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 your newscast for, uh, what is it, January 25th? This is episode 195.

Um, Alex, we are— we actually have some beautiful weather this weekend. I know it's been sunny. I mean, it hasn't been, you know, hot by any means, but it sure has been nice with the clear skies. And I spent some time outside. How about you?

Yeah, I got to get outside. You know, it's Sunday when we're recording. Yesterday I was outside, went for a couple of walks. And, you know, if you're sitting in the shade, it was cold, but it was not too bad if it was out in the sun. And I was actually looking at the forecast for this week.

Thursday, it's supposed to be 56. So for the first time since, I don't know what it's been like, October, I'm planning to go downtown. To the office and go have lunch outside on a patio downtown and maybe life will feel a little bit more normal. Yeah. As you know, I went into the office this past week for a little bit, also the first time I'd been in since October, which is a little bit weird.

I did not have lunch on a patio, but nonetheless, went into the office. Well, I really hope that we're turning a corner here, vaccines are getting out. I was actually at last night at my in-laws' house and surrounded by 3 adults who have all had their vaccines. My wife got her second vaccine, uh, her second shot yesterday, 2 days ago, uh, Friday. And my, uh, my in-laws who are both over the 75, they both got— had their first shot.

I was feeling— I feel like I was in the minority and I can't wait till we're all there and life can get back to a little bit more normal. Yeah, I agree. Looking forward to it. All right, well, let's jump over to our housekeeping. You know, we do have a Slack channel.

I feel like Slack has been once again very vibrant. I've been having a hard time keeping up with it. We're at about 1,750, 1,754 participants right now in the channel. So if you want to come get to know a lot of great folks working in security here in the Denver area, this would be a good opportunity for you to join in. Yeah, it is pretty amazing how vibrant it is.

You know, I belong to several Slack workspaces and Periodically through the day, I'll just sort of scan through all of them and see what's going on. And almost always, the Colorado Security Slack has a whole bunch of messages that were new since the last time I was there versus many of the other ones where it's, you know, onesie-twosie, things like that. So yeah, definitely lots going on in there. If you do want to join, the link to join is on our website, colorado-security.com. There's a Slack button on the front page.

Also on our website, you can sign up for our mailing list. You will get one email every week with the show notes. We send that out sometime after the podcast gets released, and if you go to the bottom of the colorado-security.com website, there's a form there for you to fill it out. We'd also love it if you would rate us and subscribe on your favorite podcatcher. That helps us find new people and gives us good feedback on how we can get better.

Also, we'd love it if you told somebody about how great Colorado Equals Security is, get them to come and join the community. Uh, and if you want to go even beyond that, we do have a Patreon campaign where you can support us financially, help with the costs of doing the podcast and, you know, all the other stuff we do with Colorado Gold Security. Uh, and we do just a big thank you to the current patrons. Uh, yes, you guys, you guys definitely keep us going. Uh, thank you to those who have been doing it for, for years, and that we have a couple folks who've just joined in the last month or so.

Um, thanks to all of you, uh, we really do appreciate what you guys are doing. Yeah, it's great. All right, let's jump into the news. Uh, this is a follow-up from a story we discussed, I feel like it was a year, maybe 2 years ago, around Carvana bringing the, uh, uh, what do they call it, the, the, um, car vending machine, right? Uh, and they're, they're still looking to— they still have made a request to build that 8-story car vending machine at about 25th and Evans.

Yeah, um, it sounds like the, the initial zoning request was positive, you know, so the, the committee that does this stuff thought it was a good idea, and it's going to the full Denver City Council to decide whether or not they want to do it. So, you know, I had not spent a lot of time thinking about this, to be honest with you. But as I was talking to my father-in-law last night about this, and we were like, yeah, it's kind of a weird thing to do. It all of a sudden occurred to me that, you know, having an 8-story building in an area where there are no 8-story buildings, right? Like, I think it's mostly single or 2-story buildings in that area.

It's kind of like having that giant inflatable ape on top of your building, all the time. Everyone is always going to see that thing from half a mile away, a mile away, and it's probably just the best marketing they could get for, this is the car dealership, come on over here and take a look. Yeah. One of the concerns that was expressed in the article, I believe by a councilperson, was, okay, what happens if their business is not successful and they vacate that building? Now you have an 8-story car vending machine and Who else is going to use an 8-story car vending machine, right?

You know, if it's a normal kind of building, you could repurpose it to something else. But, you know, with that, not nearly as flexible. I think that sounds like a really fun either meme competition or just a write-in competition for what would we repurpose the car vending machine for if they left? I think you should turn it into offices. Everyone, you know, gets a little, little space up there.

People can watch you in your office as they drive by on I-25. And when it's time for you to leave at the end of the day, your boss puts a token in and pushes the button for you to get out. Exactly. Good stuff. All right, next article.

Our ongoing favorite topic of unemployment fraud. There was an article this week talking about the new system that Colorado has put in place to, to help with that. I mean, that's part of the reason it's there. And 2/3 of the requests that they used in the, in the test, first test, did not get verified, leading us to think that maybe 2/3 were fraud. Yeah, so this is a, this is a follow-up from the Colorado Sun written by our favorite over there, Tamara Chuang.

Um, she basically— they, they did a small pilot with an identity verification system called SystemID.me. Um, and really the idea here is if you want this money, you're going to have to do this verification. It was a small pilot, just 500 people, but they mentioned that Um, they're— they were as of Friday, so as 2 days ago, they were going to be sending out invitations to, to 2,000 more people and then, and then, you know, quickly expand the program to be everyone who wants to get benefits for unemployment. I think this is great. Um, I think that the, the fact that it's been so easy and basically built on trust in the past has, has put us in this situation where, you know, I know I had a fraudulent unemployment claim against me, and I know you did as well.

And, and I have— I know people who who are receiving— what do you call those? 1099-Gs, right, from the state of Colorado saying that they got that income last year, even though they didn't, even though they reported it as fraudulent. So we've got to get in front of this, and I'm excited the state's taking these steps. Yeah, a couple things. You know, Robb, obviously you work in the identity management space, and you know that identity proofing, that's sort of the first step, proving you are who you are, is an important process before you can get to the, the point of authentication and other things like that.

And, you know, in most online systems, that really never happens, right? You know, maybe it happens in some weird process, but the, the consumer doesn't actually go through that proofing process. So having ID.me do that proofing process, I think, is, is something that probably should have happened a long time ago anyway. So great to see that they're doing that. The other piece that they mentioned in here around those 1099s, is that there is now a form that you can fill out if you do get one of those fraudulent 1099s.

Originally, when the 1099 started to go out, there wasn't really much you could do about it. And it, of course, is absolutely impossible to get through to the Department of Labor on the phone. They have a call center, but I think that they got way oversubscribed with calls. So they said they had like 68,000 calls in the first, whatever it was, few days or week. Right, so you can fill out a form now saying that you received a fraudulent 1099, and then theoretically they will, uh, remove that.

So, all right, next story. It's, it's, uh, one of the similar ones we had about the Colorado Economic Development Commission, um, who generally what they— we get to see the fact that they have approved incentives for companies to come. These are always the ones that don't say the names of the companies. Um, this one is, you know, the first part of the story is just about the fact that they've approved some commissions for an IT consulting firm from out east who wants to expand to the west, and they're going to hire 56 employees here if they accept the incentives. But I thought the more interesting part was that they also approved some expense to try and invest in keeping the Space Force headquarters here in Colorado.

Yeah. And we talked about that last week. Temporary Space Command was here, and then of course, the Trump administration in their last few weeks decided that they were going to award the permanent headquarters to Huntsville, Alabama, which of course all the people in Colorado said was a bad idea. So it looks like we're going to be putting another $30,000 towards, I guess we'll call it marketing or efforts to try and convince the new administration that that was a bad idea and it should come back to Colorado. Yeah.

The suggestion that this was a political decision is basically rampant among the Colorado folks. Now, who knows if it's true, but Right. Well, we'll see if it makes a difference and if President Biden's administration makes a different decision. Yep. All right.

Next article. I think we reported this previously, but Techstars has a new CEO. And this article is an interview with her talking about what's next for Techstars up in Boulder. So, I am gonna be, ooh, this is gonna be rough. Maëlle Gavet, Gavet, looks a little Frenchy in that name, is the new CEO.

And she's got a very interesting background and experience. She's been in executive roles in Boston Consulting Group, a Russian e-commerce site, and as well as the real estate platform Compass. And so now she has come to be CEO at Techstars and lead the venture funds there. Yeah, really cool stuff. You know, the, the previous CEO stepped down, um, and he was one of the, one of the founders, I believe, as well.

And, and this is an opportunity for, you know, bringing some fresh blood. And it looks like, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna have someone with a different set of experiences, and I'm excited to see where she takes things. Yeah, definitely. I think on a related note, uh, Techstars Boulder, uh, you know, the organization that she is now hoping to run, is, uh, has revealed their 11 startups that are in their latest class. So if you remember last year, they, they kind of had to quickly pick to virtual as they looked to get their class and bring their class through the process.

This year they just did everything fully virtual to avoid having the challenge there. And this 11 companies actually had one familiar that we talked about last week. If you remember, I think it's, is it HACA? We decided. Yes.

Yeah. The one I called out of a longer list that was like startups to watch in Colorado. They are the Slack-based compliance and security training platform that, um, that, uh, that I, I called out as something that looked really interesting, and, and they're going to be part of Techstars, so I'm sure that they're going to get some great, uh, support and leadership as they look to build out that organization. Yeah, there were some, uh, some other interesting ones on this as well. I think there was, uh, uh, which one?

There was another one on here that was a little bit related to, uh, security, I believe. Um, But there was also a couple other teaching ones and one called Defiance, which was helping with student debt, which is always very interesting given that we have a $1.6 trillion student debt crisis here in this country. Oh, it was Code Inspector. There's another startup that's gonna be doing AppSec and automated code review. So that looked interesting.

The way I read it is it looks like they're there to fix technical debt. With, with automated code review platforms. And I think, you know, the only way you're going to get a lot of progress on technical debt is, um, is automated because people hate working on it. So I think that's a great idea. And if they can, if they can make that easier and, and less manual, you're going to make a lot of progress for sure.

All right, uh, next we have some news out of the National Cybersecurity Center down in the Springs. Uh, they have partnered with Tusk Philanthropies to announce a new project, a really kind of a grant project around election resiliency, a 2021 pilot Yeah, and not a lot of details here, as this is just the announcement, but, you know, they have some grant money so that they could do pilots around electronic voting, and they're going to be working with different jurisdictions. I think, you know, I assume they can submit grant applications to get some money to look at ways to do electronic voting and the, you know, the security around those efforts. So they're going to help make— I think they're going to help make the connection between the jurisdiction and the folks who are specialists, and they're also going to have some money to make that work. So kind of a double benefit for the companies.

Yeah, and I would imagine some— yeah, by experts, I would imagine security experts as well as companies who can do the electronic voting so that they can work with the pilot as well. Obviously, there are some concerns that exist around electronic voting and things that people have to solve, and including integrity of ballots, privacy for voters, as well as ballot secrecy, and of course, accuracy. Hopefully, with these pilots, they can get some good results and maybe sometime we will have an electronic voting option. Maybe we will. Maybe we won't, but maybe we will.

Next, we have an article from the Colorado Sun. This is an opinion piece actually. We don't always do opinion pieces on here, but this one was very interesting because it is by Patrick Walsh, who is the CEO of Iron Core Labs, a local startup here who does sort of encryption technologies and, you know, data security. And, you know, he's talking about the recent SolarWinds attack, although he is nice enough not to say SolarWinds anywhere in here. And, you know, his opinion basically on what it is that we should do moving forward to to get better and not have these things happen again.

Yeah, he calls out some of the systemic challenges we have with security and the fact that anytime you're trying to keep up with vulnerabilities, there's always a gap and companies are not that great at it and incentives are not well aligned. He's suggesting you really have to get into the application and even more so get into the data to fix this problem. I don't think there's anything here that would surprise any professional security person. However, I think that the importance here is he's got a pretty big platform. You know, he's on the Colorado Suns, you know, main page, and this is something that's going to get larger than just the security or IT audience, which is exactly what I think we need to do in order to really make some progress.

So, you know, like I said, not a lot of surprises in here. Patrick is someone we've had on our show in the past. It's been a few years, but it's really good to see him still pushing the ball up the hill. Hopefully making some good progress. Yeah, good stuff.

All right, next we have an article from, uh, from Red Canary. This is a follow-up blog on their, uh, Keith McCammon. He's the, the chief security officer over there. Um, his series, he's writing about the modern security operations center and how that looks. And, and this is just phase number 2 as you look at what those different roles are across the, uh, the SOC.

Yeah, and in this, uh, this piece of the blog series, he is talking about enablement Which, you know, is something as we go through the different topics is, you know, something that I see that often is not really thought about in terms of the SOC itself, but it's a lot of things obviously that you can use to enable the SOC, things like security architecture, security engineering, data management, and training. You know, many times those things are just sort of given and, you know, the SOC is the place where they just, you know, collect alerts and and tell people about them, but, you know, really, if you want your SOC to be the most effective, you have to be doing other parts of your security as well, like security architecture and engineering. Yeah, you know, I— when I think of enablement, you know, mostly I think of training. Maybe I also think about tools. I like the way that he's really broken enablement into more than just those things.

It's not just, hey, we're gonna get you the training you need to be effective. We're also gonna think about making you effective as we architect the way our security program works. And as we engineer it, as we tune things, these are all focused on making you effective as a security operations center member. Data management, another interesting element I hadn't thought of as a part of enablement. Anyway, I thought it's interesting.

It's probably worth reading, just reading through this if you're involved with SOCs and, or security operations centers, sorry, I've been SOCs lately. If you're interested in how to make those more effective and how you can rethink the way you approach it, It's a good blog. I know wool though, wool socks that are a little bit itchy. Hey-oh. Final article this week, we have a post from LogRhythm.

This is actually an interview where Mark Logan, their CEO, was interviewed on TechStrong TV. And so he spends about 20-30 minutes talking about LogRhythm, about their acquisition of MistNet and other things that's going on with them. I don't know that we need to recap the entire video, but he talks a little bit about why it is that they acquired them, a little bit about LogRhythm in general, where they're going, the ever amazing buzzwords like XDR and other things like that. Yeah. I thought it was worth including here in the notes simply because we talked about the MistNet acquisition last week and maybe we made some vague comments, but it is nice to hear Mark Logan, the CEO himself, talk about why they made that investment.

And there's also an interesting conversation about what it's like to do an acquisition in the middle of COVID So, you know, maybe worth taking a listen. Yeah, good stuff. All right, let's jump over to the Slack message of the week. Once again, we have to thank Andre Gaeta. Andre's been the sponsor of this section of the show for a couple of years, 3 years.

Andre, thanks for doing that. And each week we pick one person who's got a great comment, an interesting comment in the Slack community to award them, and they get to pick an item out of the Colorado Equal Security store and have their favorite piece of swag. Yeah, and this week's winner is Sagar. Congratulations, Sagar. He posted a couple things from Snort.

First was about the release of Snort version 3, which is something that has been a long time in coming. I know some people have been eagerly awaiting this, so I thought that was interesting. It sparked a nice discussion in there, and if you are someone that does network security and wants to get the new version of Snort, it is now out there. All right, good stuff. Uh, let's jump over to upcoming events.

Uh, this week we have several events. First, it starts with ACES, the physical security organization in town. They're doing a young professional networking happy hour with Taylor Passanello. Congratulations, Robb. I think that's the first time this year you haven't said ISIS.

Thank you. Um, ISC² Pikes Peak is doing their January chapter meeting on the 27th. Denver ISIS is doing— sorry, that was on purpose. Denver ISSA is doing an event on the 27th. It's Your Presence Matters: How to Show Up at Your Best on Video.

This is obviously not super security-focused, but for us security people who think that wearing a t-shirt with bedhead is the way to get on a Zoom call. And then on the 28th, ISC² Denver is doing their chapter annual meeting. Yeah, that, that actually just got announced. This is their first meeting in quite a while. It's kind of that follow-up to the blog we talked about last week.

Uh, good to see that they're, they're getting back together and meeting up. Yeah, and, and then we don't have anything early in February, so, uh, that's all the events that we have. All right, let's jump over to jobs. Uh, there are a few Ping jobs. I actually have one that came off the list and one that went onto the list this week.

Um, so I— the, the privacy program position has been filled, but I am now looking to hire a security senior program manager. So this is the person who works directly for me. Um, you know, me, I've been meeting daily with my current person in this role to, um, uh, to help make sure that programs are working effectively across the organization. You know, think of this kind of as a chief of staff type of a role, and this person would have a business analyst reporting to them. Speaking of that, there's a business analyst role that's open right now at Ping, working to help with manage the projects across our function.

And then the last one we're looking to hire is a product security engineer. This is someone who has some development background Um, and a passion for security. And reach out to me about any of these if you want to on Slack. I'm happy to talk to you about it. Take a look at our website for the postings.

I think that the program manager might not be posted yet, but it'll be up in the next day or so. Good stuff. Absolute Software is looking for a chief information security officer. Tolmar is looking to hire a senior manager or director of information security. And this one was, uh, where it was— I know it was far away.

This one's up Loveland maybe, or look at— oh, it's Windsor. This one's in Windsor. So another one that's maybe not super close to Denver. So if you're someone who's, who's in one of those areas, this looks like a good fit for you. Uh, Checkr is looking for a senior technology compliance program manager.

Kind of cool. Checkr has been one of those hot growing tech companies in town. Nice to see a security position over there. There was a bunch of positions at FireEye that got posted in Slack this week. I just picked one of them Phil Keeley had shared.

FireEye is looking to hire a principal incident response consultant, and that one is supposed to be in Colorado. Colorado. Cool. Red Canary is looking for a product security engineer for the web. Uh, yeah, they had also posted a few items in Slack.

There, there was this one. There was also one for, um, for their product. Um, so there's web and there was also product or platform or something like that. And then they were also looking to hire a director of IT. So a lot of interesting positions at Red Canary.

Uh, CVS Health is looking to hire a software security Uh, analyst here in Denver. Another one that surprised me that that was in Colorado. And then Entirety is looking for a security operations analyst for the SOC. You know, Entirety, formerly known as hosting.com. If you drive down 25, you see them in the old Gates building.

So, uh, you might know them even if you don't recognize the name. Good stuff. All right, that is it for the news. We do have an interview this week. Uh, this week I had interviewed with Manish Kapoor.

If you guys remember, Manish was— is the founder and CEO of TruKno, and, and he has a great background. I honestly didn't know a ton about his background before this interview, and it's interesting to learn about his experience at Cisco. And really, he's had a pretty successful career. Good stuff. I look forward to hearing it.

All right. Well, Alex, that's it. Have a great week. We'll talk to you again next week. Thanks, Robb.

Hello, this is Ian Buxton, Senior Director of Infrastructure Information, risk, and security at Vail Resorts. This is Colorado Equals Security, for Colorado security professionals, by Colorado security professionals. All right, welcome to Colorado Equals Security. Uh, today I am doing a, uh, a new interview, and I have the opportunity to interview the founder and CEO of TruKno, Manish Kapoor. Uh, and you know, you, you and I have known each other, man, I feel like it's been several years now since you introduced yourself to me at RMISC.

I don't know if it was 2018, maybe. You know, it feels like, especially with the whole COVID thing, it was certainly, I think, our, you know, the Colorado RMISC conference. And I think it was 2018. Wow. Time goes by so fast.

You know, and Manish, we're going to talk about, about TruKno and all the stuff you're doing there. But, you know, I love to start off by getting to know you personally, individually. So the first thing I want to talk about is I've never heard someone say before that they are passionate about paddleboarding. So I want you to tell me, how does one become passionate about paddleboarding? So I'll tell you, you know, luckily I live very close to Aurora Reservoir, and I actually started off, you know, I go bike and run around it.

And so all the time I would see these people on some kind of, uh, uh, you know, a sailboat or it's, you know, it's, it's a windsurfing board and things like that. And I was like, that is the coolest thing to do, you know, it just— because it gets windy. Uh, so I was like, I'm gonna do that. So I went to get a windsurfing lesson and I went to a lake which was pretty calm, no wind. And I got the windsurfing lesson.

I was like, I think I got it. So I bought a brand new windsurf, got to Aurora Reservoir and put it there. And man, in 2 minutes I realized that surfing lesson on no, no wind lake and calm lake meant nothing. I was falling every 2 minutes. Yeah.

And then I realized that, hey, I have a bad back, uh, so probably not the best thing to keep doing windsurfing. What can I do? I looked around and I was like, what are these people doing? They don't have a windsurf, but they're standing on a board. And I, you know, talked to some people and they're like, this is paddleboarding.

So I just took my windsurf off a windsurf board, and they're actually not designed for paddleboarding, so it's actually pretty slippery. So I learned how to do paddleboarding on a windsurf board, and if you can do that, you can do pretty good on a paddleboard. So that was the— that was a start. And I tell you, it is— I truly am so passionate about it when I am on the water there, because Aurora Reservoir doesn't have any motor boats allowed. So all I can hear is birds chirping and the water, you know, the paddleboard going through the water.

That's what, you know, makes my day. So, you know, right now we're recording this in the middle of January. Is the Aurora Reservoir iced over and unavailable for stand-up paddleboarding these days? That is true. I actually go running with my dog almost every day, and I was taking some pictures there.

Actually, you can actually do fishing there now, so you can do you know, winter fishing, the ice fishing there now. So not the best time to do paddleboarding right now. Yeah. So I've been paddleboarding like 2 or 3 times, and I, and I feel like, you know, because, because I've done it a few times, it's just been like whichever board was available at the location I was. Yeah.

And I feel like there must be like a weight, a weight capacity per board, and there's got to be boards that would hold me better than the ones I'm on. But generally, like, I look at My wife's standing on a board next to me and hers is like, you know, the top of it's a good inch, 2 inches above the water. And mine's like, like the water is coming on every side. You know, I'm level, but like just barely above the water. And I feel like, I feel like that's not probably setting me up for success.

Yeah, you probably do want, you know, the right board, stable and, you know, with your height and everything. So you want to make sure there is enough inch, you know, they go by, you know, how thick it is, 6 inches, 8 inches, and so forth. So having the right board and having the right size paddle does make a big difference when you're on a little bit choppy water especially. Yeah, awesome. So you did mention running there, and another thing you mentioned you did is you actually ran in the Boston Marathon in the past.

Is that true? That is absolutely true. I would say been there, done that. Probably one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life. And, you know, as you know, in Boston Marathon you actually have to qualify a certain time to officially run.

And I was like, heck with it. I don't want to go run another marathon somewhere else. I'm just going to run it at the back of the pack. And they allow you, they actually have official start for people who are qualified. And then, and you know, there are thousands and thousands of people and at the very end are all the people who just want to run it.

And that's what I did. I tell you, even though I trained, cause I used to live in Boston at that time. Even though I trained on the actual, uh, you know, course, marathon course for almost 4 months. The tricky part was when you train, you only run up to 20 miles and then you leave the last 6 miles for the last day, uh, cause that's where it gets mental to really finish it. As well as I trained in the very cold winter cause the marathon there is in March.

And so my body was used to running up to 20 miles at that time in winter. But the day of the marathon was 75 degrees. And I tell you, there's a place called Heartbreak Hill in Boston, and it's called Heartbreak Hill for a reason. I, I, at 20 miles with that heat, my body just, uh, had some trouble, I would say, uh, going uphill. I started feeling really bad, went to the tent and they saw me like how I was feeling.

They're like, no, no, no, we're not going to let you in. Uh, we're not going to let you out until we hold you here for 30 minutes. Monitor you, give you salt. So in the middle of the marathon, I spent 30 minutes in the tent, but I kept going. That's great.

And what a huge accomplishment. Well done. Yeah. So I was almost crying by the end I finished, but I finished. So is your bad back related to running a marathon?

Is there— it doesn't feel like— my back hurts when I run. I wonder, did it get you too? It was— so the tricky part is I ran the marathon, had no extra shoes. Then I was like, you know what? I'm gonna do this yoga thing to recover from marathon.

That's what all the famous, you know, marathoners do. They do yoga and other things to recover. I'm gonna do that too. And you know, I didn't follow any instructors. I said, I'm just gonna watch a video and do the yoga.

And I did the yoga and just pulled probably too much in one direction. So since then, it caused a herniated disc, to be honest with you. So I'm recovering. Always taking care of the back from there on. Well, I, I'm sorry that the back— I mean, my back is a pain in the butt too, and I think that's part of getting old too.

Uh, well, you know, I love to hear the stories. Let's, let's kind of go back even further. Tell me where you're originally from. So I am born and raised in India, uh, a state called Punjab. It's in the northern part of India.

It's on the border with Pakistan. So half of Punjab, if you don't know, if you know the history of India, You know, when the British divided India, it was divided into Pakistan and India, and then Punjab was divided exactly in the middle. So half of Punjab is in Pakistan and half of Punjab is in India. I'm from the Indian side of Punjab. Awesome.

And how, how long were you there? And when did you come to the States? Yeah, so I was born and raised in Punjab, and we— my maternal family, so my mom's grandmother, my mom's mom, and my maternal uncle, they've been in the United States you know, 50-plus years. So they, you know, my grandmother, maternal grandmother sponsored us, and we went through the interview process through embassy and so forth. So in '94, we moved to Colorado because my, at that time, my grandmother and my uncle were here.

And I was 17 years old when I moved. And you're moving with your parents? That's right. We moved all together and I actually went to Smokey Hill High School in Aurora for a year and a half when I moved. All right.

Yeah, because you came right at the very end of high school then at 17 years old. Exactly. So you've seen a lot of change. I mean, the Aurora area in the last 25 years has certainly been developed an awful lot. Yeah, I tell you, when I went to Smokey Hill, I don't know how much you know about Aurora and Smokey Hill Road and so forth.

It used to be the dead end. And now it feels like that's where the city starts. It's It's so further you can go and it's so well populated. It used to be the complete dead end, nothing after that. And all of that has, you know, completely changed in the last 20+ years.

So, you know, just looking at your LinkedIn, it looks like after high school, did you go to CU directly or was that— was there something in between? No. So right from Smoky Hill, I went to CU Boulder, just a great university. And so I got an electrical engineering degree. And so I finished that in December '99.

And then right after that, I joined Motorola Semiconductors. They actually have a year-long sales training program in Austin, Texas. So I went from Boulder to Austin, and from there to Boston as a salesperson, technical salesperson for them, selling microprocessors and so forth. So I feel like I'm so lucky, probably spent you know, time in some of the best cities in America from Boulder to Austin to Boston and then back to Denver again. So basically, you got the job right out of school to go to Austin and did that and then is it also that same job that took you to Boston or a new opportunity within Motorola basically?

Exactly. They train you for 1 year. It was awesome to be honest with you. We were on a, you know, in quotes, 1-year sales training program with a company car and first time having some money in the pocket, right? So it was fun.

A lot of— it was the best. It was a real-time MBA, to be honest with you. I've gone to business school afterwards. I learned more in that job in one-year training than I did in the business school, because we were in some meetings. We were in the sitting in the back, just mouth shut and just listening.

But we were in meetings, uh, that— and that was the whole goal of the training program. That some decisions were made, the next day the stock price went up or down. So they really exposed us to significant things within the company, you know, as salespeople before we went out to the field. And that was amazing. What a great opportunity that was.

So you worked for Motorola there in Boston for 5 years, and then what led you to leave Boston? It looks like you moved back to Denver at that point. Tell me what's next. Yeah, so then I basically was doing part-time business school in the evenings and having a, you know, a very strenuous sales, technical sales job and business school was really tough. So I did that for a couple of years and then I decided I couldn't do that anymore.

60 hours per week, you know, just so much reading and writing in business school. So I just decided to leave the company. Motorola and went full-time to finish the business school. And then right out of business school, luckily I was able— but it's amazing. I finished my final corporate finance exam in the business school.

Next morning, took a 6:00 AM flight to do the final, final interview with Cisco. They had, you know, I had been interviewing like 7 rounds with them and they wanted me to come in and present in person. Before they, you know, make a final decision. So 6 o'clock flight, get there, all day interview presenting. They made me an offer the next day.

And that's how I moved to Denver with Cisco. That's fantastic. So where did you go to business school? So I went to the evening school at Harvard. Harvard, that's like the CU of the East, right?

Yeah, a little bit like that. That's right. I've heard of that school. Yeah. And then so what did you get— what did you start doing for Cisco?

So I joined the— in Cisco, there are, you know, 3 big service— 3 units per se, and I was in the sales part of Cisco. They actually have 3 offices in Colorado, but Englewood is where the Rockies sales office is, you know, 300 people remotely work from there per se. So I was in the global service provider division of sales, and my responsibility was to help, you know, world's largest service providers like AT&T, Verizon, Telstra, BT, all the big guys, help them understand the latest things going on in the world of networking as well as cybersecurity, you know, the latest threats, latest trends, and use that as a way to say, hey, here are the things going on. That means there's an opportunity to develop it as a service, you know, X as a service per se, hosted, managed, SaaS, all of that. And of course using Cisco products.

So that's what, uh, uh, you know, what myself for first few years and then my team overall did for, uh, across the globe. So that was, uh, obviously a great opportunity for you to figure out Okay, here's the big problems out there and try and start coming up with solutions for those? Or were you the one just coming up with the problems? What was your angle on that? Yeah, so the angle was literally day in.

This was actually my first flavor in cybersecurity, right? So think of these are people who already offer, you know, cybersecurity, managed and hosted cybersecurity to world's biggest enterprises. Right? So AT&T, Verizon, they're offering many cybersecurity services to enterprises. So I was like, okay, these guys know what they're talking about in terms of cybersecurity.

So if I'm gonna go tell them, hey, this is brand new threats and brand new things going on cybersecurity, I need to know what the heck I'm talking about because these guys live and breathe that stuff, right? And Cisco being such an enterprise company, they expect us to bring, you know, us to bring a lot of insights from enterprise side, what kind of threats and things they're seeing and consolidate and correlate all that information and then present it to these service providers. So that's what I would do is bring all that information, do a lot of research, and then say, hey, here are the new threats, here are the new types of services that could be absorbed by enterprises, here's what others are offering, here's the kind of price point why this thing should work, and then actually help them build a business case because Going to an SP and saying, here's a great service, they're like, okay, I need to hire somebody to build a business case, then I have to take it to my CFO. And it's like, I was like, nope, we built that, you know, tentative business case for you. Uh, we'll work with you to customize it for your CFO, your use case, your assumptions, your market, uh, and literally push it through the CFO, uh, you know, management chain, uh, with the business case done and then hand it off to the technical teams to actually implement the solution.

That sounds like a super interesting role. It looks like you did that job there for quite a while. Did you move around at all, or was it kind of doing that same thing the whole time at Cisco? So I was at Cisco literally almost to the day 10 years, and I started doing this work locally within the— actually in the Rockies region. Quest was my customer, I don't know if you remember Embark, you know, all these local, you know, ILACs per se below AT&T, Verizon, they were all my customers when I started.

And little by little, the responsibilities started to become bigger. So I start— took over the all US, not took over, but started to touch bigger AT&Ts and Verizons. And then over time, got into a director role where I actually led the whole team that did that kind of effort across the globe. So I, you know, went all over the world from Australia to, you know, Deutsche Telekom, you know, Europe, Germany, and so forth. So, so it's similar kind of role, just bigger responsibility than managing a team over time.

Yeah, that's great. So you said you were there almost to the day 10 years. Um, what made you leave? So I would tell you is, uh, it was, uh, you know, the things, you know, I mentioned I had to keep up with cybersecurity, right? This is an example of the problem I saw.

And I'll tell you, Robb, if you're not living and breathing cybersecurity and you're trying to keep up, and it— I would spend, no kidding, 8 hours sometimes going from blog to blog and then Google searching. Find something in a blog and like, I don't understand it, you know. They're talking about all these different threats causing a breach, but I don't understand half of these threats. And then Google searching each threat individually And then wondering, is this threat causing breaches other places? I would be more confused after 8 hours than I was, you know, informed.

And that's when I saw the problem was that, hey man, there must be better ways, better tools, and nothing in the market was there. I looked around, it's like, hey, all things related to keeping up with these threats and this information are designed for bits and bytes level that cost $50,000, and I don't need to know the bits and bytes level. I just need to keep up with cyber threats, and, you know, I want to pay $100 a month versus $50,000, you know. So that was a problem. So that is where I basically, you know, that same problem I thought would apply everywhere else also, cybersecurity and others.

So the mission became I want to get the right information to the right people at the right time. So that became the mission. And quite honestly, I said, okay, you know, I saw this problem in cyber, but this applies in medical, applies in many other industries. And I started to dig and research saying, hey, how could we get that right information to the right people in healthcare? Because it could save lives.

And it was not my forte, healthcare, so I decided that perhaps I would go back to the original problem I saw in cyber because that is my background. I have contacts there, I have relationships there, and brought back. But that mission still remains the same, right information to the right people at the right time. Yeah, I mean, I think the best description I've heard of people who, you know, who need to start a company is if there's a problem that you want solved and no one else seems to be willing to solve it, right? It's not because there's a gap there, it's just this is a problem that you wanted to see solved, and I think it's fantastic that you're you're helping be the solution to that problem.

I, you know, but it is interesting to me, you know, just as you've talked through your background, there's nothing in there to make me think, hey, you know, this guy has a desire to go be an entrepreneur, start his own business, you know. What kind of pushed you over that, or had you always wanted this, to be an entrepreneur? Like, what was the impetus for that? I would tell you, first of all, I will say is You know, I've been doing this for, you know, since 2007, you know, took, you know, 1 year to almost research and so forth, and then TruKno for last 2 years or so. First thing I would say is anybody who is listening to this discussion and they're thinking, hey, I'd love to be an entrepreneur because I want to— that's the coolest thing to do, be your own boss and do a startup and so forth.

I tell you, unless there is a passion and a mission behind what you're trying to do, it is a very, very hard thing to do, right? To start something from scratch and so forth. So don't do it because it looks sexy and cool and you want to make money and fame. You want to be the next Elon Musk, right? Everyone wants to be Elon Musk now.

Exactly. That's cool to, you know, say you want to be Elon Musk, but when it— when days are tough, that doesn't carry over. What lets you keep going is when you actually truly you know, in your genes, in your DNA level, you are a mission— you have a mission to accomplish. You know, that is what, uh, you know, it takes— keeps you going. So that was the thing at Cisco.

I tell you, when I just told my team that, hey, and I simply said, I want to go— I am on a mission to get the right information to the right people at the right time. They're like, you must— you know what happened? You're going crazy. You're a sales director at Cisco. You have SVP-level connections.

You talk to CXOs every day. I know what you get paid. You have such an awesome career and you're saying you're gonna go get the right information to the right people in the world. You're crazy. So I said, well, probably I am, but that's what I wanna do.

And I tell you, there's one thing that helped me push over the edge because it was a very, very hard decision to make, right? I'll be very honest with you. It was a cushy job because I knew it inside out. I was doing it for 10 years, just a great title, great pay, amazing company. That's probably the amazing people.

So what pushed me over the edge is actually a book I read called Alchemist. It's actually by Paulo Coelho from Brazil. And in there, there's a quote in the book that says, hey, if you truly believe in something, The world will conspire to help you. That, you know, it seems cliché, but I'm telling you, Robb, that quote I read is the reason I left that cushy job. And I've been struggling since then, you know, to make progress, but I struggle outside, but inside I couldn't be happier, right?

All the struggles are outside, you know, with figuring 1,000 things out as a startup founder. But inside, I'm on a mission and I couldn't be more happier. So I'm super curious to hear more about this. So let's talk more about, you know, what that process looked like. You know, you made the decision to move on from Cisco.

What's next? How do you go from there? So we're basically trying to figure out, you know, when you are working on a problem statement, right? In this case, we'll pick cybersecurity. Problem statement of, hey, so hard to keep up with cyber threats, as an example, right?

That is— yes, I personally had a hard time figuring that out when I was trying to keep up myself. But, you know, the first thing you want to do is, you know, triangulate that problem or that topic with so many folks in so many different diverse roles within that same industry, right? Because you don't want to build something that, you know, you think you, you know, because you think you need it, you know, everybody else needs it, right? So I would say since then, over the last 2 years, we probably have talked to more than 500 folks, uh, and every, you know, every rank, almost every title in cybersecurity, probably we have touched and, and learned everything from their conversation. Like, what, what do that— what does threat mean to them?

Like, what is important to them? What do they want to see? What is their problem? How do they get this? So I would say that was the first biggest angle, was just talk to as many people in a listening mode and trying to correlate that problem, saying, is it real?

And if it is real, you know, what is the deep dive problem? What are the use cases, you know, we want to solve? How do we want to solve it? How is it different than what's available to them today? And how we want to monetize it.

So all those different things, you know, we went through, and that was part of the process too, frankly, to reach out to you, right? Just reaching out to leaders saying, hey, this is— we're something, and we're very humbled to listen to, you know, any guidance you can offer. And the beautiful thing, Robb, is I'm— I don't know, I think you know this, and many people in Colorado probably know this, But I did not realize this until I started reaching out. We are so blessed to have such an amazing ecosystem of— it's just not just— I call it big people, brilliantly intelligent and genuinely good, right? People who are just brilliant in what they know about the topic, but they are genuinely good to reach, you know, to give time to you, to give guidance to you, to just go out of the way to help.

So did you end up having to build a team at the beginning of this? I know you said we a few times. I don't think you've been on your own. Maybe talk to me about how you looked at, you know, when's the right time to bring in— did you have a co-founder or did you kind of just start outsourcing to help get this initial assistance? Like, how'd that work for you?

Yeah, I would say that is The most important thing as a founder is to find the right people, right? Because it's all about finding the right team. And I would say from the very beginning, I was— I started alone, right? As you know, sometimes you have a co-founder, but in my case, I was the man on a mission trying to figure out what to do and how to do it. And honestly speaking, I went to, you know, RVC, which is Rocky Venture Club, with Peter Adams and Dave Harris, just awesome people.

And I would ask them even blank, stupid questions like, man, I'm looking for a co-founder. Where can I, how can I, you know, what should I do? I am struggling to find the right co-founder. You know, what should I do? And, you know, they would say, hey, go to all kinds of meetups and all forth.

And I would literally, Robb, go from one meetup to another. And as I'm talking to people, in my head, I'm scanning potential co-founder material, potential co-founder material, heck no, heck no, heck no. Having that in my head because I'm looking for, hey, I need a co-founder, but it's like marriage. You don't marry somebody because you need to marry, you marry somebody when, you know, when things are right. So I went through that, you know, going to all kinds of meetups and just looking for potential co-founder thing.

I tell you, it was hard, very, very hard, and I just kept moving forward. So I started to actually hire consultants and others to help build a platform. And one thing led to another. And I am so blessed to tell you, we have a team of 7 people now for TruKno. And we have an amazingly diverse team.

So I ended up having— choosing, you know, a couple of people we had found as originally consultants and as co-founders. So our CTO is in Egypt, Alexandria, Egypt. Our head of AI is in Finland, Helsinki, Finland. Our head of UI is in Ukraine. Head of— my co-founder Noah is based in Denver, and then a couple of other team members based in Denver, a security analyst as well as an AI intern.

So it's a long drawn-out process, but it's, it's, I tell you, it's no easy way to find right people. But once you find them, everything starts to click. And that luckily that I feel so blessed to have the team I have now. So, you know, you talked that the vision is to get the right information to the right people, which is, I mean, it's a great vision, but it's not very specific vision, right? So maybe you could you can explain to me, you know, how are you looking at doing that?

Well, let's— so that's the vision, you know, at a 100,000-foot level, right? So let's dig deeper specifically in cybersecurity, right, and specifically in threat intelligence. So if you look at, uh, you know, the world of cybersecurity and threat intelligence, right, first of all, cybersecurity, you know, lots of products, you know, $250 billion market, but if you boil it down to the nuts and bolts, it's all about understanding, prioritizing, and mitigating the latest threats, right, in your environment, in your technology, in whatever your, you know, your environment and assets are. So it's about— it's all about threat risk management. That it was.

It's not about bigger boxes, fancier software. It's all about threat risk management. Right? So that being said, knowing how important threat risk management is, you look at saying, okay, what are the tools available to this community to solve that problem? If threat risk management is so important, what are the tools?

You look at what's available today are 2 extremes, Robb. One side is, hey, you are a SOC analyst, or you are an incident responder, or you're a threat analyst, you have these really fancy IOC feeds and tools that truly are bits and bytes level. You can do sandboxing of malware. You can do all kinds of fancy things. And these things are just amazing.

Again, provided by the gorillas in the market like Cisco's FireEye, Symantec's Recorded Future, and so forth. So these tools are, you know, designed for a very niche audience, right? As a CISO, you know, even if it's accessible to you, or as an IT director, even if it's accessible to you, you're not— you don't want to be looking at bits and bytes all day long, and it's a full-time job to use these tools. So it's made for practitioners, and again, cost, you know, $50,000 to $300,000 depending upon who you choose as starting point in some cases, right? So very heavy, very deep level.

On the other extreme, if you're not that practitioner whose whole day job is to do that bits and bytes threat analysis, what's available today is completely open source, you know, let's say raw news. You know, everybody has their favorite blog post to go to— Dark Reading versus CISO versus You know, bleeping computer and so forth. So most of these people are going to these blog posts, or maybe even aggregate them in one place from Feedly or RSS feed. But it's a— it's going from one article to another and so forth if you have time, right? If you don't have time today or one week, you don't go anywhere.

So making that time, finding the right article, and then spending the time to read it, and more importantly, to understand it. And I'll tell you, there's a big difference between keeping up with cyber news versus keeping up with cyber threats, right? Keeping up with hearing headlines about a breach or a threat is not keeping up with cyber threats. That's just keeping up with cyber news. What we are building is to marry the two, saying, hey, we want to get our mission, you know, at 1,000 feet level instead of the 100,000 feet level.

Our mission is to help cybersecurity community understand the root cause behind the latest cyberattacks in the most simple, efficient, real-time, actionable, and affordable way. That is what we're after. And why is keeping up with the root cause behind the latest cyber threats so important? Because these are— these hackers are human beings as well. If a threat technique, a way an actual threat or a breach got, you know, how they infiltrated your network and got exfiltrated your data and all of that, the way an actual breach happened, if those techniques are working, these hackers will use it again and again and again, especially in the same industry and the same technology or the same assets.

So that's why it's so important to understand how are they actually doing it. So because you want to take proactive action to prevent, to make your security posture better, and that is the mission we are on, is to again enable cybersecurity community to keep up with these, you know, root causes behind the latest cyber threats in the most efficient and affordable way. So how, what does that look like? Describe the, what's the most efficient and affordable way to keep up with those threats? So the way we are doing it today is we literally Our platform ingests all kinds of news and so forth.

And what we are saying is, hey, let's take out the junk. If you go to— we ingest thousands of articles, right? We say, hey, 90%, 85 to 90% of it is syndicated content, get that out, okay? Now we have 5% to 10% and saying, hey, let's find out what articles, blogs, alerts, reports actually are talking about a factual breach or a campaign or an attack and say, okay, this article is actually talking about a breach and a campaign. Let's say, okay, out of that 10%, down to 5%.

Now we say, hey, let's find articles which actually not only say this is a breach or an attack, but actually goes into the details of how that breach happened. So when you go to actually Bleeping Computer or CISO or Dark Reading, they are giving you a summarized, you know, a news bit version of an actual report or an article somebody else wrote, which actually had all the meat in it. So we want to go to that meat original source because that's where all the 15 techniques that used— that were used behind the SolarWinds, you know, attack, right, you know, recently with the FireEye and so forth. So that is what we're doing. So we filter it down, down, down.

All the way to the right article, and then we say, hey, let's extract all the most important things out of that document and present it in a very easy visual. That means, hey, what were the techniques used? What was the malware used? Who was the actor involved? What industries?

What technologies? And present it from a 45-minute read to reading that full article to a 30-second visual and maybe even a 2-minute, a little bit deeper dive summary of what actually happened. So that is the essence of, you know, getting the root cause behind the latest threats in the most efficient way. And I, I'm gonna go out and you can pull me back. The way I think of, of the way you'd use it is you basically intend that people can set up filters in, in your platform to say, hey, you know, I want to know about the threats against my industry, you know, I'm in, you know, the technology industry, and I want to know about things that are targeting the platforms I use.

So, you know, I use AWS, and I'm curious, I want to know about any attacks that are targeting that platform. And maybe I also use, you know, these versions of Linux, and you have the ability to, if I understand this correctly, the ability to set alerts and filters so that I can see when one of the— there's a new threat that targets one of the things that are relevant to me. Is that about right? That's exactly right. There are 2 ways we see— we talk to many folks on this topic of how they plan to use it, how could they use it.

The first one is no matter how good our dashboard is and our platform visuals are, people say, hey, I don't need another dashboard, right? I have enough. Everybody wants to be our single screen, right? Single pane of glass. Glass.

We don't need another one of those vendors. So what we have heard is, hey, I want to just set the right alerts. Hey, I use Office 365. In your case, you said, you know, as an example, AWS, or I use GitHub or GitLab, or, you know, or whatever those technology assets that are important to you. You set those alerts saying, hey, anything that matches this capability, this, and then you can, you know, actually have Boolean logic saying if it's a, uh, if it's a Microsoft Office 365 related threat or breach or something and it's in finance, then send me an alert.

So you can add multiple layers of it, and it— and we're working closely to, uh, send that information as a potentially as a webhook, uh, you know, uh, to, uh, easily exportable into a SIEM or other engines. So that is one way many folks are looking at using it, is importing the right triggers into their own context of a SIEM, and then it gets forwarded to whoever the right people are. The second way we've seen is active. So people who are actually in an active threat analyst role, so their whole job is to actually keep up with cyber threats. These usually are larger companies.

So they are trying to follow a particular, you know, malware type or an actor and so forth. So they will always have alerts as well, but they're also doing proactive digging and trying to keep up. So those are others. And then the third one I would say is simply, you know, we met with an IT director. He's, I have a team of 5 SOC analysts.

Nobody else has the time to keep up with external threats. So I am it. So I just want to go to your news board and and just scan things and then share it with my team at a high level. So because nobody— we cannot hire a dedicated threat analyst, so I am kind of playing that role in an easy way. You just make it so much easier for me to do it.

Otherwise, I would just not be able to do it. So that's the kind of different use cases we have heard so far. And where are you right now? I know, you know, you guys have released some elements of this, but in terms of, you know, as a beta, as a GA? Where is it, the process right now?

So we are in beta, public beta. We have— we were in private beta per se for a few weeks before, but just actually 22nd of December is when we opened our beta to public. So a lot of these things I'm talking about, that curated dashboard, the raw newsfeed, all of it is actually open and available. Many of it You know, you don't even need a login to enter, and when you want to dig a little bit deeper, we'll, you know, we'll ask you to create a login so just— we just know who's coming. But it's open and free, and at this stage we will be turning the curated part of the dashboard to a subscription probably at the end of February timeframe.

But until then, it's all open and free and love to get users to try it and give us feedback. Yeah, I think that, you know, you just hit on it, but let's dive in there a little bit more. What's the plan for how you're going to monetize? I imagine at this point you're just burning through money, right? Because I don't think you're making revenue yet.

So how is that going to change? So what we will do is, so we will stay true to our mission on keeping it accessible in terms of not just user interface, but also affordability. So we have a freemium model. All the raw stuff we are bringing in, all the news sources, hundreds of news sources, even filtered via breaches and vulnerabilities, filter by all of that, all of that will stay open as freemium. So all the raw news and all of that, you can create your own feeds just like Feedly.

So that remains free and will remain free forever. Then the curated part of the dashboard where we really deep dive curate stuff for— by threats and breaches and all of that will go into a subscription model for an individual, and they will also have different tiers, right? Some people just want to understand techniques and others want to actually get to IOCs. And I, you know, I'd mentioned we'll have IOC, so we are working on building the IOCs in addition to TTP. So we'll have different couple of flavors for individuals, and they will also have an enterprise version of the subscription where you are able to do a little bit more in terms of policy, more security, and just bigger and better with all of the features.

And what's your timing, you think, on when you're going to be ready to kind of bring on customers for your curated portion? So curated portion again is available as a beta right now, but in At the end of February is our timeline when we will turn on the subscription for individuals, as well as some trials with enterprises. So those folks who are thinking about it, this is a good time to get in before it's behind a paywall, and it might be an easy time right now to get some familiarity with it. You know, I would say, Robb, try it, but also we truly, you know, if you go to our landing page, you will see big bold letters, by the cyber community, for the cyber community. We are doing every, you know, once you see the price points, you know, it's, you could not buy anything close to the level we're providing curation less than $50,000 or even $100,000.

Ours will be, you know, 100th of that price points, right? So everything we're doing is to get this critical information to the community, you know, in the most widespread way. That being said, we are very humble. We, we've talked to 500 folks, but we haven't talked to 5,000, right? So we have, you know, right in the website we have capability to give us feedback, where our contact— we really, really want to make it useful and valuable to the community.

So we love, you know, even if you can spend 5 minutes on it and just give us any feedback, what features, what things we can tweak to make it useful for the community. We are all ears and trust us, your feedback, you will see it get implemented within days if it makes sense from the community. Yeah. And I'll just echo that, you know, the listeners may not be aware, but, you know, you and I have talked about this several times and I've given some feedback and you've incorporated maybe everything or most about just about everything. And I definitely appreciate that.

Yeah. I'll tell you, to be honest with you, some of the feedback you gave us, we We changed quite a bit of our original architecture to implement it, but it was harsh feedback, to be honest, because we were like, oh, this is what we think and this is what we want. And some of that feedback, it came across harsh at this, you know, but sometimes, you know, people who really care want to give you the right feedback, right? And that's why everything, you know, you told us, you're like, oh man, that was harsh, but, you know, but we were listening and we actually went back took 2 months to change our whole platform to implement some of the things you asked us, but we implemented them. By God, we know.

Uh, so I really appreciate you, you know, going out of the way to give us the right guidance, because people who care will give you the right guidance. People who don't care will say it looks good without, you know, really meaning it. Well, I'm sorry if I was, if I was harsh when I did it. No, I meant it was— you were not harsh, but it was the right feedback. But it, you know, it It was different than what we had implemented, so harsh in the way that we had to do a lot of work to get it right, but not harsh in delivery.

I guess I appreciate you guys have definitely come a long way in the last year or so. So, you know, the last little bit of time we have here, what, you know, what kind of things can the community do for you? Clearly, you know, hopefully everyone's heard loud and clear, get out to the Trino website, take a spin with the technology, give feedback. Let them know how to get better. Anything else that the community can do to help you become the next Colorado security success story?

I think at this stage, we are just hungry for understanding use cases. We're hungry to bend backwards to help do trials if your enterprise— I know we're working with you, Robb, also. I really appreciate you working with us. Is, you know, give us your use cases and trust us. We will go out of the way to understand your use case and try to implement and see if it can be absorbed into our platform and helps everybody else in the community.

So that's the biggest thing from our side is just try us and give us feedback. We, like we said, we truly mean it when we say by the cyber community for the cyber community. And we will just love to hear from you and find the right use cases to make a difference. What if somebody's listening and they're super passionate, fired up and passionate about your mission and want to actually, you know, get employment with TruKno? Are you guys hiring any types of people you're looking to talk to?

We're always looking for the right people. So, you know, you can reach out to me personally at manish@truno.com. Of course, from the website as well, but personally feel free to reach out to me. We are always looking for the right people, and I've coined this frame: to be part of TruKno, you have to be a BIG person. B-I-G-G. Brilliantly intelligent and genuinely good, because just brilliantly intelligent is not good enough.

You have to care for the community, have to be truly for the mission of what we're working for. Because this— we don't see what we do as a job, we see it as a mission. So those are the kind of people we're looking for, is people on a mission to get this information in the cyber community in the right way. Yeah, that's great. Well, I mean, I think this is awesome.

I'm— I am awesome. It's great to hear about a new company that's, that's really, you know, trying to, to solve a problem that I don't think I've seen solved. Like you said, it's not solved at the level you're looking to solve it, at least, uh, and here in Colorado. That's fantastic. Anything else I didn't ask you that we should be talking about here today?

No, I think the key things you mentioned, all the topics you brought up, we would just love to hear from you. And I love your podcast. So, just keep going. Great, great, great to have this community going within Colorado, you know, in such a great way. Awesome.

Well, Manish, thank you for your time. Thanks for what you're doing there. And we'll look forward to hopefully catching up with you in a year or so and hearing about how that— how the launch is going. Thank you so much, Robb. Thank you everybody for listening.

All right, this has been Colorado Equals Security. We'll talk to you guys again 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.