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 221 for the week of August 16th. Alex, how's it going?

I'm doing well. How are you, Rob? I'm doing fantastic. The air is slightly less gross today. Yeah.

You know, I could see the mountains, which is a nice thing. Yeah. Wasn't like, you know, crystal clear blue skies or anything, but, you know, much better than it has been. Yeah, I mean, the bar is so low that slightly less gross is pretty good. I feel like I can breathe a little better today, not, you know, hacking and wheezing and sneezing quite as much.

We are recording here on Saturday, and I think Sunday it's supposed to be even better from, from what I saw in the news. Yeah, well, and actually, I'm on my way into your house, it's raining a little bit. So I think, you know, that'll help with air quality too. Raining a little bit and lightning a Lightning a lot. Yeah.

Yes. Nice show. Some fireworks out there for sure. All right. Well, we do have some housekeeping to go through.

There's a Slack channel. What did we say? There was 1,900 and was it 85? 1985. 1985.

So we're, we're 15 years away from the, the turn of the century and we'll get to talk about 2,000 people. That'll be pretty fun. If you want to join Slack, you can go to colorado-security.com and click the join Slack button. That'll help you get in there pretty quickly. While you're there, join our mailing list.

You will get a maximum of one email per week with the show notes in it. That's all we use the mailing list for. No spam, no advertising, nothing else, just show notes until we figure out a way to use it to monetize and get that island in the Caribbean. Right. We're working on that.

We're not really. All right. We'd love it if you would rate us and subscribe on your favorite podcast podcatcher, your favorite podcast listening application. That's a good place for you to let people know about us and help get us some more listeners. And another way for you to help let people know about it is to tell people in real life.

You can— I actually think sending physical letters about your favorite podcast is, is pretty ironic and is not a bad idea. Is that like the commercial? I think it's for Nissan or something where the guy, he gets a tweet and then drives to the guy's house and knocks on the door and says, LOL. He goes, are you returning my tweet in person? I love that.

Yeah. Anyway, so you could do that. You could do that. We'd love it. Yeah, we would love it.

Also, we have a Patreon campaign if you would like to help financially support Colorado Equal Security. You can go to the website, find more info about that. We have several levels for you to sign up for. Well, technically we have infinite levels, but we have several suggested levels. If you get to that $10 a month level, then you will get a free t-shirt and a shout out on the show.

Uh, we do not have any additional patrons this week, but we do like to thank our, uh, patrons that we do have who have continued to support us. Uh, thank you very much. Yeah, we've got folks who've been supporting us for years and you guys are amazing. Thank you so much for what you do. Uh, it keeps us going.

Yep. Let's jump into the news, Rob. I will. We, uh, we have some, some fun news. I don't know if you heard, but we, we talked a couple times about Casa Bonita being in dire straits, potentially going out of business, bankruptcy, all of those things.

And it looks like we may have a savior in the form of a fat little boy.

Or actually creators of a fat little boy. Well, I would say that Cartman is the only reason that they have their fortune. And, and as a result of their fortune, not a Kyle fan. The, the creators of South Park may have the money to buy Casa Bonita. You don't like Chef?

No. Come on.

Salty. All right. All right. We'll keep him. Anyway, friendly show.

Anyway, we had the story this week is that Um, the creators of South Park, um, are, uh, said to have, uh, purchased Casa Bonita. I think they're overplaying it a little bit, at least in the headline of the story. They're very excited about it, which is part of it. They've come to an agreement to buy Casa Bonita. The, the company that owns Casa Bonita is in bankruptcy, so they have to go through all of that stuff before I think they can get to a final agreement.

But it sounds like there is, um, an agreement for an agreement in place, and then hopefully that closes soon. Yeah, it, it looks like You know, basically the sellers have agreed, but the bankruptcy court and/or the creditors of the owners have to, have to agree to it. I guess that they told this to Governor Polis. That was when this was announced. Governor Polis was doing an interview with them, which is interesting.

And Governor Polis had some interesting, interesting response to this. Did you, did you see this? Yeah, I saw he got up and gave him a big hug is what I heard. He did give him a big hug and he said, you know, there's one area where we'd all love to see an upgrade. And I think I speak on behalf of everyone who patronizes Casa Bonita.

The food could be a little better, Pola said. Yes. And they said, I think it could be a little more than a little better. So, so fortunately, they agree that the food could be better and hopefully that means they'll actually do it. They won't walk in and go, well, good enough.

This, this terrible, terrible food is all we're going to do. Yeah. They have said that they are planning to partner with a yet unnamed local chef to help them with, with the menu there. So that'd be pretty cool. Hopefully we get some, some delicious New Mexican food.

They did say there's other improvements coming, such as, you know, one of the upgrades they're thinking about doing is maybe having 2 gorillas in the skits instead of just the one. So, you know, big, big changes afoot. Big changes. I did read, this is, the saga's been going on for a little bit before they got to this conclusion of actually coming to an agreement. One of the, the prior articles I read a few weeks ago, one of the, the guys was talking about how that they were going to try and figure out how to make Black Bart's Cave a little less gross.

I'm not sure. Once again, a little might be a little bit of an understatement. Yeah. Anyway. All right.

Moving on. We have a Denver company that is launching an i-renting model in Phoenix, which is guaranteeing landlords rent on their properties. So that's pretty cool. But, you know, this company had already been doing this service here in Denver. Yeah, I didn't know about it.

So for me, there's kind of breaking news, there's a company doing this iRenting model. The company's called Nomad. And, and really what they do is they come to agreements with landlords. And I'd say that they kind of smooth out rents and the experience for those landlords. If you're, if you're an individual unit holder or a small, small number of unit holders, you know, it's pretty expensive and kind of a risk when you lose tenants.

You know, this, the turnover you might get if you just have one unit, maybe you can't afford to have it be empty for 6 months. Well, basically this company will come in and say, we guarantee you the rent. And I assume it's some percentage of what you'd be getting otherwise. And we'll always pay you and we'll go find the tenants and we'll deal with all those problems. Yeah.

I mean, there are plenty of property management companies out there that will manage your properties for you. But I think that, you know, the, the model of guaranteeing the rent is definitely something new. And I mean, it's pretty cool. I'm sure that, you know, people would be willing to do that if you're, if If you can guarantee that income coming in, even if it's less than you might, might normally get in the market, it's probably worth it. I think if you're a new, the new landlord with 1 or 2 units, this makes a lot of sense.

You're able to lock in whatever profit and, and, you know, I'll tell you, I was a landlord for a few years and it looked like it was going to be good. And you get, you know, get a few years in, you have a few repairs and all of a sudden, man, this, this wasn't so good after all. I probably lost money on the deal. And I think having that surety as you jump into that new business is pretty smart. And of course, once you get into it for a while, you figure out that, okay, they're taking risks that I can now take on.

Maybe you change it, but I love that this is gonna make it more accessible for more people. Yeah, definitely. It's a pretty cool idea and glad to see that they're expanding beyond Denver. All right. We have— I think we've talked about these guys before.

It's a company in Loveland called Lightning E-Motors. They create electric vehicles or the motors for electric vehicles. And they just announced a deal that for $850 million where they're gonna be selling shuttle, shuttle engines basically to a, to a company called Elkhart. Oh, yep. Thank you.

Elkhart. Yeah. So, you know, Elkhart does, they make a lot of those shuttle buses and things like that. And, you know, Lightning eMotors, their bread and butter is taking things that are existing and then putting the electric powertrains into them. They mentioned in the article that they are selling vehicles, I think, directly to some fleet customers, including DHL, Amazon, and Fluid, who we've talked about before as well.

So it's pretty cool. And, you know, this is a pretty big market. It's not something that you normally think about. But, you know, there's obviously a lot of delivery vehicles, a lot of public transit vehicles that almost all run on some sort of gas, whether it's natural gas or regular gasoline. And, you know, we'll be trying to convert into electric at some point in the future.

Yeah, so after they announced this big deal, uh, their stock went up more than 80%. Uh, this was last Tuesday, so obviously, you know, the, the stock market thinks that these guys have a bright future, and, uh, I love to see Colorado companies do well. Yeah, congrats to them. All right, uh, next, uh, Gusto, uh, just announced a $175 million Series E with big plans for Denver. Yeah, we've talked about Gusto here a number of times.

They've hired security folks, and their CISO doesn't live here, but I think he's got some connections here in Denver. That's Flea, for those who don't know, Frederick Lee. So, but I guess a couple surprises to me in this article. Number one, awesome that they raised $175 million, but they mentioned that Denver is actually the largest home base for Gusto, where we've got over 800 of the 1,400 employees working here in our city or our area. Yeah.

And I think that that was as of January 1st. So I'd imagine that that number is even higher now. I think it's also funny that they call it a home base. Right. Right.

It's not like some of the other companies are saying, oh, our HQ2 is in Denver, even though, you know, whatever. But I mean, it is really cool that Denver is their biggest presence and they're going to be growing their overall headcount by 50% in the next fiscal year. So it's going to only get bigger. Yeah. Another couple of interesting stats I saw in here.

They say that they have over 200,000 customers. So, so Gusto has a lot of customers and of course their customers would be businesses, right? So. Right. I assume lots of small and medium-sized businesses.

But they also said they, they have offered more than 100 new products over the last year and 100 new products. I mean, this place is just going crazy. Yeah, that, that is pretty cool. And for those of you that don't know, Gusto does HR and payroll management and other things like that for, for pretty small businesses, I think. Which is part of the reason why you could have 200,000 customers.

Good stuff. Next, we have a story here from a local consulting company. So Reuben Brown, who does audit and consulting, they have combined with Liberty Technology Advisors. And basically, it looks to me like just reading this, and I don't have any insider information, but it looks like they have rolled Liberty Technology Advisors into Reuben Brown, and the going forward is going to be Reuben Brown. Consulting and really adding, you know, the new capabilities of this other organization.

Yeah, it looked like something that was very synergistic. From the press release, it sounded like what Liberty does and what RubinBrown does were different. So it makes sense to combine and they now can do more things under one roof. It also looks like they— the executives of each of the companies knew each other already and maybe had Had done some work together before, so it was again some synergies there having worked together. I love that.

Well, congrats to those guys. Of course, Rob Rudloff's a friend of ours and over there at RubinBrown. Hopefully this is all great news and gives them more fun stuff to do. We have a press release from Stackhawk. Caca!

I think we need to take a moment here and talk about this debate that happened on Slack recently. So Scott Gerlach, friend of the show and co-founder and what chief security officer at Stackhawk, I think. Sounds great. He was talking about the caca and suggesting that his caca is better than our caca. And, and I'm not sure how exactly we go about proving this.

But if you know anyone's listening, and they want to chime in and let Stackhawk know that their caca is not as good as ours, we'd love it if you would send them a tweet, or an email, or just walk over to their office and let them know in person. You know, maybe call whatever their general phone number is and just leave a voicemail. With their caca on it. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure they would love that. I think if, if all of you guys called, then the message would be received by Scott that, uh, we're, we're not a force to be trifled with.

Anyway, was there some news here? Was there some news? So there was actually a press release. It didn't involve caca. Um, uh, StackHawk released their— is the first dynamic application and API security testing solution for GitHub's Advanced Security Solution.

So Uh, the Advanced Security in GitHub is basically a way where you can, uh, pull security, uh, into GitHub and, and work within GitHub for those, uh, security products. Uh, GitHub released some of their own products as part of Advanced Security, but they're opening it up to, to third parties as well. And it sounds like StackHawk is the first one to go in there for, uh, for DAST and API security. It's amazing. Uh, just really cool for StackHawk to be able to be in that position.

GitHub is obviously the new hotness for where you're supposed to write your code, right? And, uh, and they have a lot of security tools that I think a lot of teams are looking at. Hey, do I want to go buy this external thing, you know, go spend 6 figures for, you know, Fortify or Black Duck or whatever, or do I want to use GitHub's integrated stuff for significantly less money and, right, probably, you know, not significantly different results? Um, I think, you know, being part of that library of options is going to be really powerful for StackHawk. Yeah, it's, yeah, I think similar to you know, AWS and AWS Marketplace or Azure or whatever, where, you know, you can just go, oh, I need this thing.

All right. There's a marketplace of things that I can go do it with. And, um, cool to have that marketplace in general, but for StackHawk to be the first one there, even cooler. Good stuff. All right.

Jumping over to our next, we have a blog by Ping Identity this week, the basics of zero trust authentication for federal government. Oh, this is, this is really getting into the requirements there. And, um, specifically, you know, there's been a lot of new requirements as a part of the executive order. And, uh, and, and I think Ping's coming in and showing here's how you can use your identity infrastructure to meet these new requirements in a zero trust framework, which is apparently one of the requirements of the new executive order. Yeah, um, government's going all in on, on zero trust, or at least they're saying they're going all in on zero trust, and obviously identity is a big part of that.

Uh, blog post here, uh, talks about the, the ways that you can help monitor modernize— words do not seem to be coming out clearly tonight, Rob— your authenticate— man, why don't you take this one? You can authenticate and authorize and all those good things. I'm not sure where you were going, but I think it's fantastic that if you're in the federal government or you want to get into the federal government, this might be a way for you to learn how to get identity integrated. They talk about 3 things that you should do: having centralized authentication authority, dynamic authorization, and continuous monitoring of your identity. Those sound like good ideas.

Those do sound like good ideas. I suspect that Ping Identity can help you with all 3 of those. Um, if anybody knows, it would be you, Rob. All right, moving on. Uh, we have a blog post this week from, uh, Zavilo talking about their head of cybersecurity who was the lead for Cyber Shield 2021.

So Brad Rhodes is not only the head of cybersecurity for ZVLO, but he's also a National Guard member, right? Yeah. So he's a lieutenant colonel in the Colorado Army National Guard. I think that's— I think that's high. That seems pretty high.

I think it is. We should look that up. We probably should. But congratulations to Brad, who was asked to lead this exercise. And of course, thank you very much for your service.

What exactly is the Cyber Shield 2021 exercise, Alex? So Every year, uh, the military does a Cyber Shield exercise, which is, um, sort of analogous to what you might do as a tabletop in a normal business, except, you know, a little bit more over the top in actual exercise. Um, and so, you know, they have to come up with that. They have to coordinate it. They have to lead it and they have to run it.

And so Brad was the executive officer in charge for Cyber Shield 2021. So he was the one that was in charge of the whole shebang. So, I mean, that is pretty cool. He had to make sure that they came up with the exercise and planned it and executed it. They say in the article, this is the largest unclassified exercise.

So now I want to know what the largest classified one is, but I don't want to have to be killed after I hear. So if anyone has suggestions on how I could find out without being killed, let me know. Maybe you can buy, buy Brad a beard— beer. Man, I am struggling. Well, it is, it is a late Saturday night right now.

Hey, next we have a blog post from Red Canary, which is called 5 Ways to Reduce SOC analyst burnout. And believe it or not, they have a list of 5 things in here. Is there a, a song that goes along with this? Like, you know, 5 ways to leave your lover or, you know, could you give me to sing a little bit of that so I get it? You don't want me to.

I'm asking you to. No, I'm good. Hey, we'll figure it out though. Maybe we should talk about this list of 5 things then. Okay.

So number 1 is to automate. And, and, and why would automation be good, Alex? Because then you don't have to do it yourself. That's good because you get the, get the bots, you get the AIs to do it for you. Number 2, provide training on core tools.

It's always good to know about the things that you're working with. It would be burnt. You'd be quick to burn out if you're asked to work on tools without any of the resources to be effective. Yep. Number 3 is do not implement quotas.

So basically they're saying don't say you have to knock out 100 tickets per day, right, in order to go home before you can slide off your dinosaur at the end of the day. It's a Flintstones reference for those who don't know. Number 4, Uh, is pave the way for growth. Yeah, uh, that's always good. People want to grow, they want to get promoted, they want to figure out what their path is, and so having that is great.

What's your last one? 5 is encourage work-life balance. So get them out of the office. Yeah, make sure that there isn't a quota so that they have to stay there super late every day and make sure they get their 2 tickets done. Well, I think those are all good ideas.

I'd suggest that, you know, setting a clear vision for what you're trying to accomplish as the mission would also be a nice one to stop people from burning out. If you're, if you're looking for a 6th, that's my, that's my suggestion. All right. Good to know. All right.

Last news article for this week, we have a blog post from Cybersecurity— that's with 2 Cs— Mitch Tannenbaum. And he is talking about the executive order on cybersecurity. And the title is The March Forward Continues. Yeah. You know, his, his point of this kind of status on how Executive Order 14028 is doing is that, you know, generally these executive orders have kind of landed with a thud and not, not done much.

And he's seeing a lot of movement as a result of this most recent executive order. Yeah. One of the things that he talks about specifically is that agencies have to define what their critical software is and then provide a catalog of that critical software. And they actually have 60 days to do it, which is a very short timeline for any organization that doesn't have this already let alone a government organization. Yeah.

So, so what we're saying is, you know, the SANS number one control, the critical security control number one that we haven't done for 20 years, they're going to do in 60 days. Honestly, if you can't do it in 60 days, you probably can't do it ever. So great. Go, go get it done. I love it.

Yeah. Do it. Hopefully it'll be useful for people. There's also a larger list that he has in the blog post talking about all of the things, or at least many of the things that are required from the executive order. Oh, good stuff.

That is it for news. Did you want to do a quick Slack announcement? I did. Yeah. So we didn't pick a Slack message of the week this week.

So sorry to all of you that were hoping to win. But I did want to make a general public service announcement. If you are in Slack— well, if you're not in Slack, we've already said you should join. If you are in Slack, we have over 60 channels in our Slack workspace. And some of them are, you know, much less populated than the big channels like General or Random or things like that.

Um, all kinds of different things for all kinds of different people. So I would just encourage you to go, uh, periodically take a list at, look at that channel list and, uh, you know, maybe join a channel that you haven't been in before that looks interesting. Didn't we just add music this week? We added music. Um, it is, uh, not very populated yet, but you know, a couple good discussions in there.

We have a coffee channel. Um, there's a Dungeons and Dragons channel. There's all, you know, all kinds of stuff, um, in Slack and just explore, find, find new things to talk about. All right, let's jump over to our, to our events. As a reminder, we have a calendar of events on the website, which is colorado-security.com, and we like to talk about the things happening in the next 2 weeks.

So let's go through those real quick. What do we got? Uh, first we have 2 events on the 17th. ISSA Colorado Springs is doing their August meeting, and SecureSet is doing a virtual event, Breaking into Cybersecurity, with an alumni speaker. On the 20th, ACES Denver, which is the physical security group here in town, is doing their Grizzly Rose networking party.

And this looks like a lot of fun. We like parties. On the 21st, ISSA Colorado Springs is doing a mini seminar. On the 24th, the Cloud Security Alliance of Denver is doing their August meeting. Ooh, on the 25th, ISSA Denver is doing their August special meeting.

And finally, also on the 25th, ISC² Pikes Peak has an August hybrid meeting, so you can go in person, go online, no judgment either way. You know, whether you want a regular meeting, a special meeting, or a hybrid meeting, you've got your choice. All right, let's jump over into jobs. We like to highlight a few jobs that are, uh, that are being hired each week. Man, every time we do these searches, I mean, I think I saw 500 new jobs posted in the next week— last week.

Yeah, try not to do the same company every week. Except for the ones we work for, and try not to, you know, try and find unique, interesting jobs. We'll see how we did. A few things from Red Canary. I'll go to those before we go into the rest.

I'm looking to hire a Director of Corporate Security. This is the person responsible for the security program to protect the internal resources, you know, basically the enterprise that is Red Canary. And I'm also hiring a Director of Product Security, which is focused on the entire SDLC from, you know, architecture to development to testing to operate the operationalization of our, our products that we sell to customers. Um, so kind of between those two, it's, it's really protecting everything. Uh, the third position I'm hiring at Red Canary is our program manager for the trust team.

This is the person who works most closely with me keeping our program moving forward and tracking and all that good stuff. All right, uh, Aegon is looking for a deputy information security officer. Alteryx is hiring a Director of Security Architecture. Protiviti is looking for a Technology Consulting Data Security Senior Manager for PCI Compliance in Denver. That's definitely the longest title of the week right there.

Yeah. NCAR is hiring a Manager in the Office of Information Security. Gong is looking for a Security Engineer in the Office of the CISO. Interesting, right? New naming culture here.

Quest Groups LLC is hiring a security analyst. And Microsoft is looking for a security and compliance technical specialist. And that is it for jobs. And that is it for the newscast. We do have a— this is a podcast.

This is a podcast. Yeah, we do have an interview this week, though. For the first time in a little while, I sat down with someone. I sat down with Rog— man, I can't talk either. Rob Eggebrecht.

Rob, we all know from his time as one of the founders and CEO of BEW Global. Which turned into InteliSecure. He's now recently started a new company called CloudRise. And if you remember, that's the one out in Grand Junction. Yeah.

They have a program associated with Mesa State University. We got into, you know, really how he, you know, what happened with, with the building of InteliSecure, how he left there. There's a little bit of, a little bit of conflict on that. It's kind of an interesting story. And then we get into how he built this new company and really how they're going to be looking to change the world.

That sounds pretty cool. I like world changers. Looking forward to hearing that. All right, well, that's it. That's it.

We will look to talk to you guys again next week. Thanks, Rob. This is Michael Stephen, Privacy Security Officer for Connect for Health Colorado. Welcome to Colorado Equals Security, for Colorado security professionals by Colorado security professionals.

Welcome to Colorado Equals Security. This is our feature interview this week. Um, this is Rob interviewing Rob Eggebrecht. Rob, how you been? It's been a while since we've connected.

I've been good. I mean, I'm getting older, hair is getting thinner, so yeah, but I'm still good. Well, you— it's because you're going to higher altitude, right? And you're not in the— not down in the Denver area anymore? No, I went to high altitude and then I went to the Grand Valley in the desert, and it's so darn hot there that I'm like any other animal.

I think I'm shedding my hair. I drove through, uh, I drove through Grand Junction on the way to California, uh, back in July, early July. And I got to Grand Junction and it was like, I don't know, 113 or something. And it was, it was just after the 4th of July, maybe the 6th. And from Grand Junction all the way to like the central California, the temperature was never below 110.

It was, it was ridiculously hot and miserable. And I don't know how you live there. Well, what I did is I bought a small place in Crested Butte. I call it my refrigerator condo at 9,000 feet, and that's where I spend from May 15th until the leaves fall. That's, that's perfect.

You're thinking. I love the way you think. Well, we have a lot of stuff to cover. Um, I know we're gonna, we're gonna talk about, you know, really, you're currently the CEO and founder of CloudRise, and we're gonna talk about CloudRise, but, you know, last time I've talked about you on the podcast, or with you at least, you know, when you and I last talked, you know, you're the CEO and you were one of the founders of InteliSecure. So I'd like to hear kind of, you know, that whole, that whole, uh, um, process of creating that company and the pivots you did there, and then what you learned and how that's influenced your, your new company.

Um, so let's start off with your own background. Where are you from originally? Where did I grow up? Yeah, yeah, where are you from? I'm the son of an IBMer, which stands for I've Been Moved, so I can compete with any Army brat when it comes to this.

So I was born in Rochester, Minnesota, and then I moved to Boulder, Colorado, then back to Rochester, and then Rochester to Roswell, Georgia, and Roswell, Georgia to Boca Raton, Florida, and then Boca Raton, Florida back to Rochester, and then Rochester to New Jersey, and then New Jersey to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and then I started junior high. Wow, that's brutal. Yeah, my, uh, my pop was part of the IBM PC project, so if you actually trace those tracks, uh, Boca was where they finally finished the PC. And, uh, yeah, he moved us around a lot. So, but I was really irritated because, you know, West Palm Beach, Boulder, and he settles me for my, you know, junior high and high school years in Pennsyltucky.

So Anyways, those are complaints, I guess, I can lodge somewhere else. So you got to see a lot of IBM campuses or the cities around IBM campuses growing up. And when you think of a home, does one of these kind of seem to you like home? No.

I went to DU. Well, actually, before DU, I went to Western State in Gunnison. So the day I graduated high school in Pennsylvania, I packed my car and said I was never going back to the East Coast. And so I moved to Gunnison and I spent some years in Crested Butte. And then I sat around one day and said, it's either a ski bum or something else.

And so I transferred down to DU and Colorado has always been my home, to be quite honest. I've been here over 30 years and I just love it here. Well, how did you, how did you end up landing in the security field?

We got, we got some dog action, which means, uh, we are doing a remote interview, and, and that's what COVID gives us is some dog action. No worries, Rob.

Oh, while we, while we, uh, change— I can see Rob's walking and giving us a new location, maybe a little further from the dog. Um, I, I'm looking at your LinkedIn profile here, and I see that you have some experience as a, uh, at Level 3 and NTTs. Level 3, a good Colorado company, but it looks like you were not in Colorado when you were at Level 3. Nope. I, um, so after DU, I worked for a company called Pacer Cats, which was a joint venture of Ticketmaster and Wembley Stadiums.

And that got me, uh, expatted over to Tokyo for a little bit. Oh, fun. And then, uh, I joined the gang at, uh, Vertella. And so we got to work with Bab Goyal and the whole gang over there. And, uh, then a little company called GemPlex stole me out of there, and they were managed VPNs.

So that's how I got into security, to be quite honest. It was back in the days of NetScreen 5GT firewalls and, uh, oh God, NeoTERRIS. I mean, I, I can really date myself right now, you know. Juniper was just starting out. Yeah, so it was really exciting.

And then, uh, I spent some time early at Quest in their special pricing group and business development. And then level 3, I expatted over in London and I was working in their product management for Lambdas, wavelengths, Metro Ethernet. And so I got this really nice telco background. That's kind of how Denver grew up as a tech company, you know, or tech city. And then finally, I finally, I ended up at GemPlex, ended up in Denmark, and then the craziest thing happened, which was I was laying on my couch, it was 2 in the morning, I'm living in Denmark, my family's living in Ashburn, Virginia.

Yeah, we have a house for rent in Castle Pines North, and they go, hey, we just sold the company and your stock's vested, and thank you so much, but we're letting all the GTM go. They bought the network and the ops group, Congratulations. And I sat there and went, that feels like I'm getting laid off. I did not like that feeling. So I took the stock proceeds, I left Denmark, sold the townhouse in Ashburn, gathered the family, moved back to Castle Pines and started BEW Global in 2003.

And that was when I became a true entrepreneur and went down and filed the papers to become an S corp in the great state of Colorado. And yeah, Yeah, so tell me about the, the original founding team. I know BEW has some meaning, the acronym, and really what were you guys trying to accomplish with that company? The first thing we were trying to accomplish is just get some income in the door. So it was Blomquist, Chuck Blomquist, who went all the way up through the exit with me.

He was our CTO. Chuck's a great guy, semi-retired now, lucky guy. And then it was Eggerbrecht, me, And then Vergen, Norbert Vergen. And Norbert was from Munich, Germany, and I had met him at GemPlex. He was our country manager there.

And Norbert lasted about 90 days, and then he became the victim of a divorce. And divorces and startups financially really don't go that well. So Norbert ended up over, I think, at SciTel, one of the BPO shops. And then it became Chuck and I. And how we started it was we went back over to Vertella and we said, hey, why don't we become an agent of yours and we'll sell your managed VPN services to our Rolodex that we knew.

And it was great because that instantly brought recurring revenue in when we sold those contracts, and then we just got a cut of the action. But the real story that changed everything was, um, I worked at ski shops my whole life in Denver, and there was a kid named Sean Donahue that I worked with at a place called The Ski Doctor. And Sean's brother was the founder of VeriSept. He coded VeriSept in his garage It was the first DLP solution, or it was called content monitoring filtering. And so I was talking to Sean one day, he's like, hey, we need someone to help sell this product and this solution.

I was like, oh, let's check it out. And so we became a reseller of it. And Chuck's like, I could definitely like install this. And next thing you know, we called up Dell, we bought a fleet of 20 Dell 1750 servers, rented out 2 spaces in Regus, And we started sending these servers out doing what were called exposure assessments. And it was really cool because it was the first tool that gave you that visual of multi-channel.

This is what's going on in your network. And that's how BEW started, was we kind of tripped into it from a relationship from my ski days. And then from there, it just continued to spiral up. We got to meet the founders of Vantu, Reconyx at the time, Port Authority, which turned in— and I can walk through all these companies grew up, you know, Port Authority to WebSense to Forcepoint, VonTude to Symantec to Broadcom, and we just kind of rode that wave. So initially you were resellers and then started adding like professional services for implementation, and then I think somewhere along the way you guys pivoted to really providing like a managed service around ELP, right?

What happened was, it's never— I just think it's a cool story now retrospectively looking at it. So We were a reseller and implementer, and we had, uh, kind of pivoted from VeriSept into Bantu. We got to know Joseph Ancinelli, the CEO, Kevin Rowney, the tech guy, and they just jived with us because we understood that, um, through our careers Chuck and I had both done a lot of business consulting. And what we realized with DLP was you had to go get the requirements inside the business. And so we would have these SOWs that were technical oriented But then we started getting into consulting.

And in 2008, when the market crashed, the resale market died, and little BEW Global almost died on the vine. We were caught kind of with our pants down. We were not ready for that recession. And so luckily, my dad bailed us out. Good old dad wrote us a check.

And it's a great story because my dad is a very straightforward guy. He's an engineer. And he gave us a spreadsheet called the viability calculator. And he's like, you're gonna put your revenue in, your earnings in, and if it comes up green, I'll continue to loan you money to get through this. And sure as shit, what he did give us advice on was, why don't you go out and get some recurring revenue?

And why don't you try to sell managed service? And it was funny because 3 of our customers at the time had lost their staff around DLP, and they came to us and said, can you build reports for us? Can you tune the policies? And That's where the managed services started. So my advice to entrepreneurs is you're not out of the fight if you keep swinging.

So we just kept swinging and that's when the managed services started and then the ball just started rolling because VonTu was like, oh, this gets it sticky, it builds our net retention, people buy more modules, they'll actually put it in line. And by 2012, we were a $12 million company, about $4 million of it was recurring revenue. And that's when the private equity guys and the VCs started circling. Yeah. And, and you ended up, uh, adding— so you were managed DLP, and I think, you know, really kind of rethinking as, you know, critical data protection and, uh, wait, wait, critical access frame, was it CAP?

Is that how you guys— CAP. CAP. Yeah, CAP was the acronym. Bringing back the good old days. So, uh, What we found was that, uh, you know, we created this methodology and actually came out of our ISO practice.

So a lot of people forget this, but we were one of the first what was called ACP, Associate Consultant Practices, to ISO 27001. And so a guy named John DiMaria ran that program, and John became a really good friend. And so what we did is we go certified companies for ISO 27001. It was all about scope. And so I said, let's translate this practice, LP practice, and coach our clients that at the end of the day you have a very, very endless hole.

And we process a methodology and it really caught on. And so it enabled a lot of our managed services because it was in the customer finally on trying not to turn on every DLP policy under the sun, and then it grew to— ways— we're having a little bit of a connection issue there. I'm not sure where it was, but, um, I think, I think I caught most of what you said. Basically, your, um, managed service helping, helping get away from having to turn everything on, but really focus on those areas where the most sensitive data is, right? Correct.

Yeah. Sorry, I don't know which side we're having that problem on. Okay. So, you know, any other evolutions you want to talk about there? I know you were there through 2016, you know, any other big changes that are worth sharing about at that side?

Well, you changed your name at some point as well. Yeah. We took on private equity in June of 2014. We did a Series A. We raised close to about $15, $14.6 or $14.8 million.

We then did a Series B and we bought a company in the UK called Pentora. Yeah, it was a big Vontu DLP provider and they had a managed service. So we bought them and then in the spring of 2016, frankly, the private equity guys and the management team, and this happens, we just came to an agreement that we didn't really like each other and we— there was just different routes to take. And so myself, Joe Infantino, who is my COO, Hillary Laird, who is our VP of marketing and sales, we all left and we kind of took some time off, to be quite honest, and it was super refreshing. But, um, they recapped the company and they headed in a direction that they wanted to go, and we had some other ideas and thoughts about what we wanted to do.

So, I mean, it's interesting, as, as a founder, it's got to be tough to, to leave your own company and, you know, watch somebody else run it and you, you go do a new thing. You know, did that take a while for you to get your arms around that? Yeah, a lot. It took, it took a good ski season with some really good snow. But you know what, I have some great mentors and they all wrap themselves around me and I need to kind of, you know, I'm very candid about this and I speak about it very openly.

I was a shell of what I was when I started the company. I had become beholden to what a lot of people do, which is the hamster wheel of financing and tech and you know, selling your soul for an extra dollar or 2. And frankly, I needed to fix myself. And so I took a year off. I sat down with some really important mentors and I had them coach me on kind of what I should do, what I shouldn't do.

Again, I'm very open about this. I got sober, to be quite honest. I haven't had a drink in 5 years since I left. And, you know, the tech industry, if I could make this statement, I think this is a good platform to do it. You don't have to get sucked into that culture.

And I think I've seen it ruin a lot of people in tech, and there's just a kind of a better, more wholesome way to live. So that's my wholesome commercial for the day. Well, I mean, that's amazing. And the fact that you're willing to share that is very powerful. I think we don't have enough vulnerability and people who are willing to talk about the hard parts of this industry.

It's, you know, there's great parts, but there are some really hard parts too. And And I think, you know, I know that I've seen lots of data that says that security leaders, and I'm sure executives for vendors as well, have lots of issues where drinking becomes a problem or other stuff as well. So thank you for sharing. Yeah. So I took a year off and I got to know my kids.

I got to know my dogs and I got to ski and mountain bike. And I got to, I call it, I stopped treating Colorado like Kansas with a really nice backdrop. Actually drove up into those mountains and frankly embraced what I came out here for, which is I love the outdoors. And if you guys read, when we talk about Cloudrise, we talk about genuine Colorado. It's one of our taglines.

And that's a company that we want to be. We want to be genuine Coloradans. Yeah. So, well, I want to hear, so, so Cloudrise, we've talked about on the show, you guys were covered in a couple of other outlets, and we use those stories to introduce you to the group. But let's start over.

Really, how did you go from taking your time off and enjoying— I don't call it a sabbatical or whatever you want to call it. How did you go from that to deciding it was time to start a new company? And what was the vision there? There was an interim step, and that was after taking a year off, Deloitte came knocking at the door, and Deloitte had been interested in acquiring InteliSecure. And I got to know their corp dev guys, and so they offered me a principalship in their data risk group.

And so I said, I don't really know about the Big 4. I did some research. This is a pretty big commitment. I'd be coming in pretty late as a principal. Why don't I start as a contractor?

And they said, okay, well, we'd like to kind of turn this into a talent play. And so Hillary came over as a managing director level, Joe came over at kind of an MD level into the managed services group, and then, uh, somehow like 20 InteliSecure people ended up over at Deloitte as well. I don't know how that happened, but, uh, and, uh, we created what was called Project Rockies with the corp dev group, which was really cool. The idea was to build a managed services group And because we had extensive non-competes still with our private equity partners, they successfully Chinese firewalled us off from all on-prem DLP. And that was phenomenal because what they put us into was, hey, go figure out cloud, go figure out data protection in the cloud.

And the great thing about Deloitte is you garner a lot of attention. So when you call the CEOs of Zscaler, Netscope, SkyHigh, they answer the phone and you get meetings. So from 2017 through 2019, uh, we were running this data risk cyber cloud practice with inside Deloitte, and we got to see, one, how the Big Four operated. You know, Deloitte's the largest cyber practice of consultants. It's over a billion dollars.

It is phenomenally successful. And so we got to kind of see sit in the belly of the beast to see how they operated. And we also got to meet, you know, Rajeev Gupta, CEO of SkyHigh, Sanjay Berry, CEO of Netscope. I'd know Jay Chowdhury from— at Zscaler from being a partner of CipherTrust way back in the day. And it was just this phenomenal opportunity to quiz the entire market and see where they were going, what they were doing.

We got to sit down with Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and see all their plans and what their ideas were. And so about 2 years into it, you know, Deloitte kind of said, hey, it's time for you to sign up as full-time employees. And we kind of sat around a dinner table, me, Hillary, and Joe, and we looked at each other and we went, there's a really cool opportunity out here to build something new. And so we turned it, we just said, hey, we're done. Thanks for, you know, trying this out.

And we left in September of 2019, and we founded CloudRise on October 1st, 2019. Wow. And really the vision there was, if I summarize what I think I just heard you say, is solving the cloud DLP problem using cloud-native technologies. Does that sound right? Yeah.

Well, where we really landed was we're really good at data protection problems, and we're really good at data protection tech, right? So DLP has always been kind of the big heartbeat in data protection, but we really know the encryption space. We knew the email security space. We knew the SWIG space or secure web gateway space. And then when we were introduced to the CASB space, and then when you would listen to like, so our biggest partner's Netskope, just be straight up with that.

And to listen, for me, with my networking background with VPNs and building, you know, PoPs all around the globe with Quest and Level 3 and GemPlex and Vertela, to hear Sanjay talk about how they were gonna build a network fabric which is very different than what any of the other providers do. And then they were going to take a platform and essentially collapse SWIG, CASB, DLP, network, you know, this network private access. It was just phenomenal to hear that vision. And I kind of said, this is the company that you want to go partner with, and then we can solve lots of problems with this platform. But our expertise also lends us where if clients have old on-prem DLP, they have old SWIGs and stuff.

What we're really trying to do is architect a data protection governance program for them and then help them with the right technology. And whether that's Netscope or whether that's, you know, using MCAS inside O365, whatever have you, the goal, the goal and objective is build a partnership with these clients, be a trusted advisor, and be super deep in data protection and tell them straight up Hey, we're not the identity guys, we're not the threat management guys, we're not the SIEM, SOC, SOAR guys, we're the data protection. And what we find is that depth of expertise, the total addressable market's very large for us.

So, so are you guys— and I guess as you, as you started this, this new initiative, you know, you identified a big opportunity, uh, got a good team of folks who you'd worked with it sounds like the starting team, you know, a couple times in the past now.

Did you— do you think of it as— what did you take away from previous iterations that you said, I'm going to do it different and better this time? Automation and a platform. So at InteliSecure, we could never scale. We would add customers and we would add more people. And even after I left, the answer to that with the private equity guys and the management team there was open up a triage center in Guam and get price arbitrage.

And one of my favorite lines from a guy named Vic Cattiel at Deloitte, incredibly successful principal, love the guy. I'm sitting with him in Munich, Germany, and he looks at me and I go, so Vic, what do you think of this managed service data protection thing? And he goes, are you gonna triage incidents? And I was like, well, if we have to. And he goes, this sounds like the race to the bottom of a margin toilet bowl.

And I sat there and went, when you looked at the InteliSecure model, is we would triage all these incidents, but especially with DLP platforms, it's really hard to do that because it's so close to the business. And so to have a third party reach back into the medical records department at a large healthcare organization and go, hey, you shouldn't be sending this out A lot of times we didn't have the context of the business, and so it's very difficult. So at Cloudrise, what we ultimately saw were 3 fundamental things that we think we can change. One is the delivery of services. So the delivery— what we found in the Big 4, and we analyzed this quite a bit, was predominantly they deliver their services with a fleet of people that are sent on site.

That's changed during the pandemic, but they'll try to shift back to that because they like to walk the halls. It's a smart strategy. 2 is they operate in email and they deliver work product as PowerPoints or spreadsheets. And when they do configuration work on platforms, there's no shared knowledge base. So you could have 3 consultants working on this exact same problem for like a Netscope platform, and those 3 consultants will never share the proper answer to the problem.

And he said, what happens if you built a platform that essentially could monitor all of the communication channels that you're integrated with between your delivery and your customers, and it would sit there over all those channels and go, I see that Jake, Ryan, and Anna are working on configuring this secure web gateway on Netscope. I'm going to prompt them to the actual solution. What's even better than that is if they have an updated solution, they upload it, and then the system automatically archives it, catalogs and updates it. And, uh, so you immediately can do more higher-powered, more accurate consulting and services work with you know, our thesis is what takes the Big 4 10 consultants to get done, we can probably do it with 5 or 6 with this platform enabling us. And it's really exciting.

So that's the second piece is just getting delivery better. And then the third is essentially the communication engagement with customers from a services perspective and being able to write playbooks now. So what happens is We do so much work that looks very similar. If you think about it, these platforms, what do you do? You activate them, you tune them, you have specific policies, policy logic.

We library all that. And so now when somebody comes and goes, hey, can you activate Netscope? Well, we have a playbook. And we, uh, if you look at one of our advisors, a guy named Bernd Constant, he built a SOAR platform that FireEye purchased. And so Bernd's been teaching us all about writing playbooks and automating simple tasks.

So if you really look at us, Rob, we are the next generation of a service provider. Our whole goal though is to— there's all this SaaS technology out there, but all of these service companies are still just throwing bodies at the problem, and we're going to shift that paradigm to where we are leveraging a platform that enables us to deliver repeatable, highly effective services. Well, now you got me thinking, like, what you're creating, the platform you're using to better deliver services seems more valuable than the service you're creating to the market, right? Like, how many service providers out there would spend a boatload of money to make their delivery folks more efficient versus, you know, what people are willing to pay to have their their cloud security tools deployed. Am I, am I crazy?

No, you're not crazy. You're spot on the money. We just want to keep that a secret a little bit longer. We've been, we've been shaking and jiving with our website. It's funny because we're like, okay, let's just pitch ourselves with this automation platform, orchestration platform.

And honestly, that's kind of how we started out. We were like, this is the route you're going to go. That's what I love about startups is the journey. You have to have a team that's willing to not be— I heard this term, you know, this is my first time building software as a CEO and there's a gentleman, you know, it's Byrne and Byrne goes, you want to build your platform in a decoupled fashion. You want to be able to kind of move things around and that's the way we operate our business.

We're just super nimble and decoupled and what we finally came into was we're really good at doing services And there's a very— there's a huge problem on service delivery. Let's have our platform solve for that. And then if we do some cool stuff with activations and playbooks around Netscope or Zscaler or whoever, uh, bonus. Yeah, that's really cool. And so basically you've created a very flexible platform that will allow scale from humans solving tough problems.

You're using that platform day one to solve a problem that you are very familiar with from, you know, from other places you've solved similar or identical problems. And then we'll see what avenues open up after that. Is that kind of where your head is? Yeah, I think it's super exciting. You know, the smarter you can make the platform understand where the right solutions are.

And the other cool thing is we've moved all of our delivery to Slack. Now, if a customer comes to us and goes, well, I want to communicate in Teams, we can do that. And if they want to go old school and communicate in email, well, we can do that if you really twist our arms. But what's really cool is when we— when most consulting firms onboard a customer, it's a kickoff call, it's a PowerPoint presentation. This is what we're going to do.

This is going to be our RACI matrix, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. When we provision a customer, we have predefined Slack channels with— this will be the knowledge base, this will be the configuration store, this will be the, the people you communicate with. And what's also cool about that is from a managed service perspective, it was funny, we, uh, we were working with, um, Netscope and they're like, can we come and see your delivery center? And I said, well, you can see it, but there's not one because we're totally remote. And what's cool about this is we can load balance teams and the technology that we're using.

I'll just be candid, you know, anyone can try to put this together. It's all about the execution. There's a company that was called Help and Atlassian bought them. And the Greater Colorado Venture Fund was our lead investor, great guys. And we'll get into the Grand Junction story.

I'm sure everybody thinks I'm nuts from Grand Junction, but when you hear why, there's a secret to this. But it's, uh, it's super cool because they introduced us to Fletcher, who built Help, and Help sits on top of these channels and it can automatically create tickets. And so we're not beholden— and I just get so excited about this platform because the way we've built our platform is we're not beholden to any manufacturer. We can push stuff in with APIs, but we're not like in the submit a ticket through email, have the guy work the ticket. We can create tickets on the fly, and then those tickets can look at the knowledge base first, see if a little bot wants to answer things.

It's just, it's, it's just so cool. Sorry. I mean, no, I mean, I'm super excited to hear your passion for this and, and really the way you're looking at solving a, you know, a very common problem. I would say that most of us didn't even know was a problem. Um, you're solving it in a new way with technology.

That's, that's fantastic. Making it more efficient, making it easier to interact, the onboarding process is faster. Um, pretty cool. Yeah, our goal is this. I, I, we sat in the belly of the beast, and don't get me wrong, I have a tremendous amount of respect for Deloitte.

The team there was phenomenal. They treated us absolutely exceptional. Um, nothing but kudos to them. They're an aircraft carrier, and it's really hard to adjust that delivery model, but people don't want to see a plane full of consultants show up anymore, and especially after the pandemic, that's just not going to happen. The other thing they want to see is I think they want more transparency on how the sausage is made with their service providers, right?

Rather than us sitting back in some dark sealed-off room where we get a ticket and then we log in and do some work, you can't see what we're doing, and then magic, it's done, and then you're like, how'd you do that? Well, we'd like to show them at least somewhat how the sausage is made. I think that is true partnership. And ultimately, I think a CISO's decision-making will come to this: do I hire a recognized name for 3 times the price who's doing it old school? So we'll knock them out competition-wise, and then they're gonna sit there and go, should I have my own staff do this?

Or should I partner because these guys are so good in this space, and then I repurpose my staff for, frankly, security initiatives that have to have FTEs a partner can never accomplish? And you know, as a CISO, there are just certain things in a security program that you cannot outsource, right? For sure. Yeah. And I think sometimes, sometimes it's looking at those DLP issues, right, to know what's, what's okay for your business.

That's why we don't triage. Absolutely, for sure. The beauty of the new business is, uh, we do platform management, policy configuration, policy analysis, and reporting and analytics. We did all of that in TELUS Secure. The biggest piece that we don't do here out of that, what we used to call the QMS, quality management system, is we don't do incident triage or event management.

What we do is we'll partner with your SOC, we'll partner with EDR providers, managed SIEM providers, whatever they want, and we will give them the cleanest stream of event data. And we're solving that noise problem because we get so accurate in the policy config. Does that make sense? Yeah, it sure does. And, and you guys are, uh, where are you in terms of like company progress?

How's it going with the, the building of the company itself? So we just closed our— so everybody has been asking because we did press releases and we didn't tell them how much we raised. I'll tell you how much we raised. All right, so we raised $3.5 million in a seed fund. It was oversubscribed.

We have some phenomenal— it's all Colorado money. It's so cool. I love that. Oh, it's, it's just the best. Um, and they're phenomenal investors.

I've got some, uh, some angels that, uh, have some AccuVant roots and they— I just love those guys. They've been like, you know, Dan Burns and I, we founded— I founded BEW and he founded AccuVant same year, obviously different outcomes. But Dan is— we fly fish together. He's just a great mentor and he's been a really special person during this because I was really down on myself after the whole InteliSecure thing and he kind of sat down and said, You know, as long as you're punching, you're still in the fight. And I know I've said that earlier in the, in the podcast, but it's true.

Um, we raised $3.5 million. Uh, we're profitable already. That's what I love about tech services because the services business, um, we got profitable in March. So we started October 2019. We have 20 FTEs in the US.

Uh, you're about to see 15 to 20 job recs go out the door. Um, you're gonna double in the next quarter or 2, is that what you're telling me? Yes, we're gonna double. Get ready.

And I heard you say everything's remote, but the company is in Grand Junction, Mesa County. What does that mean? Like, you know, that, that's where you have an office, or, or employees don't have to be there, I'm guessing, if it's all remote, or do they? No, they don't. So what we did is, um, I'll be honest, the Denver market is turning into the Bay Area when it comes to tech and stuff.

I'm not a big fan of it. I don't like some of the money that's coming. I'm just gonna be very candid. I think, you know, all this talk about unicorns and stuff like that, the VC hamster wheel, we're talking around the wrong stuff. We need to be talking about companies that are building value, that are sustainable.

That's me on my soapbox. So as an old-school Coloradan, we were having problems raising institutional money. I'll be bluntly honest. We're a tech services company. We're not one of these sexy SaaS companies that burns through hundreds of millions of dollars and maybe it becomes profitable one day.

So the Greater Colorado Venture Fund came to us and they were like, hey, you know, we're trying to develop rural communities in the Western Slope. And they had heard that I was interested in moving to Grand Junction. So, you know, past 50, I don't ski as much. I'm more of a cyclist. You know, I'm becoming the old man who needs to head to the desert.

And so I said, yeah. And they said, would you consider headquartering Cloudrise in Grand Junction? I said, absolutely. So we moved the headquarters over there. So there's me.

We're hiring our first Western Slope employees this week. So one from Eagle County, a couple actually in Grand Junction. And the Greater Colorado Venture Fund then led our institutional round. And as soon as they came in, then all of the others followed in. And, uh, but the biggest, coolest thing for me over there is Colorado Mesa University.

So little Mesa State, as many of you guys may know it, has grown up to 11,000 students. Go and take a drive through Colorado Mesa University and it looks like the DU campus, all beautiful brand new buildings. And so I just took on the role of chairman of the Industry Advisory Council for Computer Science and Cyber at the university. We're grooming interns. We have our first intern who's phenomenal and they're joining our development team, our consultants, and we're making an impact in the community.

We're building a little cool tech hub over there. We just finished Western Slope Startup Week. And the Telluride Incubator's over there. And, uh, there's a really cool Four Points Funding and, uh, uh, what's their name? Uh, God, I might forget about it, but it's an angel group out of Steamboat.

It's just a really great group of people that are down to earth. And, you know, if you're in Denver, you're driving 50 minutes just to get to Green Mountain to compete with 400 people on your mountain bike. I drive— I ride my bike 5 minutes to Launch Loops.

So, so you're, you're selling, you're definitely selling the area for a number of your listeners right now. Uh, and are there other security employers over there? Are you guys the only one right now, or is this a start, or you're part of another, a bigger movement? We are. So there's a couple, uh, GIS, uh, SaaS company startups.

So there's Cart and ProStar, great guys, Aaron Young. Um, ProStar just got listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Pax8 is moving into town. So if you guys are familiar with Pax8, you know, they've grown from 30 people to 800 people and they have a really cool rural business model where they've been very successful in finding towns around Florence and that area. And now they're coming into Grand Junction.

So are they, are they moving their headquarters there or they're just, they're opening up an office there? Just to open up an office. Gotcha. Gotcha. And then, uh, you know, my goal is this, to scale up Cloudrise there and, and be a catalyst for bringing more tech into the Grand Valley.

Yeah, I mean, I love it. I, I know we both love Colorado, and I, and I agree, like, Denver has become challenging, right? I mean, it's so expensive to live here, and the talent is very expensive. Even though it's— you get paid so much, it's still hard to live here, right? Because the prices have just been going up, and like you said, uh, it does feel like We've got a little bit of that Bay Area bleedover, which is not always that much fun for buying homes.

So really cool that you guys are driving into that. Speaking of Mesa State and the program there, have you had a chance to hire any of those folks yet? No, I mean, we just got over there really last spring and so setting up shop, but I'm just going to name them. We have this kid, Jacob Hanson, who is just the most amazing intern. He has just taken on— he builds architecture documents, he codes, he— and so he's— we're having a big mixer, it's called Go@CMU, and it's a kickoff where it's really cool.

Companies can come in, we can give them a project like, hey, build a reporting cube in Tableau or something, and then the kids take it for the semester and then they have a showcase at the end of the semester. So we're sponsoring that and Our goal is that we'll probably have 4 to 6 more interns join this year, and yeah, it's just super exciting. So your intern program sounds amazing, and the fact that you're tied in with that school, I mean, that's got to drive folks who actually get an opportunity to work with a security company. That's awesome. So I mean, I've heard a lot of vision here, and it sounds like there's a lot of things coming.

What do you see, you know, growth over the next quarter? Are there new Are there new technologies you're gonna, you're gonna be, uh, looking to roll out to make yourselves even more efficient? Are you looking to get new partners? What, what comes next? So phenomenal relationship with Netscope.

Netscope, you know, they've raised now, what, $1.1 billion? They're the darlings of Sand Hill Road. Uh, I believe in Sanjay's vision. Uh, they just brought Dave Peranich over from Palo Alto. Uh, Dave and I get along really well, and, uh, Our goal is this.

We did this with VonTu. We were VonTu's ultimate provider. And what I learned in InteliSecure is I just should have stuck with VonTu. When I diluted it and made people have to learn other platforms as a small company, it's very dangerous. So I think what we're doing is we're just getting in deeper with Netscope and they're expanding internationally.

So we've signed a joint venture agreement with a company called Cyber Orchard in the UK. Um, it provides us 10 resources over there, and, uh, Netscope feeds us a lot of their activation work. And so we're starting to do that globally, and I think we'll probably end up ultimately acquiring Cyber Orchard here in the next year or two. And then, uh, you know, Rob, I'd love to know— love to tell you where this journey is going to take. Um, I, I just— this is so much more fun than the first one.

Yeah, it's because I'm getting to work with some of my best friends on the planet. Uh, you are absolutely right. We've got people that were at BW and InteliSecure that went to Deloitte with us, and now they're here. And it's just this family, and we just operate as this very effective Navy SEAL team. Same time, we all kind of grew up a bit, and so it's not that bro culture.

It's more of let's get it done and have a good time. I mean, you seem, you seem really mellow and, and relaxed versus, you know, I think I, I would imagine having some success and having seen it before gives you a level of confidence and, um, maybe, uh, maybe financially you don't have to worry quite as much as you did when you were starting this whole thing off. I don't know, but, but it sure seems like you're in a really good place, uh, from that perspective as well. I got a kid at the Vail Ski Academy and a daughter in college. I won't retire until I'm 400 years old.

Well, well, whatever the reason is, you, you feel— you seem like you're in a good place mentally, and like, this is, uh, this seems like a great opportunity for you to go do some fun stuff. Yeah, and I'm super excited that you reached out and we got to chat again. It's been a while, and glad we could, you know, start telling our story. Um, we don't want to be boisterous, but, uh, you know, I do want to be a big advocate for Mesa County as well, and, uh, I just, the state of Colorado is something near and dear to my heart. It has always kind of saved me.

I'll leave it at that. And I think there's a generation of us that have the ability to not get sucked into the coast when it comes to tech. We don't have to lose our identity. There's plenty of great entrepreneurs. There's phenomenal local money here.

Let's not dilute what an amazing place this is. I love it. And I also can't wait to really see you guys prove out the model of building a company in Mesa County, out in Grand Junction, where I haven't seen it yet. So you proving out that it works is going to open that pathway to a lot more companies. Awesome.

Yeah, definitely. Awesome. Well, Rob, this has been fantastic. We will look forward to tracking you guys, and maybe a year from now when you've doubled again and Maybe, maybe you've doubled twice since, since the last conversation. We can get you on and you can tell us, you know, how you're, how you're using this technology to scale even better.

It's either that or I'll be using this technology at the corner of one of the off-ramps to beg for money. Well, I mean, as long as you're doing it at scale, you'll probably, probably do really well. All right, Rob, well, we'll look forward to connecting with you again soon. And for everyone else, signing off. This is Colorado Equal Security.

Talk to you next week. Thanks, Rob.

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 Rob by emailing info@colorado-security.com.

Until next time, remember, Colorado equals security.