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 the newscast for episode 132, the week of September 9th, 2019. Alex, how's everything going?

Things are good, Robb. Back in football season, got Some exciting college football, NFL starting. Yeah. CU, they had a great comeback win against Nebraska yesterday. They did.

Yeah. Good for them. Yeah. Bad for Nebraska, which is all right with me. Which is all right with me too.

Broncos play today. I think they're playing the Raiders. Is that true? I think that's correct. Is that— that's tonight or Sunday night, I think.

So we don't know the answer yet. Yeah, I think I do know who's going to win, but I'll keep that to myself. Lots of drama around the Raiders too. Antonio Brown being released and now with the Patriots. Oh, I didn't know he signed with the Patriots.

I saw that, I saw that he got released. Yes. So very exciting for the Patriots. Not exciting for anybody else. All right.

Well, let's go ahead and jump over into our news. We have some housekeeping. There's a Slack channel. You can go out and join over 1,000 of our closest friends in the security community here in Denver and the rest of Colorado and talk about all the events going on in the area. If you want to join the Slack channel, go out to colorado-security.com and click the Slack link.

We also have a mailing list. If you go to our website, colorado-security.com, you can sign up for the mailing list, get the show notes delivered to you every week like you are the only person in the whole world. A little love note from Alex each week. Exactly. We'd also love it if you would rate us and review us and subscribe on your favorite podcast listener.

Alex, how are we doing with our Stitcher joining there? Almost there, Robb. We're getting really close. That process is— it's a very intricate process. It takes Takes a little bit of time, but we, we're going to get there eventually.

Um, and of course, uh, once you've subscribed, we'd love it if you would tell a friend about the podcast and help us get more listeners. And finally, if you've done all those things, or if you just want to go above and beyond, you can join our Patreon campaign and sign up to support Colorado Equal Security financially, help defray the costs that we have for hosting and all the other things that we do around putting this stuff together. All right, let's go ahead and jump in while we're into the news. While we're talking about football, there's There's football news this week. Yeah, it's no longer Invesco Field or Sports Authority Field.

Alex, what is it? Uh, it is now Empower Field at Mile High. That's pretty exciting. Yeah, it sounds, you know, it's powered up, right? It is now a much better, powerful stadium.

So, uh, Empower is the, is the kind of new brand name of the company Great West Financial. Yep, which we've had here in town for quite a while. For sure. And they do retirement solutions and things like that. So I think Empower Retirement is the way they go to market now, right?

Yeah. But we know Erica Boyle and Doug Peterson. Erica, one of the directors over there at the ISO, and the CISO is Doug Peterson at Empower. So congratulations to them for getting their name on the biggest building in town. Yeah.

And they're going to be giant signs on the sides of the stadium now saying Empower. So hopefully none of us can say, what was that Empower thing anymore? Now we'll know. Right. Also, along with football, Ball Corp debuted this weekend their new climate-conscious beer cups at the CU-Nebraska football game, which was, of course, a very exciting football game.

So I don't know if you looked at the pictures. It looked just like one of those red Solo cups, except it's metal. Right. It's kind of funny. It's made out of aluminum.

That sounds like a thing that Ball would do since they are big into aluminum cans and now aluminum cups. So CU's Folsom Field was the first college football stadium to adopt a zero-waste program. They want to recycle or compost all the materials that are used on game day. That is pretty cool. And aluminum is much easier to be recycled.

You can recycle it over and over again as opposed to plastic. Thousands of times. Thousands of times. Plastic, it is possible to be recycled, but often, you know, you lose parts of it and only a few times and so forth. So awesome, it's good news.

Uh, moving along, speaking of Boulder, uh, the city to the north, Boulder biotech companies are putting Colorado on the gene editing map. There's 4 different companies there in the Boulder area who are doing some pretty cool stuff with gene editing. Yeah, and Boulder has had a long history of being in the biotech sector, and they talk a little bit about that in the, the article here. It's actually a very long article. So if you like biotech, I think it's something you should check out.

But they're really talking about the companies who are, you know, doing cutting-edge research around CRISPR, whether that's actually the techniques or the tools, things like that. And a lot of them are based here in Boulder. So I really liked at the beginning of the article, they, they talk about, you know, you get cancer and rather than having to have a scalpel remove the tumor, you know, gene editing techniques could be the solution for getting rid of that tumor. And that's the kind of thing these companies are working on. Pretty awesome.

I look forward to the day when gene editing can give me gills or, or get rid of your gills, get rid of my gills, whichever it might be, Robb, whichever the case may be for you. The other thing I wanted to mention is that in the article, they talk about Tom Cech, who is a Nobel Prize winner. He was instrumental in figuring out what RNA actually does. And he went to my alma mater, Grinnell College. That's fantastic.

So you were the only 2 people who went to Grinnell that I've ever heard of, I think. Uh, that's, that could be true. Is that possible? Are there others? Uh, there are other famous people, but don't put, put me on the spot of figuring that out, Robb.

Um, and I actually had met Tomczyk. So anyway, exciting stuff. Fantastic. All right. What do we got next?

Next, uh, Red Robin, um, completely left turn. Red Robin is hiring a new CEO. Um, actually the CEO from Noodles and Company is going to be taking over as the new Red Robin CEO. He was, he was the chairman of the board for Noodles. Oh, okay.

And he, he was brought into Noodles, uh, to work with their CEO. David Bonin Hauser, uh, to— they basically did a 2-year turnaround of that restaurant. And they, after they had closed 55 chains, they ended up having a really nice turnaround. And Noodles has had a great resurgence. And Red Robin saw that and said, let's get this guy over here.

Yeah. Uh, also as part of this, uh, Red Robin, they— there was a takeover, uh, bid from, uh, one of their investors, uh, that they have now rejected. They believe that that offer was too low. And that they feel they can turn themselves around. Well, I love having a local national presence.

That's pretty awesome. And of course, you know, they're just right over by Fiddler's Green. Hopefully this, this new CEO is able to really take Red Robin where they need to go. Also, if you check out the article, there's a nice picture slideshow showing all of the restaurants that are or have been headquartered in Colorado. I wish I had clicked through those slides.

There you go. All right. Next story, we have an update on the Regus cybersecurity issue. This article is really just talking about how the, you know, Regis is one of the very few nationally accredited centers of excellence for teaching of cybersecurity, and, and talking about how the teachers are getting to kind of live through what they've been teaching their students. This isn't necessarily a lot of news about the breach, but more about, you know, what is the impact to the organization of having this kind of a breach for that, you know, when they teach cybersecurity.

Yeah, and they did say that in the future they are going to have more public information. I think even, you know, potentially a webinar or something like that about what happened. Um, but right now it still seems a little bit foggy as exactly what happened. Yeah. And of course they, they are still in the process of recovering, so it might be a little bit too early to— could be— get too many details out there.

Uh, next, Webroot, uh, has some news. So Webroot, of course, was acquired by Carbonite, and their new parent company has promoted some of the Webroot executives to Carbonite executives. Yeah. So There's a couple interesting things to me in this. Carbonite has more than 1,000 people.

Let's say a little bit more than 1,000 people globally. There are 280 of them at their headquarters, which is out in Boston, but there are over 300 of those Carbonite employees at the Webroot headquarters here in town. So that is the place where most, well, the biggest center of employees there. And they promoted John Post to COO. Um, Chad Backer to Chief Product Officer and Hal Lowness to CTO.

You know, 3 of the biggest corporate positions are all coming from the former Webroot employees. Maybe we will end up with a CenturyLink and Level 3 kind of deal where, you know, CenturyLink technically, uh, took over Level 3, but it seems as though Level 3 is, uh, sort of eating CenturyLink from the inside. Yeah, good stuff, right? Yeah, good stuff. Next, there is an article from the Ping Identity Identity CISO Advisory Council.

Robb, what is that? So there's a press release this week basically talking about some of the research that Ping's CISO Advisory Council put together. We get together with some of our customer CISOs on an annual basis, and there's a lot of things like talking about roadmap and getting the, the CISOs' feedback on where Ping's products should go. But one of the things we decided to do a couple years ago was try and put together some research that can kind of give give back a little bit to the community and give some stuff that would be useful research. And so this year, this press release talks about 2 of the pieces of research we put together.

One was around, I think we actually talked about previously, the insider threat program and how do you build an insider threat program. The second element of it was how do you secure your customer identity and how important securing customer identity is. And of course, for many CISOs, that's maybe outside the realm of what they normally cover. A lot of CISOs are focused on corporate and workforce stuff, and this is more focused on customer or product information and, and kind of talks about how do you go about solving those problems. So it's a couple white papers you can use, and I assume you can find these white papers on the Ping Identity website.

You can click the link in the show notes, and I think that'll probably get you there eventually too. Sweet. Uh, next, there was a blog post from Red Canary talking about meeting Greg Bailey, who is now their director of incident handling. So Greg was previously a pen tester and one of the folks who ran pen testing for them and red teaming, and he's moved over to, uh, to doing incident handling. So if you want to get to know Greg a little bit, I I saw a couple interesting facts in here about Greg that I think everyone should probably read.

Uh, I am a big fan of Greg because we both had a Commodore 64 as our first computer. Well, that's, that's a pretty good reason. Greg also was almost caught by ex-military when he was doing a pen test. So we've given away the whole article, Robb. You don't have to read it now.

Just kidding, go read it. Uh, and if you want to get to know another local security company employee, well, LogRhythm has a blog post this week talking about introducing their new CEO, Mark Logan. Of course, if you listened to the podcast last week, you wouldn't need this. But, but the— this article was written saying that they took notes from a recent interview that he was in. It's quite possible that it was from the interview with us.

I don't know. As far as I know, that is the only recent interview of him, Robb. So it must be that, as far as I know as well. So if you want to get to know Mark Logan, this is a chance to read up. And then finally today, we had a blog from ThreatX.

This is the first blog that I can remember us covering from ThreatX, so that is pretty cool. This is by Chris Brezdiunas and— of Colorado EcoSecurity fame. Exactly. There has been a recent interview with her on the podcast, and then as far as I know, that's the only interview that's ever been done with her.

But, you know, she's talking about, you know, a unified approach to AppSec more around Uh, next generation WAF and, and the, uh, protecting outside, uh, for AppSec. So I was reading it and what I was really hoping this was gonna say is like, you don't need to have all your static analysis, dynamic analysis, you know, all the, all the, uh, other tools. But, but really what this was saying was there's just one tool for it in production in order to do all of your WAF-y type things. Yeah. That's what, that's what I read.

So it's like, you know, DDoS and cross-site scripting and app and business logic type. Type flaws. I think even API protection. So there you go. So Chris has, uh, got a post here if you're interested in learning more about what ThreatX does.

That'd be a good post for you to read. And that is all of our news. So let us— let's move over to the Slack Message of the Week. Thanks to Andre Gaeta. Andre has been a big supporter of the show for, you know, since we started, um, and he's been doing the Slack Message of the Week out of his own pocket.

Congratulations. Kind of a tangent, uh, it looks like Brian Thornton just recently accepted a position starting at Mimecast working as a pre-sales engineer, and he'll be working for Andre. Yeah. Brian was over at Boulder Community Health and making the move over to the, to the dark side, the vendor side. Yeah.

Congrats, Brian. Anyway, so this week's winner of the Slack Message of the Week is Mike Pedrick. Mike had a lot of great contributions on the show this week, but specifically we're going to call out that Mike, not only did he post about this, but he actually taught a CISSP training course on Saturday around CISSP Domain 6, which is secure testing, right? Security testing and assessment, I believe. So congratulations to Mike for winning.

You know, we want to recognize you for your great post this week, but also for, you know, helping the community by doing that volunteer training. Awesome. He gets to pick one item from the Colorado Equal Security store and, uh, and gets to support some swag while he's drinking coffee or walking around town in his Colorado Equal Security shoes. I did see at least one person post a picture of themselves in their Colorado Equal Security swag, um, on the Slack channel this week. So I love it.

All right, let's go ahead and jump over to events. I want to remind you all that we have a calendar of events on the, on the website, um, if you can go out and see what's going on, you know, throughout town throughout the next 6 months or so. First, SecureSet is doing a Hacking 101 Intro to Wi-Fi on September 9th. Uh, I wonder if if anything's going to change for their events now that they've been, been acquired. Good, good question.

Maybe we'll have to reach out to Brett and ask him. Yeah. Uh, next, ISSA Denver is doing September meetings on the 10th and 11th. On the 12th, uh, there's the Get Gamified Tour, experiential cyber learning. That sounds exciting.

On the 14th, we have another CISSP seminar series where they're going to have Domains 2, which is asset security. And 4, communications and network security. And, uh, if you didn't want to learn about the CISSP but instead wanted to study for the Security+, ISSA Colorado Springs is doing their Security+ exam prep on the 14th. And that's, uh, week 1 of 3. They're gonna do the 14th, 21st, and 28th.

So if you want to get Security+ed up, head down to the Springs for that really affordable and high-quality training. On the 16th, the CTA is doing a View from the Top CEO panel for local local companies. On the 18th, DenSec is doing their September meetup. The 19th, ISSA Denver is doing an education workshop, The Dark Web: An Interactive Tour. Oh, that sounds exciting.

Do I get to actually— do I get to go into the dark web? I think you can't avoid it if you do a tour of it. Holy cow. Uh, on the 19th, ISACA Denver is doing their September meeting. Uh, also on the 19th, CSA Denver, that's the Cloud Security Alliance, is doing their September meeting as well.

Also on the 19th, ISC² Denver is doing their September chapter meeting with a presentation from the FBI. That sounds like fun. On the 19th and 20th, a 2-day event, the National Cybersecurity Center down in Colorado Springs is doing the 2019 Cyber Symposium. This is not the governor's meeting. This is a separate symposium down in the Springs.

Maybe you should do that and just stay around for the 21st for the second Security+ meeting. Um, also on the 20th, SecureSet is doing a capture the flag for beginners. On the 21st, there's another CISSP training seminar, which is domains— oh, this says domain 6, and, uh, which would you— we just said happened yesterday, so maybe they switched something around. Um, and, and number 7, which is security operations. But I'm sure there are CISSP trainings, but I'm not sure what the domains are right now.

There you go. Uh, and then finally on the 24th Women in Security Denver is doing their September meeting. All right.

We're laughing because Alex said finally on the 24th, but there's another event on the 24th. Also on the 24th, SecureSet is doing an expert series. Dorn Cybersecurity doing security program boot camp. You want to learn how to build a security program. All right.

And finally, That was it, Robb. We can move on to jobs. Oh, it's not like we haven't done this before. Well, there's a first time for everything, right? Uh, yeah, that's true.

All right, moving over to jobs. Not the first time. There is a first time for Alex. You know, we, for the last 11 months, we've started every jobs session by talking about a job at Ping Identity. So Robb, what jobs do you have this week?

I have zero jobs open. We've, we filled like 4 roles in the last 3 weeks and I have nothing to talk about. Congratulations. So excited. That is very exciting.

So if any of my people are listening and thinking of quitting, give me a month. So now that you've filled all your positions, uh, and you don't have to worry about hiring people, you can actually start doing some work now, right? I can actually get some work done. Yeah. Uh, so moving on to jobs that are open right now, CoBank is hiring a senior application/cloud security analyst.

Ooh, that's exciting. SugarCRM is hiring a vice president of IT and security. That's a pretty cool role. Circadence is hiring a director of cybersecurity. So Circadence is also the company that's doing that Get Gamified event we talked about.

So they have a, like, a gamified security training thing. So maybe you could be part of that. Probably. Sounds cool. Western Union is looking for a secure— man, I am on it today, Robb.

You got this. A security operations leader. Coalfire is hiring an application security associate. Beeline is looking for a DevSecOps engineer. Spectrum, also known as Charter, is hiring a customer security specialist focused on network operations.

The Colorado Judicial Branch is looking for a network security engineer. InteliSecure is hiring a data protection analyst. And finally, Ball Aerospace is looking for a technical intern in cybersecurity. Well, we made it through the news. I didn't think we were going to make it.

We got a little rough there, Robb. I apologize. I haven't had my coffee yet. But we made it, and we now have an interview with Serge Borso. Serge, a big part of the community here in town, has done a lot of years working for corporations in the area.

And but he's now running his own company, Spider Spider Labs, SpiderSec Labs, SpiderSec Labs. And he's going to talk about how how he went from working for other security departments to running his own company and, and kind of being a who's who of security guys in town. He's also been really involved in OWASP. Yeah, he's talking about OWASP as part of that. We did talk about OWASP.

There you go. All right, well, that's it for this week. We'll look forward to talking to you again next week. Thanks, Robb. This is Brian Becker, Director of Information Security at Cronky Sports and Entertainment.

You're listening to Colorado Equals Security, for Colorado security professionals by Colorado security professionals. Welcome to Colorado Equal Security. This is Robb Reck, and I am very fortunate today to be sitting in the Ping office with Tamara Chuang. Tamara, you, um, you have quite a name in the area as a tech reporter, previously— well, currently with Colorado Sun and previously with the Denver Post. And I'm looking forward to understanding how you got to do that and, and really what you've learned through that.

But first, I, I understand that you are quite the gardener here in Colorado. Could you talk to me about what you've been doing in your garden? Sure. Thanks for having me, Robb.

So I am originally from California. Yeah, which part? San Diego. Okay. Southern California.

Very Southern California. Right. And moved here maybe 8 years ago. Had never gardened in my life. Once lived in an attic apartment where I had a cactus.

It's one of those airtight apartments. I closed the door one day and the cactus fell onto the roof, and I left it there. And for a whole year in Philadelphia, I guess it survived in the snow and water. And how's that possible? I don't know.

Well, I had actually collected it and put it back on the roof, but in a pot. And by the time I left Philadelphia, it had sprouted a flower. Oh, that's nice. But anyway, I never gardened. I never gardened until I got to Colorado.

And that's because like my first week here, my neighbor, um, rings my doorbell and welcomes me to the neighborhood. And she's like, you know, the last people here had a big garden, hint hint. I'm like, what? And she kept hinting away and said, you know, I'm a gardener, I could help you. I'm like, okay, come on over.

And so every year since then I've had a garden. And I am not a master gardener, I'm nothing. I would definitely qualify as amateur. Yeah, but everything seems to grow really well. My current garden has probably 8 different types of tomatoes.

It has pumpkins. Um, this is a big garden if you got pumpkins growing. It's a big garden. I can show you pictures. But, and, and I let the sunflowers grow wild, so it's like a great jungle.

It's like a, you know. So how much, how much time do you spend focus on your garden? So in the spring, I clear it out from the previous year, plant the seeds, do the watering. I have like, you know, those tube sprinklers or whatever. Set the tube sprinklers, and that's about it.

Oh, wow. So this is like just a day or two to get it all cleared out and set up and everything? I mean, sometimes I weed, but I kind of let everything grow. Even though we don't eat everything from the garden, it feeds a lot of animals. So somebody's eating it.

Yes, and I'm okay with that too. But we do eat out of it almost every day. That's awesome. So what— so you said tomatoes, you said pumpkins. What else?

Sugar snap peas. We have long beans, lots of kale. Um, what else? Peppers. I mean, we have pretty much have tried everything and everything grows pretty well.

All the herbs, everything does pretty well. We did corn the first year, but we also have a squirrel problem. So one day I caught the squirrel sitting on top of the telephone wires in the back of our house and chewing a cob of corn like a typewriter. That's amazing. I mean, seriously, I was like— Did it make your day?

That looked like a cartoon. Yes. And I remember it forever. But there just wasn't enough corn because you really need like several rows of it to fertilize each other. Right.

Oh, is that right? You have to have a lot of space. How big is your garden then? Square footage? Well, our house is on a third of an acre.

Oh, so you have plenty of room. It's probably 1/5 of that. Oh, that's a lot of space. Yeah. Yeah, you're not kidding around about this garden.

I love it. So have you had any— you mentioned that some animals eat it. Have you had any problems with the bugs? Oh yeah. So if anyone here gardens, especially in the Denver area, there's something called Japanese beetles.

And I mean, they are like no pest out there because they feed on your leaves. In my garden particularly, it's rhubarb, which is a poisonous plant, right? I mean, animals aren't supposed to eat it because it may kill them or get them really sick. So these bugs, they just eat holes in the leaves, so it leaves— it's left like a lacy leaf and kind of pretty, but, you know, so much for the plant. Right.

So what do you do about that? Well, the only way you can really tackle it is handpick them off. Handpicking the beetles off? Yeah. Or dumping them into soapy water.

And because I've tried, I've looked for ways to fix, to limit the Japanese beetle growth. And they are, they just reproduce like crazy. So, you know, there's things you can buy, like you— so they lay eggs in your lawn, and but if you put some sort of bacteria on your lawn, it could kill them, you know, or at least keep them from, you know, hatching eggs and stuff like that. But that means they have to touch that bacteria, and so it's hit and miss. Yeah.

So anyway, I was talking, I was at some outdoor show or plant show or something like that and met someone from CSU who mentioned, oh yeah, there was a town in Colorado that attacked the beetle and, you know, and basically got rid of it. So for more than a year I've been trying to figure out what town this was, or, you know, I thought about, oh, it'd be an interesting story. Then I figured out it was Palisade. So I ended up writing this big story in July and and with all these tips about what happened. And what happened really was they convinced the whole town to participate in attacking the Japanese beetle.

So that meant spraying lawns, drying out lawns, you know, doing all these things together as a community to fight the Japanese beetle. And I mean, the reason— there are definitely different reasons why they were successful and why Denver will, I'm told, will never be successful. But they had an insect district to force people to do it. So that's a big one. But I think it was a community effort and they all came from, you know, they came and sort of backed the peach or the produce there.

And, you know, people there knew it was important. So Palisade peaches are nationally known, right? Right. Obviously here. They're in season right now.

Delicious right now. Right. So are any of the tips that you got from your experience with Palisades useful for you in your own battle at home?

Well, if I could convince the community to do it, that would be great. And I really wish someone like the Botanic Garden would get the community of Denver together. I mean, the problem with Japanese beetles is if they're not If you use one of those Japanese beetle traps, you know, you will get your neighbor's Japanese beetles because they're attracted to the pheromones that are in it. And if your whole neighborhood does it, then it's great for the people at the center of the neighborhood, but people on the edges, you know, they'll get the Japanese beetles from their neighbors. So it just, you know, it is this daunting task.

But I, I still think, you know, there could be ways to do it because there are plants that don't attract beetles. They're, um, CSU, as you probably know, they're huge researchers on animals and insects, and they're working on natural predators, including like a wasp that lays eggs in the beetles' heads or something like that. And then it's like a horror movie. They kind of— yes, like Aliens. So there's different things that are in the works.

Yeah. But to me, I feel like, well, as long as they don't spread beyond the rhubarb and they kind of have, but they, you know, I've been really on it this summer. So, so, so it's taking a little bit more than just the setup days at this point because of the Japanese beetles. That's true. That's true.

Bummer. Well, I'd love to— let's talk about your background. So obviously, you know, I've been a reporter here for— it sounds like 8 years in Denver. Education-wise, how did you get into the reporter biz? So I actually went to college for pre-med.

Wow. And loved biology. Didn't really like chemistry because there were a lot of absolutes and memorization, you know, with the formulas you had to memorize them. And so while I did, I did, you know, I did well with labs, You know, memorizing all those formulas was really hard for me. And, you know, it came down to the point where I realized I need a practical career.

I need to— I learn by experience. And one of those things happened to be journalism. I mean, I have a whole other story of how I got into journalism. And a good time to tell it. We're all excited to know.

Well, it Honestly, it was at my college. So I went to a pretty conservative college, Wheaton College, near Chicago. And I was on the college newspaper when I was a senior, and I was a reporter. And my roommate and I— she was a photographer for the paper, and we were working late one night, and on the way home Well, we got public safety to take us back to our apartment and— but convinced them to drive us to Dunkin' Donuts or something for a late-night snack. And as we were driving, I noticed there was someone on the ground scrubbing the sidewalks.

And I noticed it was this guy who was head of College Republicans. And so then the next day, everyone was going crazy because I guess the College Democrats had done chalk drawings. This was during the Clinton-Bush election in '92. Oh, way back. Yeah, yeah.

So, and so everyone was wondering, you know, well, what happened? How come they all got erased? And I just said, oh, it was so-and-so. And that just started this craziness because you know, we had a very small staff, obviously, and I ended up co-writing the story. Yeah.

The other problem was the guy was also an editor at the paper and basically was trying to censor the story. Oh. And it just— I mean, I'm not really a person to speak up for something, you know. I kind of just observe and I write. And but that was it.

I mean, we couldn't, you know, they changed the story, they took his name out, and it was just— but he's like this huge, you know, he's the president of the College Republicans and the editor of the paper. Yeah. So very much a conflict of interest. And I was learning, you know, what does conflict of interest mean? Yeah, that's a conflict of interest.

And I ended up quitting the paper and starting my own. Holy smokes. So that was a turning point for me. Wow. And after that, I went into journalism.

And made your major as a journalism major? Yeah, well, it was a communications major because they didn't have journalism. And, you know, I— it was, you know, the fastest way to get out of college. You know, I just switched majors and went that route and have been in pretty much in journalism ever since. That's awesome.

So, so you, you graduated college, and did you go get a job as a reporter immediately, or what was that? Yes. So, um, out of college, I did some investigative reporting internships, um, worked on, you know, got to work with great people, um, and really learn about, well, what does it mean to be a journalist? You know, you got to be fair, right? Um, you can't be biased.

And, you know, I remember one editor who interviewed me when I said, yeah, you can't, you know, you can't be biased. And he's like, well, everyone's biased. And I'm like, yes, good point. But as a journalist, you try to weigh, you know, what's out there. You know what your biases are, so you try to be fair.

You know what you need to do to, you know, compensate for what— try and correct any biases, right? Exactly. And you try to talk to as many people as you can and get those opinions and figure out, you know, well, what's, what's the storyline here? Yeah. So it's— so you learned that through the investigative journalism?

Yes, and internships and starting those jobs. And so did you— those were internships. Where was your first real, like, full-time doing journalism? So I had a— I was in a, um, well, at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Okay.

So I was covering county and city, you know, very local municipal, you know, everyday, you know, what, what some of the local newspapers here, like, um, the Denver Post used to have a section called Your Hub. So I actually, I think they still do, but it's very community-related news. I think we did a lot a little more harder news than that, but it was still city council meetings. Yeah, you know, some of the boring stuff, right? But you know, that's what newspapers used to be.

They used to have reporters at all these meetings. And you know, I was on the South Jersey bureau of the Philadelphia Inquirer, and there were 3 suburban sections for South Jersey. Wow. And each section probably had 20 reporters, editors, and staff. So we, you know, the South Jersey office probably had like 80 people, which is probably bigger than what the Post is today.

Yeah, that's amazing. And I assume that, you know, really what we're talking about is the people who subscribe are basically, you know, paying for these people to go do this journalism for us, right? Instead of not just— it seems so transactional as I choose or do not choose to buy a newspaper, but it's really a much bigger picture than Right. I mean, it's information. I mean, you can, you can read today, you can read Denver Police tweets, but do they tell you the whole story?

They may not. And that's why there's reporters at the Denver Post that will figure out what that real story is. I mean, you can— it depends on your source. So how do you know you're not getting the full story when Denver Police tells you something. I mean, you don't know.

I mean, that's why in the old world of competitive journalism there were multiple sources so you could sort of read them all. Yeah, and then make your own decision. So how long were you at Philadelphia Inquirer? So that was about 2 or 3 years. Okay, and then, then I went to a bureau of the Dallas Morning News.

Mm-hmm. Did kind of the same thing but slowly got into technology. Oh, I was a business— so I became a business reporter in Dallas. So was the purpose of moving from Philly to Dallas like because you wanted to get out of the municipal stuff? You wanted to get a little different focus?

Yes. Okay. Yes. So, so that's the thing, you know, you can— once you're— it's hard to move up at a paper. So you usually have to move out.

Is that right? Yeah. And come back, come back if you want. But so in, in Dallas, I work— actually worked in Arlington, Texas. So it was a it was a newspaper war, if you can believe it.

Dallas had started the Arlington Morning News, which caused the Fort Worth Star-Telegram to start the Arlington Star-Telegram. Oh, really? And anyway, so it was a great competitive atmosphere and environment, and I got to cover business for the first time. I was attracted to business because I actually like numbers, and, you know, I felt like there was a lot of data in the numbers, and there was a lot of potential for stories by digging. Yeah, which I'm sure, you know, that's true with all beats, but I was attracted to that.

Yeah, and then I slowly got into technology. So my, my background is my dad was an engineer, electrical engineer, and, you know, he bought a PC back in the '80s. Yeah, so we were learning BASIC and Writing programs, right? Well, you know, from a book. Yeah, you just copy it exactly.

It was magazines. They would buy magazines and it would have all the lines to copy to play a game, right? Yeah, that's exactly what we did. Yeah. So, you know, and just have— so basically I grew up with a computer and, you know, that's from the '80s, right?

And, you know, when I was in college, you know, I had a computer and I was the person people came to for What was it? Word— what was that? WordPerfect? Yes, maybe it was WordPerfect. Sure, you know, it's stuff like that.

So I— it— things like that just made sense to me. Yeah, I probably should have gone the computer engineer or programmer route, but for some reason I, I felt like I was better at interpreting. Yeah, things. So like more complex stories or writing it for so I can understand at a 5th grade level, yeah, or for my parents to understand, that sort of thing. But so from Dallas, you know, I, I was trying to get on with the main Dallas staff, but then this opportunity for me to become a tech reporter, you know, was in Delaware.

So I moved back to Philadelphia, right, and was doing business and tech. And then, then, then got recruited by the Orange County Register. Hmm. And this was around 2000. That was an interesting time to be doing tech, right?

So actually, right before my interview was when the NASDAQ— like a week before my interview, or wait, it might have been the day of my interview— the NASDAQ tanked. Yeah, from all the dot-coms. Come back for 20 years, right? Yeah, but they hired me anyway. Wow.

So, and I was supposed to write for their tech section, and probably a month after I started, they discontinued the tech section. But it was more like a tabloid insert. So I just became a tech reporter. And at that time, for the Orange County Register, there were 3 and a half tech reporters. Holy smokes, that's great, right?

So, yeah, so it's a different world back. Yeah, it is. And but, you know, the other thing is Orange County is completely different than Denver. So back there I was covering, you know, there was Broadcom, lots of semiconductor companies, hardware. So tech was pretty broad.

Yes, and very siloed. You know, groups didn't seem to intermingle too much. So coming to Denver, I just felt like, oh, Wow, it's such a different tech community here. I mean, not only with everyone so excited about startups, but honestly, I do feel like the give-first mentality, like Brad Feld and the folks in Boulder, that really spread, at least within the startup community. And you could tell it was a little different here.

I mean, people seemed a little nicer or friendlier. I don't know what it is. So, and I felt like I got to write these great stories of people and companies.

And I felt like the community responded to those. So, and it's not like the Denver Post didn't have a tech reporter before. 'Cause I think Andy Vuong was a tech reporter. And I'd heard good things about him. So it was just, So did we steal you from Orange County directly?

Oh, or was there— there was, there was a gap. Okay. You need to go into it if you don't want to. I can go into it because it kind of relates to why I'm at the Sun. Yeah.

So even— so this was not quite 10 years ago, but I mean, newspapers were already in decline. Yeah. So back in 2010, and I was just getting tired. I mean, I'd been at the registered for 10 years. I felt like I wanted, you know, everything, you know, they were doing furloughs.

I don't know if they had layoffs. I think they had some layoffs, but not, not like today, right? And so my husband's company ended up moving to Denver. Okay. And we just had a kid, so it just felt like a good opportunity to quit.

Right, just take a break. Yes, to leave journalism because I was tired of an industry in decline. Yeah. And it was disheartening. So moved to Denver, became a gardener, yeah, took care of my kid.

And then when she started kindergarten, I realized, well, maybe I should look for a job. So I immediately did not look for a journalism job. I never thought I would go back. Yeah. And was in an interview, actually a second interview for a company to do like some tech writing or something like that.

And they were looking at my resume and said, hey, you know, you have a really interesting resume. Are you sure this is what you want to do? And in the back of my mind, I'm like, no. But you said yes, of course it is. Yeah.

And that day I went home and looked for journalism jobs, and the tech job was open at the Denver Post. So I just felt like it was so serendipitous because, you know, this is what I was trained to do, and I love doing it. I have a passion for it. And, um, I was hired within the month, and my editor who hired me then, um, is now— is still my editor at the Colorado Sun. So what year did you start working there?

2014? Yes. 2014. Yes. And like, what was your, you know, how— what was the Denver tech scene like in 2014?

What did you walk into? Well, Startup Week. So I started probably, yeah, so it's like 5 years ago, September. Yeah. So then that was around Denver Startup Week, right?

So that's what I walked into. Yeah, it's exciting, right? And remember, you know, back in Orange County, there was no real startup scene. I mean, not like organic. It was more like, you know, someone coming from China and setting up a new business center for, for a manufacturer.

Okay. And stuff. So it was very different. And, and one of my first interviews was Ping. Oh yeah, it really was.

It was with Andre, Andre right off the bat. Yeah. And I don't remember how that happened, but I remember him showing me on his iPhone, well, this is what we do. Here's the different degrees of how a website identifies you, showing me the 2-factor and all that stuff. But I mean, I can tell you when I stepped into the lobby, it was before Halloween.

Yeah, so Halloween is a big holiday at Ping. We take our Halloween pretty seriously around here. And that was like one of the first— I asked the receptionist, I'm like, wow, you know, I've never seen this before. And she was like, oh, the CEO is really into it. So I talked about that and I learned about Andre's love of Halloween and how he— I think he hired like some Hollywood makeup person to help him with his costumes.

And I'm like, whoa, this is hardcore. So he's way over the top. And the only problem with being that over the top on your costumes is every year the expectations just ratchet up higher and higher. So I feel for the, for the guy at this point. I don't know what you could possibly do to meet expectations now.

But that was a fun story. Yeah. So, and I've covered you guys pretty much ever since. So what other things were happening in 2014? Big, big stories around here then?

You know, I think one of the other stories I remember was, um, so there's a group called Blackstone Entrepreneurs Network. Are you familiar? Totally. Okay, so Ben, Colorado. So they were kind of new, and the whole point of them, they, they're nonprofit, but they try to help these fast-growing startups and mid-sized companies like reach the next level.

So another story I did that first year was a, you know, why is it so hard for Denver to get that next big company? I mean, you got a lot of startups, you know, you're growing them to mid-sized companies, and then they're getting acquired or they move, right? And so that was one of the early stories I did. And, you know, it's hard for me because, I mean, looking back now, I've had 5 years of Denver experience, and, you know, and I don't— you know, can we mention that You guys just announced your IPO.

So this is something I'd been bugging you guys for, you know, when are you gonna do your IPO? But anyway, so, you know, for those who don't know, Ping filed all the registration, uh, was it this week or last week? Well, it was on the 23rd of August. Okay, so that was, you know, that is, I guess, celebrated Um, thing in the community. Yeah, but you know, I have to remember, what about 2 other tech IPOs, Sangrid and Zayo?

Yeah, both are acquired or getting acquired, right? So they're both going off the market to Twilio, right? And Zayo, it's kind of a weird private equity thing, right? Yes. So Zayo's probably still going to be Zayo, right?

But they're not going to be— yes, yes. And Sangrid's still like— it's going away. It's just gonna be— well, it's a product line. Okay, is that right? There's still gonna be called the SendGrid product line?

I think so. Okay. Yeah, so, so the thing is, you know, 2 fewer public companies this year. Yeah. And I know that's still a struggle for Denver.

Any thoughts about why that is? Yeah, um, you know, well, from my reporting, yeah, you know, it's a lot about Funding, you know, is the money here? No, you know, it's, it's coming. It seems like there's a lot more VCs that are interested in investing here, like the big, you know, 4th, 5th rounds and stuff. Yeah, but the talent is still an issue from what I understand, and you might be able to talk about that some more as well.

I mean, I think Denver is doing a really good job of attracting, you know, tech workers from elsewhere. But, you know, from what I understand, it's a shortage. It's still a shortage everywhere. Enough new talent, right, to keep up with the demand. Well, and that high-level talent.

Yeah. So you kind of have to get people who want to move to Denver. And, you know, we're lucky. I mean, we do do pretty well on relocation Denver. I, I wonder how much of it is, is, is just based on we're not Silicon Valley, right?

Like, it doesn't feel like there's a lot of big public companies anywhere outside of there in the tech industry, at least, you know. Yeah, like Austin's another one that always comes up as a, um, as a comparison for us. It's not like they're, you know, they have tons of those either. Um, maybe, maybe Boston. I feel like Boston's had some bigger ones, but right, not a lot.

And a lot of those places are associated with a, you know, some sort of university. So, you know, Stanford in Silicon Valley, MIT in Boston. And I know— so, so the guy who was in charge of Ben Colorado when I started, that's JB Holston. Yeah, he's now the Dean of Engineering at DU, right? So he is definitely trying to push for that and trying to create, you know, more integration with the business community and university research and labs.

Try and have that, that elite university to generate that elite talent, right? And I think, I mean, to me it feels like, well, the Denver area is slowly, you know, little, taking little steps. I mean, you, you can't go from, you know, 50% to 500% in a year. Yeah. And, you know, it's really been a few years, only been a few years.

And, and Silicon Valley, you know, that took— I mean, that was what, HP was like early '80s, late '70s? Yeah. And probably like early '90s is when it really became what we think of as Silicon Valley, right? Yeah, it's like 15 years, right? And the other thing is just the age of companies.

I mean, once you get older companies, you have employees who branch off, start their own thing, and that whole ecosystem. That's what we really need, is those companies to, to have really successful IPOs and they just blow up big so that, you know, now the people who want to be at smaller companies start over, right? Right. There's this trickle-down talent effect. Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah, that's what we really need to see happen. And, and that, that's been talked about for years, but we're not there. We haven't had much of it. Yeah.

All right, so you were there at the Denver Post for what, like 4 years, 3 years? 4 years. 4 years. Uh, what, what ended up getting— making you leave? So as fate would have it, um, the newspaper industry continued to decline.

And, you know, I have to say that when I joined the Denver Post, I knew it hadn't improved, but I went in with eyes wide open knowing, you know, if I'm the— if I get laid off, I get laid off. C'est la vie, you know, I get it. And every year I was there, there were layoffs. So last year the editor had a meeting and said, we've got to cut 30% of staff. And that, that just hit me hard because you were up at like 120 or so at that point.

100. So it'd be 30 people. Yeah. And I felt like, well, this is it for me. It's got to be it.

Because, I mean, I don't see how I couldn't be laid off since I'm one of the newer people.

And, I mean, ultimately what got to me was the paper's profitable. It's one of the most profitable in the industry as part of the, you know, MNG chain, which also owns the Daily Camera. And to me it was more, this business model is not working. You know, advertising continues to go down, so revenues go down, which means the margins aren't as high, right? And the owners just cut staff because that will get your margins back up.

Yeah. And, you know, to me, I just felt like there's got to be a better way. But honestly, you know, after that happened, I, I started looking for another job because I figured I'd be cut.

I started hearing from so many people in the community, and it was just overwhelming. You know, people offering me a job, people wanting to help, people saying, maybe we can buy the Denver Post. I'm like, yeah, try it. But they said no.

And, and what it came down to was, you know, there was an opportunity to start something new, and I felt like I I've got to do this, you know, because I ended up not getting laid off because, I mean, the editor, you know, she really tried to keep as many reporting staff as possible, but that meant cutting so much else that helps a print newspaper operate, which meant more work for everybody else, which meant my work wasn't gonna be, you know, I couldn't focus as much on great stories. So to me, I felt like, you know, if I'm going to put that much effort, you know, on that side of, of the business, I want to— I want more freedom into what we can do. You know, I don't want to be tethered by traditional— a traditional business model where, you know, we can come up with as many ideas in the newsroom as possible, but few get it, you know, enacted because it's out of our control. Yeah. So with The Sun— so what's The Sun?

Okay, so, so as it turned out, I wasn't the only one feeling this way, and 10 of us ended up getting together. And so Larry Rickman, he's our senior editor, he had started talking to a group called Sybil. So have you heard of Sybil? I have, the blockchain newspaper people. Yes, they kind of started in the same way because they saw the downfall of local journalism and wanted to help support more sustainability.

They ended up— so it's a blockchain company based on Ethereum. And they, you know, they're funded by, I think, Joe Lubin. He's one of the co-founders of Ethereum. He's one of the big funders of Civil. So Civil offered us a grant, basically, to just get started because they wanted to support local journalism.

And we figured, you know what, here's our opportunity. And if we don't take it, you know, everyone's gonna lose. I mean, we got to at least try. I mean, if, you know, even if things get better at the Denver Post, you know, that doesn't mean it's better for, for the community. I mean, if you have fewer reporters, you have fewer great stories, right?

So less accountability for people who should be held accountable, right? Exactly. Yeah, so we figured, you know what, let's do this. So 7 reporters 3 editors, we all came together and decided to leave the Denver Post and start the Colorado Sun and focus on, you know, high-quality journalism. I mean, where this— the type of story that you click on a headline and you are not disappointed by what you learn.

And, you know, I know— so I've never had a Colorado Sun delivered to my front door. It's all online, right? This is a, this is an internet newspaper exclusively. Yes. Well, let me add to that.

Okay, so in this past year what we've been able to do— so yes, we do the daily journalism online, but because this is sort of an experiment, an experiment in community collaboration, you know, just anything we can try to help local journalism, we're working with at least a dozen newspapers around the state that are taking our stories and printing them in their papers. That's interesting. Yeah, so, you know, some of the smaller towns— and, you know, for newspapers everywhere, you know, everyone's cutting. Like the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, they had to go down to 5 days a week, but they're one of our partners. So, so if they run one of our stories, some we have like lots of coverage of the Capitol, you know, politics, policy, and a lot of statewide coverage issues, you know, they can run our stories and keep their staff focused on what's happening in Grand Junction.

Yeah. And they, you know, we're also all working on a big statewide project together. So we are, we're sort of spearheading the effort where reporters, photographers from all these papers and stuff where we're all working on the same story, type of story, different, you know, based on the community. And this will all get published, you know, you can pick and choose what you publish, probably in a couple weeks. Wow.

Yeah, so, you know, it's an effort, or it's a way that some of these smaller papers can work with, you know, people who've been in the business for 35, 40 years. What's the topics you're talking about? Mobile homes. Mobile homes. All right.

Look forward to learning about mobile homes in a couple of weeks. Yeah. So, you know, a lot of our stories, I mean, they're going to be hard stories. Yeah. You know, I mean, stories you take a lot of reporting.

Hopefully they will be easy to read. Yeah. But they're not going to be fluff. Yeah. So, so you have 7 reporters.

What's the breakdown? Like, what are they covering? Okay, we've got 2 people covering politics. Yeah. And one of the guys who covers politics, Jesse Paul, he also does whatever he wants because he's pretty prolific.

I mean, he, he's kind of a GA politics. GA, I'm sorry? Oh, general assignment. Okay. Politics reporter.

Uh, John Engel, who— he, he's a great writer. I mean, he covered, he covered Columbine. I mean, he's— I mean, he's been— he's— I don't know, I can't say enough good about his writing. He does a lot of healthcare coverage, um, and social justice type coverage and stuff. Uh, Jen— Jennifer Brown She also does like family, some, you know, schools type stuff.

Kevin Simpson, he is— he's, he's one of the guys who's been at— was at the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News probably for 35 years or 40 years, some crazy amount of number. And he, you know, he, he could have retired, right? But he gave that all up because, I mean, I think, you know, it wasn't a decision against anything at the Denver Post or the people at the Denver Post who were great. I mean, we miss them and they do good work, but it's just that business model isn't working. And if someone didn't do something about it, you know, who knows what would happen to journalism in Denver.

Jason Blevins. He, he is also another longtime reporter. I mean, he covered several Olympics for the Post. He now does like— he lives up in, I think, Eagle or somewhere over there. So he does a lot of the, you know, extreme sports.

Yes. And outdoor business coverage. So he has a special— he has a premium newsletter that is one way we we are, uh, paying for ourselves some money. Yes. Is he all about VF Corp then?

All the news he's written about that? Yep. Okay. Yeah. Um, let's see, who did I leave out?

Just you. Just me. I think you got 6, right? Um, what are you doing? So for me, I still do some tech coverage.

I wrote about artificial intelligence the other week. Yeah. Um, at the drive-through at Good Times. Do you know about that? I, I did read that.

I'm familiar with with this idea. But I think if you want to summarize that, people would love to hear that. Well, you know, I wanted to tackle this idea of, you know, where is artificial intelligence today? So, so in a lot of our stories, you know, we're not gonna follow a press release, you know. And I've been talking to this company, you know, for the whole year and just trying to figure out when's the right time to write a story because they put out a press release and Lots of other people wrote about it, but they just wrote about the press release.

And to me, it's like, that's not what The Sun is about. I want to give you something more. So, so anyway, I mean, I'm trying to remember what I wrote since that was a few weeks ago.

The— so, so this company, Valiant AI, they, they have AI as the ordering system at a Good Times on Broadway. And when I was there, it was only breakfast. Office. So, you know, I went through the drive-through several times to try and see how you mess with them, right? And the thing is, you could mess with Holly, their AI, very easily.

I mean, most of the time I actually got bumped to the customer— I mean, to the real human inside. Yeah. Um, and, and the thing is, you know, there's— it's a work in progress, you know? I mean, anyone who has an Alexa at home knows Alexa doesn't always understand you. Right.

So you have to sometimes repeat it. My, my daughter gets frustrated all the time. But, um, I was able to interview some of the staff at Good Times, and, and they were just honestly— they loved Holly because, because— and I call her a she even though Holly's, you know, no gender. Um, she— Holly does the orders so they can do other things. Um, it's not taking their jobs, right?

Exactly. And, and it just helps speed up the process. Yeah. And, you know, and I think eventually, you know, it is kind of an automated task. I mean, what AI could do is, is— I mean, and that's what a lot of people say, you know, it's, it's only so smart, but it will take care of some of those jobs that people don't necessarily want to do, or allow them to do other things, right?

And, um, it seemed to— I think some of the results they've seen already is it has sped up the process, um, and they were doing more upsells. Uh, Holly's pretty good at it. Yeah, well, because she's programmed, right? Yeah. The, uh, human may not always remember to say, would you like fries with that, or something like that.

Yeah, that's awesome. So So did you eat all of the breakfast when you went through the circle? I brought friends.

I like it. All right, so you said you're doing tech, but you're not just doing tech, right? So I'm kind of a general business reporter, and but I still get to tackle the stories I want to tackle. I suggest my own stories, right? But broadband, of course, is a huge issue.

I covered a lot of that at the Denver Post. So broadband, 100% broadband throughout the Is that the focus you're talking about? Yeah, so a recent story I did was about these broadband grants. So in the last legislative session, I don't know if you heard about this, but the whole net neutrality bill they passed, part of that was if a company, if an ISP that received a state grant was accused of net neutrality, you know, not being net neutral, they could get their funds taken away. So I wanted to say, well, who's getting these grants?

Yeah, and it was very interesting because there is something called the Colorado Broadband Office, or Office of Broadband, and that was set up under Hickenlooper. Mm-hmm. But the whole focus is rural broadband, and the goal is, I think, by next June to have broadband speeds of up to, you know, 20— the federal minimum, 25 megs down.

I want to say at 92% or 98% or maybe even 99% of Colorado square miles or households or what is that? Households. Households. Okay. Right.

And the thing is, it's actually I should have looked at this stat before I came to this interview, but I think we're at 86%. I could be wrong. I need to go back and look at my story. But, you know, that's, that's better than the national average. That seems like a lot of work to do in less than a year, though, to get from 86 to 92.

It's trying to get those started. Yeah. So getting projects started, start the builds. Yeah, and I mean, I talked to people, you know, ISPs all over the state that are doing this, and some of them, you know, they are doing wireless, you know, fixed wireless, you know, beaming. Yeah, point-to-point wireless.

A lot of them are actually doing fiber to the home, which is way better than I can get. I want that. I know, I know, which leads me to, you know, another story I'm working on now is kind of, you know, broadband and poverty, but broadband in urban areas and the cost of broadband, you know, a lot of people, if you're at a certain income level, you can't afford it. And even though you can get gigabit speeds, you can't afford the $100 to $300 monthly price tag. Yeah, very expensive, right?

What's the, like, the, the 5G? Have you started getting into 5G and how that's going to impact especially the rural? I would, I imagine it's part of the story, or is it not? You know, it's kind of— it is. It's kind of less so.

I mean, so 5G is, you know, yeah, it's faster, but part of the idea of 5G is that it can do more within a certain area. Very dense. Yes. So it can help all the autonomous vehicles coming down the road. Give them internet and help them all communicate with all the IoT devices in signs and traffic lights.

I mean, it's, it's more of creating, you know, having every item in your house be able to, you know, get great internet as opposed to, you know, how fast it is. So, you know, that is obviously starting Yeah, and Verizon has announced that they have turned on the service, but of course, you know, it's, it's limited to your device. You, you know, your device has to have a 5G chip, basically. And even if we do, we're going to run through all our bandwidth on our cell phone in like 15 minutes anyway. So, right, and if you are on that really fast, uh, mode, then, um, you, you know, if you're with Comcast or something, you'd use up all your, right, bytes.

Exactly. So, so any other interesting stories you've done this year you want to share with us? Um, you know, I've covered tariffs. I've covered— how is tariffs impacting Colorado? Give me the, give me the 3-minute version of that.

A 3-minute version. Okay. Well, you know, okay, let's talk about the China tariffs. Yeah, specifically. So, so the good news is that there aren't— China isn't huge, a huge trade partner.

I mean, you know, right, Mexico, Canada are much bigger. So, so there's less of a concern there, but there's still a lot of companies that trade with China. And it's mostly agriculture? No. Okay, surprised me there.

Right. And, and it's also what's happening right now, actually September 1st. So new tariffs start September 1st. And this new batch has affected a lot of outdoor companies. I mean, some of it, some of it has been ongoing for these outdoor companies.

But so I was— one of my stories I just wrote was I interviewed Kelty Outdoor Products. So they make like kid backpacks. Yeah, I mean, the hiking— yeah, and sleeping bags. So they're part of a company called XL Outdoors. That's a parent company, and they apparently make millions of sleeping bags a year.

Millions? Millions. And they're based in Boulder. Good for them. Yes, but those millions of sleeping bags are made in China.

Okay. So when there's a tariff, obviously they have to pay more. So, you know, there's what I've been doing, you know, I've been writing about the tariffs, but I've been writing about, well, how are companies dealing with them? And one is something called foreign trade zones, where basically you can get a designated spot on your company's property to be like this zone where there's no tariffs unless something leaves that zone. So that's one way.

So for example, there's a company— actually, they haven't done this yet, but there's a company called System76. They build computers. High-end computers. Right. But they, they started building from scratch almost their desktops, um, I think last year.

And but they were shipping all these materials in, and each— all these materials were getting taxed because of tariffs. But the irony of this is if they had built the computer in China and imported it here, there would be no tariffs on the— because finished computers or laptops didn't have tariffs, but because they were components, right? So, but if they had created a foreign trade zone, they could have imported all the products to that zone, built the computer in the zone, and then it would have been— as it leaves, it can be no tariffs. But all that's changing though because there's a new round of tariffs. So I don't know what's going to happen there.

But the most recent story I wrote was about exclusions because you can actually apply to get your product excluded from tariffs. And, um, so like Kelty's trying to get sleeping bags excluded, and it's, it's a complicated but could be simple, simple process. So, and I list the steps in my story, so you'll have to go back and read it if you're interested. That sounds great. That was almost exactly 3 minutes, by the way.

3 minutes and 4 seconds. Wow. Well, I think this is really interesting. You know, what does the future look like for the Colorado Sun? You know, for those, maybe those who aren't readers yet, where are you guys planning to go?

Why should they start to listen? How can they support you more? Well, I don't think you asked about our funding model. I didn't. So, well, we are, you know, we've been using a grant from CIBL, but the whole point of the grant is for us to figure out how to make us sustainable.

So we have— our goals are, you know, membership and underwriting sponsors. We actually don't have ads on our site. We don't. We obviously won't do annoying pop-up ads or autoplay video because that's just terrible. But the idea of having like underwriting in our newsletters is something we've started doing.

Underwriting, so it's like companies that want to support us and, and agree with our mission, you know, we will, you know, work with them to put like a, you know, this newsletter was supported or sponsored by, you know, such-and-such, and with the link, because, you know, businesses are part of our community too. So we want you guys have to have it paid for somehow. Right, exactly. That makes sense, right? So sponsored content, any sponsored content?

No sponsored content because we don't want to mislead anyone. Yeah, it's hard, the line between journalism and sponsored content can get— yeah, we are not gonna do that. You know, one, one other thing we did, so we are not nonprofit, we are a public benefits company, which means when we incorporated we had to have a mission, and that's part of our incorporation. So if anyone tries to buy us or something like that, they have to agree with the mission before they can buy us. What's the mission?

To put out good journalism. I mean, to do unbiased, be fair, you know, it's, it's mostly, you know, this whole idea of you need an independent voice to cover the news and you know, keep the community informed. And so a year into it, uh, experiments going well, not going well? What would you say? I would say going well.

I mean, we are, um, mostly member supported, right? So our membership has, you know, we are probably about 60 or 70%, um, of our civil grant. So our goal is to get to 100% break-even So we don't have to rely on civil anymore. And I think we're working on the underwriting aspect, which, you know, I know there's a lot of companies out there who have expressed support. And here's this opportunity.

If you wanted to support us, you know, you can go to our site or email underwriting@coloradosun.com.

And we can work with you on that. But, you know, right now we're mostly individually supported by folks. And the idea is, of course, we hope to grow and hire more people, hire a business person to help take care of all that stuff and expand coverage. I mean, anything from a tech reporter Maybe, you know, it could even be like a security reporter, you know, something like that. I mean, there's so many missing beats that we're all trying to cover, but, you know, part— we are continuing to grow with the community, you know, with our news partners doing these statewide projects.

I think it's for the greater good of citizens in Colorado. Yeah. That's really— it sounds like an awful lot of fun. It sounds like a lot of work too. It is, but we're also all owners.

Yeah. So the 10 journalists, we all own the Colorado Sun. So it's, you know, when you work for yourself, you don't care if you work more than 8 hours a day. Do you guys have an office? You work from home or what?

Um, I, I work from home a lot, which is great. Um, but we do have an office It's at 16th and Broadway. Yeah, so it's in the coworking space there, and we have a few desks, and we go in when we want, and we tend to have team meetings once a week. Well, we love to support you here. I'm looking forward to your next security story.

When you find that juicy story to share, we'll definitely cover it here. Any other questions that I should have asked you here that we didn't go into?

Well, you know, the other thing is we're here because of the community, and not just financially but story-wise. Yeah, you know, if you've— if you hear something interesting that is not getting covered and you think it should be, you know, email me, tamara@coloradosun.com. I mean, I have to prioritize stories and Because I want to do a good job. But if I don't know, you know, that's— you can't go after it. Exactly.

So everyone start dropping dimes to Tamara. Let's get some stories out there. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time. It was really a pleasure to have you here.

Yeah, same here. Thank you. Well, that's it for this week. We'll talk to you guys next week. 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.