.

So what's— does it have to be a multinational company to, to do this? What's the size? Um, I would say the, the, the companies that we're really working with that are moving the company forward are global 3,000 companies. We sell today in North America, um, uh, Benelux, and France, and, and, uh, the UK. Many of our companies are large clients— Unilever, Under Armour, Microsoft, Kimberly-Clark.

We signed up last quarter Stanley Black Decker, the drill. Sure. National Oil, etc. So how small does a company— can a customer get for you? Generally is the— when we, when we break up our sales tiers, about $500 million in revenue is where we draw the line of actively marketing to you.

Now, there are absolutely exceptions to that. We have Luke's Lobster, 14 restaurants and a couple food trucks in New England, that made a commitment to their customers like Chipotle did around, right, our commitment is we're gonna only use sustainably raised, harvested lobsters, and we're gonna make sure that we do these environmental things. And so they use our product internally. So there's the religion, the rules are this layer and up, $500 million in revenue, the reality is we have a group of customers that are focused on having ethics be the core of what they do. But that's the exception rather than the rule.

That's great. So you've been in here in Denver since you started. What's it been like? Have you raised capital in Denver? You have investors?

No, yes, yes, sorry, I apologize, Brian. Our seed investment, which was $1.5 million, came from Mantova Ventures. Tuckett Capital, Brian Mankiewicz, has been an awesome supporter of the company. So that happened here in Denver. But of the other $70.5 million that we've raised has been from the Bay Area, Seattle, and New York.

Is that intentional or is it just not enough access to capital here? I think, listen, there's the Foundry Group, which is one of the most extraordinary, awesome VC firms out there. I think, again, look at ethics and values. I think nobody can question what Seth and Brad and that team there have done, that they have an extraordinary values-based investment group. We have not raised money from them.

So if you don't raise money from Foundry other than seed, there's not a lot out there where you can raise money from. And what about your, your employees? Are they all here in Colorado? No, they're not. So we have— it's kind of a moving target right now.

We're adding people at a pretty rapid rate. I believe right now we have about 100 135 team members. Okay. About 10 of those are— nearly 10 of those are in London. So, no, it's actually a full— we do— we now do sales.

We now have marketing there as well. We have customer success managers, support managers, solutions. So, it's kind of other than the backend functions, it's actually— yeah, kind of all the customer-facing stuff. Customer-facing stuff is there. And then here in the US, we have probably 10 remote team members on the sales side and on the delivery side in Scottsdale and Boston and Chicago, etc., Dallas.

And then we've got, call it, 110 or 115 here in the office. So a lot of folks here at headquarters. Yes, this is— and I would— I can always be proven wrong— I would expect as we march to our goals over the next couple years. I believe that Denver— Denver will absolutely unequivocally bar none remain our intergalactic headquarters and will always be. I don't see us opening up a lot of other offices in the US.

Yeah, maybe some sales, but I think Denver will always be the heart of the company. How has it been to hire people here? What's your experience? It's awesome. Got the right talent.

Yeah, so if you look at our executive team, team, and then you look at our leadership team, and then look at the most important team, which is the employees of the company. Um, uh, almost of the 9 members of the executive team, the last 5 have been from outside of Denver. But I think what's important about that is you can now hire world-class experienced people if you— if they're not necessarily in Denver, and they'll come here. Yeah, quality of life. Many of them are coming from the Bay Area, a little bit of cost savings.

At least from there to here. And so we've been very— we've hired some just really solid leadership, but also in the development. I think of the group of developers that we've hired recently. We've gotten folks to move from Florida and Texas and Oregon. So, you know, I think what Hink and Looper started and what Hancock have done in Denver over the last 20 years is— or 15 years— is awesome.

This is a place that people want to come. We have arts, we We have culture, we have music, we have restaurants, right? You can move to Denver and not want to ski. You can move to Denver because you just want to live in Denver. And so I think that's what's really driven the tech community here is Denver, rather than just Colorado, Denver is a place that people want to live.

And yeah, more traffic, it's a little more expensive, but I would take this Denver and the multifaceted Our education system, I believe, is moving in the right direction. What they've done with the Denver Public Schools is great. What they've done with the STEM schools is real. I mean, these are real tangible things. So yeah, you got to offset the traffic, but I live in Park Hill.

So, well, we're way over time. I want to see if you have any final words you want to give to the folks listening. Certainly appreciate you, all the insights. Awesome stories. I didn't want to cut off anything.

I could have gone for another hour, but, uh, so I have to give a shout out. Um, I know this is about the information security, this whole security community here in Denver. I have to give a shout out to Cole Krems, uh, and Nick Lee, who are our world-class security guys. We have gotten our InfoSec, we've gotten our SOC 2, uh, no, sorry, we've gotten our HIPAA, our InfoSec, we're about to get our SOC 2. I'm very proud of the work the team here has done.

It's critical, it's mission-critical to what we do as an organization, and so I want to give those 2 a shout-out. That's great. So they've done, they've done an extraordinary job and they're very highly respected inside the organization. Well, fantastic. We'll definitely keep tabs on what you guys are doing and hopefully catch up with you in a year or so and hear that you've, you know, blown the doors off this thing.

All right, I appreciate it, Robb. Thanks a lot and appreciate you being nice to the dogs. You did pet them a couple times as they walked by. All right, have a good one. All right, thanks, Robb.

Learn more about the Colorado security scene at colorado-security.com, where you can see information about local security groups, a calendar of upcoming security events, and learn more about Colorado Equals Security. Reach out to Alex and Robb by emailing info@colorado-security.com.

Until next time, remember, Colorado equals security.